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Interview with Nina Paley, Part 1

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This is part of a roundtable on copyright and free culture issues. You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.

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Nina Paley’s adventures have taken her from Urbana, Illinois across the US and around the world to her current location in New York City, where I had the chance this past weekend to visit and talk with her about cartooning and copyright.

Paley worked as a cartoonist from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, writing comic books and then newspaper strips before switching to animation. If you aren’t familiar with her work, check out her website and blog as well as my recent post about the copyright controversy surrounding her film Sita Sings the Blues. Or search for her cartoons on Archive.org.

I was lucky enough to have a copy of a printed collection from 1987 of her very early work, from high school and college, which she hadn’t seen in years. That’s what we’re looking at during the start of this interview.
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I’m looking at these political cartoons, and they’re really disparate. It looks like someone said “we’ve got this article on this thing; draw something.”

Yes, that’s exactly how the political cartoons in the Daily Illini worked. I was just an illustrator, I was just drawing. I developed my drawing skills long before I developed my voice. So I was happy to illustrate anything.

Did they tell you the position to take in the cartoon? Did you have to agree with what was in the article?

I don’t even think I was paying attention. [Stops and points to a particular cartoon.] God, what an idiot I was! This is such bullshit. I was developing my politics according to people around me, ‘cause I was in college. So I was just sort of – if anyone I knew was outraged about something, I would say “what are you outraged by?” and they’re my friends, so I was like, “that’s outrageous!” Now that I’m a grown-up, I’m thinking, “what the hell?” [laughter] All these — what the hell, these are all opposite to what I think now. Apparently this one was calling for more parking on campus, and I hate cars now, and there’s way too much parking and paving, screw that. And here: “the US isn’t doing enough about terrorism.” But I was so dumb then, “oh, these people are doing bad things to other people and we should do something.”

But you did come from a political family, sort of. Your dad was the mayor of Urbana…

He was the mayor between my ages of 4-8, something like that. It was all very traumatic. Not his being mayor, but the crap I got at school from other students. My thing was, I was drawing very early, and I had my own needs for attention and stuff, and every time I drew something well, the other kids would say “you’re just showing off ‘cause you’re the mayor’s daughter.” And I would be [crying] “That has nothing to do with my art!”

I was going to ask you when you started drawing; so it was really early. You mention (in the intro to the 1987 collection) that you did a couple of comic strips with a history professor at Uni High (University High School in Urbana). Were you cartooning before that?

Not much, I mean, I didn’t get into cartooning. I thought cartooning was not art. I aspired to draw “real art” when I was a kid, when I was below 10, I thought the goal was to draw as realistically as possible and that cartooning was some sort of weird cheating thing, or not cheating but just, it wasn’t the same. But then as I got a little older, got into my early teens, I realized that cartooning was powerful. It had a powerful affect on people that just drawing pretty pictures did not have.

Were you reading things that made you see it that way, or what caused the epiphany?

The epiphany was when I started drawing them and I got all this attention. I gotta be honest about attention. I’m thinking a lot about attention and the attention economy, and I am remembering attention is sort of a dirty word from my childhood, to say “yes, I wanted attention”, you’re not supposed to say that. You’re supposed to say that you have higher motives or something, but wanting attention is really bad. And of course it was always way more than wanting attention, but attention is an essential component of communication, you know? [laughs] There’s expression and then there’s reception, and reception or attention are sort of synonymous in that respect. So when I said things, I wanted to be heard. When I drew things, I wanted them to be seen, and I just found that if I drew cartoons, lots of people were interested in looking at the cartoons, and not so many people with drawing pretty. People would say, “oh, that’s very well drawn,” but cartooning actually had an effect on people; they would actually be engaged.

It’s intimate in a way that fine art is distancing?

I don’t know! I don’t think it has to be. It’s not like the drawings of a 13-year-old explored all the aspects of fine art [laughs] or anything like that. But even when I was into the realistic drawing, I was always interested in mass media art, like books, newspapers, illustrations. And I didn’t even realize – it wasn’t until I was almost 20 that someone distinguished illustration from art. I would make these drawings and someone said “oh, those are illustrations”, and I was “oh, there’s a difference? This is some category of art? I just thought they were art.” But apparently everything I was thinking was art when I was young was actually illustration; I just didn’t know that. I thought it was art.

That was when you were in college? Were you studying art?

I think I was about 19, and it was actually a cousin. A cousin of mine, Debbie, who is a really great artist and designer who now lives in Chicago. [Editor’s note: Debbie’s website is here.] She paints objects, like shoes – I mean she paints on them – shoes and chairs and things like that. She was a designer for a shoe company and they lived in Toronto, and I had drawn these ink drawings of iguanas and showed them to her and asked “What do you think of these? Can I be an artist? I want to be an artist!” and she said “oh, I think you’re an illustrator.” So apparently I must have been fascinated and influenced by books, comics, newspapers. Scholastic books, those books you order in school and they come like Christmas every month? They had all these great things that you can’t find online because they’re under copyright and whomever owned them would never release them that way.

I remember I had a book called Captain Ecology, a cartoon by Tom Eaton. There’s another cartoonist named Tom Eaton but this is a different one. It was a comic strip book thing and I liked the drawings. And there was Escaped from the Zoo in the Daily Illini; this would have been in the early 80s.

I always drew, everybody drew when we were young. Other people stopped drawing and I didn’t. It’s really true, everybody drew.

When did they stop?

I don’t know because I wasn’t paying attention! It was just like I looked up [laugh] and “what happened to everyone? When did this start?” I don’t know what age people start really getting into shame, like feeling ashamed of themselves.

[flipping through book] PLATO! (Editor’s note: PLATO was the first computerized instruction system, built around 1960 by the University of Illinois and used by the university and local schools.)

There are lots of computers, and engineering stories and space stories in this early work. Was that the influence of the people who were writing for you?

That was my group. My father’s a mathematician, and my brother was studying math and computer science; I went to Uni High after my hellish three years at Urbana Junior High. I used the PLATO computers all the time. I was an early computer addict before most people had that opportunity; those were my friends, that was my life. When I was in college, I met other people, but I didn’t befriend other people. I always thought that the cooler people were the engineers and stuff, I did study art and I dropped out after 2 years. socially going into the art department: it was like a wasteland.

So the transition to doing Flash animation on the Mac was very natural.

Yes! Definitely.

It sounds like you were very interested in expression, in getting your drawings out.

Initially, I was just interested in developing my skills. I didn’t really learn how to really speak with my own voice until I was 20 and moved to Santa Cruz and started doing Nina’s Adventures in Santa Cruz. Up until that point, I was just interested in illustration and illustrating other people’s ideas. It just didn’t occur to me that I had that kind of voice. And I just wanted to draw. I think I was aware of the power of drawing; I didn’t know how to use it but I liked it. I was developing it. I couldn’t imagine writing my own comic strip.

And I look back on it, and I had no self-esteem, so I was continually anxious about doing this comic strip that was written by someone who wasn’t a student, (Joyride, originally written by David Gehrig), because there were these really explicit rules: Student Work Only in the paper. So I had to keep it a terrible secret that I was using an outside writer – David is writing it and he’s not a student! I gotta write this myself, ‘cause I can’t have that!

You mention (also in the introduction to the 1987 volume) that you thought you weren’t a writer. How did you figure out that you could write them yourself? At some point you must have come to terms with yourself as a writer; can you tell a little bit about how you got there?

I just started! [laughs] OK, that’s not entirely true.

When I was 17–18, I started writing a journal. I was doing a lot of very necessary self-searching because I was depressed. I was quite out about being very depressed as a kid, and basically depressive as an adult also although I take medication; I’ve been taking medication for 20 years.

And it works?

Yeah, fuck yeah. Which is not to say that I don’t still have episodes, but they’re spaced much farther apart. Devastating when they happen, but at least it’s not every day all the time. So, I was desperate, because that kind of mental illness, the older you get the worse it gets. So I was desperate for anything to help myself, and at some point I started writing this journal, this illustrated journal-y thing, where I was writing about real things that were actually going on. Things that I was feeling terrible about, and things that I was ashamed of, I would actually write them. I got better and better at looking at the hidden part of myself, and getting them out.

…externalizing them through both writing and pictures.

Yes.

Were those experiences of writing and drawing similar for you?

I wrote and drew.

Just seamless.

Yes. I wrote and drew pictures [laugh] of the inside of my head, punching people, killing myself, all those things. And they were funny, man, they were really funny. So I’d be writing these things and laughing.

And I saw shortly before I left Urbana, I saw Life in Hell for the first time, the Matt Groening books and I saw Lynda Barry’s older books. I mean, obviously they had to be older books because – that is what is now her early works. And both of them were actually doing comics about real things. They weren’t just doing fluff entertainment. They were doing psycho comics, and they were just so real. They were brilliant, and those were the first things, the first time I ever realized, oh wow, you can really discuss real stuff and deep stuff and profound stuff in comics, and be funny. So they showed me it was possible, and then I moved to Santa Cruz, when I was 20, which was a whole other world of trauma that I wasn’t prepared for.

Were you going to school?

Nope, I wanted to be a new-age crystal-wielding hippie. My friends in Urbana were hippies. In Urbana, the smart non-conformist people were hippies. And so I went to Santa Cruz, young and naïve, and was like, “oh, it’s all full of hippies; these are my people.” And I actually lived there, and then it was “no wait, in Santa Cruz, the dumb conformists are hippies and the smart non-conformists are something else.” [laugh]

So there I was – increasingly disillusioned, young, dumb, mentally ill, [laugh] and I’d just moved away from home, and I guess that was enough stress that it finally found an outlet with my Nina’s Adventures strips, which were taken from my journals, and so it began. Thus began my real life as an artist.

I was in Santa Cruz for 3 years, and then in 1991 I moved to Austin, Texas for 3 months, and it didn’t work out [laughter]. I had one hell of a depressive episode there. I kept moving away from anyone I had contact with. I didn’t realize that I actually had connections with people. I think that was a real problem with being depressed. There were people in my life but I felt like I was all alone, and nobody loved me and like that, so I thought I had nothing to lose, but you move away from it and it’s like, “oh wait, wait a minute, I did have friends, and [laugh] I’m calling them all long-distance now!”

Back before there was cheap long distance included with your cell phone.

Exactly. So then I moved to San Francisco because when I lived in Santa Cruz I’d met people who lived in San Francisco and I thought, “I’m just gonna try to live in a real city.” I was scared of real cities. I always wanted to live in college towns like Urbana. So I thought I’ll just try living in this horrible big city, and of course I took to the city like a duck to water and realized I always should have – I’m very well suited to cities.

So while we’re on the subject of how you became a cartoonist, I wanted to ask you about comments I’ve heard more than once from women who are interested in comics that they feel like cartooning is not an available profession for a woman, that they thought it was very hard to be a woman cartoonist. Did you have any particularly gendered experiences?

Cartooning is not a fucking profession. I certainly did have gendered experiences, but I do want to just say that this whole approach to cartooning and art like it’s a profession, as though it’s people with jobs, and “they’re not recruiting women, the cartoon jobs aren’t recruiting women at the job fair.” It doesn’t work like that. But yes, I had extremely gendered experiences in my youth. And I am happy to say that the last time I went to a comics event which was the Alternative Press Expo here in New York (put on by the Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art), there are so many more women doing alt comics. It was not like that at all in the early ‘90s. It was horrible in alternative comics, just horrid.

It’s not just that I was female: I had a lot of other “social handicaps.” Being a woman was a social handicap. I was so bitter, so fucking angry. And, for good reason, being angry did not help my career, and in fact, I did the right thing, which was just to get out of it, stop pounding on that particular door.

Is the reason you left comics tied to this frustrating set of experiences?

Well, I got into newspaper comics. Newspapers were much more friendly to me than alternative comics. It was a cultural thing. Alternative comics were newer, smaller, very male dominated, and for whatever reason, things happened because of socializing. Now, I’m pretty sure that with my other social handicaps – my other social handicaps are that I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t smoke, I don’t like bars. They were all really into all of those things, so people would go to parties and drink and that’s where everything happened. So it wasn’t just that I was a woman. However, I am certain that had I not been a woman, and had everything else about me been the same, I would have gotten much further. It was also this whole thing where — the alternatives grew out of the underground comics, and there were a lot of underground comics that were overtly misogynistic. And the few women cartoonists would say, “this is misogynistic; we don’t like this” and then the response to that, and this is strange, is that people would respond to that as though they were being censored, not criticized. So they were just not able to process that this would criticism. They would immediately get into this anti-censorship stuff. Maybe that’s related to stuff in Canada, because Canada was and still is censoring anything that could be considered porn, which includes a lot of comics. So the threat of censorship in Canada was very real.

I think that might be giving them too much credit.

I’m trying! But you know I wasn’t out to censor anybody – a, how could we and b, why would we want to. We were criticizing it and then suddenly we were accused of being a censor, and they were not into that. I did notice that the few women who were relatively successful underground cartoonists were either married or having sex with successful men cartoonists. So I did sort of go, hmm. Now, I’m not going to name any of them, but that was the case. And there would be depressed or even autistic male underground cartoonists and they would be fine. They didn’t have to go to the bars and do all this stuff. They didn’t have to sleep with the other cartoonists [laugh]. They didn’t have to be cute and bouncy; they were fine. But if you were a woman and you were like that, that was nowhere. And to be honest…I don’t know. I don’t really fucking know. I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad I got out of it, and I’m really glad that when I went last, there were lots of women there and these issues seemed to be just infinitely smaller now.

But it was still happening when you got out?

Oh yeah, it was a nightmare, still, when I stopped going to any comic conventions in the mid-1990s. I remember the last gig, I don’t remember what year my last Diego con was, but I was just like, I can’t ever do this again. [laugh] This is self-abuse. I guess it was shortly before I started doing Fluff. I reached a point where, “ok, I’m not going to do comics. Newspaper comics are different from comic book comics. They have nothing in common, and I am pursuing the newspapers.” That was probably 1995; I don’t remember when I started Fluff.

So I did this syndicated strip at the Universal Press – thank you Universal Press for the glorious opportunity, which I am eternally grateful for – but I did burn out. It just wasn’t fun at all anymore.

Was it the routine deadlines and the need for consistency?

Yes, the routine deadlines and the need for consistency, and also just the volume of it, every damn day. I guess that’s the consistency. The same format every single day, and so I only had this vague memory of when art was fun, and I was like “how did this happen; how did I get here?” I was just thinking I gotta have fun again.

Do you think it affected the quality of you work near the end of the strip, or was it just that it wasn’t meaningful to you at that point?

No, I’m competent. I’m always competent. By the end though, I couldn’t bear to write it, so thank god, I got my friend Ian Akin to write it, so you’ll see at the end the later Fluff’s say “Akin/Paley” or “Paley/Akin”; he did a really good job.

That makes sense though with the way you were saying: you built your chops as an artist so the drawing was always fine.

Yeah, I call that craft, now. I can do the craft, although I can’t do that stuff anymore. My soul just rebels. And obviously I couldn’t really keep doing it then ‘cause I quit. But the quality didn’t suffer. I remembered the joy I felt when I was 13 and making Super8 animation, and I had also just started dating “Dave” (Editor’s Note: Dave is the character name she uses for her ex-husband in Sita Sings the Blues), who was a professional animator, and he had an animation table, which I’d never used before.

I did Super8 animation when I was a kid in Central Illinois with no real support. There were no animators there. If there were any, they weren’t going to help a 13-year-old girl, so I had books, and that’s it. But I never had any equipment for it. An animation table is like a light box, and there’s paper with pegs, and he had this animation table, and I was “wow, I wanna do this again,” so I did. I also borrowed a friend’s Super8 camera and just picked up where I left off when I was 13 or 14 – and sure enough it was fun. My joke is that I found something that took more work and paid less than comics. That’s what I needed to have fun.

Did you work as an animator, or was this something you just did for love?

No, I wanted to keep it pure, the love of the craft. When I was quitting Fluff, I said “make art not money, make art not money. Remember that.” And of course I forget periodically and get confused and think that I should be making money and not art. They’re not mutually exclusive, not at all; but you’ve got to remember: don’t do stuff that’s bad for your soul in order to make money.

One of the things that people do leverage against copyleft is that you don’t get the quality you get with traditional methods.

You just get more of everything: you get more crap and more quality. I’m also really excited about more voices getting to be heard. What’s so different for me now is that my work can reach an audience, and it was so frustrating in the age of gatekeepers. I am so fucking sick of gatekeepers, who just defined everything that happened to my art for so long.

Out of completely cost benefit analysis motivations?

No, no, it was just their own taste. These are human beings, they are extremely fallible. A lot of them are really fucked up people, and they have these jobs where they’re supposed to make decisions about what their audience wants, and they’re frequently wrong. Even really smart really nice people in those jobs are frequently wrong. Those are not jobs anyone should have.

It should be collective.

Right, let people see it and let people decide whether they like something. I’m freeing all of my old strips under copyleft licenses [Editor’s note: many are already available on archive.org; hyperlinked names of comics in this article point to the archive.org page where you can download them.] And I would so love a publisher to publish a book of them, or some of them – anything they want. And the fact is any publisher could do that. But whomever does it first will have the competitive advantage. People tend to buy copies that are available and accessible rather than putting together their own. I have a volunteer effort to put all my old strips on WordPress blogs so that all of them are accessible. I have an enormous amount of this stuff. I was really hoping it would be up and running sooner than it has been because I’m trying to set an example and I’m trying to get my work seen again. I’ve got all these great old comics, and my work is obscure. All my newspaper strips are on archive.org. They’re apparently not accessible enough for them to be easily shareable; they’re still too difficult to find, even though they’re free. I want people to build on them.

The only publishers doing open-licensed works are tech publishers. Pop culture publishers – it is anathema to them. And the tech publishers don’t do pop culture. I actually asked O’Reilly, but physically a lot of work needs to be done. I’ve done the work of making the comics and I’ve done some work to make them accessible, and if a publisher could put it together, then people could see it online and say “is there a book of this?” And then buy that publisher’s books!

So you can have niche audiences, which scares people. It’s true when you have lots of niche audiences it’s a lot harder to control the masses, because if you just have limited information from just a few centralized points of distribution, it’s much easier to control everyone and we’re getting a situation where all kinds of niches can get the kind of culture that they want and people are saying things like, oh, and this means they’re not going to be exposed to things that they don’t like and that’s terrible, and look, these people with politics that we abhor are forming their own little communities and saying these things that we don’t like to each other, and yeah, I don’t like it either. I realize that there will be little communities of people that say terrible things that I would never want to hear, and I don’t have to. But there’s so much fantastic art that never would have made it through a gatekeeper system.

The more gatekeeping there is, the more culture is funneled. It just gets funneled more and more and more. I understand the point that not having gatekeepers means you get a lot of niche audiences, but it seems like if you don’t have niche audiences you have niche culture.

Yes! One culture fits all – but it sure didn’t fit me, and mine didn’t fit it. Didn’t fit that niche, and so the gatekeepers were like, “No. I don’t think this is the lowest common denominator and we’re only looking for the lowest common denominator.” And mine wasn’t that. So if it’s out there, the right audience finds my stuff, and there’s plenty of people that appreciate my stuff.

Read Part 2.Sita-Still-2

Cuckoo for Copyright: Sita Sings for Your Entertainment

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This is part of a roundtable on copyright and free culture issues. You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.
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Caro discussed the copyright issues involved in Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues in a post a couple of weeks ago. I’ll quote her summary of the film and it’s relation to copyright issues:

Around the same time that Lethem’s article was hitting the newsstands, cartoonist Nina Paley was hitting a brick wall in the production and distribution of her blues-inflected animated full-length feature film, Sita Sings the Blues. Made by Paley single-handedly in her Manhattan apartment, Sita brings together an embarrassment of source-material richness: Paley’s own humor-filled story of breakup-by-email, the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, and the blues songs of ‘20s American songstress Annette Hanshaw.

Despite the “open source” culture of indigenous blues, it’s those Hanshaw recordings that led her to the brick wall: the recordings’ are restricted by copyrights held by large corporations like Sony and EMI. The cost of licensing the music used in Sita would have cost her more than it cost to make the entire film…

Paley’s imaginative solution to the problem has been to give the film away for free, and the result has been a firestorm of enthusiasm for all things Sita. Paley says that her new “free culture” lifestyle has eradicated her cynicism and made her even more creative than before.

I saw Sita earlier this week, and it’s well-constructed and lovely to watch. Cutting back and forth and in and out between styles and stories, Paley’s visual inventiveness is impressive. I particularly liked the scenes of bloodshed and carnage, invariably done in a slick, cartoony animation style, with Rakhasa demons whimsically disintegrating into piled-up bloodily gushing bits as Rama’s wife Sita trills along in Annette Henshaw’s gosh-gee flapper vocals. I love Paley’s housecats too; drawn in a simple, line-art style with paws that open and close like hands, they trot across the screen with adorable insouciance.

Despite the movies pleasures, though, I had some reservations. Maybe those are best expressed by
this comment from Vikas over at Roger Ebert’s blog.

I”m intrigued by the take this woman has on the story of Rama and the Ramayan.
The story is actually, 98% of the time, told regarding the main part of the Ramayana story which is about Ram who is a an incarnation of God – of brahma, the spirit, of Christ, of Krishna, or who you will — he is God, he embodies God.

His role on earth is to demonstrate dharam – duty, and how to live one’s life. He is a good husband, he loves his wife, he is humble, he turns the other cheek against those who offend him, and wins hearts with love, humility, and peace. When his hand is forced, he fights for what is right.

This is the actual story of Ram the prince, and it is a very beloved tale by all Indians. There have been countless adaptions of it. It is very important to know this aspect of the story, though this animated tale seems to concentrate on a part of the tale that is actually not considered a large part of the Ramayana epic itself, and in fact is often considered a part of the epic that comes in a “sequel” if you will.

at any rate, the epic, as we recall, is about Ram (who embodies God), and later then suspects his wife of adultery. This is meant to be God himself, demonstrating the frailty of human beings, when they lack faith in the divine, when they disrespect the feminine aspect of God. In the epic, Ram himself knowingly, in consciousness, acts out this betrayal of the feminine, as a lesson to humanity, then is punished for it.

I thought these aspects of the tale are important to consider; the epic is not just about some evil husband who betrays his wife. The main Ramayana is not this story; but this tale of doubting his wife is toward the end of the epic, after many countless tales and lessons and acts of valour, heroism, and love by Ram for his wife Sita.
This woman, who has made this enchanted film, seems to have concentrated on the betrayal aspect (is she a feminist? is she bitter???? Her choice seems to betray an extreme vision of the epic, and does not take into account the metaphor and the knowledge by Indians that Ram was God-consciousness manifested on earth, AS WAS Sita, both to enact the frailties of human beings and the cost of disrespect to the feminine divine, in the final, last act of the Ramayana.)

I just see it as unfortunate that an animated fable such as this casts Ram as a villain, and suspect it has to do with the maker’s own somewhat imbalanced view of the epic as a whole.
Vikas

Parts of Vikas’ comments here seem irritating and wrong-headed (I mean, of course Paley’s a feminist! And what’s wrong with being bitter, anyway?) But I think there’s something to his overall point. The Ramayana is a religious epic central to India’s culture. Paley takes it and essentially presents it as a metaphor for her own relationship troubles. She uses Henshaw’s recordings in a similar way; the songs are taken out of context, so that they’re no longer about Henshaw, but rather about Sita, and through her about Paley. The movie is an engine for turning culture into Paley; Ramayana and 20s jazz are there to reflect Paley back to herself so she can be comforted and heal.

So…what’s wrong with that? After all, nobody owns the Ramayana — and nobody owns Henshaw either, even if her recordings are copyrighted. Why not take from culture what you want, apply it to yourself, and turn it to your own ends? Another of Ebert’s commenters, Sumana Harihareswara makes essentially this point:

To vikas’s comment, and those of others who fear that this film doesn’t respect the epic: I’m an Indian and I love this movie. If you watch the trailer you’ll see that throughout the entire thing you’ll hear Indians commenting on characters, motives, and the versions of the story they heard growing up. A list of collaborators, including many Indians.
http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/collaborators.html

It’s an epic, a classic. No one gets to say “This is the One True Ramayana and any retelling that focuses on a part I don’t care for is Wrong.” And that goes for Beowulf, the Iliad, and all those spinoffs of Austen and Eyre.
If you watch the film, you’ll see that it is indeed a tale of love, romance, exile, reunion, and then the episode you consider an optional sequel at the end. But if the Ramayana is a tale of hard ethical choices, then the ugly episode fits right in. Dasharatha must choose between his promise to his heir and his promise to his wife. Sita chooses between chastity and giving in to her kidnapper’s demands. And Rama chooses between his credibility as a king and his loyalty to his faithful wife.

You could see it as a testament to the epic’s continuing power, after all, that a woman from a different culture and a different era can still see herself in it. Culture is there to be used. It lives when we transform it. Right?

That’s the theory of the free culture movement that Paley promotes, in any case. And I’m fairly sympathetic. Having giant corporate conglomerates sitting on Henshaw’s recordings doesn’t benefit anyone but giant corporate conglomerates…and surely they have enough going for them as it is. And if nobody should own Henshaw, then surely, as Harihareswara says, nobody can own the Ramayana, any more than anyone can own the Bible. These texts are part of humanity’s cultural heritage; they’re riches we all share.

But…are they riches, and do we really share them? The free culture movement t presents itself often as an alternative to capitalism; a way to get culture out from corporate dominance and let it return to its free, natural state. The thing is, though, that “free” is still a price point — culture is still treated as part of the marketplace, albeit as a free sample rather than as a commodity per se. The happy jouissance of sharing and bricolage, or reinterpretation and personal healing, matters more than the original context of the Ramayana, or of anything. The freedom of culture becomes more important than culture itself — which seems to me like a classic formulation of humanistic capitalist ethics.

The fact that capitalist art is capitalist isn’t particularly shocking, or even condemnatory. And Sita and other manifestations of free culture (like, say, mashups) are fun. Irreverently taking bits from here and pieces from there and tossing them all together, regardless of context — it’s startling and exhilarating.

The downside is that it’s also glib. The 560th mashup of “Single Ladies” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” starts to feel less like high-spirited transgression than like a lack of imagination. You get that sense of lurking pedestrianism while watching Sita as well. Paley goes to India — so, hey, her love life is just like Sita’s! And Annette Henshaw singing “Mean to Me” is just like when Rama is mean to his wife! It’s amazing how those go together! By the end of the movie, the whimsical cuteness with which the Henshaw songs commented on the action had moved past entertaining and on into actively irritating. Indeed, the insistent preciousness of the film eventually becomes grating, from the oh-aren’t-they-ethnic modern-day Indians who provide adorably confused commentary to the Sita stories, to the animated Sita’s winkingly gyrating Betty Boop hips.

Watching Sita in this context, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the free culture movement isn’t so much a repudiation of modernity as it is an extension and perfection of it. We’re all consumers, we all want everything as cheap as possible — and there’s nothing cheaper than free. With culture liberated, we can all flit from distraction to distraction, stopping just long enough for a single sip before rushing off to the next taste sensation. In capitalism, we’re all tourists and all local color, performing cheerful parodies of our ancestor’s native dances for the elucidation and healing of our pathologically rootless neighbors.

Cuckoo for Copyright: Read This And I Own Your Brain

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This week on HU we’re going to have a roundtable discussion on issues around copyright and free culture. The roundtable will be anchored by an interview with artist and free culture advocate Nina Paley, conducted by Caro, which will be posted in a few days. We’re also going to have a guest post by Pallas, a sometimes HU commenter who has studied intellectual property law. Finally, we’ll have a guest post by Jonathan Newman, a contemporary classical composer and a bit of a free culture skeptic.

To start things off, I thought I’d reprint one of the first things I wrote for The Comics Journal way back when. This was reprinted by the good folks at Poor Mojo’s Almanac a while back, but hasn’t appeared on this blog before. Thanks to Alan Benard of Poor Mojo’s for putting in all the useful links, for updating them, and for figuring out how to allow me to reproduce them despite my tragic lack of tech savvy. (And Alan himself may appear here later in the week with links to some of his favorite mashups.)
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READ THIS AND I OWN YOUR BRAIN

This article [except for some very minor alterations] first appeared in The Comics Journal #268. The rights have now reverted to me (that’s Noah Berlatsky, the author), and so I’m releasing it to Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k) (and to anyone else who would like to reprint it) under the Creative Commons license Attribution-Sharealike 1.0. Basically this means that you can reprint the article for free, without permission, as long as you (1) credit me, and (2) make it clear that others are free to copy it under the same conditions. So, as I understand it, including this note should cover you. For more information on this Creative Commons license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/

Laws mainly benefit those who can afford lawyers, and intellectual property laws are no exception. If you’re a huge media conglomerate, copyright restrictions can transform you from a humble peddler of ephemera into an intergenerational dealer in cultural crack. The public wants their lovable icons — the public needs their lovable icons — and, as the only source, you can turn that rascally rabbit into a jagged, futuristic obscenity, sneer at your customers, and still walk away with a tidy profit.

ARTISTS VS. ART

This view of intellectual property has been heavily promoted by those media conglomerates mentioned above, all of whom want you to feel that, say, illicitly downloading the latest Destiny’s Child hit single is the moral equivalent of stealing an aged relative’s food stamps. Never mind that most musicians don’t get a dime from their record sales 1. Forget that artists from Jack Kirby to Billie Holiday have been systematically screwed despite (or often because of) copyright law. The ideal remains in the mind of the public, the legislature, and the judiciary: copyright laws are designed to protect artists from exploitation.

But they aren’t. The U.S. Constitution clearly states that intellectual property laws are designed “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In other words, rights are granted specifically to promote art, not artists. Copyright law assumes that artists won’t spew forth innovation without economic incentives. To give them those incentives, we grant them exclusive rights to their products. In the 1994 case of Fogerty v. Fantasy Inc., the Supreme Court reiterated this point, explaining that “The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an ëauthor’s’ creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good. 2”

Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that since the post-Enlightenment apotheosis of capitalism and the printing press, the profit motive has become an important motivation for many artists. Trollope, for example, self-confessedly wrote to make money first and foremost. If copyright were eliminated entirely and he couldn’t gain a middle-class income through writing, he might well not have bothered. The same might be said of Dickens, Stephen King, and a whole host of others — or as Harlan Ellison put it in Following Cerebus #3, “What we’re looking at is the egregious inevitability of no one but amateurs getting their work exposed, while those who produce the bulk of all professional-level art find they cannot make a decent living.”

Of course, Ellison is seriously overhyping his vision of aesthetic apocalypse, and downplaying some even more important dangers. While creators can be threatened in certain situations by a lack of money, they are certainly and always threatened by a lack of access to the work of other creators. Art is built out of other art 3. Shakespeare stole most of his plots from other sources. One of Rachmaninoff’s most famous compositions is based on an idea taken from Paganini. The novelist Henry Fielding wrote not one but two novels — Shamela and Joseph Andrews — using characters lifted from Samuel Richardson’s extremely popular Pamela. Raphael, Da Vinci, and all the other old masters used images suggested by the Bible. Walt Disney used public domain folk tales for many of his classic movies. Many of Harvey Kurtzman’s greatest efforts were close parodies of the works of other cartoonists 4. And on and on. It’s hard to think of a single piece of art that isn’t inspired by, responding to, or ripping off another piece of art.

All in all, therefore, the original copyright law, passed in 1790, was a very canny compromise between the artists’ need for a financial return and his need for access to other art. According to this act, creators had to register their work with the government, making it easy to tell which works were copyrighted and which were not. Once registered, the copyright term ran 14 years. During that period, the artist had monopoly rights to publish, distribute, and/or license the work as he saw fit. At the end of that time, if the creator was still around and thought there was still money to be made from the work, he could register for a 14-year extension. And that was it. A maximum of 28 years, and then your work went into the public domain — which is to say, it could be used freely by all. In other words, if this law were still in effect, not only Superman, but Daffy Duck, Spider-Man, the Grinch, and Snoopy would be available for many purposes, free of charge, to any artists who felt like using them 5.

ARTISTS VS. THEIR GRANDCHILDREN

Now, public domain characters and works can still generate income. Publishers continue to reprint the works of Mark Twain and Winsor McCay, for example, and people continue to buy them. Nonetheless, no media mogul can build his fortunes on licensing Mark Twain properties for film adaptations, because anyone can make a Huckleberry Finn movie for free. Nor are Little Nemo T-shirts, pajamas, and lunch boxes likely to make anyone filthy rich, because if they caught on, every schmuck with a scanner could start churning them out. Multimedia assaults don’t work unless you hold exclusive, monopoly rights to a story or character.

Big media, then, has a vested interest in extending the reach of copyright — and since big media also has a great deal of money, it should come as no surprise that copyright protection has, in fact, been enormously expanded. Thus, today, you don’t need to register your work with the government; in fact, you don’t need to do anything to copyright your work — even that little "©" is unnecessary 6.

In addition, Congress has repeatedly extended the term of protection for new works, and they have generally made these extensions retroactive, applying them to works already created. Thus, if you wrote a poem in 1977, your copyright would last for 56 years. Then, in 1978, Congress changed the law; suddenly, your copyright was guaranteed until your death, plus 50 years. According to the theory of copyright in the Constitution, this is pointless, of course. Copyright is meant to be an incentive, but if you’ve already written your poem, you’ve already written your poem — more encouragement, in the form of more copyright, might theoretically get you to write another, but no one can argue that it’s going to make you write the first one over again.

However, Congresspeople aren’t elected to promote progress, or even logic — they’re elected to kowtow to special interests. This goal, at least, they pursue with unwavering dedication and skill, as they demonstrated once again in 1998 with the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act [.pdf]. Named for a notoriously derivative songwriter-cum-legislator and backed by all the might of Disney, Inc., this bill extended the term of pre-1978 copyrights by another 20 years. Thus Mickey Mouse, due to go into the public domain in 2004, will continue to bolster the sagging Disney brand for another generation. Almost as an afterthought, post-1978 copyrights were also extended by 20 years. A new work created today will be under copyright for the life of the creator plus 70 years 7.

One interesting thing about the Sonny Bono Act is that, in their haste to propitiate their corporate overlords, Congress has abandoned not only the goal of promoting art, but also the goal of helping the artist. Copyright now extends long after the creator is dead. Indeed, in most cases, the creator’s spouse and even the creator’s children will have expired long before the copyright does. With the Sony Bono act, then, authors can dream, not merely of fame and riches in their own lifetime, but of grandchildren and even great-grandchildren growing ever more bloated and idle as they suck, leech-like, on the corpse of their ancestor. And if an author happens to be sterile, or single, or just hates his kids, at least he can comfort himself with the thought that a giant marketing nexus will tramp forward into the next century bearing his mark.

Of course, many may covet but few will ever actually attain this level of dynastic bliss. For the rest of us, the extension of copyright ensures, not greater wealth, but more certain obscurity. Take me, for example. I’m a very minor league critic and zinester. Yet, if I live an average lifespan, this article will not be in the public domain until sometime in the 2130s. Needless to say, by that point, there is a fair chance that my reputation, The Comics Journal, and even Fantagraphics [the publisher of The Comics Journal] will all have ceased to exist.

Imagine now that, for whatever reason, some academic stumbles across a copy of this issue in some library archive in 2105, and wants to reprint my article. She will of course need to secure the rights. Remember that copyright is no longer linked to year of publication — so to determine if the article is out of copyright, our academic will need to find the date of death of some anonymous reviewer in a tiny, defunct, decades-old magazine. If she’s particularly savvy and interested, and has time and money, perhaps she’ll ask the copyright office to run a search — which may or may not be definitive, since, as mentioned above, copyrights no longer need to be registered. Alternately, she may just reprint the piece, hoping that nobody will bother to sue her. But there’s also a fairly decent chance that she’ll just say “fuck it” and forget the whole thing. This is too bad for her, obviously, but it’s also too bad for me, and for anyone who writes with the desire to have their work read by as wide an audience as possible. [Licensing this article under the Creative Commons license is meant to address some of these issues, at least as far as this particular article is concerned.]

Works whose creators can’t be found are sometimes known as “orphaned works.” As copyright is extended, orphaned works by obscure or unfindable authors become more and more common. Already, films and comics from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s are deteriorating beyond recovery because no one knows who has the right to restore and reprint them. This isn’t intentional — it’s a kind of accidental, bonus censorship. Indeed, it’s so clearly pointless that Capitol Hill — prodded by public-domain advocate Lawrence Lessig — has actually shown some vague interest in fixing it 8.

But the extension of copyright contributes to more straightforward censorship as well. First, copyright holders may try to stamp out works that they don’t own, if they feel that those works are derivative. This often occurs even — or rather, especially — if the derivative work is of higher quality than the original, as was arguably the case, for instance, with the original Captain Marvel.
Second, copyright holders often try to suppress controversial works to which they themselves own the rights. Thus the James Joyce estate has long worked to suppress Joyce’s racy letters to his common-law wife, Nora Barnacle.

FAIR USE VS. GOBS OF MONEY

The problems discussed above are supposed to be mitigated in part by a principle called “fair use.” According to fair use, a small portion of a work may be reprinted for educational or critical purposes, without getting the permission of the copyright holder. “Fair use” also allows artists to create parodies based closely on a copyrighted work 9.

Fair use is absolutely vital for the open discussion of ideas; without it, free speech would be seriously curtailed. For example, fair use is what allows critics to quote from the books they are reviewing — or to reprint art for purposes of discussion, as The Comics Journal does on this page*. And thanks to fair use I can tell you, despite the wishes of his estate, that in one letter James Joyce told Nora that he wanted to “fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair.” 10

The problem with fair use is that its application is not clear-cut. When a magazine like the Journal prints pictures for review purposes, there is no problem, because the people who own the pictures want the publicity, and are therefore unlikely to sue. The quote from James Joyce is a different story. The passage is quite brief and is being used in a critical article. Nonetheless, there is a small chance that the James Joyce estate could sue the Journal over this quote. Printing it, therefore, requires a calculation of benefits and risks.

The Journal made one determination in this instance. But it should come as no surprise that the threat of a costly lawsuit can be very effective in keeping unseemly material under wraps. For example, David Stowe, a professor at Michigan State University, wanted to reprint, for scholarly purposes, racist cartoons from the ’40s which were run in Downbeat, a jazz magazine. Downbeat refused to grant permission, because they found the images embarrassing. Stowe (very understandably) felt that he couldn’t risk the lawsuit 11.

THE OLD NEW VS. THE NEW OLD

Stowe has professional credentials and is doing nothing particularly original — scholarly critique is a well-established genre. He had a good chance of winning his case in court. Yet copyright law effectively silenced him. What, then, is the likely fate of artists who want to use old works for entirely new purposes? What can they expect from intellectual property law?

They can expect to have their asses sued, is what they can expect. Hip hop, the most innovative musical form of the last 25 years, has been shaped as much by lawyers as by artists. Some of the greatest albums in the genre — De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet — used a kind of sound-collage technique, interpolating multiple brief-but-recognizable samples into each of their songs. Lawsuits inevitably followed, and the result were rules that made indiscriminate sampling prohibitively expensive. Today rap artists either use one sample per song, or else use samples that are so brief and processed as to be unrecognizable. Some performers still work in the older style, mixing and matching beats and riffs from numerous other albums — people like DJ Z-Trip — but, because they can’t release their work commercially, they are permanently relegated to a quasi-legal underground. Similarly, copyright law has crippled the growth of “mash-ups” [a.k.a. “Bastard Pop” – Ed.], recordings in which the vocals from one record are digitally placed over the music of another record: The most famous is an inadvertent collaboration between Chuck D of Public Enemy and Herb Alpert. A few mash-ups have been released
commercially, but most, for obvious reasons, have not been. When DJ Danger Mouse put out a full-length CD mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album, the Beatles’ label, EMI, hit him with a cease-and-desist order. So he ceased and desisted 12.

But at least rap and all its stepchildren exist. Hip-hop pioneers figured out a way to capitalize on new technologies and old beats before the major labels could catch them. Copyright law has altered the genre — and undoubtedly for the worse — but it didn’t prevent it from coming into being.

If only comics could have been so lucky. Technological change has transformed the processing of images just as it has the processing of sounds. Photocopiers, scanners, Photoshop and the Internet have all made it easy to alter, combine and rework pictures and drawings in ways that would have been either dauntingly laborious or actually impossible 20 years ago. So where are the collage comics to rival ’80s hip hop? Where are the mash-ups of Dilbert and Prince Valiant? Where are the comics made up entirely of altered photographs, or tweaked advertisements? For that matter, where’s the American equivalent of doujinshi fan-fiction — a sub-industry in Japan that has contributed hugely to the popularity and creativity of comics in that country?

It’s not like I’m the first one to come up with these ideas.13 But few of them have been extensively explored, and thanks to copyright law, even fewer of them have been — or will be — exploited commercially. Meanwhile, DC and Marvel relicense the same damn stories with the same damn characters over and over again, an ongoing outburst of mediocrity enabled by federal fiat. Encouraged by copyright law, American comics treat the past like a kind of congealed, brittle monument, to be worshipped and imitated, but never used. No wonder the kids prefer manga.

ENDNOTES

1. For a discussion of what happens to a band financially when they sign with a major label, see Steve Albini, “The Problem With Music,” available online at http://www.negativland.com/albini.html. Go Back

2. Gerard Jones’ recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times follows this same logic — comics aren’t any good, he argues, because the industry has historically failed to adequately compensate its writers and artists. See Gerard Jones, “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s the Fading Future of Comics,” Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2005. Go Back

3. This is a slight alteration of a quote by Northrop Frye: “Poems are made out of other poems, novels are made out of other novels.” Go Back

4. I’ve always thought that Kurtzman’s parody of Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, itself a superhero parody, was one of the century’s meta-artistic highwater marks. Go Back

5. All of these characters are trademarked as well as copyrighted, so there would be restrictions on some uses. If you’re interested in finding out more about trademark law in the context of some of the issues I raise in this essay, a good place to start is the intellectual property page maintained by Negativland, a group of sound-collage artists. The address is http://www.negativland.com/news/?cat=5. Go Back

6. Registering your work with the copyright office does provide some benefits. See the government copyright office website: http://www.copyright.gov/register/. Go Back

7. A more complete discussion of the terms of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act can be found at http://www.keytlaw.com/Copyrights/sonybono.htm. The controversy around the act is discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sonny_bono_copyright_term_extension_act. Go Back

8. See http://www.eldred.cc/. The page also has links to information about Lessig’s unsuccessful efforts to challenge the Sonny Bono act on constitutional grounds. Lessig is one of the people behind Creative Commons, an organization designed to help artists make their work available to the public domain in certain circumstances. See http://creativecommons.org/about/.
I should also note that even the mild “orphaned art” reform suggested by Lessig has caused outrage in some quarters. American Society of Illustrator’s Partnerships (ASIP) — an umbrella group of artist’s trade organization — is vehemently opposed to Lessig’s efforts. ASIP member organization Illustrators’ Partnership of America sees the new copyright environment as an opportunity for visual artists to become the Mick Jaggers of the future, making oodles of money long after they’ve ceased making worthwhile (or even any) art. IPA’s philosophy (Mick Jagger and all) is outlined at http://illustratorspartnership.net/downloads/IN_2.pdf. Their discussion of Lessig’s proposal can be found at the IPA Orphan Works Blog, under the entry for February 10, 2005. Go Back

9. For a good discussion of the extent of fair use and of some other limitations on copyright, see Susan M. Kornfield, J.D., “A Principled Approach to Copyright Policymaking [.pdf],” available online as a PDF at http://www.umich.edu/~langres/copyright.pdf. Go Back

*: [Editor’s Note: The illustrations that accompanied Noah’s article in The Comics Journal were unavailable to include here. So, go get a copy and look at them there, so TCJ can continue to help feed and clothe nice people like Noah.] Go Back

10. A little more of this letter, and a further discussion of the controversy, can be found in Richard Zacks’ An Underground Education (Doubleday, 1997). According to Zacks, the whole series of letters can be found in The Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellman (Viking, 1975; now out of print, but available in many libraries). [Ed.: Joyce’s racy letters to his common-law wife, Nora Barnacle.] Go Back

11. Stowe’s problems with Downbeat are discussed in Lydia Pallas Loren’s “The Purpose of Copyright [.pdf],” published in Open Spaces Quarterly, Vol. 2, #1, located online at http://www.open-spaces.com/article-v2n1-loren.php. Go Back

12. For a full discussion of the DJ Danger Mouse controversy, see http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62276,00.html [Ed.: See also Electronic Freedom Foundation: “Grey Tuesday: A Quick Overview of the Legal Terrain“.] [Ed.: See also these PMJA favorites: djbc: The Boston Mash-up Project; Girl Talk, Feed the Animals; The Kleptones; Jay-Zeezer, The Black and Blue Album; DJ Lobsterdust – Queen vs. Satan ft. pastor Gary G. “It’s fun to smoke dust”.] Go Back

13. Lawrence Lessig has talked about doujinshi and copyright in his article “free culture,” available at http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/freeculture.lawrence.lessig/doc. In America, Paper Rad has flirted with copyrighted characters on occasion; and in a circumspect way, so has Alan Moore. See also http://castlezzt.net/, where some Garfield comics are altered. My first exposure to collage strips like this was probably 10 years ago, when I saw Nanonuts, a zine by my friends Bert Stabler and Mike Denlinger, in which Peanuts characters are hideously transformed. [Ed: See also Poor Mojo Newswire thread: “Elizabeth gets Raped in Tomorrow’s ‘For Better or for Worse’“. Anonymous message-board participants spontaneously detoured and hijacked the comics nearly effortlessly using common computer applications, until the postings were removed by the message board owner under threat of legal action. See also: Garfield Minus Garfield.] Go Back

Note: Hyperlinks added by Alan Benard, who is solely responsible for their appearance here except as included in the orginal text of the article. Hyperlink references updated March 6, 2010.

Update: You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.

Copyright Kills Culture: Lethem and Paley sing the blues

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In 2007, Jonathan Lethem published an extended essay in Harper’s on the nature of creative inspiration and the ways in which all creativity draws on a cultural wellspring of ideas and representations. Called “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” it contains the following passage describing the “open source” culture behind the origins of the Muddy Waters song “Country Blues”:

“I made it on about the eighth of October ’38,” Waters said, “It was fixin’ a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin’ Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There’s been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out – Robert Johnson. He put it out as named “Walkin’ Blues. I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.”  In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts [of the song’s authorship]…

Lethem’s essay is, as the title suggests, entirely composed of plagiarized fragments of text, knitted together into a new whole. Whether due to his fame, to Harper’s influence as a literary publication, or to some resistance to commodification inherent to natural language, nobody objected too vociferously to the use of his or her words, although Lethem’s strategy did prompt some commentary (all of which is behind subscription locks.)

Around the same time that Lethem’s article was hitting the newsstands, cartoonist Nina Paley was hitting a brick wall in the production and distribution of her blues-inflected animated full-length feature film, Sita Sings the Blues. Made by Paley single-handedly in her Manhattan apartment, Sita brings together an embarrassment of source-material richness: Paley’s own humor-filled story of breakup-by-email, the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, and the blues songs of ‘20s American songstress Annette Hanshaw.

Despite the “open source” culture of indigenous blues, it’s those Hanshaw recordings that led her to the brick wall: the recordings’ are restricted by copyrights held by large corporations like Sony and EMI. The cost of licensing the music used in Sita would have cost her more than it cost to make the entire film. She explains the copyright obstacles facing the film and its soundtrack on her blog.

Paley’s imaginative solution to the problem has been to give the film away for free, and the result has been a firestorm of enthusiasm for all things Sita. Paley says that her new “free culture” lifestyle has eradicated her cynicism and made her even more creative than before. A lot of that creativity at the moment is going into promoting the idea of free culture: her Facebook page boasts a charming jingle and accompanying animation clip promoting the idea that “copying isn’t theft”:

(The “draft needs your audio” refers to Paley’s request that musicians make their own versions of the ditty she sings in this vid.)

You can watch Sita online (click through rather than watching the embedding ’cause the right side is cut off):


or download it from its homepage.

Lethem explains in his essay that the surrealists felt our experience of life is “dulled by everyday use and utility,” and understood cinema and photography as art forms that “reanimate the dormant intensity” of the “matter that made up the world.” Paley’s animated film accomplishes a similar “reanimation”, but it’s not corporeal material that’s made more relevant and compelling through her representation, it’s the “primal stories” of the source material. In her own words:

Sita’s story has been told a million times, not just in India, not just through the Ramayana, but also through American blues. Hers is a story so primal, so basic to human experience, it has been told by people who never heard of the Ramayana. The Hanshaw songs deal with exactly the same themes as the epic, but they emerged completely independent of it. Their sound is distinctly ‘20s American, and therein lies their power: the listener/viewer knows I didn’t make them up. They are authentic. They are historical evidence supporting the film’s central point: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place, and culture.

Lethem probably wouldn’t use the language of timelessness to describe this effect – his essay observes that “serious fiction” is “liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references,” pretty much like everything else. But Paley’s point is really more about primacy than timelessness – things common to human experience, things not transcendent to culture but merely so common among cultures that they seem universal.

But it’s not just that juxtaposition of those common elements from several cultures that animates Sita: it’s also the mark of the artist’s hand. At the risk of tautology, the animator re-animates. But not just in the literal sense: for culture to remain alive and to become mature, to learn from accumulated experience and insight, artists have to be able to take it into their hands and renew, revitalize, and re-animate it. The more locked down it is behind copyright, the harder it is for artists to do that, and the less alive the culture is.

Listen to Paley talk about free culture to the non-profit Public Knowledge:

Or if you’re interested in the business model, here’s her presentation to the National Film Board of Canada: