Authors-- They're Important IF You Want Them to Be??

Although I agree that audiences can create their own meanings out of texts, the grand declaration of "The Death of the Author" is the pinnacle of hypocracy and hubris. It does seem that for someone to declare the death of anything, they're assuming a right to pronounce this moratorium over the views of all others.

As mentioned in the Maire ni Fhlathuin reading this week, a construction of the author can be made through his/her texts. I agree with this assertion and so it doesn't come to any surprise to me that marginalized groups are saying "HEY! Not so fast! Let US decide what's dead or not!"

However, whenever we start discussing texts in terms of Black Studies, Women's Studies, Queer Studies, I find myself bristling as it feels to me that the only way for some people to have their work discussed at all is if they place their work within the context of other texts whose authors share a limited commonality. That to me, isn't a well-informed way to categorize texts.

As stated in our assignment this week: "There is often the added assumption that readers can glimpse more than just the 'creative genius' at work, but that they can also read larger categories such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality etc as emanating from these works." Maybe so, but I don't think that's necessarily true.

Whenever I've had a man ask me "Why do women do that? " (whatever "that" is), I usually can't answer the question because "that" is usually something not all women do. I've had a British friend tell me that "The British do A and don't do B." Well, I've got a lot of British friends and I know from experience that her statements don't fit the behaviors of all and so I conclude she can't possibly speak for all British citizens. Her comments usually mean that "SHE does A and doesn't do B."

A writer who happens to be an African-American male may write a particular text not primarily because he's a person of color, but maybe because he's a particular individual. Does Bill Cosby speak for all Afr-Am people? Does Al Sharpton? Jesse Jackson? Chris Rock?

To infer that a reason an author writes a particular work in a particular way is because they are x, y or z leaves me with a feeling of claustrophobia. To delineate the merit or study of work by the background, sexuality or race of its author I think further marginalizes people, since it would appear we're not studying the work within a more centralized discourse.

To think that the reason I write any particular type of text is merely because of my race, nationality, gender, or sexual preference only tells part of the story. I write what I write because I am who I am-- which is all of the above AND more!

I say, forget the delineations! All authors are individuals with individual backgrounds, individual perspectives and individual experiences and their work should be read from that perspective and with that assumption.

Me? Write something like that?!

For class this week, we were tasked with reading some samples of and ultimately writing a piece of slash fan fiction ourselves.

Now whereas, I think having us author work is a great touch to this course, I'm not exactly sure why we were forced to pick slash as opposed to any other choice. If the idea was to get us to try something new, posting any type of fan fiction would have been a new experience to me, but alas we had to write SLASH fiction (a term that sounds a little disturbing)-- which incorporates a "queering" (to whatever degree) of established characters.

According to Michel de Certeau (in Jenkins' accounting of "Textual Poachers"), there is an "ongoing struggle for possession of the text and for control over its meanings." The struggle is between the textual producers, "instituionally sanctioned interpreters" and those "multiple voices of fandom, who produce and share meanings from their own perspectives.

This exercise was to get us to participate in this struggle over text and possibly to get us to identify more closely to the "fandom" that wishes to not sit passively with a text, but to become active participants in the creativity surrounding that text.

I think writers of slash fan fiction have a reason or at least an inner desire to do it, but I'm just doing it because of this class assignment. It doesn't feel comfortable to me as I don't like altering others' characters. So to make this easier, I decided to choose characters from "This is Spinal Tap," as I think the "queering" idea already exists within the original story.

So, I came up with the beginning of what could become a longer piece, but due to time constraints and other commitments (and most importantly, becuase I didn't think it was necessary), I've stopped at two pages. Approaching this with some scriptwriting experience, I think it reads more like a script (without the proper formatting) and I'm not really a fiction writer in the long-form prose sense.

I think what I found to be even odder than writing and posting this piece was that within 24 hours, I had received a comment from someone saying they were looking forward to the next installment.

I feel really strange.

Wikipedia and the Collective Intelligence

Henry Jenkins’ article “Interactive Audiences?” makes a good point when he discusses how fans found each other prior to the web. I can boast a former membership with the Original Beatles’ Fan Club back in the late 60’s, which was suddenly ended in 1970 when they split up. I still bear the scars.

Yet during the 70’s, the fans lived on and found Rick Rann’s memorabilia and Joe Pope’s fanzine “Strawberry Fields Forever” (SFF) and the numerous Beatlefests in various places (although I never went). Yes, we fans found each other, and as Jenkins also points out, we were self-organized and connected by affinities, not localities (137). But in those days, correspondence was notoriously slow. You’d send Rick a check in the mail and a couple weeks later, a small package would arrive at your doorstep, often long after you forgot what you had ordered.

Enter the Internet. Not only can fans interact on an immediate basis, but just everything feels faster, tighter and the world, smaller. Information can get to the bands more easily through the Internet--- as yesworld.com clearly shows: each year that the progressive rock back Yes goes on tour, they have a survey of the fans as to what “little known” fan favorite would we like to hear this tour. And they always listen.

Thanks to the Web, bands who haven’t played together in ages have found that they actually have a fan base, and after literally decades, artists like the Bonzo Dog Band, The Rutles, Roky Erikson and The Moon have gone on the road, much to the small number of loyal fans’ delight who held the lonely torch all those decades. Yet ironically, this has met with the demise of many hardcopy fan artifacts such as fanzines. The Moody Blues’ “Higher and Higher” and The Beatles' “Strawberry Fields Forever” are gone now—although I’m not sure, about SFF, as I’ve stepped away from the heavy fan base of the Beatles, believe it or not.

Jenkins talks about the jammers--the sniping of cultural signs (149)-- and the bloggers, stating that these new technologies have made grassroots networks possible.

This moves us to Wikipedia, as Stacy Schiff discusses the development of Wikipedia by ex-PhD candidate Jimmy Wales and the resistance of Encyclopedia Britannica to this collaborative archiving of all knowledge. The 17th most popular website on the planet, Schiff says that the argument is that collaboration doesn’t mean accuracy; it’s whoever outlasts opposing views regarding content. As the site continues to grow, there have been some triumphs for Wikipedia. If Britannica has 3 errors, Wikipedia has 4. I do think that’s a triumph, especially since Britannica “never claimed to be error-free.”

A long time reader of Wikipedia, today I became an account holder and actually added some content to the Authorship page in Wikipedia (thanks to the requirements of this course). I felt strange adding to someone else’s work, but decided to create my own subcategory on the “Auteur Theory and the Mantle of Authorship” as a springboard to someone else’s page on The Auteur Theory.

I wasn’t sure how this would be viewed, as Schiff mentions that Wikipedia now has over 1000 people policing content and someone else may not view my tie-in to Sarris as belonging to notions of authorship. A few hours later, when I came back to the site, my hesitation apparently had been well-founded. My entry was gone!

Since I thought it should at least stay up until the discussion for next class, I went back and added it again. According to Schiff, I can revert my comments a total of 3 times before being kicked off for 24 hours. We’ll see if my new authoring relationship with Wikipedia was only to last a day. One man’s “collaboration” is another man’s bullying. Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be outlasting my opposition.

Hypertextuality and Transmedia Storytelling

Reading about the hypertextual and transmedial authorship of characters such as Batman and James Bond this week, I started thinking about the further decentralization of the role of the initiating author. As I’m not a big fan of fiction or graphic novel reading, I’ve never really considered the development of and purveyance of the iconic fictional characters we read about this week—James Bond and Batman specifically. I’ve seen Batman the television show and a few of the movies, but never immersed myself into other incarnations of the story. I’ve seen the first Matrix movie, but within 10 minutes of walking out of the theatre had unraveled the entire premise of the movie so much so that I wasn’t tempted in the least to sit through two sequels, let alone one. And now I see that what was on the screen was only a part of the story and I should have been searching for further information via their websites and short subjects.

Thanks to the readings this week, I am looking at these titles in a different light, but not to the extent that I wish to immerse myself in the back stories, participate in fan fiction or take the time to play a video game based in those worlds. Quoting Fiona Marrow (quoted in Jenkins’ article): “You can call me old-fashioned—what matters to me is the film and only the film. I don’t want to ‘enhance’ the cinematic experience by overloading on souped-up flim flam.” In this day of media bombardment, who has the time? I can’t even get into the long defunct television show Black Adder because I’ve never seen episode one! I have seen episode one of Red Dwarf, so that’s a show I can slip more easily in and out of… But am I writing stories with their characters? No. Am I playing video games based on their world? No. If I didn’t have a mortgage, full time job, adjunct teaching or a degree program to worry about, would I? No.

Yet, we’ve been asked to consider a favorite “multi-mediated on-going text in terms of our reading for this week,” and so I tried to think about how these ideas fit into the music world—(that’s where my fiction worlds are build) and decided to think about these ideas in terms of the Beatles. They are based on real people, with real lives, real talents, real birth certificates, but have been remediated across many texts in many media forms—one of the first was “Hard Day’s Night,” in 1964, while they were riding high on worldwide adulation. This is a film they actually appear in as themselves, but follow a fictionalized script of a typical day-in-the-life written by someone else. Later, not long after that and their second film Help (where they are depicted as living all together in an eccentric ultra-modern conjoined rowhouse--with four separate entrances all attached to the same sub-divided living area), they became animated caricatures by an American company with animation actors attempting bad English, let alone bad Liverpudlian accents, targeting child-fans of the group from 1965 to 1969 (I was one of them).

In 1968, the characters were adapted for older audiences in “Yellow Submarine,” but as the real Beatles were not too keen on how they had been depicted in the television show, wanted no part in the film—until they saw it. They enjoyed it so much, that they quickly threw together a tag on film of themselves recapping aspects of the film and asking the audience to join in for a round of “All Together Now” to sing themselves out of the theatres.

Forty years later, I figured the legend of the Beatles was probably just existing in the hearts and minds of Boomers who had been there but I was wrong. The Beatles and their songs have moved into Cyberspace with their own official website with their own sanctioned video games on the site. And to my astonishment have even been the subjects of younger fan fiction. If you Google “Beatles fan fic” up come 298,000 sites, although the amount of fan fic that has appeared seems to have been created during the first 10 years of the Internet and is no where near as pervasive as that of more recent characters or stories. Perhaps I didn't know where to look.

Obviously I wasn’t originally thinking about how Beatles producer George Martin and son Giles have recently created sort of “mash-ups” (if you will) of Beatles songs—having access to all the extant tracks of recordings and lifting melody lines from one song and blending them into the backing tracks of other songs, ultimately teaming up with Cirque du Soleil to create a choreographed visual experience of the songs in their Las Vegas acrobatics show, “Love.” Granted, George Martin IS the fifth Beatle and most say he has a right to do this. But even so, what happens to a Beatles song when only Paul McCartney or only Ringo Starr performs it? I’ve seen both on recent tours and whereas they were there too, it’s not the same.

And if you really want to get away from the original texts, throw in the veritable plethora of Beatles tribute bands such as 1964, the Eggmen, Rain, Me And My Monkey, The Fabfour, The Liverpool Legends... And throw in Broadway's tribute show "Beatlemania."

At the core of these performances I believe is an audience desire to hear that music performed live and perhaps to pretend what it might have felt like to feel the energy and the presence of the musicians performing them. Heck, if you had seen the real thing, you wouldn't have even gotten to hear the music for the screaming.

Ideas of interest from the latest readings included the idea of hypertextual characters who might have been created within one cultural context (such as James Bond) have to evolve and change with the times to stay popular. The idea that Hollywood is motivated to create transmediated titles if nothing more than for merchandising purposes kind of opened my eyes a little more. I know I’ve realized that when a title can be a board game and a t-shirt and a toy, that means more money is to be made, but having not delved into any particular title to that extent, I didn’t realize how pervasive and expected it has become for audiences to expand the experience. This is why “building worlds” is really how new movies are developed, for if you know the world the characters come from and exist in, then you can create as many sequels and offshoots as you wish and can afford to pay for.

I was definitely wondering about the Wachowski brothers and their willingness to take probably more credit for creating the world of The Matrix than they probably deserved. In fact, in his book Japanamerica, author Roland Kelts says that the world of the Matrix was “directly and openly indebted to several anime films in particular and to the style in general.” So, was The Matrix a further widening of an earlier myth rather than a creation of its own world?

"Authorless" Authorship and a Suggested Model for the Digital Age

We've talked a lot about the producer/consumer continuum in this class, and all the people in between the two extreme points of that line. Are there some things that shouldn't have an author?

I guess that depends on how you are defining "author." I still maintain that if the basic alphabet of the created work is wholly comprised of and dependent upon the copyrightable, trademarked work of others, I should at least expect a sharing of authorship.

In my work experience, the companies I've worked for have deemed my graphics work as not really my authorship, and I've been fine with that. For me to create graphics for electrical distribution, paper production or on-the-job safety, I needed the input of others' work and had to comply with the requests of the producer and the script, which in turn relied upon standard practices in the field as well as requests from clients that certain content be included.

I don't have any problem that my name didn't feature somewhere in the videos, web products, CD-Roms or DVDs my work appeared in, as the entire existence of these products was for training purposes, with pragmatic goals, specific procedures to follow and cited outcomes for the learners. Granted, now and again the companies I worked for might have hired a director who added a great deal of originality or distinctness to the vision of the script, but again, the directors were "work for hire," and this "distinctness" or originality wasn't a necessary ingredient to the product so much as the procedures and information the products were sold to convey.

Toys and generally household appliances don't seem to have authors with household names, although James Dyson and Dave Oreck might be attempting to change this climate. I'm not sure what makes vaccuum cleaners rising over the rest of the world of appliances, but perhaps this is the beginning of things to come.

And speaking of changing climates, since much of my studies revolve around the music industry, there is much that has changed in the ideas around authorship and ownership within the music industry since the introduction of digital files. A new model is definitely needed as consumers no longer feel a responsibility to pay for the recorded music they listen to. I think the best model that was suggested has been by Bob Lefsetz, a former entertainment lawyer who has worked for years in the old model of the industry. He maintains in his blog "The Lefsetz Letter" (and for the most part I agree) that if the music is strong enough to attract an audience, the musician now needs to get closer to his/her audience-- through concerts, a web presence and direct contact (e-newsletters, blogs, personal videos, etc.)-- in order to communicate to their audience.

If musicians wish to maintain some sort of control or pass on intentionality to their listeners, this is more possible with a closer relationship. They need to stay in the industry for the long haul (this is to help maintain and develop their audience) and offer the sale of bodies of their work at concerts. Otherwise, the song will become a disembodied, decontextualized file that floats on its own or is shared from listener to listener and no connection is established. Of course, is it a disaster if the song be removed from its author or cohesive body of work? That's not for me to decide. Maybe it isn't...

I'm just speaking to those artists who might want to keep some of the control, intentionality and connection that was possible with the pre-digital model of musical authorship and distribution. If that's important to you, then you can no longer hide behind your distributor and expect the same compensation, because your distributor now may be 100's or 1000's of young people copying and sharing your work with their friends.

I'm wondering where record labels or distribution houses will be in a few years, as musicians can create recording studios with desktop software on their laptops with ever-increasing quality. Lefsetz suggests that gone are the days when stadiums are filled with a new act (I don't think he's looking at Hannah Montana as a serious musician but rather a corporate commodity or theatrical production), but he maintains those artists who can stay in the game and keep their audiences engaged across years stand the greatest chance of expanding their audiences and keeping them loyal.

My guess is that in a few short years, those who have been to a Hannah Montana concert may only sheepishly admit that they did so.

Authorship, Ownership and The Law

I think anything that an artist, musician, writer creates should give him/her privileges of ownership, if all components are created by scratch. Privileges of copyright should be for a more limited amount of time than is currently allowed in my opinion.

Lawrence Lessig is a lawyer who will happily go to court over matters of public domain and believes that the current propensity for copyright to be extended to 95 years beyond the life of the creator is unconstitutional, as it locks up so much information that should be freed for others to use after a certain time period. Just as patents allow inventors to profit from their newly created technologies for a time (17 years), and then opening them up to the public fosters greater creativity in society, so should copyrightable material.

I’m not sure why it’s even up for debate that if someone creates a work and it was inspired by someone else’s work (because face it, who’s work isn’t to some degree?), the creator should be compensated for his/her efforts. I feel the exception is when a work is entirely comprised of splicing together elements of other people’s work.

For instance, if someone on Youtube creates a tribute to Hugh Laurie using images from his television shows, and using “I’m Too Sexy” as a music bed for the images, I personally don’t think that warrants the title of “author” or creator on the part of the one who put the video together. Perhaps those creators could be called “compilers” of some sort.

To me those that create mash-ups don’t fully fall into the same category as photographers because even though mash-up-makers are picking music from one source and visuals from several other sources, and making selections as to when each clip stops and starts and in which order it will be placed in the final piece, the “creator” didn’t really use any crayons of his own beyond his editing software. By that I mean, the creator made no active decision about lighting, direction, costuming, sound mixing, etc. He only used other people’s work (Right Said Fred’s music and the cuts of “A Bit of Fry and Laurie,” “House,” or production Laurie’s been in) to compile this “tribute.” The image of Hugh Laurie is something the mashup editor didn’t create and to some degree should be left within Laurie’s control.

I can hear Gaines discussing the tensions concerning “originality” and how the creator always invests something of himself (his mind expressed) in a work. That tugs at the original feelings of the French and later Time Incorporated v. Geis concerning the Super 8mm footage of the Kennedy assassination, concluding that if the author has put some originality into a work, it’s considered original; if he hasn’t, it’s not. “Originality does not imply novelty; it only implies that the copyright claimant did not copy from someone else (Gaines, I believe is quoting Sarony’s suit, 58).” I say, here, here!

Corporate Authorship

Corporate authorship hires artists, musicians, writers (etc.) to create projects in keeping with an overarching corporate agenda. In the past, it could be said that the Roman Catholic Church participated in corporate authorship by hiring architects and artists to design, construct and adorn its houses of worship, echoing and supporting the church’s values and image. During the Hollywood studio system, individual studios would hire individuals on every tier of film production to create movies which were hopefully going to turn a profit for the studio, in keeping with its overall image and ethos.

How corporate authorship is similar to traditional concepts of authorship is that the products can still be purchased and enjoyed by many, many people. How it is different is that virtually all of the decisions made are by committee and maintain an eye on the over all corporate goal at all times.

One way cultural authorship can differ from cultural intermediaries discussed last week is that sometimes intermediaries stumble upon a product that’s already created outside of its existence, yet try to adapt to it in order to benefit from it. The work of David Mamet, for instance was what it was outside of the marketer’s hands, but they had to work with each of Mamet’s financial successes or failures in order to market the next piece. The Beatles already was an act before manager Brian Epstein came along and worked on their image. Epstein didn’t have a corporate entity originally set up before he managed The Beatles; the group’s basic talent was already there, their goals were in place yet Brian Epstein approached them to change their image from more rough-and-tumble to suits. Once however, Epstein had achieved success through The Beatles, subsequent acts he booked followed “suit.”

Sammond’s book about the corporate manufacturing of the ideal American child is a very interesting idea, as I think these notions feed directly into the era that I am most interested in--the 60’s. I really think that a lot of adult Americans were broadsided by what happened during the mid to late 60s because they must have believed this image of the ideal child and didn’t expect a rebellion from it. Social conformity was so important at this time because the atomic bomb and communism were looming on the horizon and superficial conformity made it easier for patriotic Americans to spot those who didn’t agree.

I think that corporate authorship is found everywhere-- in academic settings, scientific communities, religious denominations, political parties, private corporations and anywhere unity is needed for furthering of power and/or sustainability.