We just had a federal election here in Canada. It was a nail biter. In the end however the Conservative party of Canada will now be reigning over the country for the next four or five years. It’s got the arts community all aflutter. The entire thing’s got me thinking a lot about popularity.<\/p>\n
I used to be popular. Once upon a time my inbox was flooded on a daily basis with fan mail, requests, death threats; it was nice. But it’s been a long time since then. My priorities changed. And unfortunately, I have a bit of a tendency to alienate my audience with each new project. It was unlikely that fans of Boneland.com would get into Minushi<\/em> and even less likely that any of those would find Refrain<\/em> relatable. But so is the chemistry of my brain and who am I to tamper with it? The fact is, in my pursuit of “legitimacy” in this entertainment business – perhaps my pursuit of a more traditional road, maybe that’s a better way of putting it – I lost my connection with the people. The populace. I’ve become a business-to-business guy for some reason and frankly, it’s never been my thing.<\/p>\n Allow me to alienate myself further from yet another segment of society with the following:<\/p>\n I’m actually looking forward to the next four to five years of domination by our dark conservative overlords. Would cuts to the arts sector really be such a bad thing? Is the current system really working all that well anyway? The more I look the less I see an industry of filmmakers in this country but rather an industry of people who have gotten really good a filling out government application forms. I’ve been guilty of this myself. And I can’t say it felt great. The money was cool for a fleeting moment, I’ll give you that, but it didn’t even come close to the feeling of opening my mailbox years ago and pulling out the first payment I’d ever made after initiating the pay-per-view service at Boneland.com. A payment issued by the fans. Proof positive that my work was worth something to an audience. No jumping through hoops. Now, that meant something. You couldn’t argue with that.<\/p>\n I’ve been trying to sell my work to the wrong people lately. To figureheads and traditionalists. To people that I, myself, have endowed with some delusion of virtue. And why, when the people are still out there, out here, right in front of me. The democratization of entertainment is only scary if you’re greatest talent is filling out applications for government handouts.<\/p>\n It’s time to go back to the people. The populace. But just who shall I alienate this time…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cuts to the arts are only scary if you’re only talent is filling out grant applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-from-the-studio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tylergibb.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}