12.31.08: Runway Amongst the Palms

Rather than take another 5-hour car ride and then a ferry to Salvador, this time we opt for the small plane that leaves from a neighboring island owned by Fabio Perini, the man who holds the patent on the machines that perforate toilet paper. We are told he owns quite a bit of the island we stayed on as well, but so far he is content to not develop it — which, it turns out, is a blessing. It is pointed out that if someone less wealthy were to have purchased some of the acreage they would most likely have sold off some of the land for beach houses or development.

We load our luggage on to a dugout canoe:

Because it’s sort of low tide the canoe is needed to ferry us to a larger boat that takes us to the neighboring island, where there is a small runway amongst the palms. There is one man there, and no one asks for our tickets. Needless to say, there is no check in or security whatsoever.

12.29.08: Informality Formalized

A restaurant where we have a moquequa (a seafood stew with coconut milk and dende-palm oil — Mauro refers to this area as Moquequaland) has a TV on playing music DVDs. One is a live show by Lucky Dube, the African singer, another is a compilation of local MTV unplugged shows featuring some artists I know and many I don’t. Among the familiar ones are Rita Lee, Gal Costa and Paralamas — but the rest (they excerpt one song each) I don’t know. The visual format (and to some extent the music as well) is repetitive. The colors and patterns of the sets change with each act, but the singers and guitar players always sit – either on a stool or on a chair — and there are lots of steel string acoustic guitars around them being strummed. I say to C that I think the seated gag is meant to reference a casual get together amongst musicians in someone’s living room or at a corner bar among friends — as often does happen here in Brasil. It’s meant to signify “informality” — though in this context it's anything but informal. Informality formalized.

I’ve seen some of these acts as shows where one artist does a whole set — Gilberto Gil’s and Zeca Pagodinho’s for example — that are funny (in Pagodinho’s case), moving and great-sounding. Sometimes the forced abandonment of full-on production and duplication of the recorded instrumentation lets the essence of some songs be better heard. Sometimes some artists' songs sound even better stripped bare, but for some of the more standard pop artists, it’s more like they simply don’t have any clothes on.

The owners of our pousada tell us that there is a lovely small terreiro (Candomblé temple) in a small town located inland. They all come out for the February 2nd water offerings to Yemanja — when drums accompany boatloads of adherents out into the sea where offerings are placed into the sea for that Goddess. There are often folks going into trance states as well.

A couple of weeks ago an archeological discovery was made between that village and an extremely isolated one on the southern end of the island. There had been interminably slow and incremental progress on putting in a fresh water pipe to that distant town when the diggers hit a large ceramic urn that contained a skeleton. The urn was broken, but not too badly. The owner of our pousada saw it and realized it was probably of archeaological value — and was possibly pre-Tupi (the tribal group that controlled most of the Brazilian coast when the Portuguese arrived). It was too substantial, he reasoned, for the Tupi, who kept small villages and didn’t accumulate stuff.

He put the pieces together and went off in search of professional help, which I can’t imagine would be anywhere local. Sadly, by the time he got back to the site the digging had continued and both the urn and its contents had disappeared.

12.24.08: Christmas Eve

On the plane to Salvador, Brasil, with Cindy. It takes us a full 24 hours of straight travel to reach this remote place that Mauro had recommended. An island at the mouth of a river a few hours' drive south of the Bay of All Saints. It’s worth the long travel day. There are no cars on this island — just two small fishing villages, the larger of which mainly caters to local tourists at this time of year. After a 4+ hour taxi and ferry trip we arrive at a tiny settlement at the end of a dirt road, and from there we head by speedboat with our bags to the smaller of the two island villages. The boat lurches over the waves and swells, heaving up, and then slamming down as it passes through a narrow gap in the reef. We arrive during high tide, and at this hour the boat can get relatively close to the shore. There is no dock, so the pilot gets as close as he can, and then we and the pilot’s assistant carry our bags and backpacks to the shore by hand, wading through the thigh-high water. I've been traveling from New York in long pants and shoes which I quickly remove and stuff in a bag, jumping into the water in my briefs and a shirt. The pilot watches and comments, "Preparado!" ("You were prepared!")

Manguebeat — from the mud to chaos (a translation of the title of the 1st Naçao Zumbi record)

From the water the mangroves look completely forbidding and impenetrable — their spidery legs make passage all but impossible. The ground that supports these trees, being flooded with every high tide, is almost completely composed of thick gooey mud that can suck hikers' shoes off. The mud swarms with crabs that also scamper and cling to the endless network of spidery mangrove legs. There are no visible openings in these thickets, at least none I could see from the boat. So, when Simona at our pousada suggests that Marco, a young man, might show us the way through the mangrove forest to an isolated beach on the southern tip of the island we said, “Yes, of course.”

We have to leave in the morning, when the tide is approaching its low point, as passage through the mangroves — and across a river that separates them from that faraway beach — is only possible at low tide. Return by the way we came will be impossible, so Simona has arranged that Antonio will bring his boat around to meet us at the beach in several hours.

After passing alongside some farms, ending with the one where Marco’s dad lives, we cross a kind of small desert that leads to the mangrove forest.

[Link to video]

A couple who had been walking 40 paces behind us now catches up, and the guy says, in English, “Do you mind if we join you?” He had recognized me but says he didn’t want to say anything because that would be “boring”. I invite them to join us and assure them that we will find room for them on the boat back to the village. He looks like a taller Sean Lennon — dark hair held up in a clasp and dark-rimmed glasses. She is pale and quite pretty. A somewhat unlikely couple, I think to myself, as he seems fairly nerdy. He says he’s a big Tom Zé fan (which is a nice surprise) and that he's seen Zé perform a few times, the latest in this guy’s home town — Acaju. The two of them traveled to the island mostly in a series of bus trips from that town in Bahia, which took them 15 hours. They are camping. We are grateful for the translator, as Marco doesn’t speak any English and my Portuguese is pathetic.

In the mangrove forest Marco finds the narrow winding track and hundreds of crabs scurry to hide ahead of us. The path begins to follow a muddy stream bed that I guess drains part of the mangrove at low tide. We have to take off our jellies and flip-flops (Marco doesn’t wear any footwear) as the mud is now deep enough that it will suck them off.

Needless to say, for some people this would be a vision of hell — the mud, the impenetrable forest and the scurrying crabs. Marco slices into the muddy stream bank with his machete and yanks out a clam (lambreta, it is called)…a minute later he produces a few more, and I happen to have a plastic deli bag in my backpack, so he tosses them in there and says we can eat them later.

He grabs a male crab (leo, or lion, it is appropriately called, as the male has yellow-golden markings on its upper shell) and that goes in another bag. A female crab, carrying eggs, gets tossed back. Later, we are told that the crabs here used to be much much larger. The local villages could live on them easily and sell some as well. Why the crabs have diminished in size is slightly hard to pinpoint — it’s not simply over-fishing. There are industries upriver and other changes in the water ecology that might be too subtle for us to notice at first, but the crabs, though still numerous as a nightmare, are getting smaller.

Likewise, the local fishermen are returning with smaller and fewer fish. Octopi used to be plentiful and large, and the smaller ones would always get thrown back. More recently they started keeping the small ones, as that was all there was, but that meant that there were no octopi around to grow into larger ones.

Larger fishing boats, some from the town of Valença, use drag nets, which scoop up everything on the bottom. Besides denuding that area of the sea of edible fish, that method scoops up all the babies and most of the rest of the food chain. An unsustainable way of fishing, they are now slowly coming to realize as the stocks have dwindled quickly.

The mangrove path gets progressively muddier and deeper. When the tide comes in the water level will rise to the tops of the mangrove “roots” — we’d be up to our necks at least.

Now there’s a little creek that we walk in, squish squish, and eventually, after a couple of hours of all of this, the path empties into a wider muddy area and then into a river — a river we will need to cross if we are to get to the beach and Antonio’s boat.

I’d been given the impression that the river (or estuary) would be lower at this time of day and that we might wade across — but that doesn’t seem possible now. Marco tries to holler to any boats or folks on the distant beach. No luck. He wades to the left and tries to signal with his yellow shirt — but no one sees him. I ask if it’s possible to swim across and he’s not sure...he tries it and soon disappears in the forest that leads to the beach on the other shore. Presumably he’ll return with a boat. C and I decide to try swimming it ourselves...we leave our bags and sandals with our new friends from Acaju. The first half is pretty muddy and it does get deep enough to require swimming — but the current isn’t strong as the tide has yet to really begin coming in earnest, so we make it across and follow in Marco’s footsteps.

A few minutes later he appears on a boat and we are all picked up and carried to a sandy area at the mouth of the river where there is a beach and a couple of makeshift shacks, one of which is floating and has a little kitchen where they offer fresh fish. It’s delicious. We share some with a family from Sao Paulo who soon arrive on Antonio’s boat. After a bit some Brazilian tourists arrive by boat and head for the other thatched hut, where they hang out and drink cervejas. There’s no town here — no electricity either, of course. It’s a pretty isolated and idyllic spot. The beach is quiet and some of the Brazilians stroll out to a sandy spit and lie in the shallow tepid water with their girlfriends.

That night the lights in our cabana flicker a few times and then go out. Electricity arrived at this village about 5 years ago, and it is never a sure thing — especially if a bunch of locals or pousada guests take showers at the same time (the on-demand water warmers use a lot of electricity).

It’s totally black out. The moon hasn’t risen yet. C improvises a wind guard for a candle out of a cut-in-half water bottle. The bottoms of other water bottles serve as glasses. We sit in front of our cabana and wait to see if the electricity will come back on.

The next day we are taken out to a “pool” where it’s possible to snorkel and see some fish. These “pools” — shallow areas protected by the reefs — are accessible at low tide. It’s so shallow around them that we can only get there by dugout canoe, the kind used by Indians and others around the world for thousands of years. The dugout navigates the swells and waves with less aggravation than the speedboat. This one has two tiny sails made of the fabric also used for bags all over the third world.

A lackadaisical breeze carries us out around the point and towards the reef at a relaxed Bahian pace. So relaxed that the owner of the dugout opts to paddle now and again.

Returning to the village in the dugout in the early afternoon we see there is now a floating bar anchored offshore in the shallow bay. It’s made of some oil drums strapped under boards with a rudimentary thatched hut on one side. There are some plastic tables and chairs on the tilting platform and a few burly guys hoist cervejas. We continue to drift towards shore past a steady stream of men and women either wading out to the bar or simply standing in the waist high water in bunches with friends, some with drinks in hand, chatting as if at a huge cocktail party. “Ciao, Alberto!” someone calls out to our fellow passenger on the dugout. We continue to drift shore-wards. It’s like a Fellini movie, a long dolly shot of partygoers scattered in a landscape. In this case they’re all waist-deep in warm water. We pass a group of ladies in wide-brimmed hats, a couple necking and a fat woman stretched out with some foam rod-shaped floats sticking up around her, their centers suppressed by her girth, the ends poking up on either side.

Tractor to Town

We take the only means of land transport — a tractor that pulls a cart outfitted with benches — to the larger town on the north end of the island for dinner. The tractor lurches and heaves over the sandy track, following the higher land in the center of the island. Occasionally at this hour one can sense a valley to the left or a swamp to the right, but mostly we struggle on through the forest/jungle. Some of the steeper hills on the track are strewn with coconut husks, as these give a little more traction. A car, even a 4x4, obviously wouldn’t make it through this “road”.

We arrive in the dark and walk through this tiny town’s favela. It's a part of town consisting of tiny unpainted brick houses or others made of sticks and thatch, though sometimes even these had strands of random hanging Christmas lights — completely incongruous and out of place.

When we visited during the day this town seemed fairly quiet and sleepy...

(albeit with some pousadas on the beaches that were filled with Brazilian tourists nursing drinks). However at night it was, as C said, like the vision of Bedford Falls gone bad in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Stalls had appeared selling cheap jewelry, T-shirts and snack foods, and bars were cranking up the music or had a TV blasting with a music program on, or both.

We pass by a small house, two rooms by the look of it, and Simona points to three large bones lying by the door — “balena” (whale) a man says. They look like hefty biomorphic boulders, hardly recognizable as bones.

She says we have to see inside, do we want to? Some don’t want to disturb the owner, but she persists and knocks at his door and shouts through the crack in the door. I hear the lock turning and the door opens and Simona says a warm familiar "boa noite" to a man with a crazy lopsided Afro. Behind him his front room is filled, floor to ceiling, with fish bones of all types — some even dangle on fishing wire from the roof. All of it found on the beaches. There are giant whale ribs, a dolphin skull (oddly human-shaped except for the jutting “beak”), necklaces of fish vertebra and a giant dried blowfish.

The room behind, also filled to the roof (but not with bones) is obviously where he lives.

Flesh and Peter Pan

Further down the road we pass another tiny 2-room house, this one, like many of the others at this hour, with lights on and windows and doors wide open to the street. In many houses there is a chair of some sort and a television blaring, a picture of Jesus adorns the wall of many and sometimes the inhabitants sit on the doorstep facing the street, saying “Oi” or “boa noite” as people pass by.

One house — a two-room shack really — has a painted mural that completely fills one wall — a naked reclining women, with fairly light skin and protruding breasts, floating against a blue background. Below her a live naked dark-skinned body lies asleep, turned to the wall, on a small mattress on the floor, shiny smooth flesh only partially covered by a sheet. In the other room I first catch a glimpse of a fragment of a large painted boot that turns out, as we pass the window, to belong to Captain Hook. Another wall-sized mural fills the second room of the house, this one depicting Peter Pan and Captain Hook sword-fighting. It’s the sort of thing one might expect to see in a crèche or on the wall of a day care center, but juxtaposed with the Playboy Goddess in the other room it makes for a surreal combination. That’s one of the things I like about Brazil.

The ride back to our village is in a sort of truck with a wooden exterior — wooden radiator grill and wooden engine housing. One of our party says this is not quite legal, as cars are not allowed on the island, and this is not a tractor — there is some kind of pickup truck chassis underneath the wood.

We head back in the dark, more lurching and gear grinding. This vehicle doesn’t have the power or massive grooved wheels that the tractors do, so the driver has trouble with some of the steeper hills. At one point the vehicle stops with a loud nasty sounding clank, and we’re off again. The driver's assistant rides shotgun and holds what looks like a vacuum cleaner pipe which he points out the right side of the vehicle — it’s the exhaust, which explains that smell.

The man who rescued Tom Zé

Last night C and I were sitting on the little patio of our cabana and out of the darkness, somewhere nearer the beach, we could hear the bass line of "Psycho Killer" booming. I guess they know I’m here. Earlier at dinner a young man approached me and asked if I was DB — he then thanked me for “resurrecting” Tom Zé. Others have said the same thing here; I seem to be known as the man who revived Tom Zé’s career as much as for my own work. That’s fine — Tom Zé certainly deserves to be recognized and one young guy (Zé’s new fans tend to be younger than I) said that Tom Zé always mentions me as the guy who brought him back out of obscurity at all of his live shows. It’s a good thing to be known for.

12.23.08: Radio City

The NY promoter has urged that we add a second Radio City date (February 28th) and I have agreed. I had to think about it for a few days, as it’s a big place and the possibility of playing to a half-filled hall on the second night would be both depressing and bad for my rep. There’s something about the proximity of bodies in a theater that generates excitement and energy. Granted the top balconies could be empty and no one would know, but empty seats scattered here and there in the orchestra and lower balconies generally makes it harder for an audience to achieve release, to let go and enjoy themselves.

Marc Geiger, my booking agent, says that “playing your hometown is like having a pimple on your forehead — everyone can see it.” Very funny, but I’d like to think my show is more enjoyable than a pimple. Both to myself and to the audience. We’re looking into using the Mighty Wurlitzer that rises up out of the side of the stage — the largest in the world that's still in its original location, I believe. Also looking into the Rockettes, but I think they go elsewhere after the Xmas show.

The first show is almost sold out after being on sale for only a couple of weeks and with only one significant ad — so that was an argument in favor of adding the second show. With more ads and posters around town, more people will know about the event; many friends I meet have no idea when I’m playing NYC. “Oh, you’re on tour! When will you be playing New York?” — so if we can reach those folks there is a chance the second show will do OK. Maybe even better than OK. (There is also the small matter of the economic meltdown, but Geiger says there has been less impact on “quality” acts, which I guess he means includes me.)

Anyway, I had an idea for a poster, and maybe an ad, that would include a lot of the snaps taken by fans and journalists of the tour so far. I talked to Danielle about culling the sources for that material and about a design idea — so that is in the works.

The deluxe CD version designed by Sagmeister Inc. is reaching people. BB e-mailed me that she got a copy and that her daughter thinks it’s cool. My daughter thinks the audio chip recording of footsteps that ends with a door squeaking and slamming shut is creepy. There are more songs on the 2nd disk, so I wonder if any of those will get reviewed or blogged about.

12.18.08: No More News

The Tribune Company owns the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs, a bunch of TV stations and some other regional newspapers. They’re just barely holding on since being acquired in a takeover a year and a half ago by Sam Zell, a real estate billionaire. After the buyout, the Tribune’s editor left, as did a lot of its journalists and columnists. They reportedly weren’t happy with some of the changes that Zell had instituted. The paper had also acquired a relatively large debt. My guess is that after Zell bought the paper, his purchase price saddled the paper with debt; or rather, the paper’s employees — since its board members, like Zell, managed to avoid any personal debt.

I saw similar things happen in the music business in the early 80’s, as record companies merged and were taken over by other companies (Warner Bros. was absorbed by Time and then later, AOL). The result was that the companies suddenly ended up in debt, and, in order to show a profit every quarter, had to forget about their standards and musical instincts. Long-term thinking became a thing of the past. They had to cut back here and there, which often meant cutting out middle-level employees. Bosses weren’t likely to thin their own ranks, and from their perspective, losing middle-level employees who had accrued decent salaries would help shore up the bottom line — temporarily, at least. New middle-level people could be hired at lower pay, or lower-level employees could be bumped up.

The thing is, it was the middle-level people who actually knew and essentially ran the businesses.

“‘From an informed public standpoint, it’s alarming,’ said Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from the Houston area, who has seen The Houston Chronicle’s team in Washington drop to three people, from nine, in two years. ‘They’re letting go those with the most institutional knowledge, which helps reporters hold elected officials accountable.’” [Link to NY Times article]

The Houston Chronicle is not alone. Almost every newspaper in the US, except the Times and the Wall Street Journal, has drastically cut, or in many cases entirely eliminated, their Washington contingent.

“‘We used to cover the Pentagon, combing through defense contracts, and we’re covering some of that out of Dallas now, but basically we don’t do it anymore,’ said Carl Leubsdorf, chief of The Dallas Morning News bureau, which had 11 people four years ago, and now has four. ‘We had someone at the Justice Department, but no longer. We can’t free someone up for a long time to do a major project.’” [Link]

As one of the Baltimore Sun reporters, who appeared in the HBO show The Wire, mentioned, you just can’t cover with 4 people what you used to with 11 — or 30. Despite management trying to squeeze more blood out of that stone, it’s just not possible. Less gets reported.

Likewise, these newspapers have dumped most of their foreign bureaus, food critics, and film critics, and are loathe to assign reporters to stories that will take months to research and write. In doing so, they are eviscerating that which makes newspapers different from online reviews, blogs and websites. When papers end up like USA Today, there will be no reason to read them.

“The much greater loss, the journalists say, is the decline of Washington reporting on local matters — the foibles of a hometown congressman or a public works project in the paper’s backyard. One after another, they cited the example of the San Diego paper’s Washington bureau for exposing the corruption of Representative Randall Cunningham, who is known as Duke.

In accepting a Pulitzer Prize for that work in 2006, ‘we were bold enough to hope that it would be the first of many, but it turned out to be the high point,’ said George E. Condon Jr., the last bureau chief. ‘No matter how much great journalism is done by national organizations, they’re simply not geared to monitor closely a member of Congress from, say, San Diego, who’s not a national leader.’” [Link]

Second to the NY Times, the Tribune Company owns some of the country’s most widely circulated newspapers. Though I tend to think of the LA Times as more a community paper than a national one — a paper that covers mainly the intrigues and dramas of their local industry (movies, music and TV mixed in with coverage of local politics and crime) — there’s nothing wrong with in-depth reporting of one’s own city. TV sure ain’t gonna do it.

Do we really need in-depth reporting, investigative journalism and foreign news desks? Can we manage without them? I am as guilty as most in that I often (though not always) read the morning papers online, for free. I jump between different publications, as their angles, points of view and interests are varied. Yeah, sometimes it’s the wacky human-interest story that grabs my attention — the sort of thing fit for web reporting — but just as often, it’s a story that is thoroughly researched and gives background and context on the topic.

How does a democracy work without (in-depth) news? It doesn’t. While most of the population will not care about access to high-quality news, there are always some who read to find out what’s really going on, and why. Dictatorships, totalitarian regimes and underdeveloped countries don’t have the luxury of investigative journalism, and the news-as-entertainment in highly capitalist regimes isn’t really informative either — it’s bread and circuses. An informed citizenry, said Jefferson, is necessary for a democracy to function. He also said:

“Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”

and

“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” [Link]

TJ may have presumed we’d get our information from other sources, or maybe, like many politicians, he simply distrusted the press. It wouldn’t be surprising if he did — imagine if the press reported heavily on his taste for Brown Sugar. Politicians are held in check by the press, for better or worse; that too is one of the ways in which the press allows a democracy to function. Without the threat of public exposure, well… you can imagine.

Anyway, it will be strange if the USA becomes a large industrialized country with only one or two newspapers — the NY Times and The Wall Street Journal — practicing in-depth coverage; the latter, now owned by Murdoch, may find itself eviscerated, assuming its fate follows those of his other newspaper purchases around the world. There is no way the Times can afford all the foreign desks, local reporters and journalists that a country of this size requires.

What will happen when most of the country has nothing but entertainment, gossip and sports as sources of information? It’s a country ripe for takeover, if you ask me. A place where public opinion can be easily manipulated, as long as the consumers keep buying. Blogs and Internet news sites can’t fill the gap, as they don’t have the resources to sustain a team of reporters working and digging into a story — sometimes for months before anything sees the light of day. They don’t have African or Southeast Asian bureaus either. Besides, most Internet news sites like Google News are aggregates of traditional print and wire service news gatherers. Without sources they’d be pretty much nothing. Local sites like Gothamist and national ones like The Smoking Gun are cool and up-to-the-minute, but they don’t assign staff to conduct long-term investigations into the how and why of a scandal or news item. They break stuff, it’s true, but mostly they rely on others to feed them information.

I have plenty of beefs with the arts and culture coverage of many newspapers; I can easily spot the biases and lack of research. I’m of that world, so I have my own personal biases as well — which sometimes match those of the critics, and sometimes don’t. I myself have gone in and out of favor a few times, so I regard their reviews and reporting with what I feel is healthy skepticism. News, though, is another story. I imagine that cops, thugs, hedge fund dudes, politicians and bureaucrats all have their own beefs with the press, but from my point of view, I’d much prefer some seriously researched coverage in those areas — with a little bias — to nothing of any depth.

I’ve been trying to imagine what this country would be like without a serious news source. Like Cuba with only Granma, the organ of the party — that and bootleg satellite TV broadcasts of American Idol. Or Russia, pre-Gorbachev, when the choice was between Pravda and some samizdat mimeographed publications. Iran under the Ayatollah or the Shah. The Philippines under martial law — when all press critical of the Marcos regime was silenced.

We tend to get all holier-than-thou when we look at countries without free press. We think their lives must somehow be more pathetic or sad. Needless to say, this attitude makes us feel better. But people go on. They know, or at least suspect, that they are being denied something, but they maintain hope and optimism. They don’t go around moping. They get on with their lives, and sometimes, at least now and then, feel like maybe the censorship doesn’t matter all that much. There are still reasons to be cheerful. We might like to think of life in an oppressive regime as sheer misery, but from what I can tell, it’s rarely viewed that way. Life goes on and people make do with what they have, and they fall in love and get drunk and sing and dance. It takes a lot — a whole lot — to bring them to the flash point, like what just happened in Greece. Mostly, people adapt to the way things are — and to feel miserable about it is fruitless. And that’s what we will do when there are only two serious newspapers left in the USA.

12.05.08: Mattel, Bratz and Creative Rights

A man in the audience in Wilmington, Delaware shouted out, “You rock like geology!”

Mattel, Bratz and creative rights

The toy giant Mattel has won its lawsuit against the makers of Bratz dolls, the slightly slutty “ethnic” dolls that have been selling well while sales of Mattel’s Barbie line have been dropping. The ruling states that since the designer of the Bratz line did the initial doll drawings while employed by Mattel, the rights to the Bratz line now belong to Mattel — whomph, the competition is eliminated in one fell swoop.

Jeff Harris [Source]

I seem to remember reading about the Bratz dolls a year or so ago — the designer tried to get Mattel interested in the line, but with their traditional and long-standing emphasis on the All American Breasts of Barbie, they passed. So, the designer went elsewhere, and despite some initial resistance, the line of dolls caught fire and began to threaten Miss Barbie herself. The Bratz dolls, who look to be of indeterminate ethnic origin — but definitely not Anglo-Saxon — started to crowd out the tall white chick with pointy tits. Do we have a metaphor for immigration attitudes (and policies) here or what?

The designer should have gotten Mattel to sign away their rights after passing on his idea, though I suspect Mattel would not have done so unless they had to. Just like record companies will often pass on an artist’s record and then prohibit anyone else from releasing it, they are scared of both being shown up and possible competition. Forget the lip service that competition is good for business — business will squash any competition if it has half a chance. Maybe the designer got a verbal go-ahead from someone at Mattel to seek interest elsewhere; maybe he thought they’d forget about his drawings; or maybe he thought they wouldn’t go so far as to claim the rights based on the drawings — but he didn’t get a proper release, so legally he’s fucked. Though it doesn’t seem fair.

It seems to me that it would be nice if there were a fairer attitude towards passed-over creations. What if the law said this: if a company like Mattel turned down his drawings, then they would automatically revert back to him after some period of time — a couple of years, for example. Long enough for Mattel to reconsider, given an always-changing marketplace, but short enough that the creation, whatever it is, might still be relevant. This could apply to recording artists, screenwriters, designers, authors and photographers — where the same kind of proprietary nastiness happens all the time.