Smart, funny, and philosophical, Wilcha's video traces his deepening involvement with the corporate entity. His initial indifference is replaced when a heavier workload prompts feelings that he deserves more. The tension between the 19th floor executives and the 17th floor creatives catches him in the middle. When management assigns the job of creating a catalogue that targets the alternative music consumer, Wilcha goes through a cycle of excitement, punk rock guilt and redemption.

The movie ends on an ambivalent note, and it was this note I was most interested in exploring. I've been through the corporate system myself -- my first novel, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, was published by HarperCollins/Avon -- so I was able to ask Chris a lot of the questions I'd been asking myself about the intersection of the corporate and artistic spheres.

Although the documentary ends with him quitting his job, the first time I talked to him he was again working at Columbia Record House.

Munroe: How did you end up back at Columbia Record House?

Wilcha: A bunch of jobs fell through and I found myself in the position where I would have to work twice as hard to hustle or I could take this position which would pay me a decent amount of money and would be relatively easy to plug myself into. In a way it felt like a step backwards but I needed the stability to start sending the tape out. So I took the job. As much as I've been accused by friends (and not friends) of it being a total retrenchment, I took the job.

Munroe: I'd like to get beyond the initial contradiction of this... the difficulty with this is that it's all tied up in weird moralism. I know when I was at HarperCollins I was never happy about it. But the thing is, what we expect from our rebel narratives like The Target Shoots First is a certain sequence of events. The video is very conscious of storytelling and it ending with you quitting fulfills that, but it didn't exactly jive with the greater understanding that you gain during the story about the levels of complicity and that kind of thing. On the surface, the fact that you're back there will lead some people to think that the whole thing is invalid, but I think that's nonsense. I think it just shows the power of these systems, and how the ways of the status quo are entrenched.

Wilcha: I thought that the more purist types might find the tape annoying from the get-go in that I was a compromised figure from the beginning -- your rebel doesn't even take the job. I don't know that it's any more glamourous to be working at a bookstore, the willfully downwardly mobile posture of being an indie culture rebel. The ending ends on an ambiguous note, it's not a Michael Moore style beatdown, but it reflects an ambiguity that is really familiar: that I know I'm going to find myself in these environments again. For me, it's really about how to navigate stretches of being independent in between being involved with corporate relationships. It's not as black and white as I once thought it was.

Munroe: Right, but on the other hand neither is it throw-up-your-hands, give-up impossibly complex.

Wilcha: Right

Munroe: It's somewhere in the middle. I think that for most people, for the sake of ease and sanity, they just get used to what they're doing situationally. Can you tell me what happened after you quit Columbia Record House?

Wilcha: I had accumulated 200 hours of tape. I decided to go back to grad school. I had been suspect of the idea of film school for a long time, but I did a lot of research and decided to go to !!CalArts, which is this art school out in L.A. Most compelling was the faculty that was there. I mean, there were some people there that I... well, I basically idolized. You can tell very quickly the politics and aesthetic of a place depending on the visiting artists that come. I remember I was looking at Columbia Film School in New York City, thinking oh I'll just go to school here and not disrupt my life, and then I went to some kind of presentation and the big guest of honour was this marketing guy from Mirimax. I would rather make a living having nothing to do with film, and make things on the fly. I don't want to translate my marketing experience into marketing movies. I don't want to go to Sundance as a representative of some movie company. That's not a didactic, pretentious thing, that's just the way I want to situate myself. If I can get income some other way then I want to do it.

Munroe: One of the most exciting things for me about the video was that you were using a video camera, really taking it seriously... coming from my zine background, it seems to me that photocopying is to printing as video is to film.

Wilcha: For a bunch of reasons, I don't think there was any other way to do it. The content is a direct function of the technology. The intimacy and trust that I built on is a direct result of being able to shoot inexpensively. The "found light" is another thing, with film you'd have to have huge florescent lights. When you're using film it's so fucking disruptive, it's so time consuming to compose a shot, to meter it... and I was at the job, I was not an outsider, I was not being paid by PBS to document office culture. I often times would be holding the camera by my waist, while framing the shot like that, because otherwise I'd have an artificial nose, it's really intimidating to have a camera pointed in your face.

Munroe: Moving away from production, how have you found distributing the tape?

Wilcha: What I'm finding is that some of the offers I'm getting from distribution people, their efforts wouldn't exceed my own. The advantage to doing it yourself is that if I'm going to another city for a festival then I can write a letter to specific weeklies, even specific writers that I know will be interested. You don't need a database of 2000 reporters, you're better off with fifty you know something about. It takes research but...

Munroe: ...But if it's something you're already reading about anyway...

Wilcha: Then right, it's basically a seamless kind of process.

Munroe: That's what I found with HarperCollins was that they didn't market the book at all and I realized that they were more focused on selling the rights to foreign markets. They have to be -- when they have the kind of overhead they have, going for the big score makes more sense than trying to sell an extra thousand books.

Wilcha: I think it's a great time to be independent. Even the music business is not even targeting me now, demographically. They're back to a mass market, crossover model a la Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. With all the mergers, a lot of midlevel bands got dropped. I think it's a moment ripe with possibility.

Munroe: Have you learned practical things from your work at a corporations?

Wilcha: I've learned a lot from working in corporations, I mean in a good way -- corporations, if nothing else, get -- shit -- done! They have elaborate systems set up, manage huge amounts of resources and information. Granted, they're completely inefficient, not lean mean lithe machines, but I think you can learn a lot from how they move stuff.

Munroe: Is this something you can see applying to your own work?

Wilcha: Absolutely, this whole experience in the past year self-promoting my tape has been the lessons I'd learned from marketing. So much of it is really intuitive things. Targeting the right people, what would I like to see, getting stuff out with some kind of understanding for schedules... I know these this sound totally naive, but so many of my friends have been total flakes when it comes to these things and I think their work has suffered as a consequence. The fun thing has been going out to shows, almost on the indie rock model... although for me festivals are having a little bit of a diminishing return, because American festivals don't have a lot of money. So you end up flying yourself there, and having a really good show where a lot of people show up, but then you find yourself in the hole. I think I'm at the point where I'd like to put on one of my own shows, and maybe split the box-office, or at least break even... 'cause I'm coming home with these huge credit-card bills...

Munroe: A lot of people asked "how did he do that" in regards to taping all the time, but I was thinking that it may have cemented your alt.consultancy status, since your quirkiness was what they hired you for...

Wilcha: I think that's overly sophisticated -- if anyone was as self-aware as that, then they'd know that the video was some great postmodern promotion for them as well. But they don't. They take you pretty literally.

Munroe: Was Rick the one who was talking about Nirvana at the job interview?

Wilcha: Yes.

Munroe: That scene when you quit really struck a note with me, when Rick said that he was disappointed but not surprised. Because that's exactly what my editor at HarperCollins said to me when I told her I wasn't going to publish with them again -- exactly the same words.

Wilcha: I think Rick is a pretty self-aware guy, the first question he asked me in the job interview was "Why should I hire you? Why don't you start your own record label?"

Munroe: I can't help but feel that there's a reason why they said the same thing. I don't think that you and I and Iris and Rick are abberations at all, but rather that we have a place within the corporate structure. I think this is how the corporation has evolved to utilized the creative itinerate worker.

Wilcha: Well, I think you actually see that much more with internet startups, people who have a much more sophisticated relationship with the work they do and who are making a lot of money at the same time. I was at on the other day where they had a ping pong table, and they were like, we're wacky, we're alternative, and y'know, it didn't ring true either. Hey, we're blowing off steam, we're throwing a nerf ball around!

Munroe: We're maximizing our productivity with stress relief activities!

Wilcha: I think they're just as scary as the corporate model. With a couple of friends of mine who are getting involved with startups, the pay structure is such that they have a vested interest. That means that A) it's a kind of family that demands much more emotionally than just clocking in nine to five and B) it functions as golden handcuffs that the reason you're there on Sunday is "Hey, guys, we all want to get rich here, so whattaya mean you need a day off?"

The next time I talked to Chris he was working for Insound, a company that sells indie film, music and other cultural product over the internet. He got to know them when they were selling his tape.

Munroe: What's Insound like?

Wilcha: It's a business first and formost, but it's run by like-minded people. So they're thinking about things in a hardcore business sense but also have a similar sense of politics. The activities of not-for-profits in the past are, because of market forces, being taken up by for-profits.

Munroe: But entrepreneurialism has implicit politics that preaches the basic all-inclusivity of the market. For people like you and I, who are skilled at marketing and produce sellable product, it's great, but it's not all-inclusive or equitable...

Wilcha: Isn't the fantasy of escape from market forces itself a product of market forces?

Munroe: I'm starting to see corporations less as evil marketing machines and more as these elephantine structures that take up most of the cultural space. Beyond the fact that they're taking a large amount of market share, is there any problems with them being involved with artistic production?

Wilcha: I don't think it's a party you're not invited to. They just do business differently, there's just another range of topics they're interested in. People I know have decided that the stuff they make doesn't fit into that economic matrix. If you're going to make a serialized six hour film that's an ambient meditation on a topic, then you're not going to do it with a major studio. I think that if you brought it into a studio, then it would change to suit the needs of the corporate model.

Munroe: Just to bring it back to your tape... given that the magalog, your involvement with which was a big tension in the movie, did not end up as a profitable thing for the company... and that big corporations in general aren't really good at niche marketing... is there anything we have to worry about?

Wilcha: The real indies are never going to be the selection of the month. It was an impossibility from the start. When we were given the imperative to do it, then we organized ourselves around this project and that was the redemptive moment for me -- we changed the way we worked. To be able to abandon the heirarchy, the glacial bureaucracy... then work became fun. But after the fact, we realized we had done what they wanted us to do -- colonize that niche.

Munroe: But seeing that we've decided that it would have been impossible for them to do it, isn't that realization kind of false? If they can't truly target us, where is the danger?

Wilcha: They can take what they need from the subculture and render it meaningless by reducing it to a style. That is a process of co-optation. If an artist -- say Jem Cowen -- has his shooting style bit by an ad agency, then that's theft.

Munroe: Artists influence each other all the time. But as soon as one of them chooses to enter the corporate world, the dynamic changes... I think that the problem with leaving art to the mercy of the market doesn't take into consideration the communal nature of art, doesn't value all the people that made it possible -- just the person who brought it to market, who commodified it. I don't think it can be a take-it or leave-it kind of situation with corporations, their presence alone has an impact on underground communities.

Wilcha: When I made the movie, I thought people's relation to corporations was really complex -- and since I've been interacting with them in connection to my cultural product, this tape, I feel it even more. I talked to HBO recently, and they appear to run their documentary division almost like a not-for-profit with money. HBO offers a better deal than PBS, who'da thunk it? It's so case specific, it's impossible to deal with abstractions...

Munroe: But when for-profit companies offer the same good terms as the non-profits, they're doing it to compete. Once they've driven out the non-profits, then they can change their terms. It's like predatory pricing...

Wilcha: But so many non-profits suck. They have non-profit-itis -- total apathy -- and don't utilize even the most basic practices of marketing. I don't mean marketing in a crass way like trying to hype something, I'm talking about a well-cultivated mailing list of people who'd want to see certain projects.

Munroe: I think that there's a problem letting the market alone decide what's culturally valuable.

Wilcha: Does the market really do that though? It's a harsh place because it'll give you a kick in the pants... that everyone deserves wide exposure and distribution is a utopian notion.

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This originally appeared, in a much different form, on the Hermenaut website.