4 ms·

Can you share some of that stuff? Where are these great movies I've never heard of? Where are the great books - can't people publish on their own nowadays? I c

Can you share some of that stuff? Where are these great movies I've never heard of? Where are the great books - can't people publish on their own nowadays? I can attest to good music being made, but it's still very slow to evolve compared to the 2nd half of the 20th century.

throwaway4aday 3y ago
> It's not the culture thats stuck, it's the media. Movies, books and widely played music are all closed avenues for 99.9% of artists. There's no way you'd get any kind of distribution worth the effort to produce such a large artifact. The most creative writing I've seen in the past 15 years has all been done as a series of posts or articles. The best genre bending music all seems to fly under the radar of most people because it only gets hosted on SoundCloud, obscure YouTube channels, and sold on indie online commerce sites, the same for short films which seem to be exclusively on YouTube or social media sites. Everything has to be DTC now, due in large part to the increase in gatekeeping by some of the platforms I mentioned like YouTube. You won't just show up in someone's feed because you're a good match for their interests anymore, at least not unless you've heavily monetized and sanitized your content to be acceptable to ad sales. So instead it all has to work on the indie model where you build your community along with your art. You have to be your own PR, run your own Discord, build your following, host your own events, etc. It's a struggle and it means your reach is just as limited as it would have been pre-internet when you were trying to do the same in your city using flyers, gigs, and word of mouth.
- dbspin 3y ago
  Completely agree with this take. Promotion is orthagonal to creation, both as a talent and an activity.
dbspin 3y ago
Re: publishing, sure you can self publish. But your job at that point is no longer as a writer. Your job is now marketing. The potential for people to see your work is directly related to your ability to sell it and arguably not at all related to your capacity to create it. It's not that good work isn't self published, its that there's nothing to make it stand out from the literary equivalent of drop shipping. The audience can't find it if it isn't being promoted. You're not just competing with every other self published work - from AI generated texts to the branded writing mills of 'authors' who pay drones to push out texts at scale under their name. You're also competing with the entire industry of online entertainment. Every brilliant thing made throughout history available instantly for streaming, purchase or pirating, and sold with every penny big content has to promote it. As for my own work, I have a small group of friends that I write with in person, and I perform in person occasionally (most recently in the fantastic writers cafe Laidak in Neukoln in Berlin). I'm utterly terrible at marketing, and my work doesn't fit the demographic criteria for contemporary publishing, so you can't find much it anywhere online or off. That's likely true of a whole generation of writers who aren't creating didactic autobiographical morality tales. I don't want to dump stories or books that take months to write into the void of self publishing, but I'm a writer so I still write. In terms of music - I just spent a few days in Berlin listening to live work at venues like Trixxter. If you're open to experimental live performance there are a whole bunch of scenes in small live venues. Again, not sure how you'd pick it out from the both the dross and the heavily promoted work online. In terms of film, again my reference is Berlin - there's a whole scene right now that you might call antifilm (I have no idea if it has a formal name). Small films shot verite from life, without a budget, and wilfully rejecting any kind of formal aesthetics (think Dogma on steroids). Wilfully horribly shot on bad cameras, but often incredibly interesting in terms of their engagement with life as its lived now, hauntology, post internet art etc. In terms of specific filmmakers Jean-Michel Brawands work is interesting. There's a whole community around Sputnik Kino and similar small events.
- playing_colours 3y ago
  Very interesting to learn a bit about Berlin’s culture scene. Do you write in German or English?
  - dbspin 3y ago
    English, Berlins a terrible place to learn German! Huge proportion of the central 'ring' population is non-native and only have mediocre or non-existent German.
jjj123 3y ago
There have been plenty of great, original movies post-2010 that push filmmaking in some way, they’re just overshadowed by the marvels of the world. Some of my recent favorites: Tar Sorry to Bother You Uncut Gems Get Out Tangerine/The Florida Project Dogtooth Mad God
- playing_colours 3y ago
  How do you find them?
  - JetSpiegel 3y ago
    Since the BBC axed The Film Programme, you can try following Eileen Jones at Jacobin.
  - jjj123 3y ago
    I used to read the AV Club’s reviews, but honestly the quality has gone way downhill there recently. Now I follow A.A. Dowd (one of the AV club’s former reviewers) plus a bunch of other people on Letterboxd, which is pretty much a social network for movies. Easier said than done, but you just have to find some person or blog that has similar taste in movies to you, and listen to them.

throwaway4aday 3y ago

> It's not the culture thats stuck, it's the media. Movies, books and widely played music are all closed avenues for 99.9% of artists. There's no way you'd get any kind of distribution worth the effort to produce such a large artifact. The most creative writing I've seen in the past 15 years has all been done as a series of posts or articles. The best genre bending music all seems to fly under the radar of most people because it only gets hosted on SoundCloud, obscure YouTube channels, and sold on indie online commerce sites, the same for short films which seem to be exclusively on YouTube or social media sites. Everything has to be DTC now, due in large part to the increase in gatekeeping by some of the platforms I mentioned like YouTube. You won't just show up in someone's feed because you're a good match for their interests anymore, at least not unless you've heavily monetized and sanitized your content to be acceptable to ad sales. So instead it all has to work on the indie model where you build your community along with your art. You have to be your own PR, run your own Discord, build your following, host your own events, etc. It's a struggle and it means your reach is just as limited as it would have been pre-internet when you were trying to do the same in your city using flyers, gigs, and word of mouth.

dbspin 3y ago
Completely agree with this take. Promotion is orthagonal to creation, both as a talent and an activity.

dbspin 3y ago

Re: publishing, sure you can self publish. But your job at that point is no longer as a writer. Your job is now marketing. The potential for people to see your work is directly related to your ability to sell it and arguably not at all related to your capacity to create it. It's not that good work isn't self published, its that there's nothing to make it stand out from the literary equivalent of drop shipping. The audience can't find it if it isn't being promoted. You're not just competing with every other self published work - from AI generated texts to the branded writing mills of 'authors' who pay drones to push out texts at scale under their name. You're also competing with the entire industry of online entertainment. Every brilliant thing made throughout history available instantly for streaming, purchase or pirating, and sold with every penny big content has to promote it. As for my own work, I have a small group of friends that I write with in person, and I perform in person occasionally (most recently in the fantastic writers cafe Laidak in Neukoln in Berlin). I'm utterly terrible at marketing, and my work doesn't fit the demographic criteria for contemporary publishing, so you can't find much it anywhere online or off. That's likely true of a whole generation of writers who aren't creating didactic autobiographical morality tales. I don't want to dump stories or books that take months to write into the void of self publishing, but I'm a writer so I still write. In terms of music - I just spent a few days in Berlin listening to live work at venues like Trixxter. If you're open to experimental live performance there are a whole bunch of scenes in small live venues. Again, not sure how you'd pick it out from the both the dross and the heavily promoted work online. In terms of film, again my reference is Berlin - there's a whole scene right now that you might call antifilm (I have no idea if it has a formal name). Small films shot verite from life, without a budget, and wilfully rejecting any kind of formal aesthetics (think Dogma on steroids). Wilfully horribly shot on bad cameras, but often incredibly interesting in terms of their engagement with life as its lived now, hauntology, post internet art etc. In terms of specific filmmakers Jean-Michel Brawands work is interesting. There's a whole community around Sputnik Kino and similar small events.

playing_colours 3y ago
Very interesting to learn a bit about Berlin’s culture scene. Do you write in German or English?
- dbspin 3y ago
  English, Berlins a terrible place to learn German! Huge proportion of the central 'ring' population is non-native and only have mediocre or non-existent German.

jjj123 3y ago

There have been plenty of great, original movies post-2010 that push filmmaking in some way, they’re just overshadowed by the marvels of the world. Some of my recent favorites: Tar Sorry to Bother You Uncut Gems Get Out Tangerine/The Florida Project Dogtooth Mad God

playing_colours 3y ago
How do you find them?
- JetSpiegel 3y ago
  Since the BBC axed The Film Programme, you can try following Eileen Jones at Jacobin.
- jjj123 3y ago
  I used to read the AV Club’s reviews, but honestly the quality has gone way downhill there recently. Now I follow A.A. Dowd (one of the AV club’s former reviewers) plus a bunch of other people on Letterboxd, which is pretty much a social network for movies. Easier said than done, but you just have to find some person or blog that has similar taste in movies to you, and listen to them.