Or don't. Whatever.

Six months slide by in a dream. Amazing.

I've been to Sydney and come back to New Zealand months ago. In the process I forgot all about this blog. It's ironic, really, because I had set it up in the first place as a way of staying connected while in transit. Ha!

Well, okay. Start again.

I've been a bad communicator. I haven't been keeping up my weblog (or much else for that matter). But I have a good excuse - I've been, uh, busy...

Well, I have.

In fact, I'm all but in transit. Fourty eight hours from now I'll be in Sydney once again, home of my heart. In the meantime, I'm doing this and that and a few other things and trying to remember stuff I can't and just generally chasing my own tail around in circles. And I really should get back to it.

So, bye.

I'm just going to go for it, okay? Blogger (which I've only recently come to grips with) is such a marvellous tool for a writer, a lovely combination of draft notes and end product, that I should use it while I can.

So I'm opening up a second, far more focused blog.

The ideas I want to get down in it - half insane, half pretty much on the ball - have been rattling around in my head for the best part of a decade without my ever having tried to order them. Of course, I have talked them out at length, on many occasions, to pretty much anyone who'd listen.

You can find it here.

I write a monthly column for a Sydney film magazine called IF: Independent Filmmakers Journal. What follows is a draft copy of this issue's installment:

tURING tEST cRASH #2

A Brief History Of Storytelling

Anecdote became parable became poetry became drama, which gave birth to opera and the novel, which, thanks to advances in mechanical reproduction, came together as the movies which, having split into large and small screen formats, are now going online and becoming [some as yet unrealised form of interactive virtuality].

The evolution of journalism from Herodotus to CNN and fuckedcompany.com and Temptation Island runs parallel to this, as do the various forms of advertsing.

These streams are obviously (and always have been) converging.

Nowadays, the difference between fiction, factoid, infomercial and straight reportage is one of emphasis or intent. This is a small thing. The real differences between the 'forms' involve what revenue model is being applied to them.

Follow The Money

Does the income of, for example a film, result from sponsorship and peripherals or from direct sales? Does the audience buy a ticket or get in for free? Are t-shirts and little plastic dolls being sold in the lobby? If entry is free, then the profits are coming (or failing to come) from somewhere else. From where? To whom? The answers to these questions will help you classify a particular work as content or product.

These are the two basic categories of public entertainment/art.

Most TV is content. Most movies are, at least superficially, product. But if more money is made off t-shirts and accessories than ticket sales, then you'd have to say the film itself is 'content'.

Content always and everywhere exists for product. This is not negotiable.

The content of a sentence is words. The contents of words is meaning. It's a Chinese Box situation, in which the sentence itself will generally be content in regard to some higher product, which might be a novel. This novel will in turn be content for a printed book, the 'end product' of a publishing firm. But it doesn't stop there. The physical book itself is ultimately content as well, subservient to the highest, least trivial product of all - shareholder profits.

This terminology is counter-intuitive. When a publisher talks about shipping product he is treating books as content, not as product at all. Treating a book as a final product is what readers do, not publishers (or at least not while they're wearing their publisher's hat).

Another example. If you consider Star Wars as a product, the story of the rebels and the Empire and the performances of the actors and the whizz-bang effects and cinematography are its content.

If you consider Star Wars as content, the product is ticket sales and peripheral marketing opportunities.

Likewise, as actors become bankable their status changes. A real star is almost pure content. Eventually, like Tiger Woods, all they have to do is turn up, at least while their glamour lasts.

Sidebar: New technology stocks are currently in trouble because the line between content and product has not yet been clearly, realistically drawn.

Television, on the other hand, has no illusions. A prime time TV show (whether situation comedy or drama or news/current affairs) is basically all content. The actual product is not the show itself, but the cars and beer and perfumes being hawked during the adbreaks. High ratings mean higher revenues for the networks and, at least theoretically, for their clients, the advertisers - and their clients in turn.

If snuff movies (legal issues intrude at present) or readings from the phone book (low public interest) were able to draw and hold large audiences, then that is what would fill our screens.

Sundance or Ghostdance?

Alternative/independent cinema made great strides in the 1990s because it almost perversely concentrated on the film being made as a final product, a thing in itself. This was a refreshing and often surprisingly workable approach.

But the very success that makes players of indie filmmakers can, in the long run, only work to relegate their films to the status of content. This process was institutionalised in popular music decades ago, and is played out again with each new genre (the textbook case being Seattle grunge).

Content art is most open to interference from outside or 'above'. TV shows get cancelled because sponsors complain. Indie movies just fail to find funding or distribution - but if they do get funded, they often end up being made as originally planned, with actual filmmakers actually in charge.

This happens more often than might be expected because the men in suits are so notoriously poor at predicting what kind of content is going to work best for their purposes that they must depend on filmmakers and other creatives to provide it for them.

So the movies become the R&D branch of mass media, an experimental test bed of 'pure' product striving to be applied and marketed as branded content.

(more next month)

Big day of trying to take control of my own website. I've been putting it off for weeks because it's such a huge, frustrating task. I'd prefer it was just done without me having to sit down and meticulously do it. Ha! But presenting poetry or any text online is difficult. There are two often conflicting imperatives at play: (a) it has be readable, and (b) it has to be worth reading. Spending too much time on what stuff looks like and ignoring the content, the actual words of the poem is not smart. But then neither is assuming that the poems are so marvellous that readers will be content with any old layout and plough on regardless.

The same applies to this blog. I want it to be at least potentially readable by others, and read by a few - although the actual number isn't all that important. One is a good beginning. One is fine. As reported by his widow in Hope Against Hope, her memoir of their life under Stalin, the great Russian poet Osip Mandlestam was fond of the term "first reader". He meant his wife basically, but he was also pointing to the fact that once a poem has been read (or listened to) with attention by someone other than the poet - it exists. The second, third, fourth and one millionth readers are all gravy. But the first is meat.

So I'm preparing my website for its first reader, and will continue to do so, no matter how many hits it gets or doesn't get... if you know what I mean.

(I've begun smoking again btw - no surprises there. Da hell wid it. I cheerfully choose death.)

I've got nothing at all to say to anyone at the moment. Nothing. Not a single damn thing. I don't even want to think about anything.