Reading this Salon article on the problems of modern US copyright law, I had a kind of counterrevolutionary thought.

It is simply not true that the policies currently being pursued suppress, as the author says, "the right to be inspired." The whole point of inspiration is that it's a semi-involuntary, instantaneous act. You can't possibly stop it through legal means. (Medical or scientific, sure, but we're not exactly at this point yet.) People can be and are inspired by "illegal art" or things that they've obtained through technically illegal means. There's no limit on inspiration, nor is there any current set of regulations that require you to pay a licensing fee to your inspirations. (Unfortunately for a lot of old, poor artists.) The things you use as material, sometimes, but never really inspiration.

I think we need to keep in mind here that what's being prohibited is not production, but distribution. Realistically and mostly legally speaking, no one's going to come into your bedroom and stop you from sampling a song or pasting in a piece of art or doing whatever it is you feel like doing, as long as you have the physical, technial ability. (And in that regard, I don't really think I need to start in on the list of work-arounds people have come up with, and the interesting artistic results those have fostered, do I?) What's happened here is that because of the internet, distribution is now nearly effortless, requiring a remarkably minimal investment of material, capital, and energy. And so these new regulations have sprung up, in no small part, because a lot of the things that are now being regulated were things that were simply impossible to monitor before: record labels would have loved to stop used records from being sold, and occasionally did, but now the technologies of distribution have made it such that they can forbid it more easily, just as it's become more easy for us to distribute it. In many ways, it's simply been an escalation of the firepower on both sides without necessarily effecting a major change in the outcome. (Indeed, if anything, it's skewed on the side of creation.)

So what I'm saying is that this sort of thing would have a lot more teeth were there not so many ways to get around it right now; we all know that there are a ton of ways to hear outlawed creations (the Grey Album etc.) no matter what the law says. Thus, the problem is not that these works are being created that no one can experience--it's that not as many people can experience it, and right now (although not usually) I don't really think that this smaller-scale problem is worth the breathless rhetoric being routinely applied to it. It won't change the fact that some teenager in Kansas, say, now has just as much chance to read about obscure Belgian techno, say, as anyone else, and that simply wasn't true 15 years ago. So what's the problem?

Of course, the objection is also made that the tragedy is not that things are getting worse, but that we have the opportunity to make things so much better, and we're squandering that. And I think that might be true.

Incidentally, I don't think you can really call the Casey Jones-to-Mickey Mouse process described midway through the article "anarchic," i.e. free of hierarchy, since after all it was the particular presence of structured organizations that allowed Disney to see Steamboat Bill (I assume Keaton didn't screen it for him in his living room) in the first place, and then to allow other people to see Disney's creation. Most of the time, culture isn't really anarchic; I think it's more useful to call it "social," or, if you want, "decentralized." But I think "anarchic" carries with it a whole host of other associations (communitarianism, anti-statism, etc.) which I don't think really apply here. But maybe I should read Vaidhyanathan's whole book.
posted by Mike B. at 4:37 PM 0 comments

Good Penny Arcade strip about the ridiculousness of claiming something "isn't for the critics."

"I bet you'd love to criticize that, wouldn't you, you Critics! But you can't. It's not for you."

posted by Mike B. at 12:44 PM 0 comments

A poem by Mao, which has a similar creepy appeal to Manson's songs and Gacy's paintings:

SNOW
-to the tune of Chin Yuan Chun

February 1936

North country scene:
A hundred leagues locked in ice,
A thousand leagues of whirling snow.
Both sides of the Great Wall
One single white immensity.
The Yellow River's swift current
Is stilled form end to end.
The mountains dance like silver snakes
And the highlands charge like wax-hued elephants,
Vying with heaven in stature.
On a fine day, the land,
Clad in white, adorned in red,
Grows more enchanting.

This land so rich in beauty
Has made countless heroes bow in homage.
But alas! Chin Shih-huang and Han Wu-ti
Were lacking in literary grace,
And Tang Tai-tsung and Sung Tai-tsu
Had little poetry in their souls;
And Genghis Khan,
Proud Son of Heaven for a day,
Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched.
All are past and gone!
For truly great men
Look to this age alone.

Has anyone ever done a study of the function of poetry as repression in China? There's Confucious, too...

posted by Mike B. at 12:24 PM 0 comments

I was walking to the train in Washington Heights this morning when a guy came up and tried to hustle me a bag of indie-rock CDs--the Pixies, the Strokes, Sunny Day Real Estate, Idlewild--for $10. I told him two true things (that I had all of those that I wanted already and that I had about 14 cents in cash on me) but I don't think he believed me. ("14 cents? You're a rich man.") Oh well. I felt kind of bad--I was clearly his best shot on 177th street, since I didn't see a whole lot of other people with messenger backs and guitars on their backs. But then again, they were probably stolen from some other post-collegiate hipster, so I don't need to feel too bad. Then again again, the hipster liked SDRE, so maybe they deserved it.

And then on the train I ran into someone who was in a play I put on freshman year of college. It was an odd morning.

posted by Mike B. at 11:52 AM 0 comments

From Tom Ellard:

One claim made by the pirate hordes is that they preserve things that otherwise would be discarded by the owners. So for example, MAME is a project that illegally collects arcade machine ROMs, whereas The 365 Day Project collects old recordings. On Hotline you can find albums that aren't in the stores any more. The claim is often made but doesn't get tested.

Cinemaware was a company that made games such as Defender Of The Crown and It Came From The Desert - they peaked in the days that Amiga was a viable company and then died sometime in the early 90's. Not sure why. The original owners have realised they have a lot of valuable property and have recently relaunched with a new Defender Of The Crown - can't say if that's worthanything - but I was impressed to see that they've made available all their old Amiga titles for free download. Which I did.

And doubly impressed to see that they're cracked copies. Here's a company that's distributing the titles that somebody stole from them years ago. Which means that they hadn't archived them - and relied on the underground to keep the data. So, use -that- in your next debate.

Plus, Defender of the Crown was pretty awesome.

posted by Mike B. at 11:40 AM 0 comments

Hahahahaha. On the Scissor Sisters:

Live, then, you would hope they'd be smart and funny and subversive and original. Only they aren't. It's a colossal let-down to discover that the Scissor Sisters are not the witty, postmodern dance band of your dreams, but merely a distressingly orthodox party outfit, perfectly suited to this University of East Anglia student union-managed venue. They provide a party, and dancing, but it feels more like a hen night rather than an epiphany.

There is an air of licensed campery to the Scissor Sisters, an accessible outrageousness that's found a home recently in naff meat markets like School Disco or in Seventies nights down the local Ritzy previously. They seem more 'Gay Bar', the Electric Six song, than gay bar, the parallel universe where the shackles of straight society can be magicked into dust and then danced on. The most troglodytic of rugby players would find nothing to threaten his values here.

BECAUSE THE ONLY GOOD MUSIC IS THAT WHICH THREATENS THE SEXUALITY OF RUGBY PLAYERS. God, this is great.

Mark's right to call it a "backlash" here--it's not a critical valuation, it's just a dumb set of preconceptions being broken down. Why would you want a fun band like the Scissor Sisters to turn out to be confrontational and "postmodern"? Oh, right--because then most people wouldn't enjoy them.

Fuck that shit. The Scissor Sisters are great because of, not despite, the fact that they genuinely want everyone to dance and have a good time. That's a rare thing, because they brought the stuffypants hipsters into the tent first, and everyone else follows. Maybe the "subversion" (ugh) they're peddling is not the challenging-heterosexual-norms project the reviewer here seems to want them to engage in (and I always thought achieving gay rights through song was a dream only peddled in off-Broadway plays!), but in challenging the musical norms of their peer group--a more minor project, to be sure, but a more achievable one, too, and a democratizing one. Maybe the trick they perform is in showing that cheesy 70's nights down at the club really are a hell of a lot of fun, and that that's OK.

The funniest thing is how the reviewer likes the Pink Floyd cover best. Of course you do, sweetie.

posted by Mike B. at 11:03 AM 0 comments

It's a good thing I've mentioned The Passion here before so I can justify posting this story, because otherwise I would have to start a whole new blog, but I would do that. It's just that good.

Performers Whip Easter Bunny At Church Play
Minister Says Play Wasn't Offensive

A church in western Pennsylvania trying to teach about the crucifixion of Jesus performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs, upsetting several parents and young children.

People who attended Saturday's performance at Glassport's memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, "There is no Easter bunny," and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.

Melissa Salzmann, who brought her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. "He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped," Salzmann said.

Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God, said the performance wasn't meant to be offensive.

Bickerton portrayed the Easter rabbit and said she tried to act with a tone of irreverence.

"The program was for all ages, not just the kids. We wanted to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter bunny, it is about Jesus Christ," Bickerton said.

Performers broke eggs meant for an Easter egg hunt and also portrayed a drunken man and a self-mutilating woman, said Jennifer Norelli-Burke, another parent who saw the show in Glassport, a community about 10 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

"It was very disturbing," Norelli-Burke said. "I could not believe what I saw. It wasn't anything I was expecting.

Whoa. "A self-mutilating woman"?

posted by Mike B. at 10:46 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Novelty act idea of the day: a Jewish metal band called "Guns 'n' Moses."

posted by Mike B. at 5:51 PM 0 comments

I have now heard the single version of the Fiery Furnaces' "Tropical Ice-Land" (found on The Big Ticket, I believe) and it's still not quite what I'm looking for. It pains me to type this, but it's actually too discordant. And I know, I know, that's a big part of their charm, but given what I think this could be (and given how pretty the original is), the out-of-tune slide guitar riff doesn't work, the reverby noises behind the chorus don't work, the keyboard hook that doesn't quite reach that last note doesn't work, the mixed-high vocal FX fuckery doesn't work. And the drums in the verse aren't that hot either. I dunno--I guess this is just a function of their particular specialty, but given how versatile they are, I'd love to see a single version of some song or another that's just 100% pop, without much of the wonderfully weird production bits that characterize the album version, because a lot of these really are great pop songs that could sound just as good in an unabashed form. I guess I sort of always think this, but I don't want this to be their usual operating principle, just a sort of one or two song experiment. And who knows--maybe they didn't feel confident in this style enough to pull it off. But I think now, or pretty soon, they definitely could.

And having lived with "I Lost My Dog" for a while, I can't help but think a similar thing--the second verse is just so good, absent a slightly better drum part, that it's grown to annoy me how the whole thing falls out of that tempo after the third or fourth verse. (There's, what, 8 or 9 verses? This is awesome.) I really love that backwards-kick breakdown bit, and even love it at that tempo, but I want it to charge back into the faster beat, given how good they are at shifting tempos. I think it'd be great if it really went for it at the end.

I might do something about that myself, though...

posted by Mike B. at 4:07 PM 0 comments

Funny real-life music reference of the day: overheard the sales guy talking about Violet Brown. Wanted to yell, "Who's Violet Brown?" Didn't.

Reminded me that I should really pick up the new Cex album sometime.

posted by Mike B. at 3:51 PM 0 comments

Creepy factoid of the day: on our company's life insurance invoice, where it would normally say "quantity" or some such and list the number of things sold, it instead says "lives." Brr.

posted by Mike B. at 3:37 PM 0 comments

ROCK AND ROLL BON MOTS, #004

I still heart the Scissor Sisters--the hatin' just makes me laugh, especially when it sounds like a sexually frustrated 14-year-old metal fan compaining about Britney. (Not naming names, but you know who you are.)

posted by Mike B. at 12:35 PM 0 comments

I am back from a little place I like to call Michiana. Regular posting to resume shortly, when my brain stops going "bleeeaaaargh." Hopefully, this will be later today, assuming my employers continue to operate under the impression that I am not actually here, although this is, I admit, unlikely. In the meantime I am listening to soothing things like Les Mouches, Beck, Asobi Seksu, etc.

Brief notes:

Looks like people are starting to discuss the study, which is good. (Link via Sasha.)

DJ set from Harm. (!)

Four days of posts about economic systems and Wal-Mart's oppressive business practices are about the last thing I want to wade through when I get back from vacation. So I didn't.

I need a vacation from this vacation. Maybe involving...robots?

UPDATE: At Hillary's request, here is an article of mine from Flagpole, an Athens, GA alt-weekly. It's basically a reprint of these two posts, except with section headings (!), minor revisions, and a fun little sentence or two at the end to tie it all together, which sentences I quite like, if I'm being immodest here. This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of clap clap / Flagpole collaborations, brought to you by reader & commenter/editor (respectively) Chris, to whom thanks are heartily extended. Of course, this will involve me writing more substantive posts rather than three-line factoids, but I'll get to that, really I will.

posted by Mike B. at 12:19 PM 0 comments