posted Feb 27, 2004, 11:20 PM | 6 Comments
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posted Feb 24, 2004, 12:07 PM | 13 Comments
I am participating in Grey Tuesday as a civil protest against EMI's efforts to censor DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, one of the most outstanding albums produced in recent months. It combines the music of the Beatle's White Album with the vocal tracks from Jay Z's Black Album. Jay Z released a capella versions of his album expressly to encourage this type of creativity. The evolution of hip-hop has long involved a clear understanding that all existing art rests on the shoulders of art that has come before. To allow people to freely share, celebrate and build upon art is to celebrate the artist. Luckily, organizations like Creative Commons allow artists to easily liscense their works in a way that allows reproduction, derivative works, and sampling.
The Grey Album pays as much respect to the talents of Jay-Z as it does to the musical legacy of the Beatles. Unsuprisingly, EMI has shown little interest in the artistic significance of this album, little appreciation for the fact that the popularity of this mix will likely boost sales of Beatles records. It is my sincere hope that EMI will reconsider their attitude towards the use of their music for sampling, and that recording artists will avoid turning their copyrights over to the five major record companies, including EMI. These companies consistently behave as if they are more interested in dollars that they are in honoring the work of their artist. They are.
In the not so distant past, all culture was free. All ideas and arts were free for unlimited consumption, free to build upon and remix. In our modern era of digital distribution, the laws governing intellectual property and copyrights have ushered us into a dark world in which less and less of the culture we consume can be freely digested and reincorporated into new creative endeavors. In the not so distant future, I believe that all culture is destined to be free again.
I am participating in Grey Tuesday as an act of civil disobedience against the laws that allow EMI to prevent the distribution of the following tracks. Under the provisions of Fair Use, it is perfectly legal for you to download and listen to them once to learn about the material in order to make an informed decision about the current laws that govern copyright. The tracks are excellent, and I hope you enjoy them:
Before this protest even began, many of the people who agreed to participate received Cease and Desist letters from lawyers representing EMI. I encourage you to visit
Waxy.org to review the unfolding of events surrounding these recordings. I also encourage you to read the
Downhill Battle and
Mathcaddy responses to the C&D letters received by the owners of those sites, (which are poignant and poignantly clever, respectively). For a list of additional sites participating in the protest, visit
Grey Tuesday.org.
Everybody move to the back of the bus. Keep the air alive.
posted Feb 14, 2004, 07:52 PM | 10 Comments
Last Friday I saw
The Shins perform at the
Henry Fonda Theatre. They rocked. Said their charismatic basist to the enthusiastic crowd, "What? You want me to take my clothes off? Well, I don't normally do this—you're special, Los Angeles. Here's my PLAIN BAGEL" He pulled up his shirt and wrapped thumbs and forefingers around his belly, creating a wheel of flesh. Outside, on the patio above Hollywood, I observed that
Christina Ricci and
Adam Goldberg both smoke Parliament Lights. I sipped at my straw, thinking to myself that
Rock Star isn't quite on par with Red Bull when it comes to vodka mixers. Later the crowd stood up, waiting, pounding on the floor.
On Saturday, at the
Knitting Factory, a sweat-shirted
Bob Odenkirk answered questions from a small adoring crowd about the failed television pilots we had all just watched. He spoke about comedy writing and cracked
jokes about the Fox network. Afterwards my friends and I wandered out onto the boulevard, yelling and skipping, seeking out
ice cream and pitchers of Natural Light.
The following morning I
joined a gym, planning to grow strong and, uh... noble. After I filled out all my paperwork and paid a bunch of money, I climbed onto a Stairmaster (an odd virgin experience, this small infinite escalator). I marched upwards and onwards for a while, and just as I decided that it was time to strap on my
iPod headphones, some R Kelly song came on the house stereo. "Ah, R Kelly," I thought to myself. "That crazy dude." A second after the music began, I heard a sort of chuckle/grunt to my left... and I looked over to see who it came from. And I'll be damned if it wasn't
R Fucking Kelly climbing the Stairmaster beside me, sweating his face off. He grinned and nodded toward me, (as I nearly tripped off my stairs, shocked by such surreal synchronicity) and then turned away to talk with a couple of his boyz who were climing machines beside him. The four of us marched in unison. I put on
Outkast, and laughed on the inside.
Sometimes L.A. life treats you silly.Three weeks ago, with the help of my girlfriend Jenny, my four-person production company filmed some quick pieces involving a couple of
viking costumes. A fun learning experience. We adjourned around 1pm, and headed downtown to see the
Frank Gehry exhibit at the
Museum of Contemporary Art. Models and blueprints lined the floors and walls. Bits of wood and paper. Jenny, Jason and I walked down the street to see the twisted titanium
Walt Disney Concert Hall. We took photographs and watched a crew shooting some kind of SUV commercial, as the sun set, pinkish. Jenny and I drove Jason back to his apartment, stopped by a cafe for dinner, and walked around the corner to the
NuArt to see the remarkable documentary
My Architect.
Later we met up with Jason in the hills above Studio City, where he was spinning records in the largest room of a beautiful
mid-20th century modern home. It was a housewarming party. We talked with the owner, a friendly and generous 28-year-old fellow who made his fortune working in the porn industry. We drank beer with new acquaintances, smoked by the fireplace, and drove on home.
Sometimes L.A. life treats you well.
posted Feb 8, 2004, 10:39 PM | 8 Comments
Last night at Mel's Diner in Hollywood, my friend Leonard set a new high water mark for Personal Geekdom that impressed me. As a group of us sat around the table, snacking and enjoying alcohol-tempered conversation, I looked over to see Leonard checking the referrer logs for his
weblog on his
Treo 600 pda/phone. And because the overhead lights were bright, he was holding it inside the glare-free cavity of his
Electronic Frontier Foundation baseball cap. A priceless moment.
posted Feb 6, 2004, 10:03 PM | 1 Comments
My friend Star shared with me a really interesting passage from an essay called "The Crack Attack," by Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine. I thought I'd post it in honor of Reagan's 93th birthday:
"Once he became president in 1981, Reagan and his appointees attempted to restructure public policy according to a radically conservative ideology. Through the lens of this ideology, most social problems appeared to be simply the consequences of individual moral choices. Programs and research that had for many years been directed at the social and structural sources of social problems were systematically defunded in budgets and delegitimated in discourse. Unemployment, poverty, urban decay, school crises, crime, and all their attendant forms of human troubles were spoken of and acted upon as if they were the result of individual deviance, immorality, or weakness. The most basic premise of social science - that individual choices are influenced by social circumstances - was rejected as left-wing ideology. Reagan and the New Right constricted the aperture of attribution for America's ills so that only the lone deviant came into focus. They conceptualized people in troubl
e as people who make trouble; they made social control rather than social welfare the organizing axis of public policy.
Drug problems fit neatly into this ideological agenda and allowed conservatives to engage in sociological denial - to scapegoat drugs for many social and economic problems. For Reagan-style conservatives and the New Right, people did not so much abuse drugs because they were jobless, homeless, poor, depressed, or alienated; they were jobless, homeless, poor, depressed, or alienated because they were weak, immoral, or foolish enough to use illicit drugs. For the right wing, American business productivity was not lagging because investors spent their capital on mergers and stock speculation instead of new plants and equipment, or for any number of other economic reasons routinely mentioned in the Wall Street Journal or Business Week. Rather, conservatives claimed that businesses had difficulty competing partly because many workers were using drugs. In this view, U.S. education was in trouble not because it had suffered demoralizing budget cuts, but because a "generation" o
f students were "on drugs" and their teachers did not "get tough" with them. The new drug warriors did not see crime plaguing the ghettos and barrios for all the reasons it always has, but because of the influence of a new chemical bogetyman.
Crack was a godsend to the Right. They used it and the drug issue as an ideological fig leaf to place over the unsightly urban ills that had increased markedly under Reagan administration social and economic policies. "The drug problem" served conservative politicians as an all -purpose scapegoat. They could blame an array of problems on the deviant individuals, and then expand the nets of social control to imprison those people for causing the problems."Funny how much the ideology described in the first paragraph survives with the Bush Administration, who resists a sociological approach to so many issues, narrows the terms of the problem-solving process with finger-pointing.
posted Feb 4, 2004, 11:00 PM | 5 Comments
Earlier today, as I was thinking about the moon, Mars, space exploration and technology, something suddenly occurred to me: It is possible that we will never, in my lifetime, develop successful
flying car technology for personal use.
It's a sobering thought.