Category: Media

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Abba Babble

Get this– from the Toronto Star, April 2, 2000:

Buried in their songs is a complex artfulness disguised in simple pop formulas, a carefully crafted infectiousness that resonates in the group’s shimmering four-part harmonies, crisp, Scandinavian enunciation, and deceptively easy rhythms. These songs, these performances, are the work of pop music geniuses. They reel us in every time we hear them.”

And one day we will all come to believe that Gilligan’s Island is really an existential drama about the dread with which modern man faces technological domination.

Their names are Bjorn Ulvaeus, Anni-Frid Lyngstad (the red-head), Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog (the blonde). Anni-Frid, Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha: Abba.

Faltskog no longer has anything to do with music. Lyngstad is into environmental causes. Benny plays accordion in some obscure folk band somewhere in Sweden. Bjorn is promoting a musical, “Mama Mia” based on Abba songs.

The most disgusting aspect of this revisionism is the pompous self-importance it allows small-time talents like Bjorn Ulvaeus.

You know, I could have sort of liked Abba a little, if I hadn’t read this drivel.

 

“Serious music critics now rank Ulvaeus and Andersson’s songs with those of the Beatles and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and their musical weight in European culture alongside Grieg and Sibelius.”

Exactly which serious musical critic?  Let me assure you, serious music critics do not rate Abba with the Beatles or the Beach Boys or even, probably, with Bobby Sherman.  Well, okay: with Bobby Sherman.

What is this? Some kind of neo-con aesthetic putsch? You have to believe that only an idiot who is unaware of the Beatles’ career beyond 1965 could make such a statement. The kind of idiot who never listened to Revolver, Rubber Soul, Sergeant Pepper’s, White Album, Let it Be, and Abbey Road. As for the Beach Boys, well, yeah, lyrically there’s not much to choose from, but please name me a single Abba song that, in terms of musical imagination, could be uttered in the same breath as “Good Vibrations”.

Exactly which Abba song can be compared to “A Day in the Life”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Norwegian Wood”, “Penny Lane”, or “Fool on the Hill”?

You want to know something else? The girls were never all that good-looking either.

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MP3’s

Let me make it clear, first of all, that I have no desire to save the music industry. The music industry consists largely of blood-sucking vampires who abuse, deceive, and exploit raw talent. A pox on all of their houses.

But, I do want artists to be paid for their work.

It is clear that there is no way to stop people from using the internet and their computers to freely copy music. It’s too easy. Even if you wanted to pay for the music, it is easier to download a copy from the internet than it is to buy a CD at your local record store.

But if the music industry can no longer sell enough CD’s to pay their artists, how will the artists be paid?

Here’s my solution: the government should impose a surcharge on all personal  internet accounts. The surcharge will be collected by all Internet Service Providers and remitted to an organization managed by representatives of the musical artists community. All artists who wish to be paid for their music will have the option of joining or not joining. This organization will find a way to track the volume of downloads for each member artist. Based on these numbers, each artist will be compensated directly from the fund.

The amount of the surcharge will probably only have to be about $2 or $3 a month or less.

The beauty of this plan is that the government is not required to monitor anybody’s downloads, or try to regulate internet usage. All it has to do is impose the fee and ensure that the money is funneled directly to the artists (and not to the parasitical music industry itself).

The only problem with this proposed system is that someone will have to develop a way of monitoring downloads and tabulating the numbers for each artist. I rather think that the makers of Napster, faced with multi-billion dollar law suits from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) would be more than happy to comply. As for all those people who are paranoid of government intervention, it should be stressed that the monitoring is done by the proposed artists’ agency and not by the government or the recording industry.

There. Done. A remarkably simple and effective solution. I hereby copyright it.

All I ask is mere .01% of the take.

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Microsoft Word Still Sucks

Normally I sit down and collect details for this kind of rant, but I’m too enraged to do it right now.

The subject is Microsoft Office and Front Page 2000.

Microsoft has had a monopoly on office “suites” since they intentionally destroyed Word Perfect for Windows by finagling the settings on the links to the operating system so that Word Perfect crashed frequently. Word Perfect never recovered. (Does anyone still remember when Word Perfect had a huge margin on MS Word, in the DOS world?)

Office has a lot of nice functions, a fairly nice interface, and some intriguing capabilities. You can’t avoid using it because almost every office has standardized on it. Employees request it. And it does have some slick features.

But it has a number of very, very large annoyances, all of which serve to profit Microsoft at the users’ expense.

1. What kind of idiot wants to store all his documents in a directory called “my documents”? Well, an idiot. You get a computer. You don’t understand anything about directories or files. You create something in “Word”. Where is it? Where is my document? Oh! Eureka! It’s in “my documents”. How convenient. Convenient, of course, until you have about 200 documents and you need to sort them into logical directories.

And guess what– Microsoft is carrying this absurdity even further! I just noticed there are two new directories on my computer called “my photos” and “my web pages” and “my music”.

And, after reading Bill Gates’ personal web page, I now understand what the meaning is of “my” in those directory names: your files belong to Bill Gates.

2. I have a lot of documents. I store them in many directories. In order to find what I want quickly, I have a list of “favorites”, which narrows down the search considerably, and quickly. Then I installed Front Page 2000 and Internet Explorer. You know what these incomprehensibly stupid programs did? They added my internet bookmarks to my “favorites” list. Does Microsoft honestly think that I now want to keep all my files on web servers all over the globe? And just try to get rid of the extra “favorites” that refer to web sites like “Amazon” (just where I want to store my personal letters, of course). Does anyone know how to get rid of them?

3. I used to create a certain file in Excel and then save it and then import it into Front Page to convert it to a web page so I could adjust the décor, install some images, and fine tune it for my web page. Well, after installing Front Page 2000, whenever I open the file, it opens Excel! Look, you morons, I want to open it in Front Page, not Excel! You can’t even “import” it into Front Page. Are you people incredibly stupid or what?

4. We have an application in the office where I work that runs on Access 95. When we installed Access 97 (as part of Office 97) on our computers, the application could no longer run. So we tried to install Access 95, while leaving the rest of the Office suite alone. Access 95 killed off Access 97. For what reason, pray tell, can you not run both Access 95 and Access 97 on the same computer? Well, the obvious reason is Microsoft’s desire to bully you into upgrading everyone in your office to Office 97.

5. For that same application, we needed some kind of module from the Developer’s Tool Kit for Office 95, which cost about $1000. We bought it. We installed it. Then we found out the application will not work with Office 97. So we went looking for the Developer’s Toolkit for Office 97. Microsoft didn’t offer it anymore. Tell you what though– if you upgrade everyone in the office to Office 2000, you can buy some other combination of stupid modules for $2000 that might give you the same functionality. But then again, it might not. Nobody knows for sure. And just think: right at this very moment, Microsoft is probably hatching their next evil plan to make your life miserable until you buy some new, expensive Microsoft application, which only make your life even more miserable.

6. I invest a lot of work in templates. They save a lot of time, if you create web pages that essentially require similar formats and images. So where are the templates for Front Page? Where are they hiding? In a directory called “templates”? Damned if I know. Where are the Office 2000 templates now? Here’s a history of where templates used to go:

 

  • Word 6.0 c:\msoffice\msword\templates
  • Office 95 c:\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97a c:\program files\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97b c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates
  • Office 2000 c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates\??????

When I tried to find my Front Page templates, I ended up in a directory called:

..\..\..\windows\application data\Microsoft\chromehorse\images\rotw.jpg

Now the “chromehorse” and “rotw.jpg” are mine. They belong in c:\chromehorse. What is this file doing here? Why is Microsoft continually hiding stuff all over the place on my humungous hard drive, so it is almost impossible to figure out what files belong where and what they do? Well, it’s not some weird sort of complex system of preserving your data. In fact, this ‘system’ is designed to embed defaults into Windows that make you wholly and utterly dependent on the operating system (Microsoft) to manage your data. And the aim of all of this is to make it less and less conceivable or possible for you to use any product that doesn’t understand these secrets intimately. In other words, any product other than those made by Microsoft.

7. Do you use the power save functions of Windows? Then your system has probably crashed. It probably went into power save mode and wouldn’t “wake up”. It went into a coma. And guess what? If you shut off the power switch on the back of your computer so you can reboot, you might very well lock the system into a permanent coma. You might have to pull the battery off the motherboard to get it to wake up again. If they can’t make the power save functions work properly, why do they even bother to put them in?

8. Wow. Even as I was writing this, I discovered a new incredibly irritating “feature”. In order to get around the other idiotic defaults of Office 2000, I decided to import my favorite Front Page template into Word and save it as a Word template. Then I can use it to write my rants in Word and save them in HTML for transfer to my web page. But guess what? When I try to import the template, Office opens Front Page instead of Word, even when I try to open the document in Word!

Whoa nelly! I just found out where Microsoft is really storing my Office templates! It’s in:

c:\windows\application data\Microsoft\templates

So we can add this to the list.

And you can think about how efficient it is to keep moving your files around like that. It’s as if every six months, your company moved their head office to a different building in a different town, and hid all the office supplies in various new locations, and changed all your user names and passwords, and won’t tell you where the parking garage is.

Wow.

As for my templates….

I’m not sure where my templates are actually. There are some bizarre file names at the tail end of that directory, none of which tell me where my laboriously designed and crafted templates are.

So, never forget that Microsoft’s goal is to put a computer into every trailer in every trailer park in America. Never forget that customers can be broken down into three categories.

10% all smart people

44% all educated people and smart people

90% people who live in trailer parks and smart people and educated people

And Microsoft probably understands that 90% very well.

“Honey, where the hell are my documents?”

“You don’t have any documents, dear. You are illiterate.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.”

By the way, Microsoft isn’t the only evil empire out there. Netscape stores your precious e-mails and bookmarks in a directory called:

c:\program files\communicator\users\mail

And your e-mail files are huge. Why? I don’t know. What are they storing in there? One of my email files is about 80 megabytes and contains about 500 messages. What on earth are they storing in there? Every address of every web page on the face of the earth in every message? Details of the merger with Warner Brothers?

Folks, it’s like TV. When TV started, in the 1950’s, we had some first-rate plays and dramas sponsored by Hallmark and other corporations looking for prestige.

Within ten years, we had “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “Green Acres”, “Mr. Ed”, “Petticoat Junction”, and “Gomer Pyle”.

 

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Survivor: Fake TV

Well, Survivor II is in full swing now. In case you missed it, a group of individuals are placed in a primitive, uncivilized location and forced to fend for themselves for three months or so while relying strictly on their wits, skills, and courage– and the generosity of the camera crew– to survive. Once a week, they have a “tribal council” meeting and vote one member out of the club. The last remaining member wins $1 million.

The movie is called “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” based on a novel by Horace McCoy (1935) and filmed by Sydney Pollack in 1969 (starring Gig Young, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Sarrazin and Jane Fonda).

What? How can that be?

The movie is about a dance marathon. During The Great Depression, various organizations, including radio stations, would host these crazy dance marathons to attract an audience, and, I suppose, to distract people from their problems. Couples or individuals would sign up and dance and dance and dance, non-stop, until only one couple was left on the floor. That couple won some money. The prize was never really very big, but it was the depression. People were desperate.

Gig Young, in one of the great roles of American cinema, plays the MC of this particular dance. His performance is dazzling. He is a mixture of Dick Clark, Billy Graham, and Satan, cajoling the dancers onwards, promising them extravagant rewards and fame, ruthlessly weeding out the half-hearted, the weak, and the indifferent. When a beautiful young girl offers to have sex with him on the understanding that he will help her win, he smiles slightly, takes the sex, but delivers nothing. The girl mistakenly believed some kind of obligation would exist, when she knew full well that she had no power to compel it.

Some medical care is provided for the dancers, but they are generally brutalized, ruthlessly weeded out, and cruelly disposed of when they give up.

When it becomes clear that not enough dancers are falling fast enough, they hold “sprints”. The dancers race around in a big circle, and the last couple is eliminated. During one of these sprints, a sailor (Red Buttons) has a heart attack and dies. His girl continues dragging him along and over the finish line ahead of one other couple. As medical personnel attend to him, Gig Young orders the band to play to distract the crowd– the party goes on. And now a word from our sponsor.

The similarities between “They Shoot Horses Don’t They” and “Survivor” are uncanny. Except that Jeff Probst is to Gig Young what Dean Jones was to Laurence Olivier. But the message is the same. Survivor is about our system, our society, and what makes you a winner or loser in the general scheme of things by which most of us live. As such, it is a remarkably amoral scheme. There are no rewards for virtue, honesty, or integrity.

The scheme of Survivor is sold to us as a contest in which the most talented and strongest are the likely winners. But it soon became clear that the most talented and strongest were the first to be voted off the island, and the most devious and manipulative dominated the proceedings. It is a tribute to the endless resourcefulness of our culture that this state of affairs was readily absorbed and adapted. Richard Hatch, the cleverest and most cunning of the contestants, quickly became a celebrity.

It is interesting that, while selling us the program as a test of survivor skills (even the name…), the producers didn’t have the guts to stay with the original concept for very long. First of all, emergency medical help was always readily available. Secondly, food had to be flown into the island on a regular basis in order to keep the contestant’s alive. Thirdly, scenes were regularly staged or re-enacted to improve on camera angles.

But most importantly, contestants were routinely manipulated in order to provide more conflict– and better television.  Left to their own devices, they were quite likely to have cooperated, something that could only be allowed in the worst nightmares of the sponsors.

But the most important element of phoniness in the whole thing is the rather bizarre ritual of voting someone off the island at the end of every episode, as if this process is analogous to some indispensable element of human society. Think of the possible alternative ways of determining a winner. A simple vote by all the contestants at the end of three months. A vote by the audience. A skills contest. Or they could even have split up the million among anyone who could survive one year without any outside help.

What might have happened is that the group would have pulled together, built a society that works for them, and learned the value of cooperation and sharing. But hey, even Sesame Street has advertising nowadays.

On the other hand, they might have broken down into competing factions, started bickering, and ended up killing each other.

What is clear in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” is that the entire contest is rigged. The participants are urged to believe that, “in this great country of ours”, the rules are fair, the rewards are just, and anyone can win. The belief in this system is what propels people to join the marathons, and what provides the owners of the marathons with their wealth. The climax of the story is when the contestants find out that the cost of all of their “expenses” (food, water, bedding) are deducted from their winnings. Not only are they exploited and cheated– they are obliged to finance the very means by which they are exploited and cheated!

In the same way the Capital Gains Deduction takes money out of the revenue stream and hands it over to the rich, so that middle-class taxpayers– who can’t afford personal accountants, and can’t make the huge investments that are eligible for capital gains exemptions– are essentially funding the very system by which they are cheated.

The weekly tribal council idea is propaganda for the right wing. There are only so many goodies to go around, and the best way to distribute things is to have a system that rewards the greediest and most ruthless among us, and punishes the nice. It’s George Bush Jr.’s tax cut in the flesh.

But I’ll bet the producers of Survivor didn’t consciously think that they were providing the right wing with free advertising. I’ll bet they just thought that a bunch of people cooperating and helping each other would be pretty boring to most viewers. And as much as I despise them, they got the viewers, and the headlines, and the talk shows, and the book deals.

They are the real survivors.

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CNN: Pabulum for the Brain

CNN, the world’s most important news station (and so say all of us!) showed it’s true colours tonight.

Tonight is the 10th anniversary of one of the most significant events of the 20th century, the tearing down of the Berlin wall. Though the end of the cold war was marked by many different stages and events, the tearing down of the wall was easily the most powerful and dramatic. It marked an end to almost fifty years of isolation and hostility, that macabre dance of death between the two lethally-armed super-powers, the exploitation of proxy states in the third world, and the polarization of the globe’s communities. It provided the world with a striking symbol of the failure of communist ideology to satisfy the needs and aspirations of millions of people. It was one of the most important events of the century.

In honor of this event, CNN decided to broadcast an interview… with Princess Diana’s butler.

You know, this is pretty consistent with CNN’s general philosophical point of view, if you can call it that. News is entertainment. That was clear from the early days of “Eyewitness News”, a stylistic innovation pioneered by the masters of trashy tv in the 1970’s, ABC. “Eyewitness News” redefined “importance” to mean “that which provides the most exciting film footage”. The top news story would be that blazing car wreck at Jefferson and Wilson, or a gaggle of high school cheer-leaders holding a car-wash to raise money for fashion orphans, instead of some new disarmament treaty or new labour laws or trade agreements or whatever. Eyewitness news injected humour and trite personal comments by the newscasters. It emphasized the chemically enhanced skin tones of their anchors and their flashy hairstyles.

This is where most Americans ingest their news. Pabulum for the brain.

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Reversed Progress

Here is an illustration of backwards progress.  Yes, I know, all these pictures are reduced to 72 dpi for display on computer– these are illustrations.   To give you real samples to analyze with me, I’d have to post some files that are very, very large, to show what the pictures look like, for example, at 400 dpi. However, anyone with an actual collection of photos can verify my argument.  You can  see that the black and white photos from the 50’s and 60’s have better resolution than the Instamatic or Polaroid shots from the 60’s,  70’s, and 80’s.

brownie50.jpg (13454 bytes)
Kodak Brownie Picture, 1950’s.  Large negative format = decent print.

brownie1.jpg (17509 bytes)
Brownie Picture – 1960’s still quite decent.

bw35mm1.jpg (12144 bytes)
35mm black and white, 1960’s: very sharp.

brownie_c.jpg (18931 bytes)
Brownie colour photo, 1960’s.

instamatic_c.jpg (16654 bytes)
Instamatic Picture, 1960’s. 


pocket1.jpg (14880 bytes)
Pocket Camera, 1977.  Ever try enlarging one of these sandbags?

polaroid1.jpg (17934 bytes)
Polaroid Picture, taken in 1980’s. Yecch.  To the turtles too.

cabaret.JPG (14680 bytes)
35mm colour, 1992

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Photoplay and Copyright

Photoplay

I just can’t leave the issue of copyright alone. It comes up everyday in one situation or another.

Today, it was my son remarking that he wasn’t allowed to use an Albrecht Durer woodcut as the basis of a project he was working on because his teacher was afraid it would violate some rules of copyright and plagiarism. He argued that a painter who has been dead for 400 years can’t possibly have any works under copyright anymore, and that it isn’t plagiarism if you acknowledge the use of the work. This teacher was so paranoid of the copyright police, however, that she still refused permission.

Here’s an interesting fact. Though most “classic” paintings are no longer under copyright, a photograph of the painting can be.

Whoa! Let’s think about that. Let’s think a lot about that, because a lot of museums, including our own Art Gallery of Ontario, won’t let you take pictures inside their galleries anymore. Even when the paintings are hundreds of years old, as in the case of the “Old Masters” show they did recently. So if you can’t take your own picture, then you have to get a copy from somewhere else. A logical place to look is in an art history book with lavish illustrations. But, according to the copyright police, you can’t copy that picture because, though the work of art itself is public domain, the photograph of it is not.

[Added 2022-04-12: I am pleased to note that many museums do, in fact, allow photography of the art work, as long as you do not use a flash.]

Now, photographers who create original pictures can definitely copyright their work. If I am walking along a boulevard in Toronto and I see a bum who looks like Mike Harris poking through a garbage bin and I take a picture and then publish it in the Toronto Sun, that is my copyrighted work. I saw the image. I took the picture. I chose the aperture and the angle and the type of film. If I was a professional photographer, I may have developed the picture and printed it myself. I may have edited it on my computer, before handing it over to the Sun for publication. Fair enough. It’s my work. I deserve to get paid for it. Let’s leave aside the question, for the moment, of whether or not the bum should also get paid. The photograph has a certain value because of the intellectual and physical effort of the photographer. That seems pretty fair.

However, the same photographer walks into the Louvre in Paris and snaps a picture of the Mona Lisa. His goal is not to create something new and original (unless, like Marcel Duchamps, he wants to put a moustache on it). His goal is to create an exact, faithful rendering of the original, so that art students can study it in a text book at a mediocre high school somewhere in Peoria. The value of the image is determined entirely by the value of the work of Leonardo Da Vinci that went into it. But since Da Vinci has died years and years ago, the image has now become a part of cultural heritage, for all to share.

So why is this image copyrighted? Legally, in fact, it is. That’s an outrage. It isn’t entitled to copyright protection anymore. It really isn’t. It’s absurd. I refuse to accept this copyright. I refuse to acknowledge it. If I choose to scan that image into my computer’s memory and show it on my web page, I will.

Here’s another interesting case of aggressive copyright imperialism: the company that sells sheet music to high school bands insists that the band is not allowed to make any copies of the actual sheet music itself, no matter what. No photocopies, no overheads. But, we are told, the copyright laws apply to intellectual property, not physical property. Remember, this is why you can’t copy software or music CDs. Because even though you own the physical disk, it is the content of the disk that is protected.

So if a school buys sheet music for the entire band, and decides to prevent the paper copies from deteriorating by photocopying them and handing the copies out to band members, there should be no problem. Remember, the school has paid for intellectual property to be used by each student in the band. What difference does it make whether they read it off the original print or a copy of it? The school didn’t buy half a copyright. It didn’t pay $20 a sheet for paper. It paid for use of copyrighted material by each member of the band. If so, there is no ethical or moral reason why the band can’t access that material in any way they choose, including computer screens.

If that is true, there should be no obstacle to making copies of the protected material for your own use. For example, I used to tape all of my vinyl LP’s as soon as I bought them, in order to minimize the wear and tear on the fragile plastic itself. I paid for the LP. I own a right to use the intellectual property on it.

Well, the record companies are finally coming around to the fact that they can’t very well have it both ways. If the copyright applies to the physical object, the CD itself, than either the intellectual property is what is copyrighted—in which case you can make as many copies as you want for your personal use—or it’s the physical object that is copyrighted, in which case you can make as many copies as you want for almost anybody.

Who else should get Copyright Protection by These Standards?

My son plays bass in a high school orchestra. They recently issued a CD as part of a fund-raiser. They carefully obtained the correct copyrights for any piece of music that was not public domain.

However, my son frequently improvises the bass line. So he creates, through his own original and unique thought processes, a piece of music that is utterly his own. Should he be able to demand royalties for each CD sold?

That bum that looks like Harris—he owns his face, his hands, his ragged clothes. He owns his posture, the look on his face, the minute the photograph is taken. But it is the photographer who collects the royalty, not him. He doesn’t even get a share.

And who should get copyright protection but doesn’t have it yet…

That’s right—you and me. Your name and my name. Your address and my address. I chose to move to this address and I chose to have this particular e-mail address. I hereby copyright it. No use without permission. I’m not kidding. If you use my name and address on your printed envelope or your electronic mail, you owe me $50.

I register a software package I have purchased to do my home accounting. The software company sells my name and address to another software company, with the result being that I get more garbage in my mailbox, inviting me to subscribe to some stupid investment service. How dare they? What right do they have to sell my name? Who decided that I can’t copy one of their software applications to give to a friend—who would be pleased with the favor–but they can sell my name to another software company—to my great annoyance?

So I propose a simple act of parliament or congress that simply assigns the copyright of a person’s name, and his address and any other personal information, including medical or credit histories, to the person him or herself. Done. From now on, anybody who wants to sell this information must pay a copyright fee to the owners. The only exception would be the standard copyright exception: research, journalism, and reviews. Done. Justice at last.

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Banning MP3

It’s been quite a while since the Recording Industry Association of America tried to have MP3 players banned but I am still so steamed about this issue that I have to give it another rant.

Think about this. The Diamond company created a little portable device called the Rio that allows you to listen to music that has been recorded and compressed into MP3 files. That’s all it does.

Anyone with the right software and hardware can create an MP3 file on a computer. You can record yourself, or you could take the Windows sound effects, or you could take a CD or tape you already own and record it onto the computer and convert it to MP3 format.

What’s the big deal? How could anyone have thought this should be illegal?

Well, the record industry says that you could take a commercial, copyrighted recording and convert it to MP3 and play it on your portable MP3 player. Again, what’s the big deal? You paid for the CD. You are perfectly entitled to convert it into different formats so you can listen to it on different devices.

Ah—but the music industry thinks that we will all shortly start copying our Celine Dion and Back Street Boys albums onto our computers and giving copies away to our friends! Then your friends won’t want to buy the albums (especially after hearing the Back Street Boys).

Well, well. So it appears that you could do something illegal with an MP3. Well well. The truth is, you could also take your Rio and bang someone on the head and kill them, but you don’t see the government trying to ban them for that reason.

Now you have to remember here that the government of the U.S. allows almost anyone to buy a handgun at any time, on the assumption that just because a person buys a powerful, easily-concealed weapon that can blow a hole the size of an orange through somebody’s head does not necessarily mean that this person is likely to commit a crime with it.

This government also allows people to buy alcohol, gasoline, rope, fertilizer, and Barry Manilow records. All without the slightest restriction.

What we have here is a classic case of the rich and powerful throwing their weight around and abusing the legislative and judicial processes in order to exploit the hapless consumer. They have already succeeded in preventing DAT tape drives from getting a foothold in America. And the Disney corporation has succeeded in extending the copyright of the Mickey Mouse character. How? Easy. You simply pour money into the re-election campaigns of influential senators and congressman.

It is shameful and disgusting. At the next election, ask your congressman how he feels about this issue. If he supports the RIAA initiative, jam your Diamond Rio up his nose.

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The MP3

How complex are the moral and ethical issues surrounding copyright nowadays, with all the advances in computer technology? Consider MP3.

MP3 (Media Player 3) is a new format for digital music recording. The MP3 system allows you to make very good digital copies from any CD or “wav” file and copy the file onto your computer, a personal MP3 “player” (similar to a walkman), or… the Internet. A typical three minute pop song, which would take up to 20 megabytes of disk space as a “wav” file, can be condensed into a 3 megabyte MP3 file. There are already thousands of sites on the Internet offering MP3 files for downloading, most of them illegal copies of copyrighted material. There are also a growing number of sites offering original MP3 files, with the consent of the artist.

Many of the users of MP3 offer a thin rationalization for their activities: they would have more respect for copyright if CDs were priced more fairly. They are aware of the fact that CDs are cheaper to produce than vinyl records, yet they cost twice as much. Very little of the difference in cost, if any, actually goes to the artist.

The music industry is absolutely frantic about MP3 and has tried their best to stamp it out. Having failed to convince the courts that it should be banned, they are now attempting to hi-jack it by presenting their own variation of the technology, but with built-in protocols to prevent successive or second generation copies from being made. If history is an indicator, their efforts are not likely to succeed. IBM, Microsoft, Compuserve, and AOL have all fought these battles before and lost.

One is tempted to sympathize with the music industry. After all, don’t they have a right to protect their music? What about the poor musicians, struggling to make a living in his noble profession? Music industry representatives are careful to present themselves as defenders of the poor artists and composers who will be denied their just royalties because of this new form of piracy. Aren’t these workers entitled to a just wage?

To be absolutely blunt about it, I don’t believe that the music industry cares very much about their “poor” artists and composers at all. The truth is that music industry exploits artists and consumers alike. What the music industry is really frightened of is the possibility that artists and composers will no longer need them at all.

Consider the rap group Public Enemy (you’ve probably heard their biggest hit, “Fight the Power”, somewhere). Public Enemy recently attempted to post their own songs in MP3 format on their website. However, lawyers for their record company, DefJam, obtained injunctions and shut them down immediately. So much for the rights of the “poor” composer.

Why did Public Enemy defy their own record company?

The dispute centres on the bookkeeping procedures commonly used by large record companies in their management of artists and repertoire. When an artist is signed, he (or they) is given a large advance, and access to a recording studio. The artist is thrilled. He probably doesn’t understand much of the language in the contracts he signs. He probably doesn’t even have a lawyer, or an agent. He thinks that if he has a hit record, he is going to be rich.

The record company, on behalf of the artist, hires public relations consultants, photographers, legal representatives, arrangers, session musicians, and so on. All of these people may in fact work for the record company, but their services are billed separately to the artist, as if they were independent consultants. Many of these charges can quickly become grossly inflated. A manicurist earning $8.95 an hour suddenly becomes an “image consultant” for a shadow company at rates of $125.00 an hour. The manicurist doesn’t see that money, of course. On paper, it looks like the record company has incurred horrendous expenses, and may even be taking a loss on the artist. In reality, if the artist is successful, everybody except the artist—and the real manicurist—will make piles of money.

This system is so pervasive that, according to Billboard Magazine, the average artist who sells 500,000 CDs will realize a net profit of about $20,000, after all the “expenses” have been deducted from his royalties!

Back to Public Enemy, this rap group woke up one day and found out that, after selling $72 million in merchandise, they were completely broke. Like any reasonable person, they wondered how that was possible. Well, their record company, Defjam, explained that, according to their accounting methods, it cost them well over $71 million to sell that $72 million worth of merchandise.

It is not surprising, then, to discover that many successful musicians follow a strategy first employed by Tom Petty and declare bankruptcy after a few short years of “success”. The reason they do so is because it is the only legal way they can extricate themselves from the preposterous contracts they naively signed. And it will be no surprise to learn that the music industry is lobbying hard for Congress to pass a new law making it even more difficult for musicians to escape their contracts by declaring bankruptcy. [update: they succeeded, the law was passed]

So, what the music industry really fears is that more and more artists will do what Ani DiFranco did and bypass the music industry entirely. DiFranco records, prints, and markets all of her own CDs, and is doing quite well, artistically and financially, thank you. Once she achieved notable success on her own, including a major story in Time Magazine, the record companies came calling, but she was not foolish enough to succumb to their offers of glittering promotional pieces in Vanity Fair and guest slots on David Letterman.

With MP3, and the explosion of inexpensive recording equipment, it has become quite practical for a new artist to create his own music in the comfort of his own home, put samples out on the Internet, and sell CDs for less than half what the music chains charge, and still make a reasonable profit. You can understand why the music industry is deeply concerned about this new technology, and why the film industry has also taken notice. Without a chokehold on the distribution of music, the major labels would quickly be forced to compete with more and more independent artists and labels.

Where does this leave the ethical listener? Certainly, the basic principle of copyright should be respected. But I believe we should oppose the attempts by the music industry to outlaw or restrict new technologies that threaten their control of music recording and distribution. We should also support balancing legislation that begins to reassert the rights of the consumer, to make copies of music for personal use, to freely copy and distribute non-copyrighted material, and to make “fair use” of copyrighted material in the classroom, library, and for research and study. Above all, artists need far greater protection from the sometimes devious and dishonest practices of the recording industry.

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Ikea

I used to look through Sears and Eaton’s catalogues mainly because there were pictures of women in their underwear. Once in a while, I would accidentally look at some of the home furnishings. What I saw nearly sickened me.

Where did they get those homes from? Nobody I knew lived in one. They were immaculate, in a perverse sort of way. The furniture was new, polished, slick, plastic. There were no signs of life, no clothes, no magazines tossed aside, no half-eaten bagels or half-empty cups of coffee. There was never any chili or soup in any of the pots. There were never any towels hanging half-folded over the sink or bathroom counter.

What was the message here? You were supposed to look at this catalogue and think, “Wow! That’s so beautiful! That’s what our house should look like! That’s what will make our friends think we’re smart and rich!” And you would buy this furniture and put it into your house and for a few days your home would look like a Sear’s catalogue but soon everything would be ugly and messy again and you’d realize that you just don’t measure up to the ideal.

Have you ever seen an Ikea catalogue? Here it is. Here is a picture of a place setting. The glass is half empty—someone’s been sipping. The silverware is scattered around as if someone just got home from work and didn’t have time to lay it out perfectly before the chili boiled over on the stove.

And here’s a picture of a pull-out pantry. By golly—there’s food in there, with the labels showing! And here’s a picture of a shoe cabinet. It’s full of papers and magazines that look as if someone just dumped them there. There’s a backpack beside it on the ground. What’s that doing there? And—can I bear the sight—here’s a bed…. and it’s unmade! Someone has actually slept in it!

Just gazing at the Sear’s ideal, you can sense the overwhelming sterility closing in on you. You get a sense that the customers of this store have no idea of what money is for, so they buy ostentatious, phony, bland, useless ornaments for their homes, and then sit around like manikins all day, admiring their silver-wear and doilies.

Ikea gives you a sense that people actually live in these furnishings. They enjoy them. They sleep on the bed, drink from the glasses, work under the beautiful halogen lights. They store things in the cabinets and eat off the tables. They have busy lives.

Ikea must be the only major furniture catalogue I have seen that shows a man with long hair tending a baby while preparing supper.

The Americans have some things right and some things wrong. They have furniture wrong.