POPPING THE SEAMS

THIS COULD BE THE LAST TIME WE ARE HERE TOGETHER

performance with rope, guitar, voice, custom electronics, amplifier, public address system

July 20, 2008
Department of Safety, Anacortes, WA
(as part of What The Heck Fest)

Showing and Sharing on a Saturday Night

Al Larsen

published in The Squealer, volume 18, issue 1, Spring/Summer 2008
The young woman sitting at the microphone abruptly stops strumming her guitar. “Oh my god,” she says, “I forgot the words. I never play in front of people – I can’t do this.” Her friends in the audience call out their encouragement and after some hesitation she begins another song. This time she makes it all the way through, to applause from the small crowd. There’s a saying among musicians that, “you only have to play your first show once,” and now, significantly, she’s crossed that threshhold.

Uploading a photo, posting a blog entry or a comment or a list of your tastes in music, movies, people: these have become common ways of social participation. But people still like to go out in the evening, to be together in person at a show or other entertainment and a handful of event series – Not the Usual Suspects, Slideluck Potshow, All Caps, Pecha Kucka – taking place locally and around the world echo the participatory modes of Web 2.0 in physical space.

Last fall and spring, the attic of a house in Buffalo’s University Heights became the site of Not the Usual Suspects, a showcase for local musicians, poets, visual artists, video makers, performance artists and comedians, many of whom were taking their first tentative steps into public exhibition. Frustrated by the wine-and-cheese atmosphere at local art events and the lack of opportunities for young and less-established artists to present work in public, Aimee Buyea, a video maker and a UB Media Study student at the time, launched the series with some friends. Describing it as “a DIY variety art show,” she placed an emphasis on participation over professionalism or even artistic quality. She consciously worked to maintain an open, non-critical policy toward booking the event. “I just made a point of being like, ‘I don’t care if I’ve never heard you, I don’t care how cool you are, I don’t care what set-up you have, I don’t care about your demo, as long as you have a good attitude and you have a commitment to play, then you can play,’” Buyea explained.

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The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism

“DIY is changing our labor markets, and creativity is becoming our most valuable currency.” (p 31)

This book is like the evil twin brother of Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Unmarketable. It too is about the relationship of underground culture to marketing, only rather than a critique it is more of an inspirational/motivational/how-to-compete-in-the-new-world manual. Sometimes he seems to be addressing “the kids,” other times it’s closer to a corporate consulting spiel.

Mason’s idea of “pirates” is broad and he brilliantly weaves together pirate radio, pirated DVDs, graffiti, open source software, illegal downloads, game modding, punk, and a game theory model called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” What his pirate examples have in common is that in each one a practice threatens the players in an existing market by doing business outside the rules of the market. This puts the existing companies in a “Pirate’s Dilemma.” Something like this… people pirate just-released movies, press them as DVDs and sell them on the street. The movie industry is threatened. But the fact that people buy these DVDs just proves that that there is a market for low-quality DVDs of brand new movies. The non-pirates have to decide whether to fight the pirates or start to compete like a pirate. If they fight the pirates – for instance, try to shut them down legally – the best the industry can hope for is a return to the market conditions they had before the pirates. But if the existing companies put on their pirate hats and start acting like pirates then they are competing in their old market (say the movie theaters) and in the new market opened up by the pirates (DVDs sold on the street the same week that the movie is released). The pirates look like a threat but actually they do everyone a favor by opening up a bigger market Read more