Thursday, June 26, 2003

You know what bothers me? Stupidity. Stupidity and short-sightedness. Stupidity and short-sightedness and self-centeredness and empty corporate speak--all of which are beautifully embodied by the ill-conceived New Orleans Media Experience.

As I see it, the project has five major problems:

1. Poorly conceived doesn't begin to describe it. On the website, our mayor--whom I generally like--describes the event as "an unprecedented annual extravaganza, celebrating the rapidly converging worlds of film, advertising, music and interactive media." What the #%$@ does that mean? Outside of a grant application, I've never seen such a bilious load of buzz-word-filled crap. "Convergence," "synergy," "interactive"--they mean nothing to me or anyone else... And on a side note, what if I don't want the worlds of music and advertising to merge?

2. The event is obviously designed to compete with SXSW, but NOME's organizers don't seem to have the foggiest idea how to go about stealing thunder. Several of the folks on the founding committee are from an ad agency in Los Angeles, one's a fledgling actor, two are government officials, and none, I'm afraid, understands what it's going to take to put together an event of this ludicrous, illogical magnitude.

3. In case they haven't noticed, there's already a New Orleans Film Festival. Granted, it's not as big as, say, Toronto or Berlin, but it's respectable. And yet so far as I know, the schmucks at the NOME never even bothered to contact them. Apparently, the people behind NOME are out to re-invent the wheel, destroy the existing film festival, or both.

4. Far be it from me to call anyone a carpetbagger, but if nearly half the people planning the NOME event are from one advertising/production firm in Los Angeles, I'm guessing this so-called extravaganza is more likely to devolve into a monotonous, one-company trade show shilling products to the rubes.

5. The NOME web design sucks. Granted, I'm not winning any prizes over here, but at least I respect you all by using HTML instead of that craptacular Flash crap. And at least I double-check my goddamn pages for spelling and grammatical errors...

But then, of course, they didn't ask for my input, did they?

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