Chad Taylor

End of days no really

Critics are saying Cowboys & Aliens didn't work, and wondering if the western is dead. Saying the western is dead is like saying the blues or jazz or figurative painting or the novel is dead: some things will always be there, in one form or another. What disappointed me instantly about the film was the aliens: I was expecting a 1950s flying-hubcap saucers vs. cowboys mashup, but I guess Indiana Jones and the Collective Noun of the Crystal Skull put everyone off that. (It nearly worked in Mars Attacks.)

Along the same line, thrillers are back. (THRILLERS! ARE! BACK!) Or rather, we flee to them in a menacing world dada-dada-da-da. As I've said before (somewhere...) I believe readers –broadly – turn to crime / thrillers because the genre commits to telling a story. At a recent literary event a publisher told me she classified a crime novel as being about "something that has already happened" and a thriller as "something that hasn't happened yet."

Screen caps from the Comic-Con trailer for Ridley Scott's Prometheus are up here. I am now officially keen. David Slade has directed S04E03 of Breaking Bad. Collider reviews it here. So that's more viewing to catch up on.

If you watch TV via torrents the New Zealand and UK governments are coming for you. Torrentfreak claims that the consultation process for the UK's Digital Economy Act was a sham and that the decision by then Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson to disconnect downloaders was a foregone conclusion. Exotically, Mandelson supped with Dark Lord Dreamworks founder David Geffen to discuss the matter, a mashup more discombobulating than Cowboys & Aliens / Alien Vs Predator / Frankenstein Vs The Wolfman. (Does Geffen put down the white cat with the diamond collar when he is at table? How does Peter eat with his fingertips touching together?)

New Zealand Sony general manager Andrew Cornwell says the new anti-file sharing / anti-download / You Wouldn't Steal A Car / Hey Kids Stop Tagging law is targeting the muddle:
"You're never going to stop it entirely. There will always be some hard core people who want to take on the system and get a lot of pleasure out of defeating it and proving they're smarter than the next person. The whole thrust of it is aimed at middle New Zealand who might do the occasional download."
So... the industry will be aiming its thrust at the amateurs who don't cost them very much while leaving heavy-duty downloaders to establish a second tier distribution network which will undercut legitimate corporations by supplying what users want, when they want it and at a lower price. Because that is, after all, how the drugs war was won.

But in America – the last country which Americans can't push around – former Google CIO Douglas C Merrill says Limewire was good for artists. And CNET reports album sales are climbing:
Wayne Rosso, the former president of defunct file-sharing network Grokster who now blogs about the music industry, says that the last time the recording industry saw album sales climb was in 2004, when there were a dozen file-sharing services operating, including Grokster, eDonkey and BearShare. Rosso said plenty of studies show file sharing stimulates song sales.
"This minor blip is nothing to get too excited about," Rosso said. "But it really shows it's all about the product...music has to have legs. That's what has been lost in the last decade: quality."
Full story (bar charts, balanced reporting) here.

You will find a better place / in this twilight

Had dinner and drinks with our good pal CHAD TAYLOR last nigh... on Twitpic