Since launching earlier today, Rob Thomas’s Kickstarter campaign to film a Veronica Mars movie has already raised more than half of its $2 million budget.

Richard Lawson at the Atlantic Wire has a provocative and interesting response. He is upset that Kickstarter is commerce masquerading as charity: Anyone Know of a Better Charity Than the ‘Veronica Mars’ Movie?

Another part of my revulsion is, yes, likely to do with the simple fact that art-related Kickstarter campaigns strip away the pretense that art and commerce aren’t inextricably linked. Money has always been part of the commercial art game, but the budgeting and haggling is usually done out of view, by a few select professionals. Kickstarter, though, puts the economic reality right out in the light for all to see. Someone like Amanda Palmer is essentially telling us that she doesn’t want to work on spec, so if we want to hear something new, we have to pay in advance.

The response is not surprising, after all, these are wealthy and successful people begging for money. But this should lead to art that feels more personal and less commercial. Ultimately, that may be better for art, culture and entertainment as a whole.

Instead of cheapening art and entertainment to ask fans to support it, this actually addresses a severe market failure in the entertainment industry.

@andrewraff It also shows the difference between depth and breadth of support for something.

— Matt Marcotte (@MattMarcotte) March 13, 2013

Many fans of an artist, film or TV show are fanatical and passionate, not simply casual viewers. People dress up for conventions, buy ancillary merchandise, and create fan web sites. And in many cases, there are artistic endeavors that have small audiences, but those audiences are very passionate.

While millions of movie viewers are willing to spend $10 to see The Avengers or The Hunger Games, there is a demand curve. The most ardent fans would be willing to pay hundreds of dollars to see the movie, while many casual viewers will not consider going to the movie if their local theater raises the price of a ticket from $10 to $11.

The traditional film financing system does not have a market to test the demand. Given the number of people who watched Veronica Mars on UPN, there’s no way that Warner Brothers would finance a Veronica Mars film if the only metric to test its success is in selling regular price movie tickets. But the Veronica Mars fans are more passionate that, on average, many would be willing to pay more than the regular price of a ticket to see the film.

Is it really so distasteful that the market is enabling creators to make films that thousands of people are willing to spend $100 and more to love rather than entertainment dumbed down and/or inoffensive enough that the requisite millions of people will be willing to spend $10, but no more, to merely watch? True, money is not the best arbiter of quality — reporting on a film’s success based on the amount of money it takes in at the box office shouldn’t make sense outside of the pages of Variety — but that individuals are willing to spend more does and should show that the fans are passionate.

By solving this market failure, Kickstarter (and Indiegogo et. al.) are making a more efficient arts marketplace, which should please both fans and creators. By connecting creators directly with the fans, the fans know that the money that they’re spending on entertainment is going directly and proportionally to the people who are creating that entertainment.

Here’s a quick list of organizations that are helping out in communities hit by Hurricane Sandy here in the New York/New Jersey area.

Before getting back into nerding out on music, television, and pop culture, please volunteer and/or donate:

Region-wide:

• American Red Cross Volunteer or donate

• AmeriCares
• Jewish Federations of America Hurricane Sandy Relief Fund

New York City:

• Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City
• New York Cares

Brooklyn:

• Brooklyn Recovery Fund
• Red Hook Initiative
• How to Help Gerritsen Beach
• Restore Red Hook

Staten Island

• Staten Island Recovers

And here are some more comprehensive lists of resources and especially opportunities to volunteer, from Brooklyn Heights Blog and Manhattan Users Guide.

I know I’m not the only person who’s watched Game of Thrones or read A Song of Ice and Fire and listened to Ben Folds Five’s “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” without thinking about some of the parallels between the narrator of the song and Martin’s best character. I put together this very quick and dirty video:

In discussing The Avengers, Tim Grierson points out something that captures elegantly one of the main reasons that I tend to find Whedon’s works so compelling: Joss Whedon: Revenge Of The Nerd:

“As opposed to J.J. Abrams, whom Hollywood has decided to anoint as our new ambassador of geek culture, Whedon never seems to be trying to prove to us how much he loves this stuff. Maybe that’s partly why some people prefer Abrams’ movies: His Star Trek and Super 8 have an ironic detachment to them that signals that we’re supposed to know it’s OK not to really take this stuff seriously. Despite his great sense of humor, Whedon isn’t ironic. For all his cleverness, he takes his worlds seriously. And even when he’s being snarky, there’s a sincerity underneath it all. With Abrams, you never get the sense that he absolutely has to tell these stories: He’s more of a producer who has a gift for good ideas rather than an artist following a calling.”

Whedon’s best work have ridiculous elements to them. Buffy, in particular, had some tremendously goofy and cheesy looking effects and villains. And even though the characters would always laugh at themselves or the situations that they were in, the situations always had gravity. The humor develops from the dramatic tension. The season arcs always built towards dramatic tension where the stakes for the characters felt huge. And even if you finished an episode shaking your head in disbelief about the implausibility or just weirdness of what happened, it didn’t affect how the characters take it seriously.

It’s always important to take the characters and drama seriously. It’s why The Wire, The Sopranos, Buffy, and Parks and Recreation work so well. They’re not afraid to be funny or dramatic rather than always serious or silly without losing the investment in the characters.

Kurt Sutter quit Twitter this week.
In and of itself, that’s not particularly newsworthy, but why he did is symptomatic of a problem that is undermining American society and threatening our democracy.
Seriously.
Sutter is the executive producer and showrunner of Sons of Anarchy on FX. He’s also someone who says exactly what’s on his mind, without much thinking. He is admittedly very self-reflective and publicly self-critical. Like most writers, mixing extreme ego with extreme neuroses. And he applies his analytical eye not just to his own work, but to the industry as a whole. These are all factors that make Sutter seem like someone who would be great fun to talk with at a party and also a consistently entertaining Twitterer.
But although thousands of fans of Sons of Anarchy follow Sutter for bits of information on the show’s production and news about the upcoming season and cast, posting on Twitter can have a much broader reach than hanging out with fans at Comic-Con or a Harley Davidson enthusiast rally. (Which I’m sure has a non-square term that motorcycle clubs actually use.)
Through a proliferation of entertainment news media and the internet, there’s both much more entertainment news coverage (from the vapid television of Access Hollywood and E! to the more detailed gossip at Deadline Hollywood and Gawker. The upside to this trend is the detailed analysis of critics at sites like Hitfix and NPR and a deeper focus on entertainment news from traditional sources like New York Magazine and The Hollywood Reporter.
And television series showrunners are not just writers and producers, but also the public voice for a show. And television shows are big business not just for the cast and crew, but the networks, advertisers and more. So the showrunner is effectively the CEO of each production. So the words of a television series showrunner are going to be read by people in the industry.
So when Sutter makes a controversial statement, such as alleging that the deal that AMC made with Lionsgate and Matthew Weiner for future seasons of Mad Men were forcing AMC to cut the budgets of its two other big shows, The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad. Writer and Director Frank Darabont had recently left The Walking Dead surprisingly quickly and AMC was reported to be in talks with Sony for a smaller, less expensive final season of Breaking Bad which may have resulted in the studio shopping the best show on television around to other networks.
That’s an opportunity to do some solid journalism, talk to sources at AMC and around the industry and work off of it to do some serious reporting.
And while not every outlet who picked up the “Sutter tweets wacky stuff” story did actual reporting on the underlying story, at least the Hollywood Reporter did. OK, they sensationalized the Twitter drama, but at least they reported on the actual news.
That alone may prove that the entertainment media is more diligent and less frivolous than the national 24 hour cable news networks.
As the most astute media critics working who share a network with stoner films and foulmouthed puppets, the Daily Show saw the trend:

Instead of researching facts and analyzing policies to help citizens with independent analysis and judgment, the news media is happy to simply report what one side says and then report what the other side says. There’s little attempt at analysis and little depth to the overall amount of reporting.
From economic issues like raising the debt ceiling and repealing the Bush tax cuts, to scientific issues like global climate change, the mainstream media seems to have little interest in pursuing truth, but rather simply reporting the existence of conflict.
This would be OK in the entertainment news, but it seems more prevalent in the reporting of national politics and policy than anywhere else, which can not serve the public interest.
See also: Myles McNutt, Antenna, The Rise and Fall of @Sutterink: Showrunners [Off] Twitter III

The first Swedish pop/jazz/hip-hop group to get the Colbert Bump, Movits made their US television debut on The Colbert Report in 2009:

It was one of the most captivating, interesting and entertaining live music performances on TV. And now Movits are back with a new album, set to drop in the US on April 5 and frenetically awesome new video for the album’s lead single, Sammy Davis Jr:

Movits! – “Sammy Davis Jr.” from The Syndicate on Vimeo.

The American Museum of Natural History is one of my absolute favorite places in New York. It was by far my favorite field trip destination in elementary school and continues to be one of my favorite museums in the world. It not only makes science accessible and fun, but has managed to stay largely the same, even while updating to reflect new scientific discoveries. Although if all of the exhibit halls are updated, like the dinosaur and ocean life exhibits, the nostalgic aspects of the New York state or minerals halls provide a comforting continuity.
So I was excited that my application to come to the museum’s first tweetup event to promote the new exhibit on the brain, Brain: The Inside Story The exhibit is very well-done and offers an accessible and comprehensive introduction to neuroscience. It is more interactive than typical for the Natural History museum, which is fortunate that they will be doing the limited timed admission. Make sure to leave enough time (or get tickets online in advance) to be able to schedule an appointment to see the exhibit.






It is certainly a worthwhile exhibit to use as a reason to get back to the Museum of Natural History.
The tweetup event allowed a fairly small group of Twitterers to see the exhibit and chat with the curators and scientists who directed the exhibit. Even more exciting, they brought us on a tour of some areas of the museum that are closed to the public.
Besides being one of the best museums in New York, the American Museum of Natural History is also a serious, major scientific institution, employing more than 200 scientists and housing an enormous collection of specimens. The displays in the museum only hold a small percentage of the collection.
Photos from the fifth floor tour follow after the break.

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Soil & “Pimp” Sessions is as inscrutably Japanese as natto, but their style of death jazz is a unique combination of bop and badassery:

The Heavy brought their US tour to the Bowery Ballroom for the first of two shows in New York City this week and the energy was consistently high. Supplementing their core quartet with loops and samples as well as a pair of backup singers and some Dap King horns, The Heavy tore through a fun, danceable set of songs, closing the set with “How You Like Me Now,” which has become a fixture on the airwaves, largely as the soundtrack to a Kia commercial.


Besides a deep love of soul music and impeccable influences, The Heavy makes its mark largely on the charisma of frontman Kelvin Swaby, who controls the stage with presence. Even though the group had a lot of energy, I’m not sure that the band grooved less than they might have because of the drum loops and samples that anchored a number of the songs.


After a brisk two song encore (closing with the high energy “Oh No, Not You Again”), the band left the stage again with the lights low and the audience applauding for an encore. But after a couple of minutes anticipation the house lights and music came up, indicating that the show was in fact over.
Of all the shows that I’ve seen over the last decade or so at Bowery Ballroom, this was one of the only ones where the sound was less then impeccable. The room sounded boomier and less crisp than usual. Openers The Black Hollies played with a mix that emphasized the guitar and minimized the vocals and bass. This was all very out of character for Bowery, which is typically the best sounding room in the city.
The Heavy will be back at Bowery on Wednesday, although it is already sold out. More photos follow after the break.
Previously: Heavy Indicia.
The House That Dirt Built: Vinyl CD MP3

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The Vilcek Foundation hosted an exhibit of items from Lost, including props, costumes and photographs. The gallery played some of Giacchino’s score. Here are some photos from the exhibit:




More photos follow after the time skip

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