Still, on the way home we were talking about it, and I went into my usual spiel about how Hollywood was willing to spend two hundred million dollars on the movie, so why couldn’t they spend an extra, say, one million dollars, and get a script by a real writer that had not only the requisite ass-kickery and car chases, but was actually compelling and interesting, too?

I have this argument memorized and can give it without much cortical involvement, but halfway through I stopped. This movie has made more than a billion dollars already; and made it faster than any movie in history. If somebody made a movie of a dog shitting in a park, and it made a billion dollars, I suspect no amount of sturm und drang and wailings about artistic vision would persuade anybody. People like movies the way they are; they don’t require ANYTHING from them wrt actual story. That’s the way it is, that’s the way they like it, and I play my own part in the whole ecosystem by forking out eight bucks even while believing the story would be excruciatingly lame.

So I’m going to tear those pages out of my mental notebook and never use them again. The only people who give a shit about a thoughtful and interesting story don’t matter to the people writing the checks, either the ones writing checks to make the movies or the ones writing the checks to see them. This is dog-bites-man to everyone but me, I realize, but what can I say. I’m slow.

Update: You might enjoy this review of the movie, which is well-written and interesting.

But after reading this review, I may be pushed over the edge into seeing it:

And then there’s the “id” part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on “over the top” as if from a great height. It’s the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or “ghetto” robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their “schmear” and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let’s go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

I love it when you hate something so much that your ranting about it turns into a kind of love.

Hat tip kottke.

But the notion that enterprise and production starts with banking is just another artifact of Renaissance-era currency monopolies. Back before the first central banks, production and yield actually created money. (That’s what all this hoopla about complementary currency is about.) Money was not lent into existence by a bank. Instead, farmers brought their grain to town and received receipts for the grain. These receipts served as the local currency. Currency was worked into existence. There was as much money as there was grain.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last year or so as research I’m meant to be doing for a book I’m meant to be working on. The story, or proto-story, that launched the idea for this book was the one that got me into Clarion last year, which is a bit of trivia that won’t interest you.

Anyway, Rushkoff is beginning to explore the notion of where money comes from. Money itself is an interesting idea, which I mean literally: money is an idea, and nothing more than that. We all agree that it means something, and so I give you some pieces of paper, and in return you give me a MacBook Pro, or work on my kitchen, or have sex with me. If we don’t agree on the idea of money, then you won’t feel obligated to do anything for me when I give you the little piece of paper.

This notion, that money is just an agreement, leads to some weird effects, like now, when the government prints up a bunch more of it. Since it’s not inherently worth anything, the effects of suddenly manufacturing a bunch more of it are a lot more complicated than if you suddenly manufactured a bunch more of something that was desirable in and of itself, like the MacBook Pro, or the blow jobs, or whatever. Rushkoff is getting at the notion that, once upon a time, creative output was _by itself_ equivalent to wealth production. Now, not really. Nobody recognizes the direct wealth effects of creative output except, from time to time, the state government. If you refinish your basement, suddenly they believe themselves entitled to more tax income from you. Of course, they don’t do this at any time when it would be to _your_ advantage.

But now, for the first time in a long time, we’re starting to think about wealth differently again. I can make you a web page, and in return you can do some software development. In a real sense (in the only real sense, actually) something of value has been created in the exchange, and yet the market has not mediated the exchange, or priced it. Which isn’t to say that the market setting prices is bad; or that this is better; but that this is now not only _possible_ (barter has always been possible) but that it’s now _practical_, on a large scale, between widely dispersed agents, for rather complex goods.

The implications of that are both huge and mysterious. I’m looking forward to Rushkoff’s book, which might save me a deal of hypothetical research.

UPDATE: here’s a comment to the cited post which makes some other points I think are interesting. Since I can’t link to the comment, I reproduce it here:

You are absolutely right that money doesn’t make labor, but in a capitalist system – in anything other than a subsistence society – output (measured in money) is created by multiplying labor and capital. For one hour of work a man with no capital can dig a one foot deep hole with his hands, a man with a little capital can dig a three foot hole with his shovel, and a fully capitalized man can dig a 20 foot deep hole with his backhoe. If there are no banks, a man must dig with his hands for a year, living in poverty, to save enough money for a shovel. But a bank will lend him money to buy the backhoe. Now, even if he has to give the bank the money from 10 feet for every 20 feet he digs, he is still digging ten times more than he was – he is getting 10 times as much money as he made digging with his hands.

So you are absolutely right that capital is not a “first step.” Capital is a multiplier of labor. Capital is what makes us better off. Your saying “music makes money – money doesn’t make music” is the perfect example of exactly what you are not trying to say. Music doesn’t really make much money. Look at pretty much any local band you like. They make very little money from live performances at pubs and the likes. They probably earn most of what money they do make from selling cds. Those cds are the direct result of capital, and they multiply the bands labor. 4 hours of playing in a pub? Maybe $800 if they’re good (at least in my city). 4 hours in a recording studio? A couple hundred cds at $10 bucks a pop. If you want to start making real money, you sign on with a studio, that organizes capital to a higher degree. Your labor remains the same, that labor is multiplied by a much greater amount of capital. So perhaps the real saying should be “people make music – people plus money make money.”

The exciting thing about debt is it can allow someone who has labor to get money to multiply their labor. As long as the cost of the money is lower than the amount by which the money multiplies their labor, they come out ahead. They literally pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

When a piece of software breaks, you have to decide is the fundamental design so flawed it has to be scrapped and you need to start with a whole new design? Or do you merely have to go in, and fix a couple of bad subroutines and manage memory a bit better. There is little doubt that we are getting screwed over by the various government bailouts, and by the lack of oversight in the banking arena. Our rules have been bent out of shape. I do not see how it follows that we need to throw out the entire system.

I can’t wait.

As evidence of this last I offer this: when I was in New York a few weeks ago meeting with some of my beloved Clarion peeps, I threw down a gauntlet. A clean slate! A contest! On who could finish the most new work, from that point till the end of the year. This wasn’t just self-flagellation, either, since many of my colleagues had fallen into the same trap of non-production as I had, though I don’t think any of them are as steadfastly mired in that damnation as I am.

So far, things are going well, though I began and then jumped away from four stories before finishing a single one, which you can read here. But bit by bit I’m getting back my mojo, and if I get it back then look out world, hello t-shirt with my face on it, which is the prize for winning. There’s a story behind that that I’ll tell you later.

You know what the biggest hurdle to finishing things is, for me? The certainty that what I’ve just done is garbage. I have a pretty sharp critical mind, and can find flaws in damn near anything. It’s hard to turn something in when its myriad imperfections scream so loudly from the page, but you know what? That’s what you’ve got to do. You have to do a rough cut before you can do a fine one, and do you know the difference between an artist who’s a perfectionist, and a non-artist?

Nothing.

View that as a big-ass disclaimer, but view it also as God’s own truth. If I can turn in ten finished stories that have serious problems I will congratulate myself on turning in ten more stories than I would otherwise have turned in.

Poco a poco, my friends. And if you have any thoughts on this topic – about how you do or do not struggle with these issues in your own life, a list of techniques that have been helpful to you, whatever – then please, let’s have it.

He also mentions that he has no idea if there will be a third movie or not.

GB: Could you see actually yourself not making the third Batman film?

NOLAN: Well … let me think how to put this. There are two things to be said. One is the emphasis on story. What’s the story? Is there a story that’s going to keep me emotionally invested for the couple of years that it will take to make another one? That’s the overriding question. On a more superficial level, I have to ask the question: How many good third movies in a franchise can people name? [Laughs.] At the same time, in taking on the second one, we had the challenge of trying to make a great second movie, and there haven’t been too many of those either. It’s all about the story really. If the story is there, everything is possible. I hope that was a suitably slippery answer.

Here’s to hoping he can squirrel up a story – because I worry the studio will chase the $$$ and make another one even if he isn’t involved.

Well, of course life now is radically different than life in Seattle. I could point to any of these differences as _the_ difference. But how much truth would there be in that? Is there maybe a simpler answer? Metafilter featured a great discussion yesterday on a question that I seemingly could have written. One response really stands out:

A sense of shame will change your life.

The nub of your problem is actually pretty common amongst those who were brighter than average as kids and weren’t pushed hard enough. You get used to coasting along with minimal effort and being a big fish in a small pond.

What you need is a bigger pond. Find a way to associate with people who are clearly doing better than you. People’s by whose standards you aren’t “functioning just fine”. If your issues are academic you need to be hanging out with fascinating, intelligent people who make you feel dumb by comparison. If your issues are financial seek out people working three jobs at once who will have no sympathy for your lazy ways. If you want to travel, but keep putting it off, start hanging out in backpacker cafes where the conversations will make you feel like a timid, provincial loser. If the issue is housework you need to be find somebody who believes cleanliness is next to godliness and invite them over to your place.

Our idea of ‘normal’ is defined by the people we associate with. You need to surround yourself by people who will make you ashamed of your apathy instead of enabling it. Big Fish Small Pond Syndrome is hard to eradicate, but not impossible. Shame is one of the best tools in a recovering fish-person’s arsenal.

I hesitate to post this because surely you must all be sick to death of posts that follow this pattern:

1: I want to do something.
2: I’m capable of doing that thing.
3: I don’t do that thing.
4: I ruminate endlessly on why I didn’t do that thing.

Still, as someone told me once, sharing means caring.

*

DDB in particular was excited about a Seth Godin idea I linked the other week, the one about taking an hour or two a day, making a plan, and turning into the person you want to be. I remain absolutely convinced that this is a viable thing to do, and that it would absolutely work, with only two simple caveats.

1: YOU ACTUALLY FOLLOWED THROUGH FOR MORE THAN THREE DAYS
2: You picked the right tasks to address in your hour or two.

I’m going to post on this soon. In the meantime, if you’ve been thinking about that topic then let’s hear your thoughts. Does your plan involve making yourself accountable by throwing yourself into some peer group where you’ll look like a tool if you don’t follow through? Will indulging all your usual pathologies now be acutely uncomfortable? What are you hoping to become?

But that’s not the only way. The other model, Simon pointed out, was Greek, where the characters were pawns in a story moved by larger forces. For the Greeks it was the gods and manifested in the fate they decreed or the caprices they indulged. The Greek message was: you’re not in control. Bigger things are at work, here.

Anyway, I’ll try to dig up that interview (Peaches, I mailed it to you once upon a time) but the point is that this was so keenly observed, and so absolutely _correct_, that I’ve never gotten over it. I think about that digital classification – Greek vs. Roman – all the time, in the course of my own work. It seems to me the pivot on which narrative philosophy turns.

But this post isn’t about that.

This post is about this, which is another guy’s observations about the clash between with the philosophy of what an artist believes to be true, and how that philosophy manifests in his art. In particular, wrt The Wire, if you believe the world is built from massive systems churning away, grinding some people into oblivion and exalting others into the kind of pseudo gods who are never touched by the fallout of their actions – examples of which figure very prominently in the news these days, like AIG – then how are you a regulator, at heart? Like Hanson says:

[...] I just don’t see how this picture fits at all with the world I see depicted in the show. It seems pretty hard to imagine a new episode staying in character while depicting more funding for a government program making things lots better. In The Wire’s world, it seems to me that money would be diverted for political purposes, stats would be “juked”, brown-nosers would be promoted, and people really trying to help would be marginalized or fired.

This is a really smart and far-ranging discussion that touches every part of political and artistic life. Highly recommended you read the linked article, and surf from there.