On Monday 12 September 2011 Network Awesome will feature Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues.
Network Awesome? Never heard of it.
You’ve never heard of Network Awesome!#? What rock have you been sleeping under?
No rock, sheesh! Don’t get cranky on me. It’s a big world, you know, awesome. I’m busy, already flying on information overload. So chill out.
Well, to be honest, I didn’t know about Network Awesome ‘till about a month ago, when Michael Sporn hipped me to it. Well, not just me, but anyone who read his blog. Newtwork Awesome had programmed some classic Japanese animation, which interested him because he’s an animator—and, incidentally, runs one of the best animation blogs in Greater Blogistan. And it interests me because I’m interested in Japanese animation.
So I virtually hauled my virtual ass over there and took a look. Yep, there they were, old Japanese cartoons. Even better, interesting commentary, such as this piece by Cory Gross about Mitsuyeo Seo’s Divine Sea Warriors, which was Japan’s first feature-length animated film, and also war propaganda.
That’s the formula, interesting material intelligently curated coupled with compelling commentary. Where else can you find that?
Awesome!
See, I told you.
Network Awesome was founded in January of 2011 by Jason Forrest, an electronic musician and entrepreneur, who wants to make the best of an almost forgotten past available to us now and for the future. That is to say, he wants to keep culture alive, a mission that is particularly important as we face the daunting task of creating a new ways of living on this planet, not to mention an outpost on Mars one of these days.
To do that we have to create at least two new worlds before breakfast and three on Saturday Night. We need all the memes we can get, because you never know what’ll work. That’s how biology works—‘random variation and selective retention’ is the phrase—and culture is like that too. Most memes are junk memes, but you can’t tell junk from spunk until you give it a ride. Network Awesome’s curators comb through YouTube looking for the good stuff and NA organizes it so it’s easy to find and watch.
Ah, I see, this is where Free Culture comes in.
Exactly. Culture has always moved into the future by reworking the past. You can’t create something from nothing. Not even Shakespeare could do that. In fact, he was one of the greatest culture sleuths that ever lived. But we’re all culture sleuths, creating and responsible for our own meme-o-sphere. We can’t function if all the memes are in corporate holding pens.
Much of the content on Network Awesome was created by Big Media for Big Media. The trouble with Big Media is that it’s got the attention span of a drunken gnat. Nada. On to the next Big Thing, always. Well, we can live with that because Big Media manages to crank out a lot of stuff in the process.
What we can’t live with is Big Media stuffing all that material into copyright prison once it ceases to be of interest to the current hive mine—which includes you and me, grasshopper. Some of it WILL be of interest to someone some time. And a dozen of those someones will become Shakespeare’s in their own time.
Or a Walt Disney, who may have been the greatest meme-hound of the 20th century. Not only did he revamp all those fairy tales, but his artists and animators drew inspiration from centuries of European art, and not a little from Japan too, and his composers drew on the legacy of classical music and folk music from around the world. Without those memes Disney would have been a duck out of water, a very thin and scrawny duck. Too bad his corporate successors have such a poor sense of cultural responsibility that they want to keep it ALL for themselves FOREVER.
And then there’s Nina Paley. As many of you know, Sita Sings the Blues resulted from a three-way collision between Nina’s personal life (she got dumped), the Ramayana (in which Rama dumps Sita), and the recordings of Annette Hanshaw (who sang about getting dumped). The Ramayana is well-know among Hindus, but hardly anywhere else. Annette Hanshaw was a star in the 1920s but has long since been forgotten. Well, now these memes have reached a whole new audience.
Who knows what this audience—that’s you, me, cousin Sue, the pet vole, and all the other creatures under the sun—will do with them?
No comments:
Post a Comment