Posts by Paul Litterick
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And I'd put money on the fact that the wise heads who declared that vampires were the next thing weren't exercising some brilliant personal insight. They read it on the internet.
They saw Buffy. The probably read stuff on Internet as well. But it was they who created the market, not the consumers. The market makers talk to the Geeks, but it is they and not the Geeks who make the decisions.
Besides, taking your product to convention is marketing. Your target audience gathers in a single place, looking for new stuff. You bring them new stuff. They go away and tell their friends about it.
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You pitch to the gatekeeper. If the gatekeeper thinks the market will buy it, they'll sign you. If they don't, they won't. None of you have countered that point.
Gatekeepers create markets. A couple of years ago, people returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair saying that it was vampires all the way down. And lo it came to pass that a genre of teenage fiction was created. Small numbers of insiders - publishers and literary agents - had decided what the market would be. Of course, they had to come up with stuff that might fly, but still they created a market. The notion that the consumer is in charge is hopelessly naive.
It is the same with every other form of creative endeavour: market makers - critics, curators and so on - create and maintain markets.
The claimed success of a few unknown books by unknown authors is not an effective alternative to the book trade. The Radiohead argument does not work either, because Radiohead were already established and had been established by the old-fashioned music industry. They also had a committed following. Nobody will give you money if they don't know you; and without creative industries like publishing and music, they won't be able to know you.
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Publishers are the ones who are struggling, because their stranglehold on distribution of the written word is under threat. Now you can get your work to the world for the cost of an account at DreamHost or GoDaddy.
Yeah, like, who needs Faber and Faber or Weidenfeld and Nicolson, when you have DreamHost or GoDaddy?
Of course, when old-fashioned dead-tree publishers are not strangling the distribution of the written word, they are doing stuff like finding and nurturing young authors,and marketing their work. But that is not an acceptable business model for people who want the product but don't want to pay for it.
The blacksmiths turned mechanics at least got paid for fixing the horseless carriages.
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The Maori Party voted against Maori interests in the ACC legislation and against the interests of the human race in the matter of the ETS. Despite these and other instances, a lot of people on the Left seem to have some difficulty in grasping that the Maori Party is not on our side. It is not even on the side of Maori. It represents itself and its backers.
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Sofie, the colonisers are all dead. And I don't think people see Turia as principled; she went off in a huff because she could not get her way.
I suspect Harawira is being pushed out of his party because they are a bunch of brown tories who are concerned with the corporate interests of the iwi, while he has support among Maori without money.
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Poor dear either does not grasp that racism involves power...
Harawira has power. He is an MP, at least for the time being.
Racisim is racism. It is not something that only Whitey can do. Harawira is a racist.
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Probably true for wider Labour but for Tizard there was a lot of criticism in her Auckland central seat. One chain email that I've seen about her and Section 92A/C leading up to the 2008 election picked up nearly one thousand email addresses, so it probably went much further.
Judith lost the seat because of boundary changes, demographic changes and an overall swing to National. Claiming that copyright was an issue is further proof that geeks like fantasy.
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I think the problem was not just the money but that nobody knew what the PM meant by Party Central, including the PM. You cannot make great architecture on a whim.
The idea of a cruisehip terminal was pretty silly as well. Cruiseships are floating cities: their passengers want for nothing but souvenirs. Besides, the ships only visit during the summer, so the terminal would be pretty bleak for most of the year.
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Queens Wharf redesign halted
Our children will thank us for it.
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Here people believe they have right conferred directly by the almighty himself to chop down a 200 year old Pohutukawa if it blocks a postage stamp view of the sea from their upstairs balcony.
After extensive study, I have reached the conclusion that New Zealanders have a psychological need to cut down trees. They stand in the way of Progress.
In the U.K. if the building is in an area of beauty or is listed you can't even change the colour of your front door without all sorts of permission.
We are making up for lost time and lost buildings by going to the other extreme (which itself is a concise history of New Zealand, but that is another story). Thus we see a determined effort to preserve those sheds on Queen's Wharf, despite the obvious facts that they are (a) ugly and (b) decrepit. When foreigners visit, we will be able to show them the sites on which our best Victorian and Modern buildings once stood and then show them the sheds we have preserved.
Breaking news on that topic: Party Central is no more.