Things as They Are.?

Live From...California, it's Southland Tales!

As mentioned earlier, I'm quite looking forward to Richard Kelly's Southland Tales and all that's associated with it. Now, it seems, Kelly has brought on a whole slew of former and current Saturday Night Live stars to fill out the cast, including the previously disappeared Jon Lovitz. Also rounding out the cast is John Laroquette and Miranda Richardson. Things keep getting stranger and stranger with Southland Tales, and I think I like it. I highly doubt, however, that this will be the serious film that many thought it might be.

Coming Soon to a City Near You....

Looks like I'll officially be presenting at a couple of upcoming conferences. One is the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts annual conference in Chicago on November 10-13, where I'll be joining a panel with fellow 'Herder palms, as well as should-be 'Herders Lies and Fish and Ed Chang. Our panel is called "Emergence & Convergence in New Media Narratives, or That's an Odd Place to Find a Story", and my humble contribution to it is a paper outlining current theories of transmediation, as well as some practical (and impractical) applications of these theories. The submitted abstract reads as follows:

This paper looks at multi-sited narrative networks, in which a narrative sequence is distributed across varying media channels (film, web, music, video games, print, live performance, etc.) that the user must negotiate in order to extract pertinent information. These networks do not constitute simple "retellings" -- stories told and retold down a chain, mimicking oral forms. Although these networks seem to take on two specific structures -- vertical (expansive) or horizontal (redundant)there is also a convergence of form that irretrievably alters each successive channel's content. In other words, the distribution of narrative across media engenders an engagement of the sequence that requires the user to process and account for not only the order and frequency with which she receives the constituent narrative parts, but the materiality of the presentational format itself. Examples will include the Matrix series, Neil Young's "Greendale," Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, and William Blake's Book of Urizen.

The other presentation, which I received word about today, will take place on March 2-5 at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' annual conference in Vancouver. I'll be on a panel culled from this Penn CFP dealing with film-to-game adaptation. My contribution began as a measley post on this blog, and it will now be paired with papers dealing with, among other things, the numerous recent adaptations of the Lord of the Rings novels and films. Titled "Transmediation and the Ideal Narrative of Batman Begins", mine, of course, is about The Batman:

In her recent article “Narrative and Digitality” (2005), Marie-Laure Ryan describes what she calls texts that think with their medium. These texts possess properties of interactivity/ reactivity, variability, multi-sensorality and networking capabilities. Unique to these sorts of texts is the “ability to create an original experience which cannot be duplicated by any other medium, an experience which makes the medium seem truly necessary” (516). Implicit within this statement is the notion that a thinking text is one that not only requires that a medium’s materiality be incorporated into the exposition of a narrative but that, crucially, this materiality is foregrounded as the key component of interaction.

Keeping this distinction in mind and drawing upon Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s work on congnition and conceptual blending, this paper intends to look at the interplay between the film and video game adaptations of Batman Begins as a function of what I call expansive spatial materialities, the modes through which a narrative is deployed within the space of a medium (such as a frame of a film or the mapping of a game level). In this specific case, the narrative of Batman Begins is altered by the variant spatialities of each particular medium. The game, for example, contains significant narrative departures from the film due to the presence of vastly expanded and interactive architectures such as Arkham Asylum, whose sheer size necessitates and alteration of the film’s content. Although neither channel needs to be experienced in combination with the other (as is required in works like The Matrix), a network still exists between the two sites that creates an ideal narrative site, in which a new, combinative narrative sequence is processed and blended by the user as a consequence of this spatial-material variance. Even though a single narrative altered by its diffusion through different media necessarily entails an engagement with a medium’s materiality, the ideal site exists entirely transmedially, unbound from its carrier. In other words, the presence of both film and game in Batman Begins works to isolate narrative from form, where neither site is an adaptation of the other but, rather, a thinking, material piece to the whole of the story.

Anyone going to be attending either of these conferences? And please remind me-- how do I apply for travel grants again? ;-)

[Ugh. I can't believe I just used an emoticon in a post. I've crossed a line today, and there's no coming back...].

Dead Air Space.

Ladies and gentlemen, Thom Yorke has joined the blogosphere. And so far, it ain't too different from a Radiohead album.

Batman Keeps Beginning.

It seems that the Batman Begins DVD set will not only include a 72pp. comic book, but that the supplemental DVD will also contain an interactive comic that supposedly will bridge some of the gaps in the film. Additionally, this digital comic will also show an innate sense of the materiality of each medium, juxtaposing their properties and making them self-aware throughout every unique and nodal reading.

OK. I made that last bit up. All "interactive" probably means is that you press a button to advance the page. But what's the world without a little optimism, right? Right?

The (Many) Paths of Neo.

Coming soon from Shiny Entertainment, the brains behind the I-used-to-think-it-was-brilliant Earthworm Jim and the I-never-thought-it-was-anything-but-awful Enter the Matrix is the newest entry in the ongoing Matrix saga (yes, it's still alive), The Path of Neo, a game that purportedly allows you to "be the one" (insert the appropriate trademark/ copyright symbols here).

Not only does Shiny claim that this game will absolultely bury any bad memories of their previous Matrix efforts by completely revamping the combat system and allowing players to play through all three films as Neo, but that also, astoundingly, the Wachowski Brothers themselves have stepped in and crafted an entirely new ending to the their film, the it's-only-good-if-you-don't-really-think-about-it The Matrix Revolutions.

So, after suffering from one of the biggest letdowns since Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach (I mean really-- how do you follow up Citizens on Patrol by pretending that Mahoney never existed?), why should I (you) still care about the world of The Matrix? Because 1) the notion of restructuring a narrative found in one medium through a revision in another is quite a radical move on the filmmakers' part; 2) this restructuring brings with it all sorts of issues about the dominance of certain media in establishing what is/isn't considered canonical in multisited narratives (in other words, it'll be interesting to see how the online comics, future [re: inevitable] DVD releases and other esoterica react to this revision); 3) the chance to actually get some answers to the many questions left open by the films and other related media is too much to pass up. I don't care much for sunset laden endings, even if they are supposed to suggest the Wizard of Oz. My hope is for more Architect, more Merovingian. And by more, I mean more than two lines and a stage-right exit. Any other hopes/ fears I've missed?

Because Sometimes, You Just Can't Be Bothered to Look Up.

iPod Subway Maps. Which would be nice if there was any room left on my iPod.

Harvest Time (Again).

Neil Young is set to release his first post-brain aneurysm CD/DVD, Prairie Wind, on September 27th.

Following the precedent set by the extraordinary Greendale opus, it appears that Prairie Wind will once again work to expose the materiality of its media. According to Young, "the DVD shows us recording the whole record, every note you hear, you see!". Young tinkered with this idea previously in the second edition of Greendale, which showed himself and Crazy Horse in the studio recording the album with bits and pieces of the accompanying film superimposed on the various media in the room.

Additionally, Young will perform two concerts in Nashville (where the album was recorded) on August 18th and August 19th which will be filmed by none other than Jonathan Demme and released the same day as the album. Quite a quick turnaround by industry standards but, knowing how crucial Young feels the live/improvised component of his work to be (he once famously commented during the Greendale concerts that the internet would serve as the transcriber for any additional narrative information that was spoken during a performace), it's no surprise that this is being done. Trouble is, no one knows what Prairie Wind is about, or whether it even is a narrative. I'm wondering how much that will change the impact of the work as a multimedia form. Do we always need to attach a narrative to a medium in order to fully expose its materiality?

The easy answer, of course, is no (I'm thinking of several art books here), but narrative should also be considered not simply as something that necessarily employs a medium's materiality in order to advance its aims, but also something that, in the words of Marie-Laure Ryan, thinks about its materiality in the course of this employment/ deployment. The narrative of Greendale, frought with conflicts between media and truth, seems especially tailored for this sort of medium self-awareness. Do only narratives about mediation function in this capacity? Can the same synergy exist between medium and narrative in other types of discourses? In other words, I wonder if there are certain narratives-- of loss, of detachment, of temporality-- that we can say re-present this medium-sentience more than others?