Doublefiltered, a webzine, has published a fine interview with me:
DF: You set one of your novels, Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, in Disneyland. How does Disney relate to all this?
CD: I am a huge Disneyfile, I love the park and I am always fascinated to see how it shows up in other peoples storylines – the same way that Vancouverites seek out bits of the Vancouver skyline in movies that have been filmed there.
Disney theme parks are a good backdrops against which to play out dramas because they embody so much utopianism themselves, so much science-fictional thinking. Walt was an optimist, and a science fiction writer whose canvas was people and social systems, like Henry Ford, and like a lot of other American entrepreneurs of that era. He was an experimenter, a social experimenter who tried out explicitly crazy communities.
DF: Do you find it at all ironic that the someone like yourself who is lobbying heavily for copyright reform is in this intimate imaginative relationship with Disney who today are one of the biggest proponents of tighter copyright restrictions?
CD: Not at all. I think that it is possible to create great art and still be an asshole. And that is Disney in a nutshell. The company does some very good things. There is hardly a company in the world that is as progressive as they are with respect to same sex spousal benefits, they are the larger employer of homosexuals in the southlands, they were the first to offer same sex benefits in the teeth of the crazy, loony, Christian right, Baptist constituency who accused them of destroying family values. And the same thing goes for their creativity.
I think that the Disney park is brilliant and wonderful. There are a lot of people who hope that we can have a popular revolution without popular entertainment – I say to them:
If your popular revolution demands that we give up on popular entertainment it won’t be very popular.
