Yesterday in class, one of my socially conscientious students asked boldly “Why is there a lack of originality in films and television today. Now being the almighty, (yes some of my students believes this, and who am I to argue), and taking a tip from the congressional book of interview replies I said, “Because there is a recession on.” To which the student looked at me with an expression that resembled one given by a silver-backed gorilla given a frozen dinner and a coke.
As I drove home that night, skillfully piloting through traffic like an eagle, I reflected the question with renewed curiosity, not unlike Sherlock Holmes deciphering the Case of the Blue Carbuncle or Indiana Jones on The Last Crusade. Upon my return home, I kissed my wife and t my daughter then immediately went to my office and sought the repository of all known human knowledge, GOOGLE.COM. I had formulated my course of action in solving this mystery; feverishly I typed in my search question,
Hollywood, originality
The little spinning circle in the toolbar spun fast, then slow, then fast again and then it paused. I held my breath, the pause meant it had found something; would my quest be this simple? The screen erupted with a huge list of sites all asking the same question; what I believed was a small mystery was more like a global conspiracy! I clicked on sites and read the ideas and hypothesis of the noted professionals and theologians. Each had reviewed the problem and had their answer, but none had gotten to the heart of the issue.
So I then moved onto sacred ground and dug deeper into the darkness of the pit and unearthed truths that were frightening and terrible. I had called a friend at a major studio, I will refer to her as Dark Angel, and she agreed to meet me. We met in a parking garage near Santa Monica, and she arrived at the appointed time. She stood behind a concrete pillar and spoke in a low gravely tone, (she had a cold and she didn’t want me to catch it), I asked her the question once more. She told me that the reason for the lack of original ideas in the entertainment industry is that those in power are the rebels of the seventies and were taught to believe that they could do better than those who had gone before. But they had one tragic flaw, their Achilles Heel to use a classical metaphor, was that they were the first of the T-Generation, (the “Television” generation, children born in the years 1958 to 1968. I read about in Newsweek), and thus that had become their template.
I shuddered; my generation had created this monster. We who created the internet and Napster, we who perpetuated the desktop computer age – we had wrought this!
I pressed her for clarification. She coughed and blew her nose like a jazz musician; then she went on to tell me that since the seventies the American entertainment industry was in a rut creatively, and to pull itself out it “borrowed” from one of our allies from the Great War, (the one with the Nazis and Japanese, remember?). They would borrow the show concepts, change the names and call them new. This cunning plan worked until the shows they borrowed were shown on PBS. Now their secret was revealed!
But retribution never came, instead a mutual agreement was signed and the cross pollination began without a hitch.
“But how does this explain what is happening today?” I asked as she once again trumpeted. “Like any drug you become addicted, you can’t stop!” her voice clearing slightly. It seems that now they wait until a property, (industry term for a show, idea, Las Vegas hotel, etc), has gone through a full cycle of re-runs or showings on cable television, the idea can be used again. But the rattlesnake inside this concept is that the American entertainment juggernaut has been programmed to believe it can do anything better because we are Americans! Thus the explanation as to why shows created overseas are better than those we copy over here, they are vastly more intelligent than we are, (This is proved by the I.Q. scores of European children and anyone living in the middle of the country).
Dark Angel coughed again and then rushed off because she was out of Kleenex. But I had my answers, and it wasn’t hard to take it from there, oh no, I had the tools to finish my quest. I returned home, sat down, did more research into the industry, and learned what had been going on for the last two decades. Once a year the American film and television industry sends representatives to a convention in Great Britain, where they show all the television shows and concept shows from around the world. After the convention, the representatives return home and inform their superiors of what they have seen.
Now that the original shows from the convention are appearing on cable television networks: SciFi Channel, A&E, USA, HBO, Spice Channel, the Entertainment machine has devolved to the basest form of life, CANNABLISM. This is where the television generation aspect rears its myopic head – it uses those shows from the seventies as the food for its huge profit hungry desire. And not just for television, much worse, for major motion pictures! Scooby Do, The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, and more on the way. And it doesn’t stop there, the now gluttonous beast has moved to another form of media loved by the T-Generation – comic books! But the latter was for purely monetary purposes. The reasoning is that if you look at the average printing of a comic book, (X-Men sells 500,000 a month at roughly $3.50 each) times that by the price of a movie ticket = a trip to the Caiman Islands for some lucky producer and his mistress.
So as I power down my computer and wander sleepily out to the living room where House is just coming on, I sit and wonder – is this original or Marcus Wilby, M.D. on prescription drugs?
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Sunday, June 29, 2008
The Lost Creative Gene
Since the first primate sat in his darken cave while the night sounds of creatures too horrible to imagine crept outside its doorway, the need for creativity has been a major part of the life of humans. I was at a function with my family and as if on cue someone will ask the standard “let’s make conversation” question concerning what do I do for a living. When I answered I was once more given the answer, “Oh I wish I was creative. I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” I tried to explain to the rather garishly dressed individual that had cornered me at the bar where I was trying to numb the effects of the event with a black and tan, that everyone is creative in some respect – cooking, craft making, computer hacking, almost anything can be a form of creativity. The person’s vacant stare spoke volumes as they moved away in search of less cerebral strained conversation. But the conversation had sparked a cord in my anthropological trained mind and set me on a course of action; a hunt for the missing link itself, lost since the dawn of Microsoft – genuscreativitus.
As with all anthropological studies, we begin with observation and hypothesis: to the general populace of the planet Earth creativity is the ability to draw, paint and put things on paper, but nothing else. I have learned over the years that this is not the case. As a teacher at an art school, I found that many forms of creativity are untapped and go on all the time. For example, the excuses you hear for why homework is not finished are the things of great fiction – and in some cases, science fiction. Gone are the days of dogs eating homework as a form of criticism of their master’s work, now a cybernetic box with vast storage capability has replaced man’s best friend as a critic of ultimate wisdom and knowledge. And we cannot forget the miniature leech that can be inserted into the larger box that can steal the knowledge and then conveniently be lost in a car, apartment, pair of pants, a dog's butt – wherever! But I digress.
I decided that I needed to go back to the source of all knowledge, a dark place few have ventured into – the Public Library! In that air-conditioned repository of lost knowledge I began to research my subject and find a clue as to when the creative gene was first bred out of the human animal. My research led me to the conclusion that it had begun to die out around the time of the early seventies when all television was just re-hashing of old ideas and disco had become the fad of the day. Up to that point in time humanity had reached the moon, lasers technology was invented, and Star Trek was an original idea. The latter would fall down in the eighties when Paramount decided to revive the idea because they couldn’t think of anything better to do.
In the last part of the seventies, a young filmmaker sparked the world with an idea that was so creative and new that it triggered the almost lost gene into activity – Star Wars had come out and changed the world. It was a fun entertaining film that made even the laziest of bipeds want to achieve something more. Though the story was as simple as any children’s fairytale, it resonated within the human brain with fire. The effect was almost like a plague, it seeped into television, literature, and politics, even into everyday thought. “We could achieve anything as long as we believe!” became the new idea. But this was not to last. Throughout the early part of the nineteen-eighties, the genuscreativitus was being reborn within the human race, but in the background gaining strength and power was the beast. Like all evil beasts of legend and folk tales, this beast started as a small thing that would gain power and grow. Its mission was not clear but it would be pushed into the light and be seen as not an evil but as a savior. This vile creature and robber of creativity was known as The Web. Like the Hydra of Herculean myth, it had many brains in many heads across the world and it grew more as its followers grew in power and cunning.
It was fed the archive of human knowledge, it was given access to all the homes and offices of the world and in the year 2000, when it was believed that it was in danger – humanity showed its true colors and saved it from a dark death. Now that the beast had been saved and its presence was established in every home, (statistics show that every home in America has at least three computers hooked up to digital cable, and every three out of five people have internet access on their cell phones), the creative gene was being bred out.
How does this affect creativity you ask as you sit there in your bedroom staring at the big glowing box in front of you reading this text? Creativity is the ability to see something of the outside world and to absorb it into your psyche and then reproduce it as something new. Creativity is an internal process that makes civilization leap into the future with a higher ideal. Now I know what you are thinking, “I can be creative, but I can’t think of anything right now. I just ate and my creativity is low after eating Doritos, microwave burritos and Monster caffeine drinks.” That is my point, when we become comfortable we become lazy, and when we are lazy we are not creative. The creative gene thrives on excitement and external stimuli from being out in the world; not inside playing computer games or watching the Food Network 24/7. It is living everyday thinking about what you can aspire to becoming. Bluntly put – LIVING!
And so, my journey comes to an end and I am still without a definite answer for all the garishly dressed people I will meet at parties and functions. Genuscreativitus is slowly becoming a recessive gene within the human spirit like hair color and height. Oh, there will be some families where the gene strain is stronger than in others assuredly, but soon even they will become very rare as the need to go outside the house and experience the world becomes a podcast on YouTube or iTunes. But as long as there are those who are clever enough to use the Hydra’s many tentacles as a way of voicing and showing their true creative natures, and exulting the virtues of experiencing the world outside the blue glow of many heads of the Hydra, there is still hope.
Next: “Originality – There’s A Recession On!”
As with all anthropological studies, we begin with observation and hypothesis: to the general populace of the planet Earth creativity is the ability to draw, paint and put things on paper, but nothing else. I have learned over the years that this is not the case. As a teacher at an art school, I found that many forms of creativity are untapped and go on all the time. For example, the excuses you hear for why homework is not finished are the things of great fiction – and in some cases, science fiction. Gone are the days of dogs eating homework as a form of criticism of their master’s work, now a cybernetic box with vast storage capability has replaced man’s best friend as a critic of ultimate wisdom and knowledge. And we cannot forget the miniature leech that can be inserted into the larger box that can steal the knowledge and then conveniently be lost in a car, apartment, pair of pants, a dog's butt – wherever! But I digress.
I decided that I needed to go back to the source of all knowledge, a dark place few have ventured into – the Public Library! In that air-conditioned repository of lost knowledge I began to research my subject and find a clue as to when the creative gene was first bred out of the human animal. My research led me to the conclusion that it had begun to die out around the time of the early seventies when all television was just re-hashing of old ideas and disco had become the fad of the day. Up to that point in time humanity had reached the moon, lasers technology was invented, and Star Trek was an original idea. The latter would fall down in the eighties when Paramount decided to revive the idea because they couldn’t think of anything better to do.
In the last part of the seventies, a young filmmaker sparked the world with an idea that was so creative and new that it triggered the almost lost gene into activity – Star Wars had come out and changed the world. It was a fun entertaining film that made even the laziest of bipeds want to achieve something more. Though the story was as simple as any children’s fairytale, it resonated within the human brain with fire. The effect was almost like a plague, it seeped into television, literature, and politics, even into everyday thought. “We could achieve anything as long as we believe!” became the new idea. But this was not to last. Throughout the early part of the nineteen-eighties, the genuscreativitus was being reborn within the human race, but in the background gaining strength and power was the beast. Like all evil beasts of legend and folk tales, this beast started as a small thing that would gain power and grow. Its mission was not clear but it would be pushed into the light and be seen as not an evil but as a savior. This vile creature and robber of creativity was known as The Web. Like the Hydra of Herculean myth, it had many brains in many heads across the world and it grew more as its followers grew in power and cunning.
It was fed the archive of human knowledge, it was given access to all the homes and offices of the world and in the year 2000, when it was believed that it was in danger – humanity showed its true colors and saved it from a dark death. Now that the beast had been saved and its presence was established in every home, (statistics show that every home in America has at least three computers hooked up to digital cable, and every three out of five people have internet access on their cell phones), the creative gene was being bred out.
How does this affect creativity you ask as you sit there in your bedroom staring at the big glowing box in front of you reading this text? Creativity is the ability to see something of the outside world and to absorb it into your psyche and then reproduce it as something new. Creativity is an internal process that makes civilization leap into the future with a higher ideal. Now I know what you are thinking, “I can be creative, but I can’t think of anything right now. I just ate and my creativity is low after eating Doritos, microwave burritos and Monster caffeine drinks.” That is my point, when we become comfortable we become lazy, and when we are lazy we are not creative. The creative gene thrives on excitement and external stimuli from being out in the world; not inside playing computer games or watching the Food Network 24/7. It is living everyday thinking about what you can aspire to becoming. Bluntly put – LIVING!
And so, my journey comes to an end and I am still without a definite answer for all the garishly dressed people I will meet at parties and functions. Genuscreativitus is slowly becoming a recessive gene within the human spirit like hair color and height. Oh, there will be some families where the gene strain is stronger than in others assuredly, but soon even they will become very rare as the need to go outside the house and experience the world becomes a podcast on YouTube or iTunes. But as long as there are those who are clever enough to use the Hydra’s many tentacles as a way of voicing and showing their true creative natures, and exulting the virtues of experiencing the world outside the blue glow of many heads of the Hydra, there is still hope.
Next: “Originality – There’s A Recession On!”
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Planet Starbucks
Is it just me, or is Starbucks set on world domination?
I was driving down the main street where I live on a mission to the grocery store for a missing ingredient for my wife; and as I passed the Mecca of capitalism, the Target shopping mall, I noticed a sign reading, “Coming Soon – Starbucks.” As I stopped at the light just 100 yards down from the sign, I looked over to see that the small bookshop on the opposite corner was now a Starbucks. I continued towards my destination and noticed that in every mini-mall along the boulevard had a Starbucks coffee café tucked nice and warm inside with the large green shield marking its territory.
My fear began to surface upon entering the grocery store to and seeing that familiar green shield glowing above a crowd hollow-eyed people muttering words like “grande with room,” “extra scorching hot”, and “venti.” There blocking my path was a miniature version of Starbucks! It stood there like earth-toned monument to caffeine supremacy. I averted my gaze lest I fall pray to its power. I made my way to the bakery section, as an overly cheerful voice asked me if I wanted a coffee drink, (Starbucks has made even buying coffee politically correct). After finding what I came for I walked around the back of the store just to avoid going past it again.
Starbucks’ mission of conquest doesn’t stop at the invasion of markets, malls and airports, oh no, Starbucks is now producing movies! Not just any type of movie either, but a family movie about a little girl winning a spelling bee. Why you may ask? Consider the sizes of coffee you can order at a Starbucks – what language is “venti” from? They have contributed new words to the English language why not produce a movie to help you pronounce and spell them. The hidden agenda is clear, start building devotees among the young, keep the cycle going.
Not since the scare of the seventies when plans for Walt Disney World were splashed across newspapers all over the world had the planet feared a large corporate monster engulfing them. The fear of a company run by a mouse, a bad tempered duck, and a dog in over-sized overalls spouting family values and the American dream struck them to core with dread. This fear spawned a novel based on this concept, called Westworld which naturally turned into a hit film. It was a great idea, a big theme park where you could interact with androids, kill them or have sex with a babe you could never get in your life. It would be like playing World of Warcraft, but you could really die. In the late eighties when mouse and his team broke ground on Tokyo Disneyland, and were looking into a nice central spot in Europe, the world truly believed that it would be a Disney World after all. However, the low sales from Euro Disney halted the mouse and posse’s world dominance.
But secretly in the shadows a forgotten goddess and her minions were waiting.
In 1971, Seattle Washington, in a small market the empire had begun. By the middle of the eighties while Disney was breaking ground Walt Disney World, Starbucks was beginning to expand into the North West coast. While Mickey and his band were setting up stakes in Tokyo, Starbucks was inching farther south to the land of gold and movie stars! In the nineties, the goddess was fully in control of the West Coast and began looking hungrily eastward. What followed were agreements with Barnes and Nobles, airports and the large grocery market chains. Where the mouse had failed, Stepford wives like baristas and Arabica beans succeeded. Not since the Nazi Blitzkrieg, has there been such a precise surgical strike against freewill.
“You’re just being paranoid,” I hear you say, well here are some facts to browse while you sip your grande, double-decaf mocha with whip:
Stats:
1Coffee houses in all 50 states and 36 countries; 9260 total.
2”The Company's objective is to establish Starbucks as the most recognized and respected brand in the world.
To achieve this goal, the Company plans to continue to rapidly expand its retail operations, grow its specialty sales and other operations, and selectively pursue opportunities to leverage the Starbucks brand through the introduction of new products and the development of new distribution channels.”
Let me leave you with this thought as you drive to your job or school, count the number of Starbucks you see in a day, and then tell me it is not a plan for world domination.
1 and 2 were both taken from the Starbucks website at www.starbucks.com
I was driving down the main street where I live on a mission to the grocery store for a missing ingredient for my wife; and as I passed the Mecca of capitalism, the Target shopping mall, I noticed a sign reading, “Coming Soon – Starbucks.” As I stopped at the light just 100 yards down from the sign, I looked over to see that the small bookshop on the opposite corner was now a Starbucks. I continued towards my destination and noticed that in every mini-mall along the boulevard had a Starbucks coffee café tucked nice and warm inside with the large green shield marking its territory.
My fear began to surface upon entering the grocery store to and seeing that familiar green shield glowing above a crowd hollow-eyed people muttering words like “grande with room,” “extra scorching hot”, and “venti.” There blocking my path was a miniature version of Starbucks! It stood there like earth-toned monument to caffeine supremacy. I averted my gaze lest I fall pray to its power. I made my way to the bakery section, as an overly cheerful voice asked me if I wanted a coffee drink, (Starbucks has made even buying coffee politically correct). After finding what I came for I walked around the back of the store just to avoid going past it again.
Starbucks’ mission of conquest doesn’t stop at the invasion of markets, malls and airports, oh no, Starbucks is now producing movies! Not just any type of movie either, but a family movie about a little girl winning a spelling bee. Why you may ask? Consider the sizes of coffee you can order at a Starbucks – what language is “venti” from? They have contributed new words to the English language why not produce a movie to help you pronounce and spell them. The hidden agenda is clear, start building devotees among the young, keep the cycle going.
Not since the scare of the seventies when plans for Walt Disney World were splashed across newspapers all over the world had the planet feared a large corporate monster engulfing them. The fear of a company run by a mouse, a bad tempered duck, and a dog in over-sized overalls spouting family values and the American dream struck them to core with dread. This fear spawned a novel based on this concept, called Westworld which naturally turned into a hit film. It was a great idea, a big theme park where you could interact with androids, kill them or have sex with a babe you could never get in your life. It would be like playing World of Warcraft, but you could really die. In the late eighties when mouse and his team broke ground on Tokyo Disneyland, and were looking into a nice central spot in Europe, the world truly believed that it would be a Disney World after all. However, the low sales from Euro Disney halted the mouse and posse’s world dominance.
But secretly in the shadows a forgotten goddess and her minions were waiting.
In 1971, Seattle Washington, in a small market the empire had begun. By the middle of the eighties while Disney was breaking ground Walt Disney World, Starbucks was beginning to expand into the North West coast. While Mickey and his band were setting up stakes in Tokyo, Starbucks was inching farther south to the land of gold and movie stars! In the nineties, the goddess was fully in control of the West Coast and began looking hungrily eastward. What followed were agreements with Barnes and Nobles, airports and the large grocery market chains. Where the mouse had failed, Stepford wives like baristas and Arabica beans succeeded. Not since the Nazi Blitzkrieg, has there been such a precise surgical strike against freewill.
“You’re just being paranoid,” I hear you say, well here are some facts to browse while you sip your grande, double-decaf mocha with whip:
Stats:
1Coffee houses in all 50 states and 36 countries; 9260 total.
2”The Company's objective is to establish Starbucks as the most recognized and respected brand in the world.
To achieve this goal, the Company plans to continue to rapidly expand its retail operations, grow its specialty sales and other operations, and selectively pursue opportunities to leverage the Starbucks brand through the introduction of new products and the development of new distribution channels.”
Let me leave you with this thought as you drive to your job or school, count the number of Starbucks you see in a day, and then tell me it is not a plan for world domination.
1 and 2 were both taken from the Starbucks website at www.starbucks.com
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