Shakespeare understood more clearly than most that there was a fine line between politics and theater; in fact most of his work was a response to or comment on both the politics of the day, and the political nature of human behavior. Sure, his Kings and princes were from an era we no longer can imagine with our modern democracies and anti-monarchic stances but we are fundamentally unchanged – it is after all, no stretch to posit Gaddafi as a modern day Macbeth. Shakespeare’s truth is always in behavior – what we, as human beings will do with power when given the chance.

Berlusconi, a media magnate prior to becoming Italy’s prime minister, is no slouch when it comes to the theatrical; and no matter how badly he runs the country, his continued presence is the result of widespread popular support, which he cultivates with ease. American’s who scoff at ignorant Italians for being susceptible to the fake tan and toupee of an aging politician should take a long hard look at the narratives we are cultivating in our own political universe. Though the apparent moral polar opposite of the Italian Prime Minister, over here we’ve got Glenn Beck, whose charisma compels many to follow him, and Sarah Palin, who though apparently not running for office, starred in a reality show, sells out book-signings and remains a heavily covered media personality.

I call this kind of character a MEDIA CANDIDATE. They vie for your attention the same way Tony Soprano did, and the same way Simon Cowell now does. When the political candidates running for *real* elected office fail to energize us, we turn to characters, heroes, those other voices readily available to us in the media. Humans think in terms of stories; we always have, and we always will. So whose narrative will compel in 2012? I have a sneaking feeling it’s not going to be a political candidate; it will be a media candidate, and you will vote with your eyeballs.

StoryCorp’s mission is “to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives.” Simple perhaps, but in the execution, often profound.

Many thousands of interviews later, StoryCorps has become perhaps the most comprehensive document of what America really feels and sounds like, outside of the din of propaganda and for that reason, I am a devoted follower.

Then I saw the creatively wonderful move into animation, and the artful renderings of these brief moments. Not only was this a re-imagining of stories through an artist’s point of view, but it also extended the world of the stories in a meaningful way. Below, is a wonderful piece that renders a brilliantly willful, brash and cheeky Chinese-American grandmother with great visual wit.

No More Questions! from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Yet every time I hear the “TV Everywhere” chorus, I wonder who made this “the moment”. Because it most certainly does NOT seem to be any kind of definitive moment for me. I still watch the shows I like, exchange the content I dig up online, no matter whether the cable is connected, wrapped, cut or hanging out behind my TV. Perhaps TV Everywhere is a song based on the agenda of cable providers desperately trying to figure out how to keep subscribers, and big content providers trying to make sure they keep their prized demographics.

But seriously, is cutting the cord and watching content across various platforms/devices really the issue when considering what comes through to whatever screen? Do platforms really matter in that context? Does the fact that Google TV wants to offer an all-you-can-eat content buffet really alter my tastes in any profound way? I think not.

As audiences, we care about whatever our interests are at the moment, not so much about the gear, or the platform. Although certain platforms make the experience of entertainment smoother and more convenient to our lifestyles, the truth remains that we follow that which moves us. And sometimes those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about technology and content in a slightly abstract way forget this. Yet, ask any TV programming executive and you will hear them say they are looking for content that audiences are drawn to. This is not to say these guys get a pass – after all, their blind spot has been their unwillingness to experiment with content that doesn’t look like old-school TV. That makes me wonder really HOW committed they are to meeting the demands of a sophisticated and fast-changing viewership. But I digress.

Let’s go to the watercooler for a second — that famed watercooler which has become extension of the shared entertainment experience we have alone or with personal friends in our private spaces – our home, or their homes. Then we seek to share and/or relive the “best of” moments when we engage with our work colleagues in a not so intimate environment called the workplace. Now with social networking in the workplace (and all the gear to make it possible even if the bosses don’t like it), the act of sharing entertainment is an activity that can be experienced not just with the folks you physically SEE in your office, but perhaps your buddies on the other floors, or a that rival company, or “friends” you added on Facebook one drunken night at a bar and now trade viral videos with. The range is wide and features feathers of every color: From long popular lo-fi gag photos LOLcats to Josh Groban singing Kanye West tweets and the occasional political moment that grabs the country’s attention such as the indefatigable Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ 8 1/2 hour speech, these exchanges connect us virtually and physically in laughter, outrage, mockery, sadness, wistfulness and all manner of diversionary emotion.

One thing is constant: every content creator wants a piece of the watercooler Holy Grail – the sticky phenomenon…the thing that gets people talking. Surely that’s why advertising, after suffering the fate of the mouse-click strove hard in 2010 to legitimately become part of that rainbow of emotion that is a valuable commodity in the marketplace. Occasionally it succeeded with campaigns like the Old Spice Guy. And it is perhaps what Hollywood tries to invent when it births a new franchise (or re-hashes an ancient one). But 2010 was also the year in which that fountain of “real entertainment” notoriously failed to create a marquee entertainment brand that had folks gathering around the water cooler.

So what exactly is it that we as a voraciously media consumptive society (at least in North America) are engaged by? A quick cobble-together yields a picture it that looks something like this: zombies (The Walking Dead), cats doing anything, famous people making fun of other famous people (Josh Groban/Kanye West), old people telling dirty jokes (Betty White), politics served with jokes (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert), regular people saying what everyone thinks but doesn’t say (The Rent Is Too Damn High Party’s Jimmy McMillan). All these people engage us in ways that entertain and/or inform, often provoking or titillating the senses.

With so much competing for our eyeballs and minds, we are now in the habit of curating viscerally and without regard for the classification of content. Invariably, hybrids emerge, and a blurring between content forms begins to take hold. For example, the blurring of the line between so called “information” and “entertainment” is increasingly evident. Certainly, to some this signals the death of “real news” and journalism. Some others, like the very tabloid styled Huffington Post lose no sleep over this distinction and move forward into a future that seeks to engage, at any cost.

While I’m not arguing for the tabloid-ization of everything, and I value ideas and engagement that push the brain beyond titillation, there must be a way in which cross-pollination becomes an opportunity to re-think the way we see form. Forget about TV being on my Android. Who cares? We MUST think beyond platform and medium into content itself, and the audience that seeks out all the things we as media creators bring them – news, jokes, social change, stories in any and all forms.

We’ve already seen the result of a powerful hybrid news-entertainment personality in “fake news” guy Jon Stewart, whose laudable actions on behalf of the 9-11 Responders yielded real political and practical impact. I’m not sure Jon Stewart as a figure could have been considered America’s “most trusted newsman” in a pre-digital, pre-social media world. Of course there are some who consider comparisons between Stewart and Cronkite a travesty of epic proportions. While I myself might wait a few more years to crown Stewart, I think the reach of his work speaks for itself.

Onward, sans-idea boundaries, into 2011!

I think the answer is yes. And I did some research to challenge my own assumptions.

Of course, now with the heavily rumored and anticipated i-something (maybe iTablet or iSlate) device from the happy people at Apple, it seems the transformation of reading is perhaps closer than we might have imagined. As is often the case, technology will drive the charge and likely change user behavior and only then will creative ideas for the product follow suit. Looking beyond the cool gadgetry of the new Apple toy, let’s just consider it another gateway into the world that Amazon’s Kindle has already established with e-reading. We can be sure of one thing though: it will likely be a user-friendly, very portable device that makes the crossover between text and image very appealing.

So there we are, sucked into the magical interface, switching between a Youtube video,  the latest issue of Vogue magazine and pages of Anna Karenina, making leaps of imagination and information that may have been a little more difficult when those materials were tactile. And I describe a scenario in a sequence that has actually happened for me. I have the Kindle for iPhone app, and I confess, I am currently reading Anna Karenina on that tiny, tiny screen on the subway and sometimes, I switch tasks and watch a randomly unconnected  video, then quickly flip through a fashion magazine all in the time it takes to get from Soho to Grand Central Station. So, essentially I contradict myself.

So I’m a media zombie, a self-proclaimed future filmmaker. But a book purist, right? Yes and no. I wonder how I would feel if there was an option to watch a dramatization of Tolstoy’s novel within my app. Would I do it? I’m not sure. But I think most people would if it made an old Russian novel accessible. And for that reason, companies like Vook and Fourth Story Media are emerging in the hybrid book space with titles ranging from how-to’s to teen novels and popular adult fiction. I downloaded and sampled the Sherlock Holmes double Vook and gave it a whirl. Frankly, launching a documentary about opium use during late 19th century London was really distracting to me when I wanted to follow the characters. But I found that I liked the interface when not actually engaged in the narrative. My conclusion is not that the Vook concept itself is flawed, it’s just that turning a classically structured narrative into a multimedia experience is a complex creative challenge. And I can’t say this particular title succeeded.

However, if a title was written by the author with the intention of creating a multimedia narrative in which the text and video where simultaneously conceived, the same way we do when writing screenplays intended for filming, then I think it would be an entirely different proposition. And I actually look forward to the birth of a new form with as much creative and intellectual rigor as good literature has traditionally had. As Bob Stein, whose Institute for the Future of Books says in an LA Times piece, “We’re going to see an explosion of experimentation before we see a dominant new format. We’re at the very beginning stages” of figuring out what narrative might look like in the future– “…the very, very beginning.”

This is an amateur movie made by a member of the The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society in 1947. Strange, you may think, as it seemed to me when I first watched this one of several films created by members of this Society as a way to analyze their dreams.

Initially, The Lion Dream struck me as the tender, heartbreaking story of a son (possibly Jewish) who lost his parents in WW2 Germany and then as an adult in 1947, attempts to re-visit the fear he harbored as a child that something devastating was about to happen.

But that’s only part of the story.

I selected this film from the materials that comprise the project  “Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, 1926-1972” because I found it haunting. Who is Teddy Weisengrund? Did he really dream this story? Or did he simply imagine it as an exercise in Freudian psychoanalysis?

The artist Zoe Beloff seems to be asking that question and many more about this curious group that was active in Coney Island between 1926 and 1972. What is not immediately apparent but which I later learned, is that this film may or may not be the ACTUAL film Teddy Weisengrund created in 1947. And maybe there was a Teddy Weisengrund or perhaps there wasn’t…

I was introduced to Beloff’s work by Mike Monello, who showed me a delightfully rendered book “written by” members of the group. It seemed for all intents and purposes a “genuine” work. But upon further investigation into Beloff’s project, I discovered it was in fact deceptively simple. As Monello astutely pointed out, this project is an unidentified piece of Transmedia storytelling – a kind of creativity without media boundaries, filled with such enormous passion for these stories and characters that you almost don’t care if it is “real” or not.

Zoe Beloff is one of those wildly creative figures whose ambitious work lives in a space somewhere between filmmaking and installation art. Her multimedia exhibition that showed at the Coney Island Museum this past summer was a combination of objects, films, drawings and writings about this visually prolific group of amateur psycholanalysts whose interest in Freud led them into all manner of activity, including trying to resurrect DREAMLAND a razed Coney Island museum and fashion it into “the first amusement park ever devoted to the elucidation of dreams in accordance with the discoveries of Doctor Sigmund Freud M.D.”

According to the New York Times article on the exhibit, Beloff, who works with found footage and objects, accidentally discovered relics of this fascinating bunch of psychoanalysis enthusiasts, and began this project to reconstruct their world. The article discusses Beloff’s prior interest in the relationship between the real and fictional, noting that most of her work “incorporates film and video in multimedia projects and environments in which the boundaries between historical fact and creative interpretation — what really was and what might have been — tend to blur.”

For the project, Beloff set about reconstructing these films, made for dream analysis purposes and imagining how each member (fictional or real) might have created his/her film. It seems Beloff has combined found home video footage with some new images fashioned in the style of the time and of the individual authors who puportedly created the films, to complete the ideas that make up the Dream Films 1926-1972 .

Beloff’s work, as wild and bizarre as it sometimes seems, illustrates what can happen when storytelling is released from the bounds of specific media or the constraints of the fictional versus the real. To me, The Lion Dream is a beautiful, understated testament to the quiet terror of a child in a moment of uncertainty made even more poignant by the possibility that it was recreated by one person in memory of another, in honor of two others.

I laughed my way through the episode – their bender night followed by waking up in Hank’s convertible on the beach with some freshly tatted backsides. Aah, yes. I know these guys. They are my friends and I miss them. Ok, I know what you’re thinking – is this fictional or real? Honestly, it doesn’t matter because on my tweed couch with the wool throw in December in New York, it was a nice fuzzy feeling. So imagine my excitement when I browse my Twitter feed and see that @Gennefer is talking to @RealHankMoody. I jump in and check out his feed. It’s crazy and unmistakeable how Hank Moody-esque this guy sounds. Tweets like:

Is there anything better than waking up after a night with a great woman, having a hot shower, and then hopping back into bed?

I’m hooked. I make a mention of him to someone else on Twitter and his ears much have started burning or something because all of sudden I get this tweet:

@filmfuturist well hello don’t think u can just mention my name without introducing yourself. U have pretty lips BTW. What’s ur story?

I swear I almost fall off the couch. At first I don’t know what to say because I know Hank is a player and I don’t want to fall for his sweet talk. So I decide to keep it neutral and ask him for some dating advice:

ME: @RealHankMoody I’m nerdy Hank. What does a girl need to do to find a smart dude?

HANK: @filmfuturist don’t *do* anything other than be yourself. You’re smarter than that. Plus, your a jewel – they will find you.

I’m not sure what to do next, so, I wimp out and hit “Follow” and become a Hank Moody follower so I can watch from the sidelines as he seduces women and talks of his conquests.

I finally work up the nerve to ask him if he’ll answer some questions for my blog and he’s charming, and gracious and utterly HANK MOODY. So here they are for your enjoyment.

How does it feel to be Hank Moody?

It feels fucking great at times.  But being a single dad is hard work.  I don’t think I do as admirable a job as I’d like, although Becca, my daughter,  does get fed and shelter is provided.  I do live a hard life, but I surround myself with women that care about me.  At least for a few hours at a time.  My strategy is to string them all together to form a 24/7 support structure.

Where did you learn your game?

My game? Are you referring to my writing? I wrote short stories and poems throughout school and really hit my stride in college. I read a lot too. Books and lately blogs, such as yours.  It keeps my mind active, my vocabulary current and my wit sharp.

I’m dying to know what the teenage Hank Moody was like – were you a stud then too?

Not really. I mean I was shy, but I always said what I thought, didn’t hold back, told it like it was.  I think that brutal honestly was seen by girls as something different to what they were experiencing at the time.  And different is attractive in many ways.

Seems like the only person who really scares you is Sue Collini. Is she ballsier than you?

Firstly, I’m not convinced that Sue is a woman.  So until the results of any tests come back to conclusively determine her sex, I’d like to not comment on the record about her balls.   In reality she’s a pussycat.  One of those that hisses a lot.

I swear I saw you once at a party in Bel Air – in the poolhouse, making it with a girl AND a guy – was that you?

I’m not ruling the possibility that is wasn’t me out. I’d like to think not. But a lot of crazy shit went down in Bel Air that I’m not too proud of.  Let’s just say that if I can’t remember and there is no photographic evidence, then it didn’t happen.

Most guys who play girls like you are called douchebags – why do you think that title doesn’t apply to you?

I’m very fond of women.  I care about them.  I genuinely desire not to hurt them.  I love their attention and desire their touch.  Their kiss awakens me.  I think about them, their hopes and dreams.  I talk to them.  All of them need attention.  All of them need to feel good.  All of them make me feel good.  Douchbags deliver a win/lose proposition to women.  My girls are treated well and respected. Win/Win.

I worry about your writing – when will you write again?

Yes. I’m in the middle of writing a new novel now.  A lot of my research is being done online via twitter (@RealHankMoody).  Its been a very tough road to overcome writers block.  Especially when I’m preoccupied trying to be the best father figure to Becca.  But I hope to have it completed by summer.

I despise your rap but I’m totally seduced by you – mind if I come over?

As long as you cook me breakfast in the morning.

In surveying the various projects out there, I found myself drawn to Twistori, which is an interesting take on this  trend. By limiting their tracking to only real time uses of the words LOVE, HATE, THINK, BELIEVE, FEEL and WISH, the project draws your attention to the verbs that create human emotion. Below, I have simply screen-grabbed whatever came through the feed in the 2-3 minutes span I was watching it scroll through.

The makers of this project acknowledge that their inspiration comes from another project called We Feel Fine which actually tracked emotions mined from all over the web in the form of text and image, and then organized them into a fascinating compilation and creative analysis of human feelings. It took me a while to wrap my head around what they were actually doing. I should say that the the authors of the project Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, are together a combination of computational, creative and sociological whizkiddery. But don’t let that deter you from looking through this project, and apparently their soon-to-be-published book on the project. In their explanation of the project and its methodology they say:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

I surmised after reading through their material, that they are in fact going about storytelling in a quasi-scientific way – and I say “quasi” only because while data is real, what they are seeking to document is really the range of human emotion.  So while they do uncover patterns in people’s feelings/behavior, it never quite seems that the purpose of the project is purely statistical despite their use of all this computational skill and technology.

There are fascinating ideas in the individual words and images here and it begs the question, “where does science/technology meet art and storytelling”?

The conversation continues.