Author Archives: quinn

Sita Sings the Blues: A Funded by You Production

I first came across Sita Sings the Blues because it’s the poster child for free expression in the copyfight crowd. Its creator is Nina Paley, an indie filmmaker, animator, and writer. She created a version of the Ramayana that reflected her own life and political environment. Aubrey Menen did that was well, and made a book I have loved since I was a child. (It’s also the source of one of my favorite quotes: “What we call History is merely Shiva’s procrastination.”)

Sita Sings the Blues, like Aubrey Menen’s Ramayana, is just damn good. The Ramayana turns out to make some good culture when ripped off, which is to my mind one of the marks of a quality holy book or myth. That it was a damn good movie which also happens to get screwed by copyright law is what made it such a popular and fine example of the harm over-zealous IP protection can do, not how screwed Paley was in particular.

Much of the media generated in opposition to current copyright regimes is nice politically and all, but it’s terrible artistically. “Honesty,” says Paley, “is where the soul of art comes from.” Not community belonging, or opposition to a legal principle, or even trying to get liked. Paley’s honesty took her to pick up the songs of the long dead Annette Hanshaw and make them the voice of Sita, the wife of the god figure Rama. Hanshaw sings sad and soulful songs of lover’s devotion while getting royally screwed. Sita also gets royally screwed in the tale, a distinctive feminine view of the original, and matching Paley’s own sense of betrayal from her runaway partner, Dave.

It’s obvious when you see the film that simply nothing else could have brought the same quality as Hanshaw. A different movie could have been made, but not Sita Sings the Blues. Hanshaw is just a couple years more recent than the magic 1923 number for public domain, and therefore locked away from use without a license for many years to come. Despite the fact that nobody but Paley seems to have known about her, being publicized in Sita can only generate more interest and sales, the rightholders are strict. It would cost somewhere between $50,000 and $200,000 to ever show Sita in a theatre legally.

Some people say it’s not good art unless it pisses someone off. By that score, Sita Sings the Blues is great art. Not only does Paley live with the threat of losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in suits over using Hanshaw’s songs, Hindu fundies have threatened to hang her for turning the Ramayana into a feminist yarn in which Rama comes across as kind of a dick.

If you can’t tell, I love Sita Sings the Blues. So much that it’s been nearly impossible to write about it, because every time I try I end up watching it again and just losing my writing time. It survives rewatching easily. It chunks, each little bit works as a short that still adds up to a coherent whole. Don’t just take my unqualified word for it. None other than Roger Ebert himself gushes about it at least as much as I.

One of the most telling criticisms of Paley is that she knew what she was getting into by using Hanshaw’s work. Of course she did, kind of. She knew she had right to clear. She didn’t research it too hard though. She had a movie to make, and she wanted to make her movie, not the movie that would be easy to clear rights for. “If I kill my own art out of fear of them, then I’ve really lost,” she told QuestionCopyright.org. That she walked down this road is a credit to her as an artist, even if it’s not a credit to her commercial sensibilities.

She acknowledges that her commercial problem is the common problem of remixers these days. “I am taking ideas that have been around for thousands of years, and 80 years, and only a few years… and I synthesize something.” And, like other remixers, this may mean that she can’t ever sell what she’s done. Paley went ahead and released her source files for Sita as well as posting it at archive.org. Others have started to remix her scenes into new things, some of which she posts on her blog.

As of last count the archive alone had 113,259 downloads, plus god knows how many on the torrents and from other sites. Would she have gotten more or less from a commercial release? I have no idea. I don’t know how art house indie films like Sita normally do. I suspect in the long run she will do well out of it, from donations, and a fanbase that would have been totally unreachable from the film festivals Sita would have played in. The people who cared about the copyright aspect did well too, seeing something wonderful and mythic and feminist that doesn’t generally intrude on the IP geeking community. Without her troubles and openness I don’t know that I would have gotten a chance to see Sita, so for my own small selfish part, I’m glad she ran into her copyright troubles. I hope it turns out in the long run it works out well for her too.

1000 Ledes n + 13: Auto-Biography

She was about 11 when the voice started in her head. It never claimed to be God or the devil. It never issued instructions, neither criticized nor praised her. The voice didn’t talk to her directly, not even once. It didn’t react when she screamed back. It narrated. It never stopped.

As she would run to her room and stuff her head in her pillow, wetting it with tears and feeling it yield against the tensed muscles of her face, the voice would continue explaining. “She ran to her room, and threw herself on her bed, stuffing her face in her pillow.” When she finally audibly shouted “Shut up!” in the silence of her room, the voice would say “She shouted ‘Shut up!'” and wait for her next move.

What Gov 2.0 is making me think

I think we are getting enough examples of what the internet does to things back in the real world to start extracting some possibly slightly predictive behavioral patterns.

The one I think is really important for .gov is that the internet eventually destroys institutions whose main purpose was physical mediation of otherwise interested but unconnected parties. Over time, those middle layers will simply go away. They have to, because they are transformed (through no fault of their own) from conduit to barrier. The transformer is environmental- the internet is kind of ice-9 that way. But this is not a binary, smooth, fast, or simple transition, and the people in the middle of it are understandably confused and angry.

This is why record companies and newspapers are pissed off and pissing other people off that can’t figure out why they won’t just cease to exist. This is painful and hard. This is so painful and so hard that we have an aversion to seeing which institutions are next. Physical mediation is a good starting point to think about it: so what parts of governments exist to physically deliver something that can be described as information? Those parts will eventually go away. They can go away gracefully, or they can not go away gracefully. Government has a possibly unique ability to make that transition as non graceful as possible, but I doubt even it has the power to stop the process altogether.

When I first consulted with all sorts of companies in 1995 about their very first web pages, every one of them did a variation of the same thing: put their catalog or brochures on the web! How cool is that! Not actually that cool, I tried to humbly suggest. “The net,” I said repeatedly until my coworkers were ready to hurl, “is a conversation.” Many of these companies and organizations had never really conversed with anyone connected to them. It never had come up. Learning what that meant is each case has made the last 13 years completely fascinating.

I feel a little like the database fetishism I am seeing is a version of the catalog idea. There is nothing wrong with putting your catalog online, but it’s a serious misunderstanding of the net to think that the net is going to let you do the same thing as printing out all your data and sending it to everyone in the world, only without paying for postage. To explain how it’s different I’m going to dodge the question by hiding behind Tolstoy- pre-internet institutions are all alike, post-internet institutions are structurally disrupted in their own ways.

Like stages of grief, we need to figure out the stages of internet integration for institutions. I suspect grief is in there.

More as my head breaks.

Eliminated from Twitter

I stumbled out of bed this morning to find my Twitter account had been suspended for suspicious activity, and I couldn’t submit a ticket about it. The ticket just wouldn’t go through. So… I guess… don’t look for me there. For my new mostly Twitter lit friends: I hope to get back on, but if I don’t I’d still love to keep in touch.

Drop your notes of sympathy, contact info, etc in an email to quinn at quinnnorton.

Update: Ok, this was part of a general bug that hit everyone that used a certain hashtag. It’s fixxored now.

Tab Dump

Slate presents BuyOneAnyway: “For just pennies a day you can cloth, feed and shelter newspaper professionals.”

One of the things that makes our species great isn’t self awareness, it’s that we’re aware of other species. Sometimes we do something so cool with that awareness I am left gawping, but with delight this time. “Scientists draw ancient squid using its own 150 million-year-old ink”

5 Myths About Health Care Around the World. One of the best and most lucid pieces about how healthcare really works, in the places where it does work.

1000 Ledes: n + 12: The Woman Looking After You

Wendy lost her insurance providing job because urgent surgery was going to require that she miss work. She was invited to quit, and thereby avoid being fired. Insurance paid only about 20% of her surgery costs, the rest was to come out of her suddenly non-existent income. Washington state won’t provide her with insurance- she’s not quite old enough and she isn’t disabled. Cobra was far too expensive.

Her new part time job doesn’t offer insurance. She hopes to not get sick again.

The kicker is that Wendy is a CNA- Certified Nursing Assistant. She provides hospice care, often in the homes of the terminally ill. There she looks after her patients, not just medically. She laughs with them, listens to their stories, helps them get out of the house, sometimes makes their favorite foods.

In short, she gives them the excellent care that our society has chosen to deny to her.

The trick ending of Inglourious Basterds (Contains existential spoilers)

The first thing I didn’t expect about Inglourious Basterds is this: it was hilarious. Really just knock down drag out this is damn funny, kind of funny. Maybe not as much if you aren’t familiar with WWII, or with movies about WWII, or movies made during WWII. (though that last category gets over my head) The jokes are subtle a lot of the time. They are references. There’s a scene in Britain complete with a Churchill so drunk he functions as little more than furniture. Churchill isn’t, in fact, a speaking part. From my companion’s perspective, I appeared to be choking from laughter at that.

The second is that it is the most meta film I have ever seen, including Tristam Shandy. I couldn’t help at various points poking my friend and making references to JOI’s The Joke (one for my infsum buddies). Moments of other films didn’t just come up, they were practically pointed at by the actors. The discussions of film theory took up more time than QT’s famous violence. The plot hinged on the history, culture, chemistry and even mechanics of film. This movie played with reality vs fantasy in war movies while the characters talked about how real the character of the war movie in it was.

As people keep noting, it’s a movie that turns the Jews into the Nazis and the Nazis into the Jews and takes great fun doing it. But it doesn’t stop there- the Jews even become suicide bombers, striking a contemporary note. It’s a revenge movie in just about every possible vector. It was an obscene love affair with the warm and powerful hate that revenge can turn into a kind of orgiastic joy- with a price. Unlike Kill Bill, there’s no one Bride. Just about everyone is down to get theirs, and they do. The psychic price for revenge in IG seems to be life, which most characters give willingly and enthusiastically. But it’s not, that’s a red herring. Revenge turns out to be much more expensive.

It wasn’t really a period piece. The 1984 Apple ad made an appearance, along with Austin Powers further back in time, as a general. There were others as well. And something about Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) felt anachronistic from the start, and by the end, I believed that was on purpose. Raine, it is explained repeatedly, is part Apache. He’s called Chief several time, and cites that as his reason for favoring scalping. He was a reference to something older- the American genocide- and something younger- mixed race whites being proud of their blended heritage. Aldo Raine seems quite intentionally in, but not of, this movie.

Only two serious characters in it don’t seem to have any revenge motive- Landa and Raines. They are men that spend the entire movie with smiles on their faces, like they know something the other characters don’t, smiling like they know what’s really going to happen. It’s Raine that bodily reveals the true price of total revenge. It is this: Revenge will make you one flesh. More totally than sex or love or culture or media, it is revenge that will erase the differences. Your blue-eyed Indian children will stalk the Earth, and they may love you, but they won’t know how to tell you and your most hated enemy apart.

It left me shaky and wide eyed, wondering down the empty 2am streets of Boston, walking all the way back to Cambridge with my companion without really noticing the time go by. I don’t know if I believe QT. But, strangely enough, history seems like it might be on his side. Perhaps it’s an idea that is more palatable to me expressed as no cultural identity survives massive conflict- not even the winner’s. We touch each other, we change each other, we start again. QT is not where I expected to find something like this, and it makes me wonder if this is something new for him, or if I should go back and watch the others to see what I missed.

Looking for your questions…

On digital rights, to answer in an upcoming article in Maximum PC magazine. I’m especially looking forward to questions on mashups, if there’s anything you’ve wondered about, or suspect other people are wondering about. Please feel free to post them in the comments, or to make your life much easier you can mail them to my quinnnorton.com address (quinn @) or Twitter them to @quinnnorton.

Thanks!

So close and yet so far away

Ted Kennedy, who has fought so hard for healthcare reform, has died on the eve of the big battle. Aside from the damage to this cause which is closer to my heart than I can often handle, I am struck by the desperation of the timing. How awful to go at this moment.

I wonder tonight how many more lives that might cost in the coming years.

Rest in Peace, Senator Kennedy.