Tag Archives: Nina Paley

Sunday Funnies

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To wrap up the roundtable, some Nina Paley cartoons. The full run of Fluff and a selection of more Nina’s Adventures, along with other cartoons, interviews, and miscellaneous materials related to Sita Sings the Blues, are available at the Internet Archive.

Click through the thumbnails below to read.

“Art vs. Commerce” from Nina’s Adventures

“Sheep Reincarnation” from Nina’s Adventures

“Urbana, Illinois vs Santa Cruz” from Nina’s Adventures

“That Little Weasel!” from Nina’s Adventures

Empire of the Godzillas from the Daily Illini (c. 1983, University of Illinois Student Newspaper)

Godzilla PDF

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Update: You can read the whole roundtable on copyright here. Despite Caro’s promise that this is it, we’ll actually have one more post on the topic tomorrow….

Steal This Blog

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I am a composer of what we (or at least other composers) tend to call “Concert Music”, that is, music for string quartets and orchestras and choruses and other things where you sit quietly in a darkened hall while shooting dirty looks at the old lady unwrapping a cough drop. I am expensively and elitistly-trained, and work (mostly) by commission. It is pretentious, it is fun, and I do it professionally.
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Note by Noah: This post is by Jonathan Newman, incidentally, who is so shy and retiring he didn’t give his whole name, or his website, which is here.
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Following the thread of posts this week, I’ve noticed more than a little talk about copyright essentially being created for and serving only the Publisher, and not the Creator. But what if that’s the same person? Save one or two works, I am a self-published composer; I run my own “publishing company” (it’s not, really, it’s just me and my Schedule C and a quirky company name), but while serving that function I do all the things a traditional publisher would do, including its main function: to exploit the copyrights it owns. Doing this myself pretty much avoids exactly what Nina Paley describes as the “gate-keepers”…those faceless corporate intellectual copyright owners who keep The Artist down. But I am the Artist (and the Publisher, the two are halves of each other in the case of copyright), and so even though “exploit” isn’t exactly a friendly word, it works fine, because there are in fact multiple ways to make a property (a piece of art) work for the both. Because for me, owning my works, and controlling their distribution through licensing, is how I’m able to survive as a working composer.

Most people don’t realize that when you make a work–and I’ll use music as an example for obvious reasons–your rights concerning the piece are numerous, and on several levels. I’m probably missing one or two, but once your new hypothetical work is completed (Congratulations, writing music is hard) you’re faced with what is actually a constellation of rights, all of which one, or his/her evil representative if s/he’s traditionally-published, can “exploit”:

  • The right to reproduce it (make photocopies, bound copies, whatever)
  • The right to publish and distribute it (these days you should think twice before signing that one away)
  • The right to sync it to motion-picture (this was the prickly one for Nina Paley)
  • The right to “grand” staging (use in a play or ballet or pretty much anything else with costumes)
  • The right to record it (the first time that is, and then anyone can do it as long as they pay the statutory mechanical rates. Thus, covers.)
  • The right to “prepare derivative works” from it (for music that usually means arrange it for other ensembles or instrumentations. For books and whatnot that usually means licensing the rights for the opera, or the movie)
  • The right to broadcast it (radio)
  • and the right to perform it (the biggie)

Now, which one of these would you like me to ignore because you have a yen to use my piece for your own art? My performing rights royalties alone (collected for me by my Performing Rights Agency Of Choice, ASCAP, which also collects any broadcast royalties that might happen) are actually a significant chunk of my income. Does Free Culture want to perform my piece without my collecting that? It might help to know that performing rights royalties are split 50/50 between writer and the publisher. As my own publisher, I receive 100% of them. (Another gate jumped.)

What about when someone likes my recent chorus piece, and wants to arrange it for their brass choir? I should have an open-source attitude, right? Forget the arranging license (and the fee that goes with it) and let it everyone have it, because it’s good for creativity and good for artists?

My point is that any one of these singly isn’t such a big deal, and I’m all for the big picture of helping the Cause of Creativity. But taken as a whole, managing the above list becomes this precious bundle of life-giving manna. If you’re interested in being a composer making a middle-class living that is. Which I am. I don’t teach professionally (only occasionally, usually as a guest artist at a university), so If I give any of these up, all of a sudden, composing music (ie. making Art) is my hobby, and I have to make my living outside of it. And I’ve found that the people most vocal about the benefits of free culture, or maybe most lax in shepherding the above rights, are those who choose to make their living some other way.

When asked in this Roundtable’s centerpiece interview the other day, Nina Paley replied to a question about Free Culture creating “a situation where you can’t have an artistic middle class.”:

What we have now is you can get paid for craft. You don’t get paid for art. You get paid for craft. Every animator that I know, or almost every animator that I know, works at a studio, working on shit. They know it’s shit. They do their best to not think about it, but it’s god-awful commercial shit.

Actually, I get paid for Art. I could have chosen to get paid for craft (being an orchestrator, or a commercial music writer) and decided I was actually better at making Art. And it’s a slog, let me tell you, selling Art. Because Art is, I’m sure you all noticed, incredibly subjective. Only a few out of many like my stuff, and even less love it (shocking, I know). If I expected many to like it, I’d be writing very different music, and would have a lot more wiggle room when it came to giving away my stuff for the sake of Art.

Paley also talked about art not being a profession:

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.

I realize how mercenary this sounds, but how about making art AND money? Ultimately I’m unclear how copyleft (or free culture in general) can maintain my middle class income. As far as I can tell, the current copyright laws are what do that.

All that being said, I’m actually a fan of Free. I give away content like crazy on my website…mp3 downloads…score of the pieces as PDFs, etc. I give away CDs, even commercial ones, like candy. I give away many (expensive to produce) printed scores. Because I do believe that giving away significant content–not just useless crap, but stuff people can use–in many ways does help create that “fan base” one hears the astute bands and rock stars talk about … those fans that downloaded the album for free, but who later on shell out 300 bucks to go to the tour show and buy the $25 t-shirts. Which right there crystallizes the line for the Free argument. You don’t see “Pay what you want” Radiohead (I’m a fan) letting their devoted following into the show for free. (Or do you? I don’t really know.)

So among this noise, some content is always controlled by the owner. It’s not all free, it’s just a question of what content is deemed not free. For me, it’s the performance materials. That’s the paper (maybe someday it won’t be, I’m looking at you iPads) musicians rehearse and perform from. I rent it, I sell it, I control it. Nothing drives me more bat-shit crazy than seeing other composers give away their stuff. A website full of scores and parts… “Come play my music! I won’t charge! I just want you to play it to Get My Name Out There!” Well, a) I hope you have another job, b) you just made mine a lot harder, and c) the end user (who, sure, now knows your name) thinks your stuff isn’t even worth the paper it’s printed on.

Paley giving away her (beautiful) movie is great and all, but I can’t exactly sell “Jonathan Newman” t-shirts to make up the difference. If all the cool kids started wearing Sita pins and she turned into a pop culture icon, then it hardly matters whether anyone paid to show the film. As much as I’ve tried to make it one, that avenue is not really an option for me.

It’s true, 70 years after death is a silly amount. 50 did seem like enough–2 generations after death (“My Granddaddy made that! You can’t touch it!”)–does seem like enough time to for the family to come up with some more original content, but, as we all know, Disney had other ideas. Still, before these protections, composers did have to scramble. In 1945 Stravinsky famously changed all the half notes to quarter notes in Firebird (not really, but you get the idea) to make a newly copyrightable version for the U.S, so he could prevent the loss of income from performances there. Nothing new under the sun.

I feel Paley’s pain, dealing with copyright owners. Just ask any composer about getting text permission from a publisher for a poem he or she wants to set. Try figuring out who owns the poem in the first place. Or if it’s PD or not. I’ve actually been working on an opera for the last couple of years. The first year of it was just figuring out who actually owned the film my collaborator and I wanted to adapt. I see the problem as not necessarily the rules themselves, but the companies/businesses/corporations who collect the intellectual property and then seem to want to hoard it without licensing it, simply because it doesn’t seem worth it to expend the time/energy/resources/employees to deal. Their mistake is that it is very much worth it. Exploiting the copyright (issuing licenses and collecting the fees), is the entire point of owning the property, whether it’s small or not. When they do that, they are serving the Publisher function. It’s how or whether they’ll do it at all that’s causing problems.

And so, I’m finding the Free Culture argument suspect. If someone wanted to copy my bicycle so that there’s now “one for each of us”, my honest reaction would probably be ‘Fuck you. I spent 3 years making that bicycle. Make your own damn bicycle.’ Not exactly a constructive argument, granted, but let’s at least acknowledge that we’re not talking about a bicycle. Bicycles are not special. They are not (generally) art. Yeeesss, all art is derivative, it’s true. Art is synthesis, and some synthesis is better (brilliant, “original”) than others. But creativity can not be its own reward. We still live in, for better and often worse, a capitalist society, and in no other profession in that society is a lack of compensation expected, like it is with Art. People get paid for charity work, for goodness sakes. At some point, someone, has to charge someone else, something.

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Update by Noah: This is part of a roundtable on copyright issues. You can find the whole roundtable here.

Interview with Nina Paley, Part 2

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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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Previously, Part 1.

So that’s a pretty good segue into talking about Sita. You’d talked about how traumatic it was to realize that the film was illegal. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you found it out, what specifically was wrong, and what it meant to get it decriminalized?

It’s not so much that I realized – I mean, I knew that I was using stuff that I did not have permission to use. But it should have been public domain. I knew that it should have been public domain. I learned that part of it was public domain and part of it was not, and the realization was not so much “oh, I don’t have permission for this.” The realization was the severity of the penalties, and how much more severe the penalties have grown in the last 10 years. Realizing that, wow, I could go to jail for making this film. That was impressive! And it’s all because of these law changes thanks to the industry reacting to the advent of the Internet and really cracking down, and it was like, “wow, I could go to jail.”

If you didn’t pay?

It’s not even if I didn’t pay. There was this dawning realization that getting permission was this Kafkaesque nightmare. Because before that, it was like, oh well, I’ll just pay. They’ll say some amount and I’ll pay. I could not have imagined the difficulty of even talking to them. They wouldn’t even answer my calls. So I think that after a few months of getting the runaround from all of them and not having our calls returned, and being told to call other places and then that went nowhere, while reading about the severity of the punishments, maybe it just took a couple of months, April-May of 2008, when I’d been working on this for a few months and realizing There is No Way Out. They’re not going to talk to me. They don’t have to talk to me. The burden is on me. If their deal is that they only talk to you if you hire a paid intermediary, I have to hire an intermediary to talk to them. I have to do this stuff that I can’t afford to do, and I’d better do it, because if I don’t, I could go to jail [laughs] not to mention being fined zillions of dollars.

So it wasn’t a sudden moment, it was a long gradual slow sinking feeling.

Was it pretty easy to find out at the beginning which pieces were copyrighted and which pieces weren’t?

Well, it was possible to find out. I knew that her voice was not the problem, thanks to the student attorneys at American University.

But someone else did that research; you couldn’t do that on your own.

No, there’s no way I could have done it, but at least they did it for free. And they did all this extensive research on the recordings, and we found that the recordings were not a big problem, and that the underlying compositions were under copyright. I knew that from the beginning, but I could not have imagined that it would be that difficult to clear them. I really thought they’d just name some reasonable number, ‘cause they want money, right? They’ve gotta be – everything I’ve heard about these companies is that they’re interested in money, so clearly they’d set something up so they could get money, right? They wouldn’t ask someone who doesn’t have money to pay $220,000 because there’s no way they’re going to get that! That’s why there’s the whole statutory rate for mechanical licenses. I learned that the statutory rate exists because the record industry lobbied for it, because too many labels wanted their artists to record covers that were the property of other publishers, so it was the record industry that got the statutory licenses for the benefit of the record industry. So the licensors were just crazy; there was no way they were going to get this $220,000 they quoted, and that’s fine with them. It was just this dawning understanding that if no one gets to see my film, that’s fine with them. They don’t have anything to gain from my going forward. It’s not worth the trouble to them, but I could go to jail. I could go to fucking jail.

So as the technology to do things with culture has gotten more democratic they’ve gotten more draconian in almost every way.

Yes. This is like a mafia shakedown. Copyrights were always designed for publishers, not authors – you should read this great essay by Karl Fogel about the history of copyright – but they’re a monopoly for publishers and the argument that publishers used to get this monopoly is “look at this writer. How is this writer going to get money? They’re going to get money by selling us their rights. First we give them a right, and then they sell it to us and then we get a monopoly, yay!”

This is so utterly irrational and unreasonable. It’s something that was supposed to be in the public domain, and if the cultural work is lost, they don’t care. They don’t give a shit about my film, or the songs they “own.” So what I’m supposed to do is kill the film. That’s every message I’m getting: the whole structure is designed for me to kill the film. That is the only possible outcome of this. So then I was like, ok, this is censorship. If the system is designed for me to kill my film, this is censorship. And it was a long struggle, let me tell you. Many tears were shed; I felt so trapped.

You found lawyers who were willing to negotiate this?

I had a sales agent who is a lawyer. I didn’t end up using him in that respect, but his firm – he was trying to get it sold to a distributor and the distributors required that everything was cleared first, and the burden of that fell on me. So initially I used his law firm which was phenomenally expensive and also they did a terrible job. But at least the companies talked to them, because they knew the name. So we got the initial estimates from the companies, and for the mere $10-15K or whatever I ended up paying this law firm, I got to learn that $220,000 was what I would have to pay to clear the rights.

But you didn’t end up paying the $220,000.00; you ended up paying in the range of $50K. What would have been different if you’d paid the $220,000.00?

Then it would be free and clear. Then I would not be required to pay additional money for every 5000 copies sold. I have to make additional payments now, for every 5000 copies sold.

If someone makes a derivative work and they use the songs, can they pay the fees listed on your website, or do they have to negotiate their own?

They have to renegotiate their own licenses. The only thing that my license fees pay for is the cost of a copy, any copy that is sold, a DVD or the iPhone app. If you sell an iPhone app of a movie, you have to pay those fees, which means that the iPhone app is either very expensive or free.

So if someone downloads the film and uses the sound, they’re going to have to call and get their own agreement.

Right, it is a copyleft work that contains copyright stuff. And the copyright stuff will probably be unfree forever, so any reuse of the songs has to be relicensed. You could certainly use all of it without the songs. And some of the modern songs are copyleft now as well; you can make derivative works with all of the soundtrack works except the Rudresh Mahanthappa songs and the Annette Hanshaw songs.

I had one question about Sita itself. The first time I saw the film this dynamic of the whole purity and honor thing really struck me, because I associate that so much with this very politicized aspect of Islamic culture, with honor killings, and that was a real obstacle for me the first time I watched the film, because that such a serious issue for so many Islamic women. I realize this film is not about Islam in any way, but this is a phenomenon that’s been politicized in our culture in relation to Islam. I’m not sure most Americans would realize it’s even an aspect of traditional Hindu culture. You’re obviously critical of it in the film and show it as hurtful, yet I don’t think your film politicizes it. Did you think about that at all when you were making the film, that this issue of a woman’s ‘purity’ being a smear on male honor is a really loaded concept?

I think it’s a problem in all cultures. I just had a conversation with a Hindu friend of mine about Islam, just last night, and I pointed out that our ideas about Islam are not Islam as a whole, they’re a very Arab idea. There’s crap in parts of the Koran just like in parts of Hindu texts, and Christian and Jewish – I don’t know if Buddhists have really horrible things in their texts, although certainly Buddhists can act horrible, like everybody else.

Actually, Ken [Levis], who just walked in here a few minutes ago, made a great documentary called Struggle for the Soul of Islam, and he shot it in Indonesia, which for a very long time has practiced a relatively gentle kind of Islam and only very recently this Arab-style fundamentalist style has come in, and the fundamentalists say that their way is the Real Islam – they say that this really tiny slice of Islam is the Real Islam, and I sometimes wonder if it’s just pure oil money that has created the crisis in today’s Islam, because this Arab style is dominating. They do outreach, they go everywhere and try to convince Muslims all over the world to practice it their way, and that their way is the real way.

Any religion has misogynistic practices, all cultures – ours has evolved from a culture with those practices – so I don’t think they’re unique to Islam. We just know a lot more about them in Islamic countries today.

Right, they’re politicized in Islam in a way that they’re not politicized in other cultures because of political Islam and the way that’s intersecting with the West.

And I can very much believe that they’re more prevalent in Islamic countries right now, which is not to say historically. Obviously, sure, Hinduism has that tradition too, and nobody likes it when you talk about things negative in their cultural history. It’s just all over the world. It’s certainly been a practice by Christians and Jews.

The first time I saw the film it was something I snagged on, especially at that scene where Sita is taken into Mother Earth, which just felt so much like a metaphorization of death and yet it’s presented as a victory for her. The second time I saw it I had gotten more into the spirit of it and just thought “this is so great.” [laughs]

I love that scene. When I do talks, I often don’t want to sit through the whole thing and I come in at that scene –– and it’s just “yes! Go, Sita, run!”

You are giving a lot of talks, now, and spending much of your time being a political activist for copyleft. Do you see yourself being self-consciously political in your art now, or is it going to be two strands?

I’m going to do whatever the muse tells me to do. This past year, definitely these copyright and censorship issues have been on my mind. So it’s natural and essential that I express that. It’s very unlikely that will last forever, because I tend to be passionate about things and then I work them out of my system so I can talk about something else.

I’m always singing your Copying Isn’t Theft song, whistling it in the convenience store and belting it out in the car when I’m at a redlight.

[laughing] Yay!

It’s really catchy, and it’s always popping into my head and reminding me to think about copyleft. And I think with the samples of work I read and looked at from throughout your career, that’s a very Nina Paley thing – that little encapsulation of some point that just really gets at the heart of a point in a way that sticks in your head. Do you really just think like that or do you work at coming up with those things?

I’m terribly forgetful, and every day I will hear or think something that seems so brilliant, and it is a constant source of pain that I can’t remember them, and I guess I do this to remember, but I can only do it for a tiny, tiny fraction of what moves through my consciousness. People say such great things, and I get a headache! I’ve had a headache for four days, because I’ve heard such great things that people have said!

You should carry one of these recorders around.

Yeah, but who has time to listen to all that! Sometimes I’ll write notes, and they go in a notebook and I never look at that again. That’s why I’m thinking about the attention economy: there is more brilliance than I have attention for, and it’s really painful. It’s also my biggest concern as an artist, when I make anything: who is going to look at this? Who has time to look at this anymore? We’re all looking at everything, so who has time to look at anything? And a lot of it is fantastic. I know 98% of it is crap, but there’s so much more of everything, that the 2% of brilliance is growing. Which is why, mostly, I love the idea of the free internet as a wonderful culture filter. I just sit there and wait for someone to recommend something to me, but I don’t have the patience to filter everything myself. That’s how it really works – people recommend things that they like. They don’t recommend things they don’t like, and you have your networks of people that you trust, and they suggest things to you and it all works in a very decentralized, organic way. I have faith that this is increasingly going to be the way we filter our media.

Even when things are recommended to me, I have a very short attention span. So if someone suggests a YouTube video, if I’m not hooked after 45 seconds, I’ll give up. I’ve seen YouTube videos that have made me cry. I saw a great one yesterday; it’s so dumb, it’s so perfect for the Internet. It’s the Cat-certo. It’s a full orchestra, being conducted by a live conductor, beautiful 5-minute long composition, accompanying Nora the Piano-Playing Cat. Nora is just some woman’s cat who goes bang bang bang against the piano. It’s a cute cat video that’s been all over the web and this guy did this beautiful orchestral thing to this video.

I think audiences are taking back their power as the scarcity of works goes away. Most people haven’t realized the power that they hold in their attention. I’ve been thinking about how much people pay for attention, and this idea that people have that the work is a product; the work is the scarce resource, and people will pay for the scarce resource. And it’s so completely backwards, because in the digital age, works are not scarce. They can be copied for almost no money, and the scarce resource is in fact people’s attention. And of course that’s the last thing the media industry wants them to think.

And people don’t acknowledge that. Artists pay a lot of money to get attention, but they don’t talk about it. Most films lose money. It’s like 95% of films lose money at the box office, and I don’t know how much time they give them to make money back on DVDs and merchandise, but most of them make a loss permanently. You’d better be glad there are niche audiences because that’s the most you can hope for!

That right there should make you go, “ok, what is happening?” People are doing these things and they are losing money. I was thinking about my All Creative Work is Derivative Minute Meme, and it was hovering at 8000 views on YouTube. And I thought, “oh, I want more people to see it!” And I wondered if I was going to have to promote it to get more attention. So I was thinking about submitting it to film festivals, and the amount of money it was going to take to submit it. I picked out 20 film festivals and it averaged about $40 a film festival to submit, and also the cost of making the DVD, packaging it, the time spent filling out forms, and postage, and all that sort of stuff, and that’s probably $60 a festival.

If it got into the festival, how many people would likely see it? 100 if I was lucky, and probably more like 45. But let’s be generous and say 100. I am paying $6/person for their attention. And I would totally do that. When I look at the economics of me, that’s not a bad investment; it helps the film a lot.

Speaking of the economics of you, Jaron Lanier asked you [on WNYC’s Soundcheck radio program] about artists being able to make a middle-class living, a consistent and predictable living. It’s a general response to copyleft, that this creates a situation where you can’t have an artistic middle class.

I think it creates a situation where you can have an artistic middle class, which we don’t have right now. What we have now is you can get paid for craft. You don’t get paid for art. You get paid for craft. Every animator that I know, or almost every animator that I know, works at a studio, working on shit. They know it’s shit. They do their best to not think about it, but it’s god-awful commercial shit.

Which is not to say that commercial stuff is bad, I’m not anti-commerce. But it’s devised by some idiot, it’s lowest common denominator, and this is what really talented people do. They do crap work. And it’s not just in animation; it’s at all levels. I can say when I did illustration work, 9 times out of 10 it was for some god-awful piece of shit that paid a lot. That’s not art; that’s craft. You can be paid for your craft. But copyleft actually allows me to make a middle class living as an artist for the first time in my life. It’s not predictable. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but I will say I’ve got more money coming toward me that I ever had before. But the real problem is that copyright proponents don’t like the idea of artists making middle-class livings, because artists are supposed to be fabulous superstars and make millions and millions of dollars. It’s the lottery, the winner-take-all. I think with copyleft you can have a lot more artists doing a lot of good art, making reasonable amounts of money, but this whole fantasy of being the super duper rock star that makes millions and millions of dollars, that is a lot less likely.

It’s the artistic version of people voting against their economic interests because they think they can be Bill Gates.

Yes. Proprietary art is the lottery, and people fantasize about winning the lottery. And with this other system, it’s like, well, if you do this you’re not playing the lottery anymore. You’re not going to win the lottery but you’ll have a much better chance of actually making a living, but no lottery. And they go “Noooo! I wanna be able to win the lottery! And if that means that what I’m actually doing is squandering my talents on somebody else’s piece of shit, then I’ll do that because I wanna be like Madonna someday.”

And by the way, these professional people like Marvel Comics, that’s a product factory. There’s very little of Marvel that I would call art. I’m not saying there’s none.

I have a friend who says one of the things that appeals to him about superhero comics, especially from the ’50s and ’60s is looking for the places where you can see that there was an artist behind that craft factory, looking for that one panel out of 100 where you can see that hand behind the art. That’s what he looks for specifically, and he finds it very humanizing.

That’s really cool. There’s another problem in that copyright is not related to attribution. We don’t actually have laws that protect attribution. You can protect attribution in a copyright contract, when you sign your rights away, you can include things that say you will be credited. But there’s nothing inherent in copyright that says that; that’s up to your contract. So most of these craftsmen, the ones that Jaron Lanier calls artists, they’re not credited. They sold it, and it’s just amazing. We don’t need copy rights; if anything, the big concern for society as well as for individual artists is plagiarism.

With Copying is Not Theft, people conflate copying and plagiarism. Oh, copying is not theft, oh, I’ll just copy this kids’ term paper, and I’ll get an A on it. But no, if you copy it and copy their name with it, that’s copying. If you copy it and put your name on it, that’s fraud! They’re not the same thing!

I just wrote an article called the Limits of Attribution. It’s got pictures; I illustrated it.

When we were going through all the work [on Sita], people kept saying, “you realize copyright protects you?” but it really doesn’t. It doesn’t even protect the people who want the lottery; it protects their fantasy. And also people would say, “Oh, it’s all about money.” But if the corporations wanted money from licensing they would set reasonable prices and they would let ordinary people talk to them. It’s not about money; it’s about control.

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.

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: