Peter Rogers's Blog
"You know what? Screw this. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in Margaritaville."

Sunday (12/26/04) 4:25pm - ... wherein Peter muses on the Gallery of Nonexistent Art.

Where This Came From

It's occurred to me that I haven't had enough fun writing lately.

The most fun writing projects stem from those idle daydreams where I think "Wouldn't it be cool if there were a song about such-and-such?" or "If they made a movie with this kind of storyline, I'm sure I'd get a kick out of it." The tricky part for me has always been to notice when I'm thinking something like that and write down the idea.

Say what you will about writing a big pulp radio-serial adventure about highly improbable secret agents fighting a Bond-like villain in a version of Morocco completely unhindered by accuracy or historical reference, I really wanted to write Bellydancing Ninjas.

I figure that a community like the one below would be a good way to foment this kind of casual, "wouldn't it be cool?!" attitude towards creativity. The good ideas that we usually discard as pointless reverie, we would hold on to -- not necessarily to do anything big & meaningful with them, but just to make them into curious blog entries. :)

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The Idea for the Community

The community would dedicate itself to reviews, excerpts, and discussion of works in various media that have the sole drawback of being totally made-up. So it's the perfect place to talk about the new and curiously-Japannified manga series based on Firefly, or that exhibition of the little-known Belgian found-object surrealist Henri Rendon, or maybe Metallica's recent Christmas album. [1]

The rules would be fairly simple:
1. The thing you are writing about must be nonexistent. If you put up a review of Rubber Soul, your post will be ridiculed and most likely deleted.

2. No, really, it has to be something that doesn't exist. If you put up a review of a short story, and you've written the whole short story yourself, results are similar to transgressions of rule #1. (Short excerpts are fine for illustrative purposes.)

3. Nobody 'owns' nonexistent art. If I post a short excerpt from the pilot episode of Cartoon Network's "Behind the Toons" (with its dramatic 'Where are they now?' footage of Scrappy-Doo), other people can define other aspects of the show. I don't get to say "No fair!" just because I introduced the concept. (In improv terms, this would be "no blocking.")

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Possible Problems

1. The fanfiction/RPG-overlap problem. One can argue that fanfiction communities serve largely the same purpose as this would -- in this case, by allowing bloggers to show around their pieces based on existing works. One can further argue that fanfic communities do a better job of it by providing more specific venues, so that the various classes of Harry-Potter-fanficdom can gather by highly-specialized interest.
   1a. OMGSQUEEEEE! If this community gained any popularity, then bad slash fic [2] might overtake it like kudzu or a eutrophic algal bloom.

2. The 'one-joke' problem. Obviously, on the surface, this community would provide one quick joke -- "Ha, ha, we're talking all seriously about things that don't exist." If people get beyond that, and see an interesting opportunity to improvise with other lj-ers, then we have a community. If people don't, then we have a quick laugh along the lines of KHAAAAAN! and nothing more.

3. The 'really bad improvisor' problem. Let's be honest: not everybody would be good at this. Or, actually, no, everybody I know would be good at this; I suspect most people would be good at this; so I'll rephrase: some people would be really bad at this. Or even willfully bad: if somebody came in hell-bent on adding an advertisement for "Bart's Garden Supply Co." to every thread, it would be pretty damn hard for the community to abide by the "no blocking" rule. To put it more generally, the community could degenerate to the banal behavior of its worst members, and then be of no use to anybody else.

4. "It's too much work." When playing a Thousand Blank White Cards, I found that the players of the game (wherein players draw all the cards in the game) were sharply divided into two camps: people who said "Wow! I get to draw up my own cards?!" and people who said "What?! I have to draw up my own cards?!"

If people generally find the very thought of review-writing to be difficult and onerous, then the whole thing can't work.

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Where Do We Go From Here?

I'll see if this idea is still tugging at me at the start of the New Year. If it is, then I'll try & refine the community rules a bit and see if I can't start something.

As I see it, the advantage of this idea is that it doesn't matter if anybody else contributes anything to it. If it's just my little Zen Garden of artistic silliness, then that's okay. It'll just be the place I periodically stash reviews of nonexistent things.

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[1] On that last work, the wise reviewer would do well to compare and contrast the album with A Very Mötorhead Christmas.

[2] The pejorative might be redundant; as far as I can tell, writing:slash as acting:pr0n.

Mood: creative · Music: Beatles - Penny Lane

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