Archive for August, 2006
Gare thought about his options, and none of them seemed good. The man’s fists were pressing into his collarbone so hard he thought he might break in unfortunate ways at any moment. He really wanted to get Ruth to call Tom, but he’d already had this conversation a million times before, and he knew he couldn’t do it.
“Maybe I can meet with Mr Fandetti instead,” he gurgled.
The man’s grip loosened slightly, and Gare felt himself slide down the glass a tiny bit.
“You?”
“Yes! Yes, we’re almost interchangeable, Tom and I.”
“Really.”
“Yes, absolutely.”
The man shrugged, then smashed Gare back into the glass door, shattering it everywhere. It wasn’t that it hurt, but Gare squealed horribly at the thought of the needless expense of repairing the office already.
The man pulled Gare back, stared at him angrily.
“That’s what I was gonna do to your ‘partner’ for standing us up. Glad you’re interchangeable?”
“No, not so much,” winced Gare as he was set back down on the ground. He straightened his suit out and tried to look professional again, as if what had just happened hadn’t really happened. “So is your boss nearby, or am I going to his place?”
The man’s hand grabbed onto Gare’s face so fast it made his nose creak. He stumbled a bit, but the man held him up quite well.
“Mr Fandetti is TALKIN to you, pansy!”
Gare tried to make eye contact with Ruth, to see if she thought this was odd too. Unfortunately, he couldn’t make her out between the fingers across his face.
“Sorry, who’s Mr Fandetti?”
“He’s the one holdin’ your stupid pansy-ass face, beefer!”
Gare knew now that he’d best just let these things go. He held his hand out meekly and smiled pointlessly into the palm, but with enough fabricated courtesy to stun a cow.
“Good to meet you, Mr Fandetti. I didn’t recognize you with… that… suit.”
Fandetti let go of Gare’s face at once and started to smile like a man who was supremely insane, and so dangerous that no one dared tell him. He brushed imaginary lint off his shoulder and nodded appreciatively at Gare.
“He thinks so, too. Now you’d better get your useless ass down to his limo, or he’s going to get cranky again.”
Gare nodded, turned around in the hopes of getting something approaching sympathy from Ruth, but she was smiling at him broadly. Sadistically. God, who had hired this woman?
“So you’re staying on as the receptionist?” he asked.
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” she grinned.
“Good,” he spat, “get the hell into that office and fix our money problems. And if Tom comes back… tell him… tell him I need help NOW!”
Happy 10th! I had a blast with this one… I’m starting to appreciate how the story is going to evolve even more now… there’s a metaphysical side to the time travel story. I think that pretty soon we’ll get a sense of what the story’s all about, but for now I’m going to throw a bit more confusion into the mix!
All previous episodes and how we got there here.
The questions and their answers were:
Name Ryan’s other companion: Franklin.
How many seconds?: 20.
HELP SHAPE THE NEXT EPISODE… FILL IN TWO TEXT FIELDS AND MAKE MY LIFE HARDER!
To help shape the next episode, click here.
I hereby nominate Ze Frank as the first professional internet celebrity.
Not an ” internet personality”. Not a “celebrity”, in that demeaning way you hear offline media talk about people on the web. I mean celebrity like Jon Stewart is a celebrity. Fame and respect and all that comes with it. And I hereby challenge the web to compel him to stay online, where he belongs.
The stinker of being an internet celebrity is that you have to be humble. If you’re too overt about asking for financial compensation for your work, you’ll get accused of “selling out” and lose your audience. It’s part of the territory. That’s one big element that keeps internet stars from sticking around… there’s no value in trying. A comment posted on the “Ask a Ninja” site made it clear that even the dedicated fans wouldn’t be willing to pay for the show. They felt entitled to it for free.
We, as an internet society, are being stupid, and it’s time we stopped.
Ze can’t ask for subscription fees because doing so would be poison to him. [This blog post is not condoned by him; I haven't even considered asking his opinion about it. If I were him, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot cattle prod*] But that’s HIS restriction, not mine. And I am quite happy to do something stupid. Stupid is what I do best.
Here’s my proposal, and you tell me what you think. I’ll peg a subscription to The Show at $3/month. That’s not a value judgement, just a gut feeling of what the market will bear. If we assume that between now and the end of Ze’s “year of The Show”, we’ve got six full months left, that comes to $18. My proposal is that we each send Ze $18 to show our appreciation for what he has been doing for us. He doesn’t need to give us early access, special features, any of that crap. This is us, the patrons, supporting our favourite artist.
I realize there are some people out there that don’t have credit cards or don’t have access to them, or just aren’t ABLE to drop money into things, even if they want to. So I propose a second element to this idea: proxies. If you have the ability to pay and need something done that you figure costs $18, post it below. If you can’t pay but can do any of the things you see in the list, do the work and that person will spend the $18 on your behalf. Features on a website, maybe a quick picture, anything at all. If you have a specific talent, post that below too and see who bites. $18 isn’t a lot of anyone’s time, and it’s the least you can do to support The Show.
Let me be ruthlessly blunt with the naysayers: I don’t CARE if you don’t like the idea. If you think Ze should HAVE to do the show without any kind of compensation at all, fine. Just don’t help, and stay quiet about it. But I’m willing to bet you spend more than $18/month on your cable bill, and none of THOSE people would have a second thought FORCING you to shell out cash to watch them for 3 minutes a day. Which activity do you want to condone?
Internet culture is not a joke, it’s not a silly imitation of what’s made in Hollywood. What we do here may be rough and low-budget, and it may never be “mainstream”, but it’s our homegrown style. The point isn’t to adapt until we conform with some foreign ideal, it’s to PERFECT our style until it defines our OWN ideals. That kind of work takes money. It’s time we stopped punishing our artists for the sins of Old Media. It’s time to start taking care of our own.
Pledge your $18, and let the era of professional internet culture begin.
Update: To be extra-super-duper-clear, this is an action by Ze fans aimed at Ze fans, with no input from Ze himself. It’s not a question of “you need to pay this to watch The Show”, it’s a question of “you should want to pay this because it’s the least you can do”. If you’re angry that you feel guilt-tripped about being cheap, don’t take it out on Ze. He’s not calling you cheap, I am!
* To this end, I invite Ze to call me an asshole in his next show, so that everyone can see what he doesn’t much care of the trouble I’m causing him. He can also insult my clothes if he likes. It’s okay. I’m not proud of them.
“Okay, I know. I know,” said Gare, though as he spoke it he actually had no idea what he was going to do. “You’re going to give Tom a call and see if he knows what’s going on. Because…”
He was trying REALLY hard to think of what was going on, but was coming up empty….
“… because I guess he wrote some cheques from the wrong account. Because that’s all it can be, really.”
The woman stared at him with a face so unamused that he felt, in her presence, like there was no point to life anymore.
“I have three problems with this, Mr Marx,” she said.
“Okay, okay, let’s hear them. Constructive criticism, working together as a team.”
“First,” she said tersely, “I don’t have any way of calling Mr Lincoln without a phone.”
“Oh, right, sorry. Here, use mine,” he said, and fished his out of his pocket for her. “Second?”
“Second, I have serious doubts about your financial stability after all this. And THIRD… if you don’t have money for the rent, there’s no way in hell I’m going to be your receptionist.”
Gare thought for a moment. She had a good point.
“Okay, listen… um… Beth, was it?”
“Ruth.”
“Ruth, right. Ruth, this is the thing… just two days ago I invested about half a million of my own dollars into this company. Did it myself, in person, at the bank downtown. I know for a FACT we have the cash to run this business. Absolutely. So the ONLY explanation that makes ANY sense at all, is that there’s some technical screw-up somewhere that’s… that’s just screwing us up.”
Ruth observed him carefully. Then she started to check through his phone’s address book. She hit the dial button and stared straight into Gare’s soul.
“You’d better be right,” she said, “I don’t play games.”
Gare felt superbly small. He nodded meekly. And then in a rush, he remembered something that made him grab the phone from Ruth’s hand and shut it off.
“No! Holy hell, no. I forgot… Tom’s out on the Livingstone case today. No phone contact till he’s done.”
Ruth was not impressed.
“He’s… he’s under cover or something. Keeping a low profile. If his phone rings, it’d… um… Yeah, you’re not a very happy person, are you?”
“My ass is numb. Are we going back inside today, or should I go home?”
Gare was about to try and riff off some kind of new idea when he heard a gruff voice from behind.
“Which onna yous is Lincoln?” said the round man with one long dark eyebrow like a swarthy caterpillar.
Ruth wasn’t in the receptioning mood, so Gare fielded it.
“Um, Mr Lincoln’s out on business today. I’m his partner, Mr–”
“OUT?” said the man in a crazed burst of fury, and then, without warning, grabbed Gare by his jacket and slammed him into the frosted glass door. “Mr Fandetti don’t like it when he’s stood up, understand? Now you get your partner on tha phone real quick, or I’m going to have to leave him a souvenir of my displeasure.”
Gare whimpered softly as the glass creaked behind him.
I’ve been trying for some time to articulate a feeling I have about internet culture, and only just today have I managed to decipher it. It always felt familiar, like something that had existed in my brain for far longer than I’ve really thought about online art. It didn’t make sense, but now it does.
In Canada, we suffer from a sense of cultural inadequacy. Although we manage to breed some of the top actors, artists, writers and musicians in pop culture today, we don’t see ourselves as being that good at anything. I mean we DO, but mostly in a “wow, they were on Jay Leno!” way… Until they cross the border, they’re not really stars. We place no value on ourselves, and it makes our own brilliant minds leave us for greener pastures.
That’s what’s happening on the web. I guess people from the USA don’t see it because they don’t have that shared societal baggage that Canadians have. We’re in the process of confirming our second-class status. We’ve conceded the battle without really knowing there was a chance we could win the war, and the end result is that we WILL be the losers, because we aren’t making an effort not to be.
As the major American networks move onto the web over the next few months and years, our dominance of our online world will be diminished, and eventually we WILL just be training grounds for Hollywood online ventures. We need to capture our Dan Aykroyds, or Alanis Morisettes, our Jim Carreys… we need to keep them here, if only to be able to say “See! We have our own A-list!” And then expand from there.
I’ve got a plan based on this I shall articulate later. And the best part is, it won’t eat another day of my week!
