On Brian Eno and Barry Lyndon: An Interview With Geeta Dayal (Part Two)

Eno seems to have been interested in cybernetics from a very early age. How did this interest impact his work?

Many artists, particularly in Britain, were interested in cybernetics. A lot of this can be traced to Roy Ascott's infamous "Groundcourse" at various art schools in Britain in the 1960s. Pete Townshend of The Who underwent the "Groundcourse," and so did Eno, and so did many others who would go on to be major names in their fields. Ascott's curriculum was a systems-based approach to learning, inspired by cybernetics.

Most people associate cybernetics with Norbert Wiener, but what I found even more interesting was the British wave of cybernetics theorists that came a bit later on -- people like W. Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, and Stafford Beer. Beer's book The Brain of the Firm, especially, was a major touchstone for Eno. Beer applied cybernetics to management, and Eno applied Beer's management theories to the studio environment

.

Eno is most often associated with Ambient music. Can you share with us something of his understanding of this concept and where it came from?

Ambient music often has no discernible beats or melodies. It is music, as Eno once said, that is "as ignorable as it is interesting." Eno is the prime exponent of ambient music, but the concept has been around for a long time. The concept was established in the modern era by the composer Erik Satie, via his idea of "furniture music" -- music that would mingle with the sounds of forks and knives at dinner, as he described it.

You have a great deal to tell us about Eno's process, including how he thought of his collaborators, their tools and technologies, and even the space of the studio as "instruments" through which he created his music. What does this expansive concept of "instrument" tell us about Eno's approach as a composer?

"Expansive" is a good word to use to describe Eno in general. Eno is not a traditional composer by any standard. Nor is he a trained musician. As I write in my book, he uses the "non-musician" label to his advantage. He doesn't play by the rules and conventions of music theory, because he doesn't really know the rules. But he has incredible intuition, and a lot of natural talent for music. And, as Eno's frequent collaborator Robert Fripp told me, Eno's playfulness in the studio is key. If an air compressor makes an interesting sound, why shouldn't it be an instrument?

Think of how creative children are. When you were a small child, you didn't know that pots and pans weren't real instruments; you just played with them anyway because they make interesting noises when you hit them. Then you get older, and you learn that a piano is a real instrument and pots and pans aren't, and you stop banging on pots and pans.

Part of the idea of the Oblique Strategies cards is to put you back into a playful environment. To drop the inhibitions of rigid classifications, strict hierarchies, and what's "wrong" and what's "right."

You compare Eno's music at one point to the work of Stanley Kubrick --especially in Barry Lyndon. What makes this analogy appropriate andinformative?

I read somewhere that Barry Lyndon was one of Eno's favorite films. I wondered why. Then I watched the film closely a few times, and I started to understand. There were a few interesting coincidences between Barry Lyndon and Another Green World. One was that Barry Lyndon and Another Green World came out the same year -- they both came out in 1975. Barry Lyndon doesn't look like many other films out there. It looks very organic and natural, as if it's shot with natural light alone, but Kubrick actually used the most advanced technology available at the time. In a similar way, Another Green World is full of imagery from the natural world -- the album title alone seems to suggest lush, pastoral landscapes -- but it was made using some of the most cutting-edge studio techniques, and lots of synthesizers and other electronic gear.

For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick searched the world for the the most high-tech lenses possible -- lenses that would be capable of, say, photographing a scene in a dark castle lit with candles. No one else in the industry was using these super-fast lenses; Kubrick had to have them custom-built according to his crazy specifications. Kubrick also used custom lenses for A Clockwork Orange, but Barry Lyndon took the technology a step further. Instead of the stark visual effects you see in A Clockwork Orange -- that dystopian, futuristic feel, which seems to suggest cutting-edge technology -- Barry Lyndon is the exact opposite. It's full of sweeping views of the Irish countryside, this gorgeous natural imagery. You almost feel as if
you could step right into the film; it feels so real.

I was struck by the phrase, "music as immersion," in the book. What kinds of immersive experience did Eno try to create through his work?

There are a few ways. One of the tricks Eno uses, which I write about in my book, is long fade-ins and fade-outs, to make you feel as if the music is part of a larger continuum -- as if you're stepping into a scene that's still happening when you leave it. In the classic U2 album The Joshua Tree, which Eno produced, the first song, "Where the Streets Have No Name," fades in very slowly. The song takes a long time to start. That's
on purpose. You're stepping into a world; you become immersed in the album. It doesn't start abruptly, like most rock albums do; it lures you in. You can hear the same thing in the classic David Bowie album Low, which Eno also produced; the first song, "Speed of Life," takes a long time to fade in.

Another immersive technique Eno uses is that his ambient music often sounds like a slice taken from a larger whole -- there's no beginning/middle/end or traditional verse-chorus-verse song structure. It's an ocean of sound, omnidirectional. This is interesting to me for
several reasons. There's the feminine aspect -- it's quite the opposite of, say, the Rolling Stones, with a macho frontman shouting loud lyrics and a band bashing out the tunes.

And then there's the textural aspect -- Eno's music is about textures, layers, timbres. Eno has a flair for a good melody, but his music isn't about melody per se, nor is it necessarily about rhythm either. Some great German bands in the 1970s, like Can and Neu!, did a similar thing with their music, concentrating on texture.

Throughout, you describe Eno as an artist drawn towards both experimental and popular music. How was he able to find a balance between the two impulses and how have this merging of distinctive kinds of cultural production shape how critics and fans have responded to his work?

Eno's great talent is in being able to travel both worlds. U2 once famously said that they didn't go to art school; they went to Brian Eno. There's some truth to that. Eno's interest in experimental music started very early on, when he was a teenager. He started booking experimental musicians as a student in art school; he performed with avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra. This was all before Roxy Music, and before his solo career.

But the pop mentality started early on, too. Eno grew up listening to American doo-wop records, and his first favorite band was The Who. Eno was more successful than a lot of others at merging experimental ideas with a pop aesthetic. That's why so many bands go to him when they want to do something unexpected. You don't go to Eno to get the best-sounding, best-engineered record on planet Earth. You go to get something interesting. To go somewhere you haven't gone before. And at its heart, that's what experimental music is all about -- experimenting.

Geeta Dayal is an arts journalist and critic who writes frequently on the intersections between sound, visual art, and technology. Her book Another Green World, on the musician Brian Eno, was published by Continuum in 2009. She is the recent recipient of major funding from Creative Capital / The Andy Warhol Foundation, in the Arts Writers Grant Program. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Print, and Wired. She maintains a blog at www.theoriginalsoundtrack.com.

On Brian Eno and Barry Lyndon: An Interview With Geeta Dayal (Part One)

I don't write much on this blog about popular music. I have always said music and sports were my real blind spots when it comes to researching contemporary popular culture. So, I have the utmost respect when I find a writer who can take me inside the music and help me understand why a particular album matters for the culture. I am all the more delighted to find such a person in my own backyard. In this case, I do mean this more less literally -- in my own backyard.

More acurately, I discovered that Geeta Dayal, one of the students who used to live in Senior House, the dorm where Cynthia and I were housemasters for fourteen years, has become a top notch music critic. Geeta was an undergraduate student in the Comparative Media Studies Program, she was one of the leaders in Senior House culture, and for a short while, she worked for me as we were launching the Center for Future Civic Media. But when she wasn't hanging out in our dorm, she was studying journalism at Columbia, writing for the Village Voice and a host of other publications, and working on a book about Brian Eno or more exactly a book about one of Eno's best albums, Another Green World, which shows us the many different layers on which his music works and situating it within the context of his life and his times.

I read the book with both pride in what my former student has accomplished and fascination with what she had to teach me about an artist who ranks very highly on my personal list of music preferences. I often use Eno's music as a backdrop when I am writing and I like to listen to this strangely familiar (and I do mean strange) music when I have trouble relaxing in strangely familiar hotel rooms while traveling. I knew I liked Eno, but I didn't have a language to explain why. I had to share my excitement about this book with my readers.

In this interview Dayal helps us to see the links between Eno's sounds, his early experience as a painter, his fascination with cybernetics, his collaborations with other artists, his fannish engagement with Stanley Kubrick's films, especially Barry Lyndon, and his ability to move fluidly between high and pop culture.

First, let's go through some of the choices which shaped this book. Why Brian Eno? Can you tell us something about his importance to contemporary music and about your own interest in the subject?

I find Eno to be an endlessly fascinating figure. He has so many varied interests -- creating ambient music, producing rock music, making video art, mixing up his own perfumes, gardening, cogitating about evolutionary biology and cybernetics, inventing iPhone apps -- the list goes on.

I identified personally with Eno's sprawling scope. When I was a student at MIT in the 1990s, I ran a magazine, had a radio show, organized protests, made dozens of short films, did neuroscience research, established a 24-hour video art telethon on the MIT cable channel, booked bands, taught high school students, and did about a million other things besides. It's a miracle I graduated on time, and with two degrees at that.

Over the past decade, I focused myself on being a writer, because writing was a safe space to explore my wide range of interests, from visual art to science. Writing gave me focus and discipline, and a set of practical constraints to work within, which I found useful. But writing never restrained me creatively; if anything, writing a book helped my imagination to grow. Eno is very focused, too, with an almost laser-like intensity. But he is, as he likes to call himself, a "non-musician." He uses music as a way to test out new ideas, with a sense of playfulness and an all-embracing perspective. Sometimes I joke and say I'm a "non-journalist."

And why Another Green World? What made this particular album a key focal point for structuring your examination of his work?

I thought pretty seriously about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album Eno made with David Byrne in 1981. But Another Green World told a better story. It signified a major transition in Eno's aesthetic direction. The album was a bridge to Eno's ambient works. It was composed almost entirely within the studio environment, which I thought was a very intriguing story to tell. It was made at around the same time as Discreet Music, an album that also had a great story behind it. And Another Green World was the first album to be composed with the help of the Oblique Strategies, and I found the Oblique Strategies cards to be a very interesting thing to talk about, as well.

The Oblique Strategies cards become a central motif running through this book and also played an interesting role in your writing process. What can you tell us about them? What do they show about Eno's particular flavor of creativity? And how did they guide your own journey as a writer?

I find the Oblique Strategies cards to be extraordinarily useful; I've been using them for years. I keep a deck on my desk at all times. When I get stuck while writing -- which is often -- I pick a card. "Are there sections? Consider transitions," a card might advise. "Use a different color." Sometimes this advice is not useful at all, but it always makes me laugh, rearranges my perspective, and helps to shakes me out of my rut. Each chapter in my book is named after an Oblique Strategy -- "Honor thy error as a hidden intention," for example. "The tape is now the music." It seemed natural to use the Oblique Strategies cards to write the book; I was often stuck while writing this book. My book is a short one, but it was an extremely ambitious project. I was trying to distill a lot of research, and a lot of ideas from the last forty years, into a very short space. Some of these ideas were very challenging ones, and I really tried hard to explain them in as clear terms as possible.

I think the Oblique Strategies cards tell you a lot about Eno's quirky sense of humor, and also about his approach to making music -- both in his sense of play, and his faith in the artistic process. But the Oblique Strategies didn't emerge out of a vacuum. In my book, I write about many other creative techniques that were similar to the Oblique Strategies -- from John Cage's use of the I Ching, to the Fluxus movement's inventive use of cards, to Marshall McLuhan's "Distant Early Warning" cards. The late artist Peter Schmidt developed the Oblique Strategies cards with Eno; Schmidt was making paintings based on hexagrams from the I Ching in the late
1960s. There was a lot of interest in chance at around that time, and in systems. The Oblique Strategies cards, in their own way, were a systems-based approach to creativity.

How much access did you have to Eno and his collaborators in developing this book?

One way to write this book would have been to do an extended interview with Eno, and base the book solely around his observations. But Another Green World was made quite a long time ago, now -- 35 years ago! -- and Eno is a bit exhausted with talking about his work in the 1970s, and doesn't remember much about the ins and outs of the making of Another Green World, anyway. I don't blame him. And Eno always surrounds himself with interesting people, and works with so many people. So it made sense to talk to them.

Part of what made the book interesting, I think, was that I didn't base the book around a big interview with Eno. Instead, I did a lot of archival research; I read thousands of pages of interviews and reviews. I read dozens of books, from topics ranging from the history of cybernetics to gardening to visual art to British experimental music. I spoke to a lot of Eno's friends and collaborators, past and present, who were very open in talking with me. I wanted to meet everyone, not just his collaborators onAnother Green World. I wanted to talk to people along the entire spectrum of Eno's life. I was interested in collaborators, assistant engineers, ex-girlfriends, friends. In that way, you create an outline of the person that might be more nuanced and surprising than just going straight to the source.

I had experience with doing a lot of digging. When I was starting out as an arts journalist, almost ten years ago, I spent a year working as the research assistant to Simon Reynolds for his book Rip it Up and Start Again, a major history of post-punk music. An incredible amount of research went into that book: around 125 new interviews, plus hundreds of archival interviews, cut out from old press clippings, and rare zines and so on. Simon taught me how to research and write a non-fiction book, based on original research. It's a painstaking and sometimes painful process,
but I think the results are worth it.

I was interested to learn that Eno started out hoping to be a painter and only later turned his attention to music. What led to the change? Is there a way in which we can describe Eno's music as "painterly"?

I think that painting and music are interrelated. Kandinsky, for instance, had huge ties to the music of his time; he was very inspired by composers like Schoenberg, and expressed this in his work. And many musicians were into painting; composers like Scriabin were deeply synaesthetic, and described their music in terms of colors and so on. Messiaen, the famed composer, once walked out on a performance of Beethoven because he felt that the purple colors on the stage clashed horribly with G major!

Eno's first favorite painter was Mondrian; he had a small book of Mondrian prints as a child, and became fascinated with it. For Eno, the shift to music happened in art school -- and as I write in my book, art school in Britain in the 1960s was an incubator, of sorts, for many of the leading rock musicians of the time, from The Who to Roxy Music. It was a safe environment to test out new ideas. Painting seemed to be stagnating a bit, compared to the huge explosion of ideas in painting in the first half of the 20th century. But here was rock music, in the late 1960s in Britain; of course a young, creative person would want a piece of that. Even Andy Warhol, the coolest painter in New York, was aligning himself with rock and roll, and hanging out with the Velvet Underground.

Geeta Dayal is an arts journalist and critic who writes frequently on the intersections between sound, visual art, and technology. Her book Another Green World, on the musician Brian Eno, was published by Continuum in 2009. She is the recent recipient of major funding from Creative Capital / The Andy Warhol Foundation, in the Arts Writers Grant Program. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Print, and Wired. She maintains a blog at www.theoriginalsoundtrack.com.

What the Chinese Are Making of Avatar

Several years ago, I met a remarkable young man named Lucifer Chu in Shanghai. Chu had been the person who first translated the works of J.R.R. Tolkien into Chinese, after a considerable push to convince publishers that there was a market for fantasy and science fiction in China. He took the proceeds from the sales of the Lord of the Rings to launch a fantasy foundation, which promoted fantastical literature in Taiwan and mainland China, and he translated more than 30 fantasy novels for the Chinese market. As of a few years ago, almost all of the fantasy novels and role playing games available in Taiwan were translated by Chu and he was making in roads into getting these same works published for the mainland. He argued that the fantastic played crucial roles in Chinese folk and literary traditions but the genre had largely been eradicated there as a consequence of Maoist policies during the Cultural Revolution which promoted socialist realism and saw fantasy as western and decadent. Chu argued that bringing fantasy literature back into China was a way of helping his people rediscover their dreams and reimagine their future.

As I have been speaking with my USC student Lifang He about her work on the fan cultures which have quickly grown up around Avatar in China, I've wondered what connections, if any, exist between these two efforts to promote the fantastical imagination in that country. Are the young men and women we read about here the offspring of Chu's efforts? Are they connecting with western fan culture on line? This piece offers us some tantalizing glimpses into the many different ways Chinese fans have mobilized around and fantasized about James Cameron's blockbuster.

The American press has been following the commercial success of Avatar in China primarily as a business issue -- exploring what it might tell us about other opportunities for selling media in this country, using it to shadow Google's turmoil in the country, and marginally exploring why China was pushing the film from many of the nation's movie theaters. Yet, this piece takes us inside the world of Chinese Avatar fans, helping us to better understand what the film looks like from their perspective.

Avatar and Chinese Fan Culture
Lifang He

James Cameron's new movie Avatar is breaking the box office record in China. It is the highest grossing movie in Chinese movie history, achieving around 1.02 billion USD (Xinhua News, 2010). The influence and popularity of Avatar is spectacular and fans were crazy about the movie. Because of the limited IMAX 3D theaters in China, the movie tickets are in short supply and the price is very high. The tickets are officially priced at USD 18-26 but resold at up to USD 60. There are only11 IMAX 3D theaters in China.

Despite the ticket prices, Chinese fans waited overnight outside the store for many hours, similar to people waiting outside the Apple Store for the new iPhone. White collared professionals in small cities took their annual leave and made group trips to nearby big cities for the IMAX 3D version. Enthusiastic fans watched it multiple times in three different versions: IMAX 3D, 3D and 2D.

Being a fan of Avatar goes beyond the theater screens; it floods into a variety of online fan activities. When the Chinese government wanted to pull the 2D Avatar off most of the theaters to provide screens to the new released movie Confucius, many online fans called for a boycott of Confucius. Chinese audiences are becoming more and more active, embracing aspects of participatory culture and fandom, and seeking to more directly shape their entertainment options.

In this essay, Chinese fan culture will be discussed by examining various Avatar fan activities on one of the growing online communities, Baidu Tieba, a user driven network. Fan produced media will give us some clues as to how the young people react to the movie Avatar and why they are enthusiastic about the movie.

Collecting and Sharing Information
As of February 2010, users at Baidu Tieba generated 36,187 topics and 452, 509 posts about Avatar (Baidu, 2010). These posts involved the sharing of relevant information and the discussion of the characters, director, story, plot and other interests.
The planet Pandora draws most of the attention. Fans are very interested in the Pandora world because the movie only provides a glimpse of its ecology and culture. Fans established an online study group to learn the Na'vi language, planet, trees, customs, colors, lifestyle in Pandora etc. A fan bought an English version of Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora and shared the content with other fans (link). Some fans can't understand English very well, so they are waiting for the Chinese version of the book. As one fan explained "no matter how expensive the book is, I still want to buy the Chinese version although my monthly salary is only 800 RMB (120USD) a month."
Some fans complained that the Chinese translation of the movie were really bad and posted the correct translation for other people. Similar to the Chinese translation team who volunteered to work on English and Chinese translation of American TV shows like Lost, 24, and CSI, they are very dedicated.

As Neytiri draws many discussions on the web, fans wanted to make Jake as popular as Neytiri so they tried to build the buzz online. In these efforts, they collected all kinds of pictures and posters from the movie and other media. They also discussed Jake's hair, dress style, facial expression, and his pure smile in the movie. For instance, fans chatted about when Jake had the best smile in the movie. The first time Jake ran out of the research institute when he first got his avatar, his smile was regarded as the most pure and innocent.

Fans were also eager to explore all kinds of information from the production, back-story to the reception process. For example, they talked about the sex scene that was cut off from screen, explored the different versions of trailers, the couple's relationship in the movie, and their stories in the future. Other interesting discussions included the best time to use the restroom during the movie. They indicated that it is better to go to the toilet when the movie was at 56 minutes so they won't miss a lot of exciting moments.

Fans share the knowledge with all the members of Tieba community, circulating the information and inviting other members to participate in the discussion. As Pierre Levy wrote "no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity" (Levy, 1998).

Fan Writing

Besides collecting and sharing information about the movie, fan writing is another emerging form of fan activity on the web. Because of the restrictions of the Chinese publication rules, the internet provides more free space for fans to publish their work and most of their work is much better than what has been written by the professional journalists, covering comprehensive stories about the evolution of IMAX 3D technology, the background of director, back-stories of the characters.

Some fans also wrote a parallel story based on the Chinese current social issues. As a famous blogger, Chenpeng Li wrote, the story of how the alien Na'vi are pulled off their homeland by humans is similar to Chinese residents being forced to leave their homes and land by the Chinese government (Sina.com, 2010). Avatar is a great metaphor of nail house dwellers against big property developers. "Nail House" refers to home or buildings of people who refused to move when the property needs to be demolished by the government for development (Wiki, 2010). In Li's blog, he wrote

"in 2154, a land development company RDA went to Pandora to get more land and living resources with the assertion that the residents who agree to move out can get attractive compensation. The residents refused to move out since they have lived there for many generations, just like the Na'vi people who didn't want to move because their roots were under the tree. RDA has a strong relationship with the government and also has other supports such as city managers acting as low-level government officials, responsible for maintaining city laws and rules. A disagreement erupted and started a fight between the RDA and the residents. "

Li regarded Jake as the leader who betrayed the Housing Demolition Office, referred Colonel Quarles as the chief city manager and the Na'vi people as the Chinese residents who are pulled off their land. The last scenario about Neytiri beating Colonel Quarles represents the extreme military power that was defeated by the Chinese mass residents.

Chinese fans also associated themselves with another Hollywood movie UP, which tells a story of a 78-year-old man Carl Fredricksen who refused to move out from his neighborhood. He made his house as a makeshift airship to fly to his dream place Paradise Falls using thousands of the balloons. A popular Chinese blogger, Han Han commented on his blog:

"UP provides the Chinese citizens with a new perspective toward house demolition. Chinese residential tenants only have the right to use the land for 70 years, and after 70 years the land use rights belong to the government and the houses are regarded as private owned property. Both the movie UP and Chinese government provided us a solution to cope with the house demolition. UP tells us to lift the house off the ground by the helium balloons; and the Chinese government tells us that don't think too much because after 70 years, the houses will probably collapse" (Han, 2009).

In recent years, China has been experiencing a fast period of urbanization and many old buildings and neighborhood have been torn down for modern shopping malls and skyscrapers. Over 30 million residents have been forced to move from their homes (Hays, 2008). Li referred the movie to some cases in China that residents refused compensation deals and fighted with the government. Fuzheng Tang who poured gas and burn herself to protect her three floor home from Chengdu violent home demolition, Pan Rong who threw self-made petrol bomb to the demolition crew, and Chongqing nail house are the all real cases for anti-demolition.

Avatar and UP are a good reflection of recent Chinese social problems, showing a lack of citizen rights and choices. As Han said " brutal demolition can only happen in foreign planets and China, which foreigners can't image" (Sina.com, 2010). Chinese fans found both movies quite related to their life and both provide them with a story that they can share and discuss. The only Chinese popular TV series Snail House (Wo Ju), also titled Dwelling Narrowness, that can truly reflect their life tells a real story about how average Chinese people became house slaves in Shanghai in an environment of rising home prices and official corruption, was eventually banned by the government. Li regarded Avatar as the best movie that eulogizes the nail house successfully fighting against forcible demolition in China. The forcible city managers, house demolition office, Chinese City Demolition Ordinance was vividly analogized in the movie (Sina, 2010).

Fans Creative Work

Besides collecting and sharing knowledge and fan writing, fans also use other ways to create their own works such as costume play, Avatar paintings, etc. One of the most popular works online is the costume play by a couple from Chongqing. They dressed like Jake and Neytiri and posted their Avatar pictures online, which has over 94630 viewers (Baidu, 2010).

Vidding is another way for them to participate in the creation. Three kinds of videos will be shown here to showcase the vidding culture in China. The first one is a theme song vid, which remixes the video "I See You" and "My Heart Will Go On." Fans find that the stories of two theme songs are very similar: both are love stories and the main actors in the two movies both died. For example, the lyrics of "My Heart Will Go On" has the words "I see you" that can match with the content of Avatar. Here is the video of "I See You."

Also fans made another version of Titanic with "I See You."

In another video, fans used photoshop to make Avatar posters for the celebrities such as Obama, Yao Ming and Li Yuchun and used their Avatar photos as materials to make the video, which can be played here. Similar to the fans of Kung Fu Panda, they like using Photoshop software to make posters with different themes such as Harry Potter, Lust, Caution, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.

Another vid is created by a World of Warcraft fan J J. Because the worlds of Warcraft and Pandora are very similar, he incorporated the video clips from the WOW game and made a WOW version of Avatar, which is very popular among Chinese fans. Here is the video.

Why fans are so enthusiastic?
The Internet and digital technology has given fans unprecedented access to information and has changed the concept of freedom of choice and creative expression. Because of the national system and media censorship, Chinese people can not say anything they want. But online community provides a good platform for the fans to say something they can't in real life.

Online community also provides them a way to relieve the stress and escape from the reality because they face so much pressure from all aspects of society such as intense high school graduation examination, competitive job hunting, etc. In addition, playing around in the Internet is not regarded as a serious hobby by Chinese old generation who are very realistic and more concerned about their children's future such as going to a good university and having a decent job.

Chinese youth are tired of Chinese serious mainstream film culture because Chinese films lack the creativity that American TV shows and movies have. Avatar created a dream and an ideal world that Chinese fans can't have in reality. As a famous movie director Lu Chuan said, "Avatar made me realize that what we lack is not technology. I suddenly realized how far away our films are from simple beauty, crystal-clear purity and passionate dreams" (Sina.com, 2010).

Conclusion

Since its launch, Avatar has developed a huge enthusiastic fan base in China. Although Chinese fans are not exposed to as much media products as Americans because of the unequal international distribution, they are very active in learning and understanding what's happening with the movie. Internet and new technologies provide them a medium to participate in the media production and distribute their work online. They collect and circulate information, participate in the discussion, and create their own works to contribute to the Avatar community. It is a great representation of creativity and self-expression.

Avatar has also had a revolutionary impact on Chinese movie industry, stimulating the development of the local movie making. Chinese Film Association and Chinese Film Art Research Center hosted a conference meeting in January 2010, discussing how to improve Chinese movies. The professor Shixian Huang from Beijing Film Academy criticized the famous Chinese film director Yimou Zhang's recent work A Simple Noodle Story, which was only taken several months to be finished and is a very low quality movie. The secretary-general from China Movie Forums indicated that the main film audience is generation 80s and 90s who are enthusiastic with the non-reality films which lacks in China. He appealed to the Chinese government that China should give support and help to such kind of films. Some other interesting questions are also raised in this meeting such as how to nurture the audiences by the series films, how to cultivate the young talents, how to bring the technology to the movie making, etc.

China is in a transition period where old system and new system are colliding and they haven't developed a very stable system yet. In the future, with political and social policy more and more open and transparent, there will be more freedom for movie production. It will be also be easier for the Hollywood filmmakers to promote their films and other media extensions.

Lifang He is from China, where she received her undergraduate degree in Journalism. After college, she was hired by two global advertising agencies Wieden & Kennedy and Euro RSCG Worldwide. At these agencies, she worked as a strategic planner for a variety of international brands including but not limited to Nike and Nokia and gained experience in consumer and market research and developing brand strategies. Since August of 2009, she has been pursuing her Master's degree in Communication Management at USC Annenberg School for Communication. It was while attending a USC class taught by Henry Jenkins that her academic interest turned toward transmedia planning and studying fan culture. Her specific areas of interest in these fields revolve around digital culture, brand communities, and how brands relate to and engage fans.

References:

Baidu (2010). Retrieved Jan. 20, 2010

Baidu Tieba (n.b.). Retrieved Jan.20, 2010

Chuan, Lu (2010). Avatar Critics. Sina.com. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010.

Han, Han (2010). Sina Blog. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010, f

Hays, Jeffrey (2008). Urban Life in China. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010

Itzkoff, Dave (2010). You Saw What in Avatar? New York Times.

Jenkins, Henry (2006). Fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture.

Levy, Pierre (1998). Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace.

Li, Chenpeng (2010). Story of Avatar and Nail House. Sina.com. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010.

Nail House. Wikipedia. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010.

Sentinel, Asia (2010). Avatar vs. Confucius in China. Korea Times. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010.

Xin Hua News (2010). Retrieved Jan. 20, 2010.

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• Film: Newswire:Chinese Government Pulls Avatar from 2D Screens (avclub.com)

Vidding Kung Fu Panda in China

From time to time, I use this space to showcase the global dimensions of the kinds of participatory culture which so often concern us here. When I first started to write about fan culture, for example, the circuit along which fan produced works traveled did not extend much beyond the borders of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and perhaps Australia. American fans knew little about fan culture in other parts of the world and indeed, there was often speculation about why fandom was such a distinctly American phenomenon.

Now, fans online connect with others all over the world, often responding in real time to the same texts, conspiring to spread compelling media content from one culture to the other, and we are seeing a corresponding globalization of fan studies. Yet, some countries remain largely outside of field of view, because of language barriers, cultural differences, political policies, and alternative tech platforms.

Consequently, most of us know very little about how fan production practices have spread to China -- which is too often described in terms of its piracy of American content and too little discussed in terms of its creative repurposing of that content to reflect their own cultural interests. So, I am really excited over these next two installments to share some glimpses into fan culture in China -- specifically focusing on the vidding community there (but also discussing other forms of fan participation.)

These two posts were created by Lifang He, an Annenberg student who took my transmedia entertainment class in the fall and who is doing an independent study with me this term to expand her understanding of the concept of participatory culture. Here, she talks about how Kung Fu Panda got read in relation to the economic crisis in China, and next time, she will tackle the array of different fan responses to Avatar.

Kung Fu Panda vidding and Chinese fan culture
Lifang He

In this paper, I'm going to write about a Chinese vid based on a movie Kung Fu Panda as it is a great example of fan made extensions in China. I'll introduce the background of the movie, discuss the relationship between the vid and the original movie, and also I'll talk about fan's role in the vidding and Chinese fan culture.

Kung Fu Panda is a 2008 animated comedy movie directed by John Stevenson and produced by DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. It tells a story of a clumsy panda bear Po, who unenthusiastically works as a waiter for his father's noodle restaurant and eventually achieves his dream and becomes a master of martial arts.

According to Sina Entertainment (2008), this movie achieved significant monetary success after it was released on July 20, 2008 in China, which had hit approximately 14 million USD box office sales in the first ten days.

This Hollywood made Chinese movie is much better than other Chinese made Chinese movies, which proves American's leading ability to create entertainment and market Chinese culture. The movie is filled with Chinese elements. The key character Panda is China's national treasure and the other characters in the movie such as the monkey, snake, red crowned crane, tiger and mantis are the classic representatives of Chinese martial arts. Moreover, the Chinese imagery was used so well that Chinese audience felt very excited to discuss how great the movie is. As a famous Chinese film director Lu Chuan commented on his blog, " the movie brought big laugh to Chinese people. It was a big surprise. Our familiar culture is no longer a burden for the creativity, instead it becomes an active and vivid entertainment" (Lu Chuan, 2008).

In response to the success of the movie, a lot of discussion was generated online between the audience and the animation filmmaker after its first release. Fans posted reviews on their blogs and discussed their favorite characters on Bulletin Board System (BBS). Also hey used Photoshop software to make posters with different themes such as Harry Potter, Lust, Caution, Pirates of the Caribbean, which attracted a lot of buzz. They also created music videos and wrote lyrics to compliment the movie, which were posted on social networking sites. After knowing that The Kaboom of Doom, a sequel of Kung Fu Panda, has been currently in pre-production and will be released in 2011 (Wiki, 2009), fans started to make their own versions of the movie.

Among all of these fan activities, producing vids and sharing with other fans on Chinese social networking sites is one of the most popular ways for them to express their love to the movie. They wrote scripts, re-edited video clips using the original footage and did the voice over to tell a new story. Unlike American viding culture that has a relatively long history, Chinese vidding only emerged a couple of years ago owing to the video sharing websites such as Youtube.com, Tudou.com. There's no centralized grassroots community for vidding in China and Chinese vidding culture is very casual. An example to help exemplify how fans use this to publicize their opinions is a vid called Gu Piao Panda (Stock Panda), which is widely spread online and applauded by the fans.

Gu Piao Panda is a three-minute short film, which links Po to China's unsound stock market and tells a parallel story about stock panda. The story starts from a scene that Po was a legend in the stock market, but it turns out that it is just a dream. In reality, he is a rookie stock investor and his money is all tied up in stock because of the global recession. Po is so sad that he goes back home to talk to his goose father and his father persuades him to withdraw money from the stock market because of the bearish market situation. Po has a strong belief that he will become a guru in the financial world someday and the only reason he hasn't achieved that yet is because he hasn't met his teacher. His father has no choice and encourages him to attend a stock master competition at somewhere in the mountain. Po tries so hard to get into the competition and there are three competitive groups --- the happiness group with monkey in it, the fighting group with tiger in it and the desire group with red crowned crane in it. These three groups represent the three different types of stock operators. Then, Po attends the competition and finally his teacher finds him and teaches him how to become a successful fund manger. In the vid, the creator doesn't show an ending in the video, and instead he poses a question that if Po will become a stock master finally.

There are many similarities between the original movie and fan made vid. First of all, both of the film and fan vid chose Po as a main character as he is a good character to conceive the new stories and has become a prototype based on which fans have developed distinct characters in various contexts. In Kung Fu Panda, Po is an every Panda who masters some area through his persistent effort. Gu Piao Panda is a rookie stock operator and finally achieves success as a stock master. In other vids such as Real Estate Price, the key character panda is portrayed as a junior real estate developer who finally becomes a hero to save the real estate from subprime lending crisis. Moreover, the storylines of the two movies are very similar. Specifically, Gu Piao Panda creates a story that Po is a rookie stock operator who wants to become a stock master. In Kung Fu Panda, Po is a worker at his father's noodle restaurant who wants to become a kungfu fighter. Also, they both fight for an evil in the two videos. In Gu Piao Panda, he fights for the stagnant stock market. In Kung Fu Panda, he fights for Tai Lung. Furthermore, Po attends the competition to become a master in two movies either as a kung fu master or financial guru. In the original movie, he fights for a kung fu secret book. In the vid, he fights for two cars as the competition awards. When examining the video clips, it is apparent that fans use the same video clip to convey the same meaning in the different context. They just choose the video clips they like from the original movie to tell their stories. Other vids such as Real Estate Price, Kung Fu Competition, Certificates are all associated with the current social issues to tell different stories.

Real Estate Price

Kung Fu Competition

Certificates

This parody is so popular that fans keep spreading it online because there's so much fun in the video. Some popular terms and events used in this vid are funny in the context of Chinese culture. For example, they use the word "Niu Bi" (newby) to describe how successful Po is in the stock market in his dreams. They also use the word "Tao" (trapped in the market) to explain that his money is all tied up to the stock account. Real figures are also incorporated to make the audiences feel more attached to the story. For instance, Po's goose father persuades him to withdraw the money because the current stock index is above 2000 points - which is where the Chinese stock market was registering at that time when this vid was made. In addition, they use Dong Bei language, a northern Chinese dialect that often associated with Chinese cross talk to voice over the video. This brought more joy to the audiences, especially during the global depression era.

Gu Piao Panda and other vids are great examples showing that Chinese fans' role has changed from audience to active producers. They are not just passively receiving the information, but becoming publishers. The Internet has become a platform for them to distribute their works. This emerges an Internet culture called kuso, which is very popular in China. Kuso, originated from a Japanese word, is a popular subculture in China that deconstructs serious themes to entertain people (Wiki, 2009). Some interesting quotes from ESWN Culture Blog that can explain the popularity of Chinese kuso culture are, "Kuso is people deconstruct burning satire." "Kuso is an art criticism loved by people". "Kuso is people's ordinary, yet interesting, spiritual pursuit." (Soong, Roland & Qing, Huang, 2006)

The most classic case of Chinese Kuso culture is a fan-made short movie called The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bread based on a famous movie Wu Ji (The Promise) directed by Kaige Chen. A Chinese fan, Hu Ge, felt disappointed with Wu Ji and made his own spoof right after the movie was released. This fan-made movie joked about the film Wu Ji and dominant serious journalistic work, attracting huge fan following. From this fan made film, kuso has become more and more popular in China and represents a type of Chinese fan culture in the Internet.

There are two main reasons can account for the popularity of kuso culture in China. One important reason is that Chinese youth are suffering from social pressure and kuso provides a way for them to relieve themselves from the real pressure. They are a new generation who is tired of serious mainstream culture and kuso becomes a way for them to express themselves online. Moreover, kuso requires less technical skills and technology requirement and cheaper cost of movie production makes it possible for fans to make their own videos. Also the video sharing websites give the audiences a good platform to distribute and create a huge opportunity to show their own works.

Lifang He is from China, where she received her undergraduate degree in Journalism. After college, she was hired by two global advertising agencies Wieden & Kennedy and Euro RSCG Worldwide. At these agencies, she worked as a strategic planner for a variety of international brands including but not limited to Nike and Nokia and gained experience in consumer and market research and developing brand strategies. Since August of 2009, she has been pursuing her Master's degree in Communication Management at USC Annenberg School for Communication. It was while attending a USC class taught by Henry Jenkins that her academic interest turned toward transmedia planning and studying fan culture. Her specific areas of interest in these fields revolve around digital culture, brand communities, and how brands relate to and engage fans.

References:
Chuan, Lu (2008). Kung Fu Panda and Hollywood Movie. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009

Kung Fu Panda Ticket sales(2008). Sina entertainment. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009
Kung Fu Panda. Wikipedia. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009
Kuso Culture. Baidu. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.
Maureen Fan (2008). Kung Fu Panda Hits A Sore Spot in China: Why a Quintessentially Chinese Movie Was Made in Hollywood. Washington Post Foreign Service. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.
Qi, Cai & Ying, Xie (2009). The Internet kuso culture in China. CulChina.Net. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.
Qing, Huang (2006). Parody can help people ease work pressure. ESWN Culture Blog. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009
Soong, Roland (n.d.). The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bun. ESWN Culture Blog. Retrieved Dec.10, 2009.

On Anti-Fans and Paratexts: An Interview with Jonathan Gray (Part Two)

In the second part of the interview, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jonathan Gray talks about his new book, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. Don't know what a Paratext is -- you will soon, as Gray explains how everything from "Oscar Buzz" to action figures help to shape the meanings and emotional experiences we have in relation to the films and television shows we watch. There was not an Oscar given last night for best paratext -- as long as the evening was and as outraged I was to see that Roger Corman (who happened to have trained two of last night's best director nominees -- Cameron and Bigelow -- as well as such recent winners as Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard) and Lauren Bacall (Lauren Fraking Bacall) were given their special Oscars at a separate event! Yet, it is hard to imagine Avatar making the money it did, a low budget genre film like District 9 making the list at all, or for that matter The Hurt Locker building up the critical support it did in the absence of well-crafted campaigns designed to warm us up to these particular projects. And given the huge grosses that Alice in Wonderland took in this weekend, we certainly might pause to pay respect to the creative promotion that the film has received in the months building up to its release, even though much of the press is going to ascribe the box office purely to the growing public interest in all things 3D. So, this interview seems particularly well-timed, even though, in fairness, I should note that Gray answered these questions some weeks ago and might have new things to say today precisely on these topics.

Your new book, Show Sold Separately, centers around "media paratexts." While this concept has a long history, it is apt to be unfamiliar to many of my readers. Can you define it and explain why you prefer it as a category to other ways of talking about these phenomenon?

I draw the word from a book of that title by Gerard Genette, a French literary theorist. He was interested in all those things that surround a book that aren't quite the "thing" (or "the text") itself. Things like the cover, prefaces, typeface, and afterwords, but also reviews. His subtitle to that book - "Thresholds of Interpretation" - is the intriguing part, since it suggests that meaning might be constructed and might begin at these textual outposts, not just at the site of "the thing itself." And that in turn offers a pretty radical proposition, namely that the item that we're studying, whether it be a film, television show, book, or whatever, becomes meaningful and is interpreted in many sites, some arguably even more important than the site of thing itself. The purpose of the book, quite simply, then, was to examine those sites.

I prefer the word paratext precisely because it has a pretty academic background, and from within textual studies at that, and thus isn't encumbered by a lot of the connotations that surround many of the other words that we usually use. Your readers may be more familiar with "hype," "synergy," "promos," "peripherals," "extratextuals," and so forth. But hype and synergy frame paratexts too definitively as wholly industrial entities. Certainly, paratexts are absolutely integral in terms of marketing, and in terms of grabbing an audience to watch the thing in the first place. But we've often stalled in our discussion of them by not moving beyond the banal observation that hype creates profits. What I wanted to look at is how they create meaning, how our idea of what a television show "is" and how we relate to it is often prefigured by its opening credit sequence, its posters, its ads, reviews, etc. Meanwhile, "peripherals" belittles their importance, since they're not at all peripheral, at least in potential. "Promos" is fairly innocuous, and yet I'm interested not just in how the things that surround a film or show create an image of it before we get there, but also in how reviews, DVD bonus materials, fan creations, and other after-the-fact paratexts might change our understanding later on, so that too seemed inadequate. And though I like "extratextuals" (the title of my blog!), "extra" means "outside of," whereas "para" suggests a more complicated relationship to the film or show, outside of, alongside, and intrinsically part of all at the same time. Hence my fondness for that word in particular.

You write in the introduction, "While many consumers deride the presence of hype and licensed merchandise as a nuisance, we also rely upon it, at least in part, to help us get through an evening's viewing or a trip to the multiplex." In what sense? In what ways do such materials shape our experience of films and television programs?

Let's take the trailer as an example. We've all seen thousands of them. And when you do, you often hear evaluations from the crowd around you. That's because everyone is judging the film before it's even been released. But they're not just saying "wow" or "ugh" - they're learning something about the characters and whether they can identify with them, about the genre of the film, about the kind of world that it's set in. In short, they're getting a pre-view of the film's basic components, and it's thus being constructed as a meaningful entity for them. When the film finally comes along, it doesn't begin with a fresh slate; rather, its viewers have a history with it. They've come with expectations, with engagements with certain characters, and with an idea of how to make sense of it. Indeed, in many cases, they'll already be enjoying the film, as played with in a beautiful way by an Onion News Network parodic item about Iron Man trailer fans being worried about the studio making the trailer into a feature-length film.

But all sorts of other things might happen along the way too. Perhaps the trailer confused us into thinking that the film was something different, and so we sat down to watch an action film and got a drama instead. Or perhaps the hype and paratexts annoy us, and so we decide that we don't want to see the film - we don't need to, since we already know it to be junk. Or perhaps paratexts clash - the trailer looks awful, but then you hear an interview with the director and you're fascinated. The frame of mind that we bring with us to any viewing experience is remarkably important, and paratexts often play the key role in creating those frames. Meanwhile, the story doesn't even end after watching, since other paratexts might reframe an experience. Perhaps a "making of" special or a podcast asks us to think of it in a new light, maybe a fanvid, item of fanfic, or other fan creation challenges our understanding of a character. The great Russian theorist of narrative, Mikhail Bakhtin, poetically wrote that no meaning is ever dead, and that every meaning will have its homecoming. So too with all items of media, which aren't just framed; they can be reframed.

I've spent some time in the blog over the past few months reflecting on the benches that were erected in anticipation of District 9 and the ways they contributed to narrative exposition and shaped emotional reactions to the film, well beyond their roles as pure promotion or publicity. I take it you would read these as classic examples of paratexts. How would you explain their contributions to District 9?

Those are great examples, since they put you into the world. When you're faced with a bench that tells you one kind of being isn't allowed there, it opens up a history, at least in the U.S., of segregation, and of racial intolerance. We like to pat ourselves on the back and think that it's all behind us, but such benches haunt us with the notion that it's not. If you're Black, I'd guess there's a sore wound that's opened. And if you're liberal and White, there might be some liberal White guilt over your potential complicity with the segregation: do you really want to sit on that bench now?

All that can happen before you even know there's a movie. Now when you're told there's a movie, and that these benches are part of it, they've given you an experience of that world. You've set foot in it and had an experience in it. The narrative, in other words, has begun. Your allegiances are being pulled on. Or, to point to another classic example from film history, the Jaws poster scared the crap out of me as a kid. I couldn't swim without thinking that a massive great shark was about to gobble me up, as I moved on unaware, just as with the woman in the poster. So the horror and fear began long before the film (and, damn the designer, continued long after!).

You note that paratexts can be "entryway" or "In medias res." Early discussions of transmedia storytelling focused on nonlinearity -- suggesting that the parts could be consumed in any order -- but more recently there's been a focus on notions of seriality and temporarily. What might your book contribute to that discussion?

What I'd hope readers would see is how many different media the story can be told over. It's not just the "big" media, like film, television, books, comics, and videogames - trailers can also play a part here, as can opening credit sequences, or DVD bonus materials, posters, ad campaigns, or, as we've discussed, benches. When we recognize that, we move towards realizing how audiences have always been intimately familiar with serial storytelling and with transmedia. We're all already well-trained to keep shows on hold for years, inbetween trailers and film and bonus materials, so I'm dubious when I hear complaints about audiences being unable and unwilling to deal with seriality and transmedia.

But if I talk of "us" needing to realize that, meaning "us" as analysts or fans, it's also production cultures that need to learn from it. Towards the end of the book, I draw on several interviews I conducted with transmedia producers, and they all point to an industry that isn't currently set up to facilitate discussions between the marketing department, the writers, the DVD producers, the videogame designers, and so forth. Let's imagine a future in which communication improved, and thus one in which all these paratexts and sites didn't work against each other or simply in spite of each other, but instead contributed to the serial development. Then, as audiences, we could have a much richer product, and I imagine the producers would be much richer too.

You suggest that audience-produced artifacts -- such as fan vids or spoilers -- can be paratexts that help shape the meaning of the work. Your emphasis there is not so much on how they resist official meanings but rather how they shape our interpretations of the primary text. An old school cultural studies approach might talk about this as a struggle over meanings or as competing bids for interpretations. How do you think about the relationship between commercial and amateur paratexts in the age of participatory culture?

I don't mean to foreclose the possibilities of resistive readings. But someone very smart and way more knowledgeable about fandom already wrote Textual Poachers, and if there's only one thing that many people in cultural studies know about slash fanfic it's that it's supposed to be doing interesting, resistive things with gender and sexuality (I say "supposed to" only because some don't believe that). So when I came to the chapter on fan-created and -circulated paratexts, I didn't need to make that point. Instead, I wanted to focus on how one can use paratexts to cut one's own groove through a text in a way that isn't necessarily working against the producer's version, but that is personalized nonetheless. Many relationship and character study fanvids, for example, don't necessarily repurpose a character, but they do ask us to stop and think about that character and his or her history in ways that the official text, in its breathless progression, may not have time to do. I don't mean to suggest that this is either the dominant form of fan use of paratexts, or even one that's necessarily changed in a more obviously convergent media era. But it might help cultural studies to back away from some of the desires for an orcs vs. hobbits style bad-and-good battle between The Industry and The Fans, and to focus on smaller, humbler moments of repurposing.

Critics in the 1980s talked about television series such as He-Man, Masters of the Universe as half hour commercials for toy lines, suggesting that the commercial tie-ins stripped them of any real meaning or narrative interest. Your work suggests something different -- that the toys become vehicles for extending the meanings of a series into everyday life. How have action figures impacted our interpretations of blockbuster movies like the Star Wars franchise?

Star Wars is a great example here, since what we had was a text that was seemingly put on ice (or should I say put in carbon-freezing?) for three years between each film. That's a long time in a child's life, so excellent or not the trilogy likely wouldn't have held the attention of those of us who were kids at the time if it weren't for the toys. The toys kept Star Wars alive by transferring the story and the world to the playground, and hence by keeping that galaxy from drifting far, far away.

However, precisely because the text entered the body of the toys for such a long time, we need to ask how they contributed to the popular understanding of Star Wars. On one level, for instance, I think they worked to gender the text. When all the toy boxes and ads were showing boys playing with them, when FAO Schwarz in New York required one to march through a tunnel of GI Joe figures to get to the boys' palace that was their Star Wars section, and when all the figures had guns (even when all we see them do is drink or press buttons in the films), the toys were strongly framed as for boys. The toys also helped, I'm sure, to amplify fans' nostalgic feelings towards the texts, since those of a certain age can think back to countless days spent playing in school yards or excitedly opening a Millennium Falcon for Christmas or so forth, and all of a sudden Star Wars seems such a huge part of our childhood ... courtesy of the toys as much if not way more than the films. So toys contribute to how we make sense of all these films and shows, and to the cultural meanings that surround them.

But more than that, they also teach kids to expect transmedia and participatory culture. When I talked to Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof about what got him into transmedia, he told me the tale of the Boba Fett toy. When I asked Jesse Alexander of Heroes and Day One the same thing, he too waxed eloquently about Star Wars. Licensed toys let us into fictional worlds, and I've yet to hear of a company send a cease and desist letter to kids for playing with toys, even if they're wedding Han to Luke. So if many of us grew up expecting to be able to play with texts, and move their characters into new realms, let's look to toys for where it may've all started.

We've just ended The Oscar season. To what extent is "Oscar buzz" a kind of paratext for more "serious" or "middlebrow" forms of cinema?

I'm glad you asked, since I find it amusing when people hear the topic of my book and quickly pronounce that they hate "that stuff" (hype and paratexts). They'll often list the blockbuster of the moment for illustration, so right now everyone claims to despise Avatar when they want to impress me with the height of their brow. But there is no such thing as a text without paratexts. So it's not a question of preferring a text without paratexts - it's a question of which paratexts are one's poison. Oscar buzz is great for the middlebrow audience, New York Times reviews, buzz at Cannes, or even what their film prof says works for some, and for others it's trailers and huge billboards. So there's no escaping paratexts. If we think we live in a media saturated world, the films and shows are only a fraction of that world - the paratexts are everywhere.

Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he researches and teaches on various aspects of television, film, and convergent media, including satire, comedy, audiences, and textuality. His most recent book is Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), though he has also written Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008) and Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and is co-editor with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), with Robin Andersen of Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World</em>. He also blogs at The Extratextuals and Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture.

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March 4, 2010

On Anti-Fans and Paratexts: An Interview with Jonathan Gray (Part One)

If you are interested in Lost, The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Star Wars, Fan Studies, or Transmedia Entertainment and you are not reading the work of Jonathan Gray, then you aren't doing it right! And let's face it, if you weren't interested in at least one of the above, then you probably have simply stumbled onto my blog by mistake.

Given that I am interested in all of the above, I keep stumbling onto Gray's work and each time I do, I come away a little better educated than I did before. Gray has got to be one of the most productive -- and provocative -- writers working in media studies today. This guy really is an extratextual! And he's someone I'm finding myself working with more and more. He's a member of the Convergence Culture Consortium network of scholars; he's edited several books where my essays have appeared; and he's been working behind the scenes to help pull together our Transmedia, Hollywood events this month. And he's now teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I did my PhD.

So, it's a pleasure to share this interview with you. The first installment covers everything from his recent work on parody, popular culture, and politics to his long-standing interest in fans and anti-fans. Mostly, Part Two focuses around his significant new book, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010). I wrote a blurb for this book, so I got to read it months ago, but it is just now hitting the shelves and starting to have a real impact on how we theorize and criticize everything from movie trailers to action figures.

Jonathan, you are a highly prolific writer who has published books on a broad range of topics. What do you see as the unifying theme(s) running through your work?

One of my key interests lies in how audiences operationalize media, or, in simpler terms, how meaning is created between items of media and their audiences. More specifically, I'm intrigued with how meaning for something can be created outside of that thing itself. Thus my first book was about how parody aims to "hijack" the meanings of various other genres, recontextualizing how we make sense of them. And the recent book, Show Sold Separately, is about how all those things that surround a film or television show, from DVD bonus materials to ad campaigns, merchandise to fan-created texts, actually play a key role in creating meaning. Satire TV, meanwhile, was in one sense a book about how politics and the news come to make sense in entertainment television. Television Entertainment was a little different, but is most clearly indicative of another central and intersecting strand of my work, which involves exploring the social, cultural, and political uses of media entertainment.

One of your primary contributions to the space of fan studies has been to focus attention on "nonfans" and "antifans." Why have these groups been neglected in audience research for so long? How do they relate to older categories like negotiated and oppositional readers? And what do they add to our understanding of fan culture?

Functionally, fans tend to be easier to study, at least from a cultural studies, qualitative perspective. When one is going to spend a portion of one's life sitting down and chatting with people about their media consumption, or reading their postings online, it's understandable that one would gravitate towards those audiences who are most literate about their subject, and most excited. "Snowball" sampling tends to pick up more fans too, since they can often be keen to be interviewed. Theoretically, a lot of qualitative audience research was motivated in part by a desire to show media consumers as not so hopelessly lost in the system as some suggest, and thus it was rhetorically important to make that case with fans.

But along the way, the risk has developed that fans stand in for audiences in general, when many audiences aren't fans, or define their fandom in very different terms. A particular danger here is that fans tend to know the whole object, and they tend to be very close to it. But what about those audiences who, for instance, know they hate something, even though they haven't ever watched it, or have only seen bits? They also have a relationship to the text, and it's created meaning for them, but it's a relationship that we've not studied too closely. Hence my interest in anti-fans. And then somewhere in the middle are those people who might watch semi-regularly, who have opinions on a show, and to whom the show means something, but who miss episodes and who have poor knowledge of background information. Surely much media consumption is casual and "meh"-ish: non-fans. But what is the show to them, and how do they construct it?

I'd see fandom, non-fandom, and anti-fandom as a completely different dimension from oppositional, dominant, or negotiated readings. After all, as fan studies have shown, some fan readings are deeply oppositional, some are dominant. Similarly with anti-fans and non-fans. As to your final question about what studying such viewers would add, they'll allow us to understand how affect works more clearly. Fandom involves anti-fandom (think of the Star Wars fan who hates Trek, since his galaxy isn't big enough for both franchises, or of X-Philes who hated the addition of the Terminator in the final seasons), and vice-versa (many haters are performing a love for something else). So just as we can't truly understand a concept like gender without interrogating both "masculinity" and "femininity," we won't truly get how affect works generally, or even how fandom works specifically, till we explore anti-fandom a little more.

Some critics have argued that news parody programs cheapen political discourse, trivializing important matters, and represent the further shift away from hard news and towards "news entertainment." Your Satire TV book takes a different perspective. What impact do you think such programs have on civic engagement and democratic participation?

That complaint, that The Daily Show and its colleagues take viewers away from hard news, always seems to forget that very few satiric shows actually compete with the news in timeslot. It also seeks to blame satire for the failings of the news. If people aren't watching the news, it's not because Jon Stewart is doing magic tricks in the circus tent down the road: it's because the news is often a seriously debased entity, reporting in a slack, half-ass way, addressed to an older white male audience, often with little interest in others, in a manner that is often the true circus act. So first off, I'd respond to that criticism by saying that if satire TV is so often being compared to the news, that's because the news is doing something wrong. And if people are trusting Stewart more than many newscasters, the productive question would be what is the news doing wrong and what is Stewart doing right, not how is Jon Stewart responsible for the fall of democracy.

But if we move away from comparing them, and consider the shows in and of themselves, their contributions are many. On one level, they're not afraid to be critical or to ruffle feathers. They also speak in a language that many understand, inviting us in, not just using "inside the Beltway" lingo. When successful, they encourage many of us to care about politics in the first place, and they encourage us to be savvy, attentive, critical citizens, watching and listening to politicians and newscasters with our guard up. They are media literacy teachers, while also being voices that empower us to be citizens, rather than cajole us or guilt trip us into caring about politics.

Satire TV mostly focuses on the role such programs played under the Bush administration. We are now a year into the Obama administration. How has his presidency changed the relevance and tone of The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and other such programs? Why are there not shows about Obama in the same way that Lil Bush made fun of his predecessor?

Satirists aren't going after Obama as much, as you note. Which is a pity, since every person in power needs to be subjected to a satirist's sting. I'm a big fan of the medieval Fool model. But we're in a two party system, and therein lies the problem, since too often it requires a binaristic way of looking at politics, whereby criticism of one "side" becomes, whether it wants to be or not, support for the other. On one hand, then, if your job is to make fun of stupid things said and done by people in power, how could you be expected to see the Democrats when at times you need to look through Rush Limbaugh is encouraging people note to donate to Haitian relief since it'll only embolden Obama, when Rudy Guiliani and Dana Perino are claiming there were no terrorist attacks under Bush, when Glenn Beck is being Glenn Beck, when Jonah Goldberg is saying the Na'vi should've been Catholic in Avatar, when Sarah Palin thinks universal healthcare is a secret Nazi "death panel" plot, and when Dick Cheney is doing his best Emperor Palpatine impression? As they did under Bush, the Republicans just give way too much A-grade material to satirists. And on the other hand, if your sympathies lean left, as most satirists' do, it must prove hard to focus on Obama when it means supporting the Birthers and the Tea Baggers as a result.

I'm not someone who feels it's impossible to satirize Obama. But satirists go after crazy politics, and until the Republicans find a way to instill a semblance of sanity in their ranks, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and co. will likely continue to focus on the Republicans. While that takes the eye off the presidency - which worries me - it's still a vital task.

You've written about "news fans" and I find myself returning to this concept in trying to think about the cult that currently surrounds Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh. Are we at a moment where reactionary politics is fueled as much by the fan followings of talk show and news personalities as it is by Washington-based leaders?

It certainly seems that way, doesn't it? Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity on the right are all doing pretty well. And I'd bet that more folk on the left identify with Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann than with many politicians. Rumor has it that Lou Dobbs is even planning a presidential run [shudders]. Granted, few other fan objects get the chance to "cover" their fans on a weekly basis, so there is something of an echo chamber effect. But the more that we find political mobilization looking like fandom, the more that we need to think seriously about the connections. Liesbet Van Zoonen has an excellent book called Entertaining the Citizen in which she broaches the topic, Cornel Sandvoss has done some thinking about this, and you have too. But sadly the folk who study fans and the folk who study politics and journalism have been so successfully segregated from one another in most instances that there's nowhere near enough analysis along those lines.

Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he researches and teaches on various aspects of television, film, and convergent media, including satire, comedy, audiences, and textuality. His most recent book is Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NYU Press, 2010), though he has also written Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008) and Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006), and is co-editor with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (NYU Press, 2009), with Robin Andersen of Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), and with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World</em>. He also blogs at The Extratextuals and Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 24, 2010

Camille Bacon-Smith and Henry Jenkins at Gaylaxicon 1992 (Part Two)

Transcript of a panel discussion between Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith, moderated by Shoshanna, at Gaylaxicon 92, a science fiction convention by and for gay fandom and its friends, on 18 July 1992. At that time Henry was about to publish Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Routledge, 1992); Camille had published Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and Popular Culture (U. of Penn. Press, 1992). Shoshanna is a fan. All fans identified here are identified with the name/pseud they requested.

Shoshanna: I wanted to ask you guys to bring this back to media fandom a bit, and talk about the ways that you see media fans doing something different, and what--since the title of this is "The sociology of media fandom"--how do fans behave that's not the way Lucasfilm behaves? If you find that interesting. And where do you think that comes from?
Camille: Well, first... I don't do sociology, I do anthropology. It's a little bit different. But that's okay, because that's what we called this panel anyway. So if there's any sociologists out there who are sitting there saying, "That's not sociology," I know that.

NB: That's another territorial battle in itself.

Camille: Yes, it is.

Henry: I'd say we poach right across that one and keep going...

Shoshanna: And we're not going to fight that one.

Camille: It's hard for me to say because one of the things that I really feel strongly about is that media fans are doing something, in a particular way, that is a folk process that goes on in all kinds of ways, for all kinds of things, everywhere all around the world. The problem we have is that we tend to think that what happens in straight white male America is the norm. In fact, it is the exception. And what women in media fandom, what the guys who come into media fandom, are doing is what everybody else all over the world is doing. They are taking the items of their culture, they are recombining them, remanufacturing them... The notion of originality has to do with how well you can represent the norm, what you can bring to the aesthetic conventions of what you already hold dear. The important thing is not to write a slash story that's completely different from every other slash story. This would be a total waste of effort. No one would want to read it. The point is, you want to write the slash story that is the best slash story because it does what everybody else does, better. It does the same theme, but does it with a little more insight. Or even with the same amount of insight as this other story you liked. Or you're recombining this element instead of that element. But this whole notion that you have to be different to be good is different from--it's what we think of as high art, but it's different from the way most of the world conducts its art.

Henry: If I could follow up on that... The other thing that I think is radically different is the economic relations involved in fandom. What excites me is the degree to which fandom is really based on the communal notion that you have something that you want to share with the community, not you have something you want to make a profit off of. And fandom at its best is when fans... The circuit is a good example of this. Things are distributed at cost. Ideally, zine publishing as it started was a matter of, I will charge you what it cost to produce the zine, with maybe enough more to let me start up the next zine. You're not profiteering off of zine publishing. The fan filk clubs trade tapes back and forth. The fan video artists make, you know, "Send me a tape and I'll give you a copy of my videos." I see some danger of that changing, and I'm a little concerned at the advent of semi-pro filk organizations that publish conglomerate filk, or at some of the new conglomerates of zine publishing that are just sucking in zines and selling them, and there's now a middleman between the writer and the reader. What I like about fandom is that, unlike in professional publishing, the writer and the reader actually have something to say to each other. I write a letter to a zine editor and say, "I'd like to read your zine." She sends it back to me. I write back and say, "That was a great story. I really liked this, this, and this." That creates a channel in which the reader can become a writer, the writer is always a reader, the roles are not as rigidly bound up apart from each other, and that sense of possessiveness and profiteering is absent, in favor of a sense of community, of sharing, of giving back. You write your stories to be read by your friends, you don't write them to be read by your customers, and I think that that is something that's really important about fandom, and very different from the notions of intellectual properties that we've been talking about, in corporate America.
Camille: And again, much like the rest of the world has conducted its art since time began.

Henry: Absolutely.

BT: [mostly unintelligible; then:] ...having their [i.e. fans'] own community, partly because no one else wants to be in it [Laughter] and partly because it's something that's theirs and they don't want other people in it. So fans become possessive about some of the academic interest in the community.
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em>Shoshanna: I would suggest that it's not just possessive, it's defensive. Because we've seen so many Newsweek magazine articles that begin, "Hang on! You're being beamed to one of those weirdo Trekkie cons!" And there's a sense of being made fun of. It's very exciting for me to be up here sitting on this panel between two academic authors who are not making fun of us. And that's because they are us.

Camille: Oh, I saw the first review of my book. It was written by a literary scholar, and the funny thing was, several of the people who brought this to my attention laughed and said, it doesn't look like he even quite knows what anthropology is. But his positive evaluation of the book, and he really thought this was a positive evaluation of the book, was that when he started reading this book he thought these people were really really weird. And I was sufficiently persuasive that by the end he didn't think they were quite as weird as he had when he started. And it's like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Back up. Read it over again. Read my lips, you know? You're weird.

Henry: I talk in the book some about this policing of boundaries. There are these stereotypes out there. And I've had the same sets of experiences, where in the academic community they read it and say, you took a subject that I thought was indefensible, you took a subject that... I thought I could not be made sympathetic with these people at all, and I started to understand where they were coming from. And that to me is powerful praise, because that's the fight we're fighting out here. The mundane world does not get it. It simply does not get what fandom's about, and it needs to be explained to them. Once it's explained, I think there's not the hostility, maybe, as much. There's a certain fear... slash provokes its own anxieties within the homophobia of the culture we live in, there's a certain fear about women writing their own stories about men--that spooks the daylights out of a lot of men in our society--but the notion of, once you start thinking intelligently about what's going on here, one can change. But fandom is defensive, for very good reasons.

Camille: But you don't want those guys poking around in your dresser drawers.

NB: You can answer this question, or not answer this question, because this particular fan convention is a Gay-laxicon, and... I've read countless analyses of how the straight mundane community reacts to fandom, or media fandom or what have you, and I've gotten varied reactions from people in the--when I say "gay," I mean gay, lesbian, bisexual, trisexual, whatever--I've gotten varied responses from people within the gay community. Depending on which parts... I mean, anything from politically correct lesbian feminists who say, why are you writing about all these men, to again, the breaking up of the notion that it's all a bunch of heterosexual... I mean, I am a fanzine editor, and I thought I was the only lesbian who liked to read and write male slash stories, until I met a whole bunch of other lesbians, and bisexuals and what have you, and met a couple of gay men. And so you've got a significant part of the gay community in this. And then there are gay men, a few, a minority, that like to write slash stories, and then other gay men who sit there and say, this is not realistic, or a man I talked to was saying, "Slash writers aren't writing about me," was one reaction I talked to somebody about. So I'd like to see whether you have any comments about, or what you would think about sociological, anthropological, what have you, about how all this impacts on the gay community, and gay fandom.

Camille: What I did when I was working on my book, particularly when I hit slash, was, my field, folklore, is overwhelmingly gay. It's overwhelmingly gay. So this may be one of the few fields in academia where heterosexual people are in the minority. And so it was very easy for me to just go to any number of my classmates and just, cold, slap a fanzine on their desk and say, tell me what you make of this. Generally speaking, the gay men thought it was hysterically funny, and there was this Professionals story called "Masquerade." [It's on the circuit.] When they hit "Masquerade," they would come back to me and they would say, "I've seen it." Not, "I've seen this story," but "I've seen this in real life. I have seen this dance," they would call it, this first-time dance. There were some stories that were totally ludicrous, and in fact one very dear friend, who is a gay man and who does write the stories, and in fact likes the most romantic, just to be authentically slash will deliberately put at least five impossible sexual acts into his stories. [Laughter.] And he called me up one day and he was devastated, because his library had just gotten in a copy of the Joy of Gay Sex and he discovered one of his impossible sexual acts was in fact possible. [Laughter.] So now he had to think up another one. I'm looking for a picture here, I can't find it... Because one of the things that--yes, I found it. However, one day... [She is getting ready to hold her book up; laughter.] Now this is not a wildly filthy picture I'm going to open this book up to. However, this picture came in one day and I showed it to one of my friends, and first his mouth dropped open. Then a couple of hours later, we were in the archives, he came back with a friend of his, and said, show him the picture. And his mouth dropped open. Now the thing is, that's the picture. [She holds it up. It's on page 185, for all you folks reading along; it's a TACS portrait of Doyle, shrouded in mist and gazing piercingly out at you, with his shirt and jacket open to show his chest and his trousers unzipped to show pubic hair but no genitalia. It originally appeared in Discovered in a Graveyard.] Now these are people who had no idea who this person was, but it sort of got them. The gay women that I showed it to had no interest in it at all; they thought that this was totally politically incorrectly stupid. And they basically said, you know, if I want to read men together, I'll read The Deerslayer; I don't have to read these, you know? And they would say to me, where are the stories about the two women? And I would say, I don't have any. Or I only have these, and I'd give them copies of this one fanzine that I had, and it would be, like, this thick, and it maybe had two pages [of female slash]. And they would say, well, I'm not interested in this anyway, and they'd put it aside [? unclear].
<

strong>Henry: I could address your question. Your question poses a number of possible responses to me, all of which, I think, are important to raise. One is that one of the problems I've had with Joanna Russ and other writers who have written about slash--is that the question is often posed as, why do straight women want to write sex about gay men? And it became immediately clear to me, as I was doing this, exactly what you're saying: there are large numbers of lesbians and bisexual women in the slash community, and there needs to be a way to account for that pleasure. I'm not sure I fully address it, but at least I think it comes up in my book, with accounts that don't hinge on heterosexual fantasies, which I think some of the earlier accounts did pose a very heterocentrist conception of what is going on when people read and write slash. The second point I'd make, and I'm going three different directions here, is that I've shared this with David Halperin, a colleague of mine and a noted gay historian, and he became very excited and has written an essay comparing the myths of Gilgamesh and the Iliad to slash. [Laughter.] Because his work is about Greek sexuality, and his point was, the ancient Greeks went back and reread Homer, and the Greeks had a sexuality which was based on a much broader range of sexual object choices than present-day society--he doesn't like to use the word "homosexual," or "gay," because it's inappropriate historically--but same-sex relationships were quite regular. When they reread the Iliad , they slashed it, in effect. And there are lots of Greek manuscripts about Achilles and his charioteer, that Homer probably didn't read those relationships as lovers. But many of the Greeks did, and, in fact, began to rewrite it. So he sees slash as continuing with that, and there's now a great deal of excitement in the gay and lesbian studies community about it. And the third point I would make is more personal, which grows out of my own experience reading slash, as someone who had thought of himself in primarily heterosexual terms; I'm married, I have a son. But in the process of reading slash, I discovered that I was bi. I discovered something that was very important to me, that I really did take pleasure in this, that this fantasy really appealed to me, it opened me up to a variety of other types of experiences to think about, [to think about] my sexuality in very different terms. And I think that that process is potentially going on more large scale in our society right now. If you look at Penthouse Letters right now, for example, they've moved gradually over the ten years of porn reading that I've gone through from having ménage à trois scenarios that involved two men and one woman and the two men don't touch, to having the woman direct the men to suck each other off, to now there are now columns of gay scenarios, first-time stories, published for the predominantly straight readership of Penthouse, which are completely two gay men, or a gay man introducing a straight man to the experience of gay sex is what normally the scenario is. That's just a broadening of acceptance of this in the straight male community. And I think slash is part of--could potentially be part of that process of changing the homophobia in our society, or at least opening straight men to admit their own bisexuality, and to admit desires that they're not publicly allowed to express, the very desires that are repressed in the television narratives slash builds on.

Camille: I just wanted to add something that I thought was very interesting. I started my study in 1982. And what I found was that the representation of gay and bisexual women in particular increased dramatically in fandom after 1986, when Joanna Russ's article came out. [This article was published in two versions. One, aimed at non-fans and entitled "Pornography By Women, For Women, With Love," was in her collection of essays Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts (Crossing Press, 1985); the other, aimed at fans and entitled "Another Addict Raves About K/S," was published in a K/S zine--I think it was Nome 8 but I'm not certain. It has been circulating informally in fandom since.] That article seemed to make-- It was not really just a matter of that an audience became aware of this that didn't know about it, but an audience also was told that it was for them. And I think that was a very important thing for many people, because many people said that that's where they heard about it.

NB: [unclear; in Darkover fandom, lesbian slash is written] not only by lesbians, and bisexuals maybe, but by perfectly straight women who maybe are just exploring that tiny bit of bisexuality, and some of them... a couple of the best lesbian slash--I mean, they have that lesbian slash feel that's been in the professionally published anthologies, have been written by women I know are straight, and some of them by straight men... [something unclear, suggesting that Darkover fandom/fan writing isn't segregated by gender or orientation, unlike media fandom, which] is kind of segregated, you know... I am a writer of lesbian as well as male slash, and I can't, you know... I just wrote a Thelma and Louise story, and it was published, and the editor called me up and said it's getting a positive response, and I'd like to think that there are some straight women who are responding positively, as well as gay women and everybody else. One of the big problems with lesbian media slash is the lack of credible women; it probably is the main problem, that tv and movies don't give us... They are terrified of women in pairs; look at the big brouhaha over Thelma and Louise.

Henry: But I think it's possible to reclaim those characters in the margin. I've read Yar/Troi stories, for example--which are a stretch, and a big one--but there is a way in which you're playing two different styles of femininity against each other that works on the printed page.

NB: I wrote an Uhura/Saavik story, which will be published in the fall--I mean, that's a real stretch, but I was just fantasizing...

Henry: Blake's 7 characters... The treatment of women on Blake's 7 lends itself to some interesting slash pairings as well.

Male audience member: [unclear; he'd like to bring it back to] the question of appropriating cultural icons for dissemination. I don't know--how large is the typical circulation for a fanzine? How many fanzines are there? What is the approximate composition of the people who write and read fanzines? [something unclear; then] Part of the question for the art is that people tend, in my knowledge of folk culture, people tend to appropriate, but they produce art for local consumption, a very small community rather than a mass community, which gets back to the difference between Lucasfilm, which is producing a mass amount of stuff [laughter], or now we have the technology for self-publishing large amounts of [unclear; of slash SW stories] for your family, for your friends, for your local club. My real question is, what is the population? I don't know.

Henry: Maybe you can answer this better than I can, Camille; you have numbers in the book. I swore off counting things in my book.

Camille: Yeah, okay. There's thousands and thousands and thousands of fanzines. There were over thirty thousand people who had written in them when I stopped counting in 1986. The fanzines that I know that have sold the most are pretty much mainstream genzines--well, not genzines; what that word means has changed its meaning in fandom, in the fan community. The ones that have sold the most are some of the oldest zines, and they're still selling. Jean Lorrah's Night of the Twin Moons has sold--each individual fanzine has sold over five thousand copies. DL regularly will sell out her Star Trek, basically PG-rated fanzines with no slash content, and she can sell out fifteen hundred copies regularly, and she comes out with two or three different ones a year. Slash... the most explosively distributed fanzine that I recall in slash was Courts of Honor. It sold six hundred--they printed six hundred copies. And I believe Nome, which is another very big, very well-respected Trek zine, does between six and seven hundred copies. So we're talking very different numbers for slash. And once you leave Star Trek, the numbers drop dramatically, so that a print run for a minor... less... for what used to be called a "fringe" fandom, but fandom has changed, is between two hundred and a hundred copies. So the numbers really start to drop off pretty sharply when you get into slash, and that's a major move up in slash. Now what was the other question?

Shoshanna: In terms of number of fans, it's worth saying that there are fan communities on every English-speaking continent. There are very large ones in the States, obviously; there are very large ones in Great Britain; there's a good-sized fan community in Australia; there are also smaller fan communities that I know of, because I've visited them, in France and in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is really small, the one I know of. But anywhere that these media products are available, there are fans.

Camille: It is also not true that the appropriation of materials is only done in very small communities for very small distribution. Because what often happens, and has happened since at least the fifteenth century, or actually the twelfth, I suppose, is stories may start in a small community, but they will travel very rapidly. So for example, the story of Cinderella originated in China in the fourth century, traveled all over, all over the world. So these kinds of folk articles have as much globe-trotting capacity as what we're doing today. It takes a little bit longer; it may take a few hundred years instead of a few hundred milliseconds, but this stuff has always traveled.

Henry: One of the things that interests me is precisely the global circulation of zines. You read zines from England, Australia, Iceland. These zines are read, and people can build a national or even international reputation in fandom that nobody on the street would have even heard of. Artists at cons... I have JK's artwork on the cover of the book, and that may mean something to media fans, and her name on a painting at MediaWest, say, will up its price six, seven hundred dollars fairly regularly. My publisher, of course, never heard of her. This is, so far as I know, the first commercial book cover that JK has ever done. But I chose it with the confidence that that name recognition would be there for media fans, and it would be a signal that this book, despite its kind of academic title, is addressed to them as well. The notion in our society that women, particularly, have so few outlets for gaining status, that women who are in low-paying jobs, who are in secretarial positions, who are, you know, in service sector jobs, can gain a national and international reputation as an artist, as a writer, as an editor, is a very important aspect of fandom, I think; precisely that it is a larger community that you can become important in. And I think that matters to people on a lot of levels; I think it's really important that such a space exists.

Camille: It really matters if you travel, because you can travel from house to house all around the world; it's really great fun.

Henry: And at the same time, the process, like the folk process... I ran into Leslie Fish's filk songs in the southern cons, for example, where people sang the songs but had no idea that Leslie Fish had written them. They had become so much part of a community and had traveled, like your Cinderella story, across these spaces, often without people knowing, intermediate, where they had come from, and they really had been taken up as a folk text, in a very traditional sense, the same way, presumably, earlier folk songs lost their authors in the process.

Shoshanna: And, circularly enough, there is a filk song--filk music is science fiction folk music--there is a filk song entitled "Look What They've Done to My Song," which is the filk singer who goes to a convention and hears other people singing his song, only they've changed it. [Laughter.]

Camille: Yes, and he probably stole the tune anyway.

Shoshanna: We have about three minutes left. Do you guys have wrap-up comments, or does any audience member want to get something in quick? [Pause.] All right, sum your books up in two minutes each.

Henry: Well, rather than summing my book up, I wanted to stress that we're not unique in this. There are large numbers of graduate students and junior faculty people out there who, like me, came up through fandom, who are part of the fan community and who are now choosing, in whatever discipline they're in, to write about it. I know of so many projects out there that I think are real important dialogue beginning to take place, at least in media studies and film studies, between fans and the academic way of approaching media. And I think fandom offers the academy new models for criticism, new models of engaging with texts that are going to be very productive. We're learning from you, and I'm glad to be part of you at the same time.

Camille: Well, I suppose that it's time to 'fess up. All the while that I was doing my book, I was an academic, and that's all I did. And I would actually write stories, and I would go around from group to group, and get them to finish the stories for me, and tell me what to write, so that I'd know what was going on, and what the process was. But when I finished the book and put it all away, I discovered there was this one little set of stories that I couldn't put away. And so somehow I had gone native in this one little tiny section, and the problem is... It's not the big section like, you know, Star Trek--If I ever saw Kirk and Spock again...well, you know, I'm here. One of the reasons we don't have many people here [at the con] is they're probably all over watching Bill and Len's Excellent Adventure as we speak, because they're at the Civic Center, Shatner and Nimoy [at a CreationCon the same weekend]. But there's this little tiny group called Pros--The Professionals. And it's a show that you've never seen, unless you're from England, in which case you won't admit to having seen it because it is total trash. Oh, it is, it is...if it wasn't trash I wouldn't like it. [Laughter.] But I couldn't--some of the stories were really neat and I couldn't stop. So, if anybody's got anything that's been written in the last two years about the Professionals, I want it. And I want it now! [Laughter.]