The Open Vein

Dear Wife: Here is where I’ll be, courtesy of Google.

View From Moscow to Mexico … in a larger map

Gambling Comes to Massachusetts: The High Cost of a Low Trade

My new colleague, Dan Kennedy, has a nice post up on the recent decision by Massachusetts state government to bring casino gambling to the state. It took me back, as gambling was once something of a beat for me: I spent the fall of 2005 on a book proposal (aborted when crowdsourcing blew up) about the nasty underbelly of the “gaming” industry. One of the most insidious impacts of gambling’s growth has been the domino effect casinos have on states. Iowans flocking to Illinois riverboats to empty their wallets puts considerable (and understandable) pressure on Iowa legislators to reclaim that “lost” tax revenue. “We have $1.5 billion worth of Massachusetts gamblers today who spend that money just in Connecticut,” Governor Deval Patrick told reporters Wednesday.

Now consider this: Researchers have made significant advances in their understanding of the neuro-chemistry of compulsive gambling (as opp. to its less virulent cousin, “problem gambling.”) Compulsive gamblers are now generally believed to have lower baseline levels of dopamine in their system. They’re thrill-seekers. Innocuous enough, yes? But unlike the general population, every time an addict experiences a dopamine rush it burns a neural pathway in that individual’s brain. This is what creates the ever-deepening sense of withdrawal.

Here’s the amazing part: Pathologists have discovered that from a physiological perspective, gambling and cocaine were indistinguishable triggers. Put bluntly: cocaine (a highly controlled substance) and gambling (a virtually uncontrolled substance) have identical effects on the addict’s brain. Do casinos know this? Duh. Casinos make at least a third of their income from the two or three percent of people who can’t control their impulse to gamble. Naturally, the casinos and slot makers like Bally capitalize on this research to construct gambling experiences perfectly calculated to provide that dopamine rush. The compulsive gambler is sated, just for a moment, before going back to chasing the high. (Here’s a great piece from 2004 about the science Bally employs to keep pathological gamblers coming back.)

In researching my book I came across this anecdote: A photo showed a slot jockey holding up a check for $50,000. She looked inexplicably miserable. A friend of sorts—the floorman at the casino—explained why: She was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Fifty grand hardly made a dent.

“In this regard …

… Crowdfunding becomes an offensive striking at traditional oligopolistic structures whereby a few white collars decide who gets to make it and who doesn’t, often overlooking huge groups of talented but poorly connected individuals.”

This is about as apt a description of Crowdfunding’s revolutionary appeal as any I’ve read. (From Benjamin Larralde’s post on Crowdsourcing.org. It’s worth reading the entire essay.)

The Missing Link: Creationism and Cryptozoology

“Only God knows for certain whether or not plesiosaurs are still alive. But again, if you believe that the world is millions of years old, then the possibility of a plesiosaur still living would be hard to accept. But if you believe the Bible, that the earth is less than 10 thousand years old, then the survival of the plesiosaur makes a whole lot more sense.”                                                       — From “Are Plesiosaurs Still Alive.”

Yes. That does make a lot more sense.

A Transmedia Bibliography

Super rough post published in the spirit of “release early, release often.” I’m hoping to get a few selected people to add to. I’m in the beginning stages of writing a transmedia narrative. As part of the process I’m hoping to build a list of resources, print and otherwise. Any additions, comments, corrections, hugely appreciated.

1) 2003 Article: “Transmedia Storytelling,” by Henry Jenkins. (MIT Technology Review, January, 2003) The single seminal document that coined the term “transmedia storytelling” and put a conceptual framework around a cultural practice still in its infancy.

2) 2006 Book: Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins. (NYU Press, 2006)
Jenkins expanded on the article in his book, which was groundbreaking on several levels but particularly theorized that narrative would continue to migrate onto new platforms and, more to the point, multiple platforms at the same time.

3) 2007 Article: “Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games,” by Frank Rose (Wired Magazine, Dec, 2007)

4) 2011 Book: The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, by Frank Rose (Norton, 2011)
Frank is a friend and a colleague from my days at Wired, and another pioneer of the emerging field of transmedia scholarship. This book focuses primarily on the commercial uses of using multiple platforms to develop character and narrative and to engage an audience over time, and through interactivity. But the ideas and case studies contained inside the book have implications for anyone working in the medium.

5) 2011 Blog Post: “Social Media Theater”
KATE: This is especially worth reading, as it will only take a few minutes and will give you a quick overview of some of the exploration taking place and the questions I want to explore.

How I Became A Writer: A Study In Abuse, Inspired by True Events

When I was 14 my friends started a punk rock band. There was a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer. They needed a singer. I couldn’t carry Jingle Bells, but there weren’t a lot of options. Shawn’s Mom wouldn’t let him go downtown to where the underage punk shows were played, and Jared had a terrible lisp. So they went with Jared, but he moved back to Cleveland. That pretty much exhausted our friend circle, and left me. We had our first rehearsal in my friend Dan’s basement. We muddled our way through a few Minor Threat songs. The lyrics were profound, and deserved a passionate rendering: “Sick and tired of all your lies/I don’t want to hear it/When are you gonna realize…/That I don’t want to hear it.” When I was done my friends looked at one another and shrugged: “I guess someone needs to stand in front of me,” said our drummer.

Though I couldn’t sing, I could write lyrics. By which I mean, I could physically take a pen and create legible marks upon a page. This is generally the point in a story at which it’s revealed that, after years of writing really bad songs, I eventually began to write good songs. That is not my story. During the two-year tenure of the Suburban Morons, my lyrics were admirably consistent in their dependence on hoary punk rock clichés and a paucity of discernible rhyme schemes. My finest work was a number in which I compared our bassist’s ex-girlfriend Barb to a Barbie doll. It was an inspired analogy: She too was plastic; She too fell in love with a big, dumb jock; She too … well, the analogy only went so far, but then our songs were very, very short.

I continued to write. My overwrought lyrics gave way to florid, angry poetry. I still wasn’t a good writer, but I was worse at everything else. A guidance counselor once pulled me aside—I swear this is true—and told me that she could absolutely guarantee that I would never succeed in any field or vocation, and that the sooner I confronted this fact the better off I would be. I was not shocked by this revelation, having already come to it myself.

A few years later I wound up at Ohio University, a large state school in Ohio. I’ve always assumed my father, a professor, pulled a few strings, but looking back on my university cohort, it’s hard to imagine he would have needed to. OU was a repository for farmboys on their way to middle-management jobs at the hometown factory. It was not, by any reckoning, an intellectual redoubt.

Against this backdrop I began to make a mark, in that way a smear of dust is faintly detectable against an all-white background. I applied myself to my studies, and began to get good grades. I volunteered for the school newspaper. My friends and I started an “alternative” magazine. At the end of my college career I took an advanced creative writing class. I wrote a short story about a detective and an overbearing father murdered by his own son. I received an A. At the end of the semester I approached the professor and asked him, breathlessly, whether or not I was, you know, a writer. “Pray not,” he replied before chuckling and turning back to his work. Such strong words of discouragement had no effect. My greatest gift, I discovered, was neither dedication nor intelligence nor any kind of native talent. It was an absolute immunity to criticism. I was destined to become a journalist.

I was told by my journalism adviser that my talents were well suited for certain trade magazines in Cincinnati—“Signs of the Times is always looking for good writers,” he said. “Get it: Signs? Signs of the Times? It’s about the signage industry.” I never applied. I moved to New York City instead to cash in on the lucrative field of art criticism. Within weeks I had been hired by the country’s leading art magazine, Art in America. As a production assistant. I made sure advertisers sent in their ad copy and paid their bills. Then I was fired. So I found work at an art gallery. That went under. I got a well-paid job as a graphic designer, but started sleeping with an intern. Another dismissal. All along I’d been supporting a low-level, but persistent, journalism habit. After writing a highly personal essay about skateboarding for the Village Voice, I was approached by one of the editors.

“That was a good story,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. I didn’t hear this often. “Can I ask, I mean, if you don’t mind, what did you like about it?”

“It was pretty …” she paused to think. “coherent.” She looked at a spot on the floor between my feet. It was a kind thing to say. Coherence is a rare attribute in a Village Voice article. I thought she was going to walk away at that point, but she turned back to me as if she’d finally convinced herself to finish a distasteful meal. She asked how much I knew about technology.

The correct answer to this question was: Nothing. Nothing at all. “A lot,” I told her. “I’m totally into … you know, silicon chips and stuff.” Two weeks later I’d filed a story for her. It soon became a weekly gig. My career was really taking off. After a year of being paid 25 cents a word for my musings on subjects I only half understood, I received a raise to 50 cents a word. My salary doubled, I could now afford to take girlfriends out to cheap dinners on the proceeds of my weekly articles. And now we reach the part of the story where hard work actually does pay off, if not handsomely. Laboring under the ceaseless lash of overworked editors, my writing actually improved. The most sublime flowers were mercilessly snipped; Brilliant constructions were deconstructed; fine nuances of expression were brutally rephrased so that ordinary people could, as the copy editor would say, “understand what the fucking hell you’re talking about.”

I just nodded and took my lumps. This went on for many years. When I wrote my first book a few years ago, I had to go find someone who could punish my prose in the way I’d grown to expect. This stratagem backfired. Despite the fact thousands of dollars had passed from my pocket to hers, she persisted in liking my book. “I went back over it,” she said on our third or fourth meeting, “and I still think it’s in good shape.”

I looked away, dejected. I turned back to her. “Edit me,” I pleaded. “Edit me!” Eventually I found a colleague kind enough to read my galleys. “Terrible!” he wrote of one passage he underlined in angry red ink. “VERY awkward,” he wrote in another. “Totally rework or, better yet, cut entirely.” I read these comments with delight. I had, if it’s not already obvious, grown to love the abuse. I was a victim of a vocational version of Stockholm Syndrome. In 2009 I moved to Boston and began writing fiction. This suited my needs for a rigorous method of feedback, because my early attempts have been really, truly awful.

To Be Continued …

#osloexpl

Oslo Explosion. 

That’s what the hash refers to. What follows is the last tweet that I received from @rtege, the reporter on the ground on the island of Utøya: “As darkness falls, things are quiet. No helis over Utøya, no sirens, couple of boats still on the water. Rescue crews gone home.”