I hesistate these days to write much of anything about the current administration or the GOP at large lest I trip and fall down their rabbit hole of blatant hypocrisy. Yet reading a post by Andrew Sullivan this morning, I felt the need to comment. Ah, the sweet illusion of participating in a dialogue.
Anyway, Sullivan is discussing the fact that while McCain bases his fitness for office on his status as a former POW, and more particularly a victim of torture, the Bush administration continues to support a set of policies which (incoherent as they may be) seem to negate McCain’s experiences in Hanoi as torture per se. In Sullivan’s words:
[Based on administration policy,] Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of “long-time standing” that victims of Bush’s torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely “enhanced interrogation.”
It barely needs saying that for the GOP, the fundamental unspoken (or perhaps, for some, subconscious) distinction between what happened to McCain in Vietnam and what now happens to prisoners at Guantanamo is that in McCain’s case it was happening to a white Christian American. This fundamental racist Christo-supremicism is what makes McCain a brave survivor of cruel torture while Adel Hamad, for example, is merely an enemy combatant subject to enhanced interrogation techniques, though of course could never be admitted.
And yet the question of whether McCain was tortured itself contains a deadly contradiction for the in adminstration. This question is unlike the familiar questions which directly challenge official narratives of the “War on Terror,” such as ther we are torturing people, whether there was evidence of WMDs in Iraq, or whether there is any reasonable basis for detaining the particular people currently at held at Guantanamo. Practiced lies, no matter how absurd, can be employed to shut down any of these lines of inquiry. On the other hand, answering the McCain question at all will amount to a choosing between three options, all of which are unacceptable from a public relations standpoint.
1) Admitting publicly what the world already knows - that America tortures prisoners
2) Debunking the POW hero status of its chosen faux-maverick successor.
or
3) Acknowledging that what was torture for McCain is not torture in Guantanamo because the lives of our enemy combatants are of lesser value.
A sort of interesting note on sample provenance from Wikipedia: In the original song, the various vocal samples are taken from Spock and Bones on Star Trek. Who knew? Maybe everybody.
Beastmaster Romance - “What’s on Yr Mind (Pure Lethargy)” [mp3]
Two excellent discoveries in Brooklyn this weekend:
1) Brooklyn Flea. Here, on Sundays, you can admire all types of flea market goodness. Even if you’re not looking to spend any money, browing around is worth the trio, not to mention that it’s a great excuse to walk or bike along the tree-lined streets of Fort Greene. Alongside the usual flea fare of found treasures and furniture from the 70s, the market features live bicycle refurbishing and handfull of terrific food stands. Tina and I split a jalapeno and cheese pupusa and a big cup of really excellent horchata. There are also several stalls featuring local arts and crafts, including…
Bicycles are important, beautiful, and worth a close look.
Most bikes I paint are, or have been, used daily for transportation, recreation, messenger work and/or for racing, They are worn and customized uniquely, being at once a specific bike and a collective symbol of empowerment.
Off hand, I don’t know of any other artists who use bicycles as their primary subject matter (a quick google search reveals the more technically-oriented work of Daniel Rebour). I like the idea of portraying bicycles as “symbols of empowerment” though the notion of custom bicycle portraits makes me somewhat wary. On the one hand, capturing your bike in a sort of family portrait could be a statement on the importance of self-powered transportation in your life. Self-congratulatory, maybe, but sincere and kind of tender. But then I also envision a scenario where a wealthy Park Slope brownstoner commissions a portrait of the $5,000 racing bike he takes for a couple turns around Prospect Park every other weekend; a crass glorification on luxury goods which is frankly barfarific.
Potential benefactor obnoxiousness aside, I recommend taking a tour through Lempert’s gallery of paintings, drawings, and prints.
Boing Boing recently noted that seminal new wave band Devo has filed suit against McDonalds for copywright infringement regarding “New Wave Nigel,” a Happy Meal toy created as part of a joint McDonalds-American Idol marketing campaign. As you can see in the image to the left, Nigel’s outfit - in particular the hat - bears a striking resemblance to the classic Devo uniform, which is apparently “copyrighted and trademarked.”
This lawsuit produces some conflicting feelings for me. On the one hand, I’m generally opposed to intellectual property litigation. It’s absurd that Devo has copyrighted a silly hat and is now seeking to control how and where that silly hat can be replicated. Devo created a set of visual and musical aesthetics and then released those aesthetics into the public sphere, making a fair amount of money in the process, I’d imagine. Now that these ideas have released into the culture at large, the idea that Devo should be able to determine when, how, and by whom they are used is neither ethically sound or logistically tenable.
But then this particular case provides something of a worst-case scenario for copyfighters. In the name of free-flowing art and information, should Devo have no recourse against such heinous corporate entities as McDonalds and American Idol when they attempt to co-opt Devo’s work for the purpose of pushing lowest-common-denominator, profit-driven pap or - probably worse, but who can tell - fuel for the intertwining destruction of small-scale agriculture, local consumer economies, union labor, and healthy metabolisms worldwide?
This is the kind of case that intellectual property proponents cite when they attempt to frame the increased control of creative work as an effort on behalf of struggling artists rather than the Disneys and Viacoms of the world. Devo, while clearly not a group of struggling artists at this point, is undeniably the little guy when stacked up next to McDonalds and American Idol. What’s more, Devo’s Jerry Casale particularly cites the band’s opposition to these corporate/cultural institutions as their motivation for pressing the suit.
What’s a pirate-friendly, vegetarian, corporate-media-hating, I.P. insurgent to do? Accept this unsavory use of the Devo hat as an unfortunate side effect of an open system of culture production (while combating the likes of American Idol and McDonalds by other means)? Cheer on Devo for turning the big boys’ weapon of content control against them?
After eight years of slugging it out in a city unfriendly to bands, they make their final appearance tonight at the Delancey.
In their wake, they leave a puddle of kicked-over whiskey, a tangle of broken strings, and a whole catalogue of big, noisy, deceptively taut rock and roll songs. Their hands have been gnawed by dogs in Brooklyn. They’ve been chased through the streets of Dallas by psychopathic junkies. They’ve driven across the country in a giant van with questionable steering capacity, fending off weird sexual advances and weirder home security systems. They’ve put up with as many crappy sound systems, dubious bookings, and personal injuries as any other band, and more than some.
But then they also dished it out as well as they took it. They’ve never been shy about playing the better part of a set with their backs to the crowd, periodically laying down on the stage, or clearing a room with an unwarranted and seemingly unstructured noise outro. They persistently ignored song requests (though generally granted requests for Jared to disrobe) and from time to time they flipped over drums, threw microphones, hemmed and hawed.
But if they weren’t always the most audience-friendly band, they more than made up for in the quality of their songwriting. Man in Gray’s musical sensibilities never relied on silly gimmicks, facile references, or labored attitudes and airs. To paraphrase Mr. Business, Man in Gray was a five-piece band where no two pieces were ever playing the same thing at the same time. For me, that was always a part of their charm, but it certainly meant that their music was never easy for the listener. And maybe that’s one of the big reasons they never became the darlings of LES tastemakers or the blogosphere’s MP3 dilettantes. They never tried to inspire some new and precious multi-hyphenated sub-genre, so reviewers tended to deal with them by tossing off a thoughtless Pixies comparison and moving on to something in the electroclash vein.
In fact, the Pixies-est thing about Man in Gray was the ten million pounds of sludge that they dumped over most of their recognizable hooks. Their songs, especially heard live, require some excavation on the part of the listener. Sure, there are tracks like Incommunicado or the inexplicably-disappeared Hoboken that come out swinging, but so many of the band’s best songs are the slow burners. Pay enough attention to tracks like Crawl, Sleeping, the bipolar Green, even their behemoth eponymous track, and you can uncover the truly sharp and clever phrases that lurk beneath the messy surface. It’s these songs, I think, that give you the biggest reward on repeated listenings.
Looking back you can say for sure that Man in Gray held their own. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day they achieve the scene’s ultimate retroactive reward: to become one of those bands that tomorrow’s hipsters pretend to have been into at the time.
Man in Gray’s Farewell Performance
w/ Gold Streets, Mancino, and Zero Spanish
TONIGHT, 8pm, $6
@ The Delancey (198 Delancey St.)
Boing Boingcalls attention to the Associated Press’ recent attempt to implement fees onto publications, including blogs of course, that want the privilege of quoting their articles.
For quoting as few as five words, the AP now expects you to cough up a liscencing fee ($12.50 for 5 -25 words, more cash for bigger quotes). What’s more, if they don’t like the way you use the quote (if you criticize AP coverage, for example?) they reserve the right to revoke that liscence.
Coverage of this new policy in the New York Times’ business section calls this an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.” Of course, the AP has no need (nor indeed any right) to establish such a standard for itself, as a legal precedent already exists in the form of Fair Use doctrine. According to the Copyright Act of 1976:
the fair use of a copyrighted work…for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The logic that excludes a 2-25 word quote from an article within a blog post from such a definition must be tortured indeed.
Boing Boing quotes extensively (and presumably without having paid) from the salient analysis that appears on Making Light.
Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.
Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.
The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.
While I don’t think the Associated Press is actively looking to implement social Darwinism though control of media content, there can be little doubt that they are engaged, intentionally or not, with the full-scale elimination of the public sphere in favor of a giant system of end user license agreements. Such a process assumes that journalistic institutions not only have the right to enforce where and when their reportage is referenced, but that this right supersedes the public’s right to exchange information on matters of public importance. It becomes the duty of the public to fit public debate into considerations of the AP’s profitability and to stay on message (i.e. support the AP’s editorial decisions) if it wishes to generate an active discussion of public information as it is filtered by the AP.
These structures are symptomatic of a corporate media system that wants to ride the wave of new media technologies in order to penetrate more and more markets, and in many cases to include their audience in the production of branded content, but nevertheless to deny the challenges to content ownership that come along with those media. In any case, if there is a more sisyphian task than attempting to secure than text on the internet, I can’t say I know what it is.
This contradictory stance is perhaps most evident in the AP’s stupefying attempt to crowdsource the enforcement of its fee structure. iCopyright (the company that the AP has employed to handle it’s quotation liscencing) advertises an Operation-TIPS-style snitch program, offering up to $1 million for reporting instances of “piracy”. So watch yourself, because “it is remarkably easy for digital rights bounty hunters to catch and prosecute pirates.”
Ultimately these quotation licenses will probably end up a passing error in judgment. It would seem that the AP has already backed off of its very first high-profile attempt at enforcement. According to the New York Times:
Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.
On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.
The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet.
Luckily for the public sphere, the internet knows how to bite back.
