When one considers what’s going on technologically and commercially, he said, there’s a real question about whether festivals “are going to be obsolete in a decade, because people won’t find them valuable anymore—they won’t be the platform from which people need to operate.”

Above, from a story in the Village Voice by John Anderson pegged to tonight’s opening of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, Geoff Gilmore sells the biggest event associated with his new employer by theorizing that it, and all festivals, may be on a long slide towards obsolescence.

Coincidentally, earlier this morning I watched the below video by JJ Lask, whose directorial debut On the Road With Judas premiered at Sundance in 2007, toured the country last year on the Range Life Roadshow, and is now available on DVD. “Don’t expect too much,” Lask says. “I’ve never had a girl come up to me after a show and say ‘I want to blow you,’ … I’ve never had a distributor come up to me and say, “Hey, I want to buy your movie … and blow you.’”  Lask goes on to suggest that the real values of the film festival experience are the free wine and the cushy hotel rooms from which to work on a follow-up screenplay in peace.

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Filmmaker Peter Greenaway is giving a multimedia presentation/lecture this morning at the Clicks or Morta?r symposium, and if you go to Pixel Palace RIGHT NOW, you can watch it live. I’ll investigate whether or not the video is archived after the show is over, and if so, I’ll post it here.

I discovered the Greenaway presentation via the Documentally Twitter stream, which has been disseminating Greenaway’s best quotes live. Examples: “Peter Greenaway thinks the remote control shot the cinema dead.”; “Peter Greenaway thinks film festivals are a waste of time.. ‘We need to put new wine in new bottles’”. Etc.

Clicks or Mortar? is a one-day event in the UK devoted to imagining the future of cinema as a concept and as a public space. From their website:

Digital projection is turning cinemas into spaces that can support every sort of screen-based creative work, extending their usefulness far beyond simply showing films.  In the future they may be transformed from ‘picture palaces’ into ‘pixel palaces’, offering a home to games players, interactive performance artists and moving image makers, supporting new forms of film storytelling and, most significantly, engaging audiences who may well be turning from passive consumers of culture into active participants in its creation.

UPDATE: I’ve installed the Ustream embed after the jump.
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Reuters ran a story yesterday on “adlets”, also known as “blinks”, also known as extremely brief audio commercials that radio programmers can sprinkle into blocks of content. It’s a format that seems to be catching on with the studios–Fox has apparently bought a lot of adlet space to promote The Simpsons (ostensibly, these short bursts of brand identification would work equally well to promote both the series and the movie), and Paramount went the blink route in promoting Stardust (perhaps that’s why we blinked and missed it at the box office? Ha ha.) I only listen to NPR (yeah, I know) so I haven’t heard these, but apparently the prototypical example is the voice of Homer Simpson saying “Doh!” popping up in between songs.

Idolator connects this “advance” in marketing techology to Blipverts — ie: the micro-commercials that somehow caused an aggressive local news man to get trapped in the machine, resulting in virtual media sage/Coke spokesman Max Headroom. I was a big fan of Max Headroom as a teenager (thanks to Sci-Fi Channel reruns), but I couldn’t remember exactly why Blipverts were so dangerous. So I went looking for clips from the show, and stumbled across the entire 48-minute pilot, which I’ve embedded above. And for my paranoid rantings on the insidious connection between Clear Channel and Max Headroom, click the “Read More” link.

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