It seems appropo that the last posting here was about my “death experience” as I like to call it. This blog in many ways needs to be brought back to life, and so do the intentions of the Schmooru community.
Schmooru was established at a time when creative people were being taken advantage of by things much bigger than them, through contests that pitted us against each other, while these powerful forces were able to shirk any responsibility for the RISK of creating off people lugging around digicams trying to make it in this world on their own.
Fortunately, in many respects quality reigned supreme, and those contests mostly fell by the wayside as the seemingly never ending supply of talent gave way to reality that ‘vaster wastelands’ of shitty content didn’t help to sell your soda company. Beyond that, there were cheaper easier mediums to exploit where you didn’t even need to have the contest or pay anyone anything for anything.
That’s the world we live in now. I will bring up the age of obscurity often in this resurgence. We live in obscure times, where the information we think we’re getting is not what it seems, not always manipulated by the people in between(as it once was), making the all powerful (an increasingly smaller set) almost completely unaccountable for what they do to manipulate us. For instance, as a creative community, mostly of filmakers I woud like to dispell a myth that there’s anything democratic or quality oriented about how your videos you make for these private entities (youtube-googleplex, vimeo, etcs..) are reaching your audiences. They are highly censored by powerful people who know virtually nothing about content or the love of the craft (yes its worse than the reptile network execs from the 50-90s, at least YOU knew who they were and THEY knew who they were!).
I will add this caveat. The views expressed here are my own– and brought forward through my role as the moderator of THIS creative community. My ulterior motive here is having enough STUFF to fill and complete my PHD work at the European Graduate School. My primary motive is, I get to see a lot things where I sit in the Cole Valley in San Francisco. There is a bad, greedy air in this city over the mountain and its killing what made this place give birth to the idea that magic boxes at the end of the content could do amazing things.
Please be critical of me. That’s welcome here.
-Daniel P Beckmann, Cole Valley – 11/6/2013
P.S. This will be spelled wrong. The word order may be complicated. Despite everything you say or ask for I refuse to put this new resurgence through a filter of any kind. Good luck out there. I don’t need a large audience. For my conscious I need to express the antidote to the obscurities of our times and for my PHD, I need things in writing.
P. S. S. The rules of RETRO <a href=”tomarken.com>Tomarken.com</a> certainly apply here. We will avoid the Zero-Sum-GAIN, you may not like it– but something new will ALWAYS greet you here.