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Some friends

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I met Scott “Understanding Comics” McCloud eight years ago (at the first Digital Storytelling Fest in 1995) and have been following his work with enthusiasm from a distance ever since. The concept of “micropayments” (small-amount payments directly from readers to content creators) was very much in the air then. McCloud now has a real-live micropayment-supported product out there: It’s a comic called “The Right Number,” which he’s publishing in three installments. Each installment costs 25 cents to read; you have to put a minimum of $3 into a Paypal-like account run by BitPass to get started.

I just paid my two bits and read the comic — a noirish (or, given its palette and ever-so-slightly adult nature, I should say “bleuish”) tale about “math, sex, obsession and phone numbers.” I found it more than engaging enough to bring me back for parts II and III, which is more than I can say about most Hollywood products that demand macropayments.

Meanwhile, if you’re here in the Bay Area and haven’t already heard the buzz, Josh Kornbluth has a great new solo show called “Love & Taxes” at the Magic Theatre, and it’s just been extended to early August. The show uses a comic saga of Josh’s deepening debts stemming from a failure to file his tax returns to make some deeper points about the purpose and value of the tax system — points that are hugely important at this moment in history, when the very notion of using public levies to support public goods is under assault by the president himself. At 4:30 on Sundays, after the matinee performance, Josh is also hosting free public forums called “Tax Talkbacks” with experts (this coming Sunday, New York Times tax-beat reporter David Cay Johnston is the guest).

If you don’t trust my enthusiasm — yes, Josh and I are old pals — you can check out the enthusiasm of other critics who aren’t friends with him.

Semi snooties

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My kids love a book called “Big Truck and Little Truck,” in which a little pickup tries to make his way through the big world. On one page, plucky Little Truck encounters what the book describes as “snooty semis.”

Matthew and Jack often have near-total recall of the phrases in their bedtime books, but they somehow transposed “snooty semis” into “semi snooties.” The word was too wonderful to correct at first, and over time I have come to find it of some use.

“Semi-snooty,” for instance, is now the word that pops into my brain when the word “semiotic” is uttered within my earshot. Many are the crimes against common sense that have been committed in this word’s name. But last week at the Stanford/Harvard ILaw seminar Terry Fisher used it in a context that actually made sense to me.

The phrase he used was “semiotic democracy,” a term that apparently has been kicking around academe for some time but that I have not encountered before. Fisher described a “concentration of the power of meaning making” as a corollary to the concentration of media ownership and the prevalence of broadcast media technology. So if “political democracy” describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the exercise of political power, “semiotic democracy” describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the creation of cultural meaning.

Which sounds like a pretty great ideal to me. However far we may be from ever achieving it, it’s a useful yardstick, something new to weigh in the equation of social value. And it is exactly what has attracted me over the years to the phenomenon of digital storytelling. Which leads me to…

Itunes, have you met Emusic?

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Haven’t had time to test drive the new Apple music store. I’m glad that Jobs & co. seem to have broken the logjam in getting the big labels to find a reasonable way to distribute their music online.

The one drawback of the Apple service many users have complained about is the absence of a wide selection of independent and alternative music. I can imagine the organizational explanations for why this is, and I’m sure it’s not Apple’s preference — after all, in the world of mainstream personal computing Apple has always been an “alternative.”

Still, it underscores how happy I continue to be with the Emusic service, which I’ve now had for a good year and a half. $10 a month; unlimited downloads without annoying DRM mechanisms. Since in any month I find at least a half-dozen CDs I want, that’s a bargain; plus I get to sample lots of artists without having to negotiate stupid streaming-only limitations. If your musical taste runs to obscurities anyway, this is one of the best bargains on the Net.

“The Bug”’s life

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One of the things I’m proudest of from my tenure as Salon’s technology editor was whatever role we played in helping the writing of Ellen Ullman — some of the most thoughtful, accessible prose on programming you’ll find anywhere — reach a wider audience. We excerpted her “Close to the Machine” when it came out in 1997, and I had the pleasure of interviewing her at the time. She later did some more memorable writing for Salon.

Now she’s written a wonderful novel called “The Bug.” You can read the excerpt here, and my new interview with her here.

Another grim world

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I spent the better part of my youth listening to Brian Eno’s albums “Here Come the Warm Jets” and “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).” In later years, I found his discourse on art, science and technology to be valuable and fascinating. Now he is providing a thoughtful perspective on how the U.S. looks from Europe. It’s an important read.

As my colleague Joe Conason points out, what a shame that this is available only in the Time magazine “European edition.” Sort of defeats the purpose…

You can’t always sing what you want

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So you’re the chief censor for the Chinese Communists, looking at the Rolling Stones’ set list for the forthcoming tour (drawn from their “40 Licks” hits collection) and deciding which songs Mick and Keith can or can’t play. Do you —

(1) Ban the incendiary “Street Fighting Man” and the nihilistic “Sympathy For the Devil,” songs with genuinely subversive and violent messages?

or:
(2) Ban “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Beast of Burden” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” because they’re somehow lascivious (though lord knows why they are considered more objectionable than other Stones hits like “Under My Thumb”)?

China chose door number two. I guess trying to fathom how the censor’s mind works is a hopeless undertaking.

Tolkien’s time is now — always

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I finally got around to reading the Time magazine issue from December about “The Two Towers” — the one that contained a much-talked-about essay by Lev Grossman that tried to identify a cultural shift away from science fiction and toward fantasy.

Grossman’s idea is that the zeitgeist right now — post 9/11, war-on-terrorism-driven — is tilted towards clear conflicts of good and evil. Tolkienian fantasy fits this bill in a way that the dominant science-fiction mode of the ’90s — dystopian cyberpunk, Philip K. Dick, “The Matrix” and so on — doesn’t.

All of which seems to make sense on the surface. Except for one annoying fact: Tolkien first achieved huge popularity in the U.S. during the 1960s — the very era when American certainties about good and evil fell apart under the burden of Vietnam. Grossman tries to address this by writing: “A country drowning in the moral quicksand of Vietnam and Watergate found comfort in the moral clarity of Tolkien’s epic story of a just, clear war. Good and evil are fixed stars in the skies of Middle-earth even as they’re starting to look wobbly in ours.”

Maybe so. But now we’re having it both ways: Tolkienian good and evil are appealing in times of (ostensible) moral clarity like the present — and they’re appealing in times of moral ambiguity, too!

I think the problem here is one endemic to the kind of trend-story journalism Grossman’s piece represents — in which a writer starts from a cultural phenomenon and then tries to use it to draw wider conclusions about “the state of the culture.” The writer must assume that the cultural phenomenon is “touching a nerve” or “striking a chord.”

But sometimes the culture moves for simpler reasons. It’s probable that Tolkien’s books became popular in the ’60s because that was the first era in which they were widely available in affordable paperback editions in the U.S. If they’d been published in the ’50s or the ’70s or the ’80s, they’d have probably ended up just as popular — and we’d have writers trying to explain that popularity in terms of those decades’ zeitgeists.

Similarly, the “Lord of the Rings” movies are great film adaptations of Tolkien’s work that are popular because they are really good, and they would be popular in virtually any era you can imagine. We probably had to wait till now for the opportunity to see Tolkien on screen because the filmmaking technology had to reach a certain level — not because the culture needed to move into a state where it was receptive to Tolkien’s tales.

10 years of digital storytelling

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If you’re in the Bay Area you should consider this event Thursday evening at the Yerba Buena Center: “Voices Known: Celebrating 10 Years of Digital Storytelling.” This is a kind of anniversary party for the Berkeley-based Center for Digital Storytelling, a major hub — maintained by Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen — of the digital storytelling movement that I’ve been writing about, on and off, for years now. It’s a live performance featuring Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Awele Makeba, Brenda Wong Aoki/Mark Izu, Scott Wells and more. Tickets are $15-25 (info at 510 548 2065).

Cloudy channel

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My radio listening habits tend toward college stations and public radio — what the Replacements celebrated as “Left of the Dial.” So my awareness of the continued degradation of the commercial part of the spectrum has been provided mainly by the dogged investigative work of Salon’s Eric Boehlert, whose exposes of the Clear Channel monopoly have justly earned him a passel of awards.

Today’s New York Times brings a new twist on Clear Channel-ism: David Gallagher reports on the remarkable process by which this radio mega-conglomerate has assembled a DJ from database parts. Basically, they’ve taken the recorded voice of Carson Daly, chopped it into little snippets and used those soundbites to re-assemble pseudo-local broadcasts — so that listeners in, say, Atlanta hear a localized “top 40” broadcast, with Daly introducing each song in the particular order that applies to that market, yet Daly never actually said those words in that order.

It’s hard to know whether to applaud the ingenuity required to create such a DJ-bot, or barf at the complete triumph of corporate homogenization that it represents. I think the gagging in my throat tells me which reaction predominates for me.