annabel scheme

Unconsciously Screamin’

One of my favorite moments in Annabel Scheme is the party thrown by a mys­te­ri­ous musi­cian known as “The Beekeeper”:

If you had elec­tronic eyes and night vision—I had both—you would have seen slips of paper pass­ing from per­son to per­son. On each slip was a phone num­ber. Each one was dif­fer­ent, and there were a dozen cir­cu­lat­ing in the crowd. Each wan­dered and blinked like a fire­fly as kids used their phones, torch-like, to illu­mi­nate the num­ber, then passed it on. Here and there, then every­where, they were dial­ing num­bers, switch­ing their phones to speaker-mode and push­ing them up into the air like trophies.

The buzzing was com­ing from the phones. It was a low, rhyth­mic drone. At first you couldn’t hear much, but appar­ently, if you put enough phones on speaker all at once, it starts to get loud.

Really loud.

So that was the trick: There were no speak­ers because the crowd was the speaker. The bees did not sound so far-off now.

Scheme clenched her teeth. “This is hurt­ing my face.”

Sud­denly it stopped. The grave­yard fell silent. It was a field of pale arms thrust to the sky, sway­ing like sea­weed. Kids were bounc­ing silently on the balls of their feet. Waiting.

Then there was a count-off, a tat tat tat tat and then the music started and it was every­where, megawatts of power flow­ing out of every palm and pocket. There was no focal point, so bod­ies were pointed in every direc­tion, ric­o­chet­ing and chain-reacting. Kids were los­ing it, jump­ing up and down, col­lid­ing and cud­dling in the dark grass.

The music had a clear beat, but it was warped and scratchy, like some­one was tun­ing a giant radio. Snatches of singing would ring out for a moment, then deco­here. There was a trum­pet that pealed from some­where very far away…

The music was com­ing together as kids fol­lowed their ears. If your phone was buzzing with bass, you joined the bunched-up sub-woofer sec­tion. If it was send­ing high notes siz­zling into the air, you joined the line that snaked around the crowd’s perime­ter. The music worked its pat­tern on the crowd. It was both amaz­ingly high-tech and totally pagan.

The first ques­tion I had after read­ing this was — I won­der if Robin knows about Zaireeka, the Park­ing Lot Exper­i­ments, or the other stuff that The Flam­ing Lips tried in the late 1990s?

I still don’t know. But I was reminded of that per­plex­ity today read­ing this inter­view with Pitchfork’s Mark Richard­son that’s all about the amaz­ingly high-tech and totally pagan crap that the Lips tried before explod­ing with 1999’s The Soft Bul­letin. Com­plete with YouTube videos, sev­eral of which were new to me.

If you were taken with either (Scheme or the Lips), try both.

 

A very significant object

I’ve got a Sig­nif­i­cant Objects story-let up today! Check it out here; get some more con­text here. There’s a very strong indi­ca­tion that it has some­thing to do with the mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ance of Annabel Scheme… can you spot the clue?

As with all Sig­nif­i­cant Object sto­ries, you can actu­ally bid on the object, now laden with the pleas­ant weight of nar­ra­tive. All pro­ceeds go to 826 National.

 

The Remix Fund

I’m launch­ing a pro­gram today that I’m really excited about. The idea is this: I wrote and printed Annabel Scheme; it’s out there in the world, peo­ple are read­ing it, and I’m get­ting good feed­back. Cool. But I have to say, what I really lust after—maybe irrationally—is like… Annabel Scheme fan-fic. Images of Scheme her­self, or Sebas­t­ian Dex­ter or Jack Zapp, by some kid at deviantART. Tracks from the Beekeeper’s server. Remixes, reimag­in­ings, and reboots!

I’m under no illu­sions; this is ask­ing a lot. Peo­ple want to appro­pri­ate and remix the pan­theon: Bat­man, He-Man, Sher­lock Holmes. Who cares about some new story that’s only existed for two months and only a few thou­sand peo­ple even know about?

Econ­o­mists talk about using well-designed incen­tives to cor­rect mar­ket dis­tor­tions or to encour­age a cer­tain kind of devel­op­ment. But to my knowledge—please tell me if I’m wrong—nobody’s ever released a piece of work under a Cre­ative Com­mons license with much of an incen­tive attached. Usu­ally it’s just: “Hey, do some­thing… with this… if you want?”

So, I’m exper­i­ment­ing with a Remix Fund for Annabel Scheme.

There’s an impor­tant dimen­sion to the fund that I really like, but am hav­ing a hard time explain­ing clearly: You can pitch an idea that you your­self want to do, of course, e.g. you’re an artist and you want to draw a por­trait of Annabel Scheme and you’d like $400 for your efforts. But you can also pitch an idea that you’d like some­one else to do. It could be a friend of yours, of course; it could also be some­one whose work you admire, e.g. another writer you dig, a web­comic cre­ator you love.

This is a bit tricky, obvi­ously, because, like, don’t the cre­ator get any say in the mat­ter? Of course they do: if an idea pitched on some­one else’s behalf gets the green light, I’ll email them and explain what’s up. I actu­ally have a the­ory that this could be a pow­er­ful mes­sage to get: “Hey, out there in the world there is some­one who’s a big fan of yours, and they set it up so that you could do this mini-project and get paid for it.” I don’t know; maybe it will be too out-of-the-blue. “Wait, what? Who are you? Annabel WHAT?” But I’m hope­ful, and I want to try it out, because that’s the only way we’ll know for sure.

Any­way, this is fair game for Snark­mar­ket read­ers, obvi­ously, so check it out.

In 2010, every media bud­get should have a line item for remixes!

 

Telling stories about stories

Increas­ingly, I’m con­vinced that no media is suc­cess­ful or even com­plete until it’s been trans­formed or extended. I know this is not super-controversial—it’s sort of the Cre­ative Com­mons party line—but it turns out things don’t trans­form them­selves! A lot of media gets CC-licensed and then just sits there.

I’m also influ­enced by Henry Jenk­ins’ notion that the most suc­cess­ful fic­tional worlds (Star Wars, Harry Pot­ter, and so on) are not so much straight nar­ra­tive sto­ries as they are “plat­forms” for peo­ple to build on. You need a cen­tral story to get peo­ple excited about the plat­form in the first place, but then you also need lots of hooks for them to extend it, both for­mally (movies, comics, video games) and infor­mally (fan-fiction, fan films, art). The cen­tral story is like the iPhone; the exten­sions are like the App Store! (And P.S., the platform-worlds aren’t all robots and wiz­ards. Ulysses is a plat­form, too.)

Okay so, I’m a long way away from build­ing a plat­form on that scale, but it’s fun to sort of “act it out,” even at this stage. Thus, when patron-guests arrived at the Annabel Scheme launch party, they were pre­sented with a piece of evi­dence from Scheme’s col­lec­tion. The evi­dence was all dated and tagged in ziploc bags; it was all very strange.

The mis­sion: come up with the story behind the evi­dence. There was a Nar­ra­tive Evi­dence Research Data­base col­lec­tion sta­tion set up, off to one side of the party, to cap­ture these sto­ries. Here’s a taste of what peo­ple recorded:

I have to say, it is unreal to see other peo­ple say­ing “banana box” and “Sebas­t­ian Dex­ter” and “Annabel” on cam­era. It really is the next level. Some­body reads the book, enjoys it, even tweets or blogs about it: awe­some. I mean, just really won­der­ful. But some­body acts it out? Sub­lime.

There’s more to come on this front—I’ve allo­cated $1000 from the book’s bud­get for a remix fund, and next week, I’m going to post a form where peo­ple will be able to sub­mit pitches. After that, the book’s patrons will all vote on their favorites, and those projects will get funded. Hey: things don’t trans­form themselves.

 

Slate tackles the book trailer

Our own indis­pens­able @SaheliDatta points to Slate’s take­down of the pro­lif­er­at­ing book-trailer genre. The col­umn is skep­ti­cal of book trail­ers, but I tend to find them charm­ing. I remem­ber lov­ing the idea when I first ran across it, and now we’ve got sev­eral exem­plars of the form, like the Lit­tle Prince Pop-Up Book trailer:

I like the way book trail­ers attempt to light up your expec­ta­tion for a printed page by teas­ing you with an entirely dif­fer­ent sort of temp­ta­tion. A good book trailer is like good food pho­tog­ra­phy. I don’t think of the pri­mary seduc­tion of a meal as being visual, but a well-done food photo evokes every­thing non-visual about a meal — taste, scent, tex­ture. Sim­i­larly, I don’t typ­i­cally think of the pri­mary seduc­tion of a book as being its atmos­phere or aes­thetic, but this is what a good book trailer (or ani­mated book cover) evokes — the envi­ron­ment the book will cre­ate around you as you read it.

Oblig­a­tory Miranda July link. Oblig­a­tory Miranda July book trailer: