Archive for August, 2011

• Kickstart This

  Date: 2011.08.30 | Category: Consumerism, Movies | Response: 1

  I spent about a decade running a small record label (which may come out of hibernation soon, but that’s a story for another day). Perhaps because we found ourselves working primarily with artists who were either indifferent or had an outright aversion to any sort of self-promotion, and the fact that I wasn’t terribly good at that stuff myself, we were never particularly successful or prestigious. And yet, we would still get approached from time to time by artists who were interested in releasing music on our label. Eventually, I developed a standard response: “You’d be better off releasing it yourself — and if you need money, just do a Kickstarter.com campaign.”

  Kickstarter.com, for the uninitiated, is a site which lets you “crowdsource” money for your art project. Basically, you pick an amount — anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars — and then you try to find enough people to “kick  in” a few bucks to help you reach your goal. If you exceed your goal amount, that’s great — Bay Area musician Nataly Dawn (if her face looks familiar, you probably recognize her from the Hyundai commercials that were ubiquitous last Christmas) wanted $20,000 to complete her album, and she’s more than quadrupled that with six days left to go. However, if you don’t reach your chosen amount by the end of the pledge period, you get bupkes. The people who signed up to donate never have their credit cards charged. Your project is dead… unless you start from scratch with a new, presumably less ambitious campaign, or come up with another way to fund it.

  I’ve contributed to a handful of Kickstarter projects, and so far I have a 100% success rate — they’ve all been funded, though some have been touch and go until the last few hours. So far, my favorite is American Ruins, in which Chicago artist Matt Bergstrom photographed images of abandoned buildings and had them made into View-Master reels. A few months after the project was funded, I received a handsome box in the mail containing a viewer and three reels. (I’m a View-Master buff, and I also enjoy images of urban decay — a perfect match!) I’ve also contributed toward four albums and a couple films.

  However, now I am afraid that my perfect record is at risk. As soon as the project was announced in mid-July, I became a backer of Laughter Against the Machine, a documentary which will follow three Bay Area comedians as they tour the U.S., bringing their special blend of humor to folks in Phoenix, New Orleans, Madison, and a few other stops. The stated goal of the tour and film is to “move Americans past the grievances that divide them, to the problems we face collectively.” Oh yeah, and to make people laugh. Ambitious, but I would expect nothing less from W. Kamau Bell, whose long-running one-man show, “The W. Kamau Bell Curve,” promised to “end racism in about an hour”; he frequently offers discounts to patrons who bring a friend of a different race with them to the venue. Bell will be joined by fellow comics Nato Green and Janine Brito.

  Green told Salon.com that the trio wants to explore “Big Ideas” and tackle controversial issues, though they aren’t always able to anticipate which topics will make their audiences squirm — “Jokes about vegans, Tyler Perry or the Gipsy Kings end up being way more volatile than jokes about race, slavery or the Holocaust.” (Wait a second — they’re joking about vegans? Now they’ve really gone too far!) These three comics could make a comfortable living performing in Bay Area clubs, pandering to lefties by telling jokes about Michelle Bachmann and Fox News, but unlike a lot of local stand-ups, they don’t want to go for easy laughs. They want to stretch their boundaries by getting out of the clubs, talking to Muslims in Dearborn or folks patrolling the border in Arizona. Filmmakers Mike Paunovich and Evan Donn will be trailing them with cameras, and hope to turn the footage into what will no doubt be an insightful, thought-provoking, hilarious documentary.

  But while the tour is already booked, LATM is still $8,000 short of its $20,000 goal. The deadline is Sept. 9. If they haven’t reached the magic number by then, they’ll get nothing.

  I think this is a worthwhile project, and if you’re interested in comedy, documentaries, bridging the red/blue divide, or jokes about Tyler Perry, you should consider becoming a backer, too. (A mere $10 will get your name in the film’s credits!) For some reason, 987 people have “liked” the project on Facebook, but only 244 folks have put their money where their mouth is. Maybe the other 743 are waiting ’til the last minute, but in the meantime, the comics are getting very nervous.

  Perhaps if the project is fully funded, the film will be released in time for the 2012 election season. By then, we will all definitely need a good laugh.