Posts by Kerry Weston
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Yes, i remember Helen making a lot of fuss about integrity & golden handshakes - John Tamihere springs to mind - by not cutting Winston loose, she looked a hypocrite. To then run their campaign on trustworthiness was bizarre.
I know everyone's said it before, but the pre-election TV coverage was a disgrace. The media "stars" seem to believe they are the most important item. Presidential? But the Leaders weren't given the chance to orate - to give crafted, deep & detailed speeches that actually might have revealed themselves and their policies in a meaningful way.
i almost didn't bother voting myself - I found the whole thing such a farce.
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I have always described myself as sexually ambivalent. It would be unreasonable to suggest that I am bi as I have never had a homosexual relationship. ... I can empathise with the idea of falling for or being infatuated with people rather than genders. Indeed I don’t tend to appraise men or women in a gender typical manner. I used to fall for faces and voices.
Ditto. Although I've had close friendships with other women, they've never crossed the physical line. Closer than most relationships with men, except for gay/bi men, who I've been close enough to that I considered marriage with one and fell madly in love with another. I suspect i liked them because of a certain spontaneity, joie de vivre they both had, a willingness to be open and expressive that, sadly, lots of very straight kiwi men don't have, especially the older ones.
Voices - yeah, they are irrationally attractive, or not.
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although mp3 is a worse version of a product, its not that bad to listen to in most situations. it would really show up in a sit down and listen to your expensive stereo in a controlled room environment but who has the time for that these days.
That seems to me one of the key changes. In my household it is exemplified by teenage sons listening exclusively on mp3 with very average speakers plugged into the computer and me with my rather nice stereo in the studio listening to better quality sound.
The whole packaging quality - I meant that it "contains" a deeper experience. Like, i still listen to Joni Mitchell and part of my pleasure is in the fact she's a painter whose paintings are often on the packaging. It's a bonus to go online and see more on her site.The old way meant that the buyer got more of an insight into the musician and what went into the music.Part of figuring out why it's meaningful, but maybe folks don't give a shit anymore about that! I notice that my sons don't bother looking up band bios or extra information. So there is more of a separation between artist and their product.
For branding, the producer is inextricably linked with the product - unless of course, you musos start hiring household names to endorse your work. i suppose Neil Finn could start a Kiwi Music You Must Hear site that distributed stuff and buyers would be attracted to that.
i used to be a librarian in another life and it never ceased to amaze me how you could have truckloads of information that so many people hadn't the first clue how to find what they want in it.
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I find the whole categorisation of people according to bonking practices very limiting. Like, as soon as "they" decide what category you fit in, that's where you're stuck, along with whatever "they" think that involves and it is now shorthand for your complete personage.
I recently returned to my home town for a birthday party/reunion with old friends, most of whom i hadn't seen for at least a decade or so. I went unaccompanied and pretty much the first thing that people tried to find out about me was whether I was gay, bi, partnered. It was like they couldn't actually deal with me until they had that sussed. Being a contrary sort of person, i of course kept my mouth shut, apart from a "Wouldn't you like to know?" attitude. It's not that my old pals are intolerant or judgmental about such things, it was simply the idea of being defined by that.
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No, Americans all seem to have a not to latent idealism about the unifying idea of the American dream.
It what makes them so different from us, I think culturally we lost that idealism of our imperial dream - blown to muddy smithereens on the Somme and at Passchendaele - never to be recovered.
"Never" seems a bit harsh - but did we have a collective, unifying dream before then? Warfare and fighting, here and abroad, marked us for a long time and we're still channelling it into sport and violence. No-one's articulated an alternative vision. or if they have, they got stomped on in the ruck ;-)
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yes, i think there would be a general blanding. Creatives would hold onto their best work unless they already had a high profile - a brand - and they had sufficient monetary resources to exploit their own work themselves. Maybe the dearth of truly great work would be a good thing - eventually the tide would turn. As far as online presence goes - how then would you distinguish yourself from all the others? Seems to me people would have to spend alot of their free time checking out music when there's not an abundance of free time to be had. And how to have any kind of sustainability from it? More important, what could keep you inspired & fired up to keep producing work? And would that be something different from what keeps you sparking now?
Pardon me if this repeats anything further upthread - just kicking it over to see if anything hybridises or -even sparks a new train of thought:-)
in a way, visual artists are less affected - painting already has to deal with cheap reproductions/prints or outright theft peddled under a new signature. It's already a catch 22 where you have to distinguish yourself so your name is associated with your 'style', get established and do it before the imitators latch on. My "solution" is not to attempt to make a living out of it, keep it on the back burner until i can acquire some real time to put into it - rather have the freedom to make what i want than get all head-fucked with branding, businessy stuff.
One other scenario with no copyright - creatives will get owned, heart & soul, by media companies. That might work well for some.
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Let's pretend copyright ends tomorrow. What do you think will happen? What will creators do? i think it's worth visualising that scenario and analysing the possibilities.
it really illuminates how important it is to the integrity of the art we create that we do have control over what is done with it.
Integrity's a dirty word now, isn't it? Capitalist modus operandi is to split up groups, fragment and individualise - fragmenting the individual is the next step.
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Jon, okay, the incremental steps versus Big Leap solution (and all possible permutations inbetween) is a typical creative process, so if we're keeping to the music model, i think first there needs to be a lot more trawling for information. I can't help much with specifics there as music/marketing is not my field.
That said, i wonder if there's any research on changes/development in how people (probably under 30 and weren't previously buyers of cd/vinyl) download/share music? is it just a phase? Do they buy cds as well? When they sort out their favourites, do they go on and purchase that music? This might seem simplistic and obvious. But to me, the quality of the music listening experience is the crux of it - the big differences between pre-internet purchase and experience of listening and now. There was no separation between creator and their musical work before - when you bought an album, you bought the (illusion?) of a deeper experience, a "piece" of Led Zeppelin or whomever. Like a book, everything about it is a physical repository of meaning - it's been (ideally) crafted as a complete work and everything (lyric sheet, photos, artwork0 contributes. i still want all that stuff, just like I want a real book, not an e-book.
The point is - do people who've never known that experience eventually hanker for something more substantial than downloading bits and pieces - is that even measurable? If they've never known a more substantial experience, will they never miss it?
I did a little experiment the other day - downloaded some old music I loved as a teenager, bought the albums, had the posters etc. but I've never had it on cd. I quite got into arranging favourite songs, and they're ok to listen to in the studio, but not a patch on the originals, whatever their faults/excesses.
It's a truism that not everything an artist, in whatever genre, creates is great - Picasso made some utter crud amongst the thousands of works in his lifetime - it's an integral part of the process. if you want the best, you have to accept the worst in amongst it. It's my gut feeling that the spiral will return to artistic integrity. And the best way forward will have that at its centre. Start with that first - the solid core - and the rest will follow.
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Nah, Craig's more jemaine I reckon. In a noice, tweedy cardie with cables down the front and pockets.
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Thanks for that, Islander. If it's not too intrusive a question, may i ask why "conditions will never be right ... to allow the making of a live film of a certain novel.' ? I often wondered why it had never happened...I imagined directors/producers being pretty keen on it.