All 2 entries tagged Vampires

The Many–tentacled Vampire of Andrei Codrescu

Political parties appeared and disappeared like the thick grounds at the bottom of Turkish coffee cups. Gipsies read fortunes and played addictive violin music that made one lascivious and light-headed. All this frivolity rested like a multitentacled vampire above a huge, backward peasant mass that lived in hunger and rags in villages. The aristocratic vampire with its grotesque appetites sucked dry the energy of millions of wretched humans.

--Andrei Codrescu, 'The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess'

Notes:

- Are political parties necessarily 'thick'? If the coffee referenced had been Greek, a culture known for a better quality of coffee grinder, or perhaps more time on their hands, or more muscly-armed coffee grinders (most of whom are women, I should add) then perhaps the coffee grounds and, thereby, the political parties, would have been 'thin'.

- For 'Gipsies' read 'Gypsies'. The differences are slight, but important: American gipsies have lighter hair, a tendency towards baldness, particularly in the eyebrows (often mistaken for alopecia) and commonly occupy positions in local government. European gypsies are more peripatetic, with longer arms used to keep better hold of the reins of their caravan horses. Often with innate artistic abilities, they congregate in hinterlands and have an aversion to tentacles.

- the inaccuracy of the reference to 'addictive violin music' is an easy one to make; Italian gypsies and their genetically displaced Irish cousins were known to lace their melodies with atomised heroin derivatives in the early part of the twentieth century, often disguising themselves among Romanian travelers to displace xenophobic sentiments upon their rival counterparts. (A form of ground Turkish coffee mixed with Greek squid ink was used to dye the red hair of Italian and Irish gypsies, often bought from the coast of what is nowadays called Croatia, though the recipe existed in the days of Sparta.) Conventionally, Romanian gypsy violin music is designed to thread well with various herbal smokes, particularly that of burnt cloves, which, while habit forming, is not considered physically addictive.

- Since when have vampires been folklorically connected to tentacles? Perhaps Codrescu is thinking of a rare breed of winged Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni.

- Due to the middle-clawed feeding technique of the colossal squid, the peasant masses may well have found themselves inverted, or 'backwards', during consumption, but traditional depictions, particularly in woodcuts from the region, show peasant masses to be facing forwards.

- The association of the vampire with aristocracy is a simplistic one, arguably deploying a crass 'Scooby Doo Effect' (cf. Toby Litt, et al) that reduces the pure solution of the monstrous to an ugly analogical residue. This perhaps may be a misprint for 'arithmetic vampire', a far more terrifying concept, linked to the rice-grain counting Old Higue of Caribbean folklore. Similarly, for 'grotesque appetites', read 'grotesque algebras'.

- This narrative fails partly for the inconclusive disposal of the enervated masses. Although indisposed in terms of kinetic and heat energies, the waste corpus of the masses still has a functionality in terms of weight and inertia that implies a continuation of the masses. The bodies of the dead will nourish the seeds of the new masses, re-energised and shooting anew against the calculating demon. While the demon may continue to feast upon the equations of the new masses, in that period of dead mass one can see the opportunity also for the dependent vampire to dwindle into irrelevance, or the madness of starvation. Vampires require an energy source, while the masses do not, are not, addicts, though they are capable, in their music of creating addictions.

George Ttoouli : 29 Jan 2010 09:00 |  Tags: Andrei Codrescu Dada Dadaist Analysis Tentacles The Posthuman Dada Guide Vampires |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Bypassing publishers

Writing about web page http://www.nin.com/

I stumbled over some interesting music industry happenings recently. I say stumbled: Saul Williams is coming to the UK in February, to do an event for the London Word Festival, run by Tom Chivers of penned in the margins, who I've worked with on podcasting; and I'm a MASSIVE Nine Inch Nails fan. I put two and two together (i.e. I read the websites) and this is the story: 

Saul Williams' latest album is produced by Trent Reznor, who decided, having had trouble releasing the album through a major label, to make the album downloadable for free online. The results: 

"As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.

[...]

"If 33,897 people went out and bought Saul’s last record 3 years ago (when more people bought CDs) and over 150K - five times as many - sought out this new record, that’s great - right?"

[NB. These figures from this blogpost - go here for the full blog.]

The first 100k downloads were completely free, with an option to pay $5; since then the album's been available for $5. So a drop in about 5000 of actual sales, but a 500% audience boost, roughly.

What's really interesting is the cost of production and marketing. Trent's latest post points at an Observer article by Simon Napier Bell, on the topic of industry giants and how they screw the artists:

"Imagine the outcry if people working in a factory were told that the cost of the products they were making would be deducted from their wages, which anyway would only be paid if the company managed to sell the products. Or that they would have to work for the company for a minimum of 10 years and, at the company's discretion, could be transferred to any other company at any time."

Most notable fact is the 10,000% mark up on raw product to retail price. That profit mostly goes on rent, employee's salaries and into the pocket of the label, not the artist. Remove that and the relatively insignificant cost of hard copy CDs, etc. and you're left with just the artist's time and the producer's time and then the relatively magical concept of the art's intrinsic value (i.e. how much did you enjoy it?).

Compare to Radiohead's latest, In Rainbows. Originally available free, with an honesty box, which reportedly saw devout fans throwing £70 or more into the band's pockets. Now only available from the band's official merchandise website, for £40. Ouch. Ditto Saul Williams' Niggy Tardust, which uses Paypal to process credit card payments. (Waste appears to have its own system, but I couldn't be bothered to register. Maybe when I feel rich enough to buy the album.)

I've had a couple of chats with China Miéville about a similar line being taken in book publishing. Cut out the conglomerate vampires because soon digital reading tech is going to be as good and widespread as ipods. So how to control it, if it takes off?

Readers are swamped with text these days, they're up to the eyeballs in reading material (of a different sort to literature though? I add ponderously) on screen, off the 'net. So there's no question about whether it's going to grow, as far as I'm concerned. I've a friend who came back from Japan recently with a (Chinese-) modded Nintendo DS that allowed him to download ebooks to it from the internet, load up any text, whatever he wanted - correction, whatever he can get hold of, which, increasingly, means everything.

The future is here already, according to China (M, not the country), we just don't have it shipping free with new home entertainment systems yet. According to some people this and digital print in general mean (these are paraphrases):

• The death of the book in the next five years (China)
• A shift towards localised networks, devolution of readerships (Rupert Loydell, Stride)
• An interesting fad, that marketing departments need to be aware of and part of (Stephen Page, CEO Faber & Faber)
• Something that will create a new playing field for the publishing industry (Alexandra Pringle, Bloomsbury Editor, I think said something like this at her recent Warwick visit, as did various other small press people I've chatted to)
• A way to screw artists of their royalties (this comes more from music and television giants, like David Geffen, who set up that anti-piracy squad several years ago targeting mp3 websites)
• A way to screw conglomerate publishers (Steven King & Trent Reznor, though I might be over-interpreting them both)

China suggested that writers will eventually find themselves working directly in partnership with freelance editors, and releasing their books online, possibly with the kind of honesty-box donations that you get on Trent's site.

[Or the one that featured for a while on Stephen King's page, when he serialised The Plant online. The figures I saw published on King's website at the time showed him to have a net profit after the first one or two installments of about £75,000. The article linked above suggests total profits of nearly half a million dollars and that the project was abandoned supposedly because of a slump in people paying for the downloads. Nice work, if you can get it.]

But these processes are subject to one important point: artists with established fan bases can get away with it, but how do you draw new audiences on the net? What will new artists do when they only have a range to 100s or, if they're lucky, thousands of readers? OK, OK, Arctic Monkeys, I hear you say. (But don't say Lily Allen at me, she's connected.)

At the end of the day, being a good writer doesn't make you a good editor; being a good editor doesn't make you a good promoter; the business of publishing art is set up to work with skilled individuals and the idea that a writer is nothing without their readers is a strong one (but not one, in my book, that justifies pitiful royalties and contracts that hold artists over barrels marked 'profit'). At the end of the day, the book still needs to be written, then edited, then promoted. So writers who need editors who need marketers will find themselves working with an increasingly fragmented, independent array of individuals with various skills (accountants, PR people, editors, sub-editors, typesetters) so let's, for the sake of convenience, call this collective a publishing house.

And oh, right, we're back to square one, but with a chance to rewrite the history books. More tea, Comrade Lenin?

So, for me, there's some weight to Stephen Page's idea that the internet's effect on publishing is essentially a marketing problem, in need of marketing solutions. Publishers who don't keep up will look like dinosaurs, and lose face. Publishers who do keep up will be doing the same work as before (providing a collective, professional service) but in a new environment, alongside the existing one, until that, supposedly, dies out. If at all.

Piracy itself won't have that much of an impact on anything except the scale of operations - though the new model of publishing huge quantities of writers and texts that each sell in small quantities (cf. Salt, Shearsman, and, godhelpme, lulu) marks a change that will be much more noticeable at the lower end of the industry's turnover scale. The giants already have massive back catalogues, rights to recent classics and estates, that they won't have to worry too much. Their staff will though.

The main problem is that we're in a transition phase and, as usual, the industry is using it as an excuse to separate the wheat from the chaff in the usual fashion: through blinkered, unimaginative capitalism-tinted goggles. Similarly, you get the kind of shameless exploitation of artists that leads to protest (cf. Writers' Guild of America). Even the BBC is guilty of it, e.g. through early screenings of second episodes online and marketing sampler series to mobile phones. They've asked writers to 'go with it' for the sake of marketing experimentation, but bottom line here is that the broadcaster/publisher is getting coverage at no expense, from someone else's artistic product.

Sure, you could whine till the cows come home, only you can't afford any cows, or a field, because you've got no money. The obvious response is to go and do something it about it. Or go into banking.

George Ttoouli : 28 Jan 2008 09:00 |  Tags: China Mieville Digital Publishing Piracy Publishing Saul Williams Society Of Authors Trent Reznor Vampires |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem