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Some Internet providers in the US are considering a tiered pricing system — charging more to customers who use a lot of bandwidth. There has been a hue and cry from the public regarding this proposal. By now, everyone is used to paying a flat fee, and then assuming that they can use as much bandwidth as they can get away with for that fee. The providers have even abandoned the tiered proposal trials in some cities — they are that unpopular. We’ve all become accustomed to overlooking how much bandwidth we use — without thinking about it, we go from low bandwidth usage, like emailing, browsing websites and surfing, to fairly high bandwidth usage, like video Skyping, uploading audio and photo files, or streaming a movie from Netflix or iTunes. Internet users presume that high bandwidth usage, like Skyping or video and audio streaming, is their right. This struck home today, when someone offered our group a password to a wi-fi network he had established, but didn’t offer it to those who habitually Skype. Initially, this seemed mean, but I had noticed that as more folks hop on a network, especially Skypers, the speed of the whole network goes down — especially for the rest of us. Even simple emailing becomes sluggish or intermittent. Bandwidth hogs take 80% or more of the bandwidth, and everyone else is left with slow or sometimes non-existent connections. Here then is the hidden cost of “free” services like Skype — they’re only “free” when the resource (the information highway) is limitless and infinite — which in this case, it is not. The same thing happens in hotels — the more people log on to the hotel server, the slower the whole thing goes. Sometimes it slows to a crawl, and after you’ve paid 5 Euros for an hour’s use, that can be pretty frustrating. The information highway can have traffic jams, just like any other. We tend to think of bandwidth as a God-given right, but it’s too finite, and its limits become apparent as the highway gets more crowded. So, should access be tiered? If the tiers are partitioned in chunks, should only those with more money have access to higher bandwidth connections? This would eventually lead to an information and Internet hierarchy — streaming movies, music and TV will only be available to those who can afford it — and the rest will have to watch in low-res or be content to miss that kind of web experience, forced to settle for basic emailing and web browsing. The whole Internet mixed media experience — Flash sites, video clips, audio clips, slideshows etc. — would become less available. As it is now, I don’t think twice about watching a video clip, or listening to some streaming audio if I’m curious — but I might hesitate if I knew that a meter was running. I could envision the idea of a meter that monitors bandwidth usage and charges accordingly. It might be a fair system — leaving the choice up to the user in each instance, rather than segregating users into discrete tiers. The proposed tiered plans sound less flexible. They seem to want to establish completely separate pipelines — gated Internet communities, in a way. Likewise, I just read that for centuries, fishing was relatively unregulated. There were limits on excessive catch, but the fishing grounds were more or less a free-for-all. Chesapeake Bay and other fishing grounds were public property. Anyone with a boat — a commercial fisherman, or a kid in a rowboat — was allowed to pull up oysters or crabs. It would have been all well and good when supplies seemed unlimited and plentiful, but they’re not anymore — in some places, there are no oysters or crabs left at all. Most, of course, were not taken by kids in rowboats. One proposed solution has been to privatize the oyster beds — allotting each fishery a designated area — with the assumption being that if fishermen realize that their stock is limited, they will self-manage and regulate their own consumption and fishing. Little Johnny on his rowboat will be pretty much out of luck, as the “public” fishing zones will have been fished out, and the private areas will be off limits. As our oceans and waterways become fished out and depleted, it’s fairly easy to justify some sort of fee, management or enforced regulation system — but shouldn’t that apply to anyone who uses limited natural resources? For years, mining companies have been digging out underground resources while paying a minimal cost for access — and they often leave environmental disasters in their wake. Weren’t those resources in some sense “public”? Ditto for oil and natural gas companies — shouldn’t they pay their host nations a hefty fee for access to finite resources that are, in a way, the patrimony of humanity? Someone once asked me, rhetorically, if an overweight person should pay the same amount for a plane ticket as someone of “normal” weight. It’s a rude and uncomfortable question, but not totally unreasonable when you consider that someone twice my weight requires twice as much jet fuel to get them airborne. Their carbon footprint is higher as a result. In effect, I’m subsidizing their excess — at least if all seats except first class are priced equally. Similarly, should kids and babies fly for less? Should tall men and women pay more? What about those whose above-average weight isn’t a result of overeating or poor diet? That seems unfair. Who’s to say why someone is overweight? And if you’re tall, it’s not your fault — you were born that way, so why should you be penalized? The tiered or metered way of charging for resources — how would that work? Can bandwidth even be considered a resource? Is it like the electromagnetic spectrum — a government-managed “public” resource, with various frequencies allocated to broadcast TV, mobile phones and police transmissions? We accept that not just anyone with a transmitter can usurp part of the broadcast frequency, start a radio station or blast their TV network to everyone in town — chaos would result. We accept that even though the airwaves might be “public,” they do need to be regulated. But cable and fiber optics aren’t God-given — someone paid to lay them down. For some strange reason, we presume that our health is a crapshoot. Most public health plans don’t tax people according to a tiered plan dependent on their propensity for getting diseases — though some folks, due to lifestyle, addiction or bad parenting will require more frequent and expensive treatment than others who live healthier lives. The folks who pay higher taxes, and those who are less prone to illness, are paying for those who are reckless with their health, or (it is presumed) just plain unlucky. Every industrialized country submits to this, apart from the US, where insurance companies fulfill this function — and they aren’t quite as altruistic, though they still maintain the crapshoot model, at least in the public’s eye. Anyway, the built-in unfairness of this system — that some per chance pay more than their share — is justified by the idea that a health disaster could randomly happen to any of us. We know this isn’t quite true — besides the lifestyle and social context factors that affect our likelihood of getting ill, there are genetic factors that are becoming easier and easier to assess. It seems inevitable that as genetic profiling becomes common, many will balk at paying for those who have a much greater propensity for getting serious diseases. Insurance companies will probably begin to adjust to that information before public health plans do — the companies themselves are taking on the risk, so if they can better their odds by charging so and so more because addiction, MS or Alzheimer’s runs in their family, they will. To many people this will seem unfair, since they might be as healthy as anyone else when the insurance company determines their rate — so, they will argue, why should they pay more? Auto insurance companies already do this with drivers — those who live in high-risk areas or have had accidents pay more. We don’t mind paying — via taxes or insurance — for the other fellow if we believe our risk is more or less the same as his, but we might be reluctant to pay medical bills for a junkie. In the long run, and from a wider perspective, health care does more than just insure against sudden medical costs — that is, public health care, not insurance plans. Public health care ensures that everyone lives without the fear that the bottom of their world will suddenly drop out. In the US, people with medical emergencies suddenly can’t pay their mortgages, college tuition or for their kids. They often end up on skid row, or at least in bad shape, because their financial situation is precarious (since there is no safety net) and a medical emergency knocks the whole thing down. In those countries where these worries are not as pressing, the people’s lives are different — they're less desperate, less on the edge, and therefore everyone, even those who are paying more than their share, benefits. It’s hard to quantify that benefit, I would imagine — but anyone with eyes and ears can sense it. So, back to the Internet. Is there a parallel with health care, insurance, fishing? Should I pay more, or receive less for what I pay, because my neighbor wants to stream movies, or video Skype to his or her pals night and day? Not sure. Maybe the question is how much we are willing to give up in order to share, and be equal… and what are our rights, if any, as far as resources go?
It seems the proposed bailouts of GM, AIG and a host of others are not all that popular right now; many in the US feel that the law of the jungle — of the free market — should prevail no matter how big the company. If you can’t survive, then you will justifiably become extinct — repercussions be damned. If Detroit and the surrounding cities turn into a 3 million strong refugee camp (there are camps in Fresno already), then so be it — at least that’s the current vibe. (Thing is, those refugees won’t stay put in Flint, if the Dust Bowl and Katrina were any indication.) This sink or swim attitude was reinforced when the executives of AIG gave themselves bonuses this week — $165 million (or more) in bonuses — and GM executives flew on private jets to ask Washington for taxpayer money. These guys are all unreformed bubble heads — they claim that only they know how best to run their companies, and are therefore essential to keeping them afloat... but weren’t they the ones who drove their companies to bankruptcy? (Of course they’ll blame it on the credit crisis.) Besides, some of those who received these bonuses have already left for greener pastures — so much for the argument that the bonuses are incentives to stay. It’s human (and often animal) nature to help those in one’s group who have fallen behind — and we instinctively look after those close to us. Occasionally we allow our friends and family to fail — maybe not too frequently, but once in a while — but more often we come to their aid, at least some of the time. But somehow this seems different. For one thing, these guys have proven that they aren’t likely to change their behavior. They’ll drive their companies right back into the ground, because that’s their modus operandi. They’ve made no serious statements about changing their ways. None have said they’re sorry, or that they were wrong. Most of us say we should get rid of the bums and let someone else try to keep these behemoths afloat — if they deserve to be kept afloat at all. The new head of AIG says in the NY Times: “We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.” [Link] In other words, his type of executives will leave to work for the highest bidder — the implication being that they have no loyalty to either AIG or to the taxpayer. They don’t really love their work — they just love the money and perks. They’re not even accepting bonuses based on performance! These guys don’t believe their own “market forces” bullshit when it comes to their pay — they expect a bonus no matter how bad they are at doing their jobs! Can I get a job like that? One of the AIG execs recently wrote a resignation letter, reprinted in the Times, claiming that his department didn’t lose money; his department didn’t engage in questionable creation of assets; and his group worked really hard for years and deserves their bonuses. He felt they were being unfairly lumped in with the bad apples across the hall. They’re all being forced to pay for the unscrupulous behavior of some rogue departments. I’m tempted to agree, but that kind of behavior was tacitly encouraged in the banking world. There were no reins, and anything that made money was OK; just like at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, that reckless culture and behavior was part and parcel of the whole deal. If this guy knew a while back that others in the company were engaged in rash and risky behavior, why didn’t he blow the whistle or resign then? Here in Europe, there will be a G20 conference in London in a couple of weeks. Like the AIG execs in Connecticut, London bankers have been warned that demonstrators may not take kindly to their strutting about in public. Therefore they might consider dressing down — in disguise, as it were — or not going out at all. It was suggested that AIG employees go out in pairs, and only in daylight hours. Bankers incognito — what a concept! That guy might look like a homeless person or a rent boy, but he’s a billionaire. The Masters of The Universe may think that going tie-less in khakis will do the job — but the internal memos also suggested that they think again and try harder, because people can still recognize a “dressed down” banker. Get your glam and punk gear out of the closet — now’s the time to sport it one last time.
I bike to the local mega contemporary art museum. There is a major Degas show, which I skip — I see dancers and tutus every day — and opt for the show of more recent work — the theme of which is Charlie Manson. Charlie Manson! Bad timing, as a young German boy has just gotten hold of a gun and massacred a bunch of his former schoolmates. Most of the work was by German and other European artists, many of them unfamiliar to me — a testament to how parochial the NY art world is. I have to admit the most riveting pieces were the ones closest to the source: the first, a hallway with some Bobby BeauSoleil paintings (which may have been collaborations with his wife Barbara), that were very cool, mythic and slightly creepy — like Mike Kelley or Jim Shaw, but for real. 
BeauSoleil was in the 60’s band The Grass Roots, which later became the band Love. He also did the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising. The second piece was a TV playing an interview with Charlie done a number of years ago — the Devil is an old man now. Anyway, every (obvious and) pointed question aimed at Charlie was deflected — brilliantly, and often in an unexpectedly philosophical way. When asked about how it feels being in prison much of his life, Charlie responds by saying, “I’m not in prison, you are.” I’m not sure how or if he elaborates, but he obviously means that we’re all prisoners of our preconceived ideas and the limiting social worlds we’ve constructed — no one is truly free. Anyway, it goes on like that, his response to every question spun out to infinity.
At the Düsseldorf airport, an young man seeks solace and confides in a friend:
Some say Cuidad Juárez is now the most dangerous place in the world — it beats Baghdad. Most of its arms come from the US, and the US buys most of its drugs as well.
An accounting firm that’s been analyzing GM says that even with the $30 billion bailout they’ve requested, GM won’t stay afloat. Pragmatically, it would be sheer lunacy to throw $30 billion at GM executives — who still ride around in their town cars and fly on company jets — only to see them allocate it for their own golden parachutes before their company, and the cities of Detroit, Flint and a few others, become giant ghost towns. I have a feeling there will be a knock-on effect, and other ghost towns will arise in the wake of those Rust Belt towns’ demises. GM’s management has made few comments re: altering their course; there has been little mention of producing green cars, or building public transportation systems or infrastructure. They talk mostly about closing plants, cutting divisions and firing workers — but not about rethinking what they make, or their role in the world. It seems they basically want to stay the course — but in a smaller boat. The passengers who can’t fit get thrown overboard. The boat is headed for Niagara Falls, so as far as I can see, it doesn’t really matter what size it is. There are options. Workers could take over the factories and start producing stuff that suits the world as it really is. Or the factories could be nationalized, and the government could force the factory infrastructure and manpower to begin making stuff that benefits the population. Assembly lines would have to be altered, refitted and modified — but it’s either that, or sell the machines as scrap steel. Or the companies could make changes voluntarily — re-jigger themselves to build trolley cars, high-speed rail systems, and hybrids. Some of these, being public works, would probably receive a large amount of government financing — funding for work, NOT a bailout.
We Live in a Virtual World French public health officials are considering laws that would ban the promotion of eating disorders — including a requirement that magazines reveal the extent to which their images have been artificially retouched. It’s viewed as a public health issue because girls and boys (and men and women) are feeling increasingly ashamed of their bodies as they compare themselves to what they see all around them — images of bodies that are not real, that have been photoshopped, digitally airbrushed and heavily modified.
[Source] Of course, ever since the birth of the movie star early last century, their images have been cleaned up, improved and controlled. Celebrities and pin-ups have been with us for a long time, and the fairytale world of far-off Hollywood was always infinitely better than whatever small town reality you were living in. But it was just that — a fairytale kingdom that existed far away, with relatively few inhabitants. The difference, I suppose, is that of quantity, not quality. These days, altered images are ubiquitous; the fairytale world threatens to engulf our own. The illusion is more complete, too — with digital technology it’s harder to see the smoothing. Stalin would have drooled at the possibilities. Almost nothing one sees in print or advertisements hasn’t been “improved” in some way, except maybe some journalistic news photos — and even those are suspect. There’s the visual field that consists of us and our friends, and then there’s the print world — certainly more dramatic, and often more physically perfect. We live in a parallel universe, slightly more drab and definitely more pudgy. One can’t legislate the heavenly world out of existence — people need fairytales, after all — but maybe a more constant reminder to not believe everything we see would help us to retain some tenuous connection with our pathetic reality. The thing is, we can’t help believing what we see. When I look at an impossibly sexy woman on a billboard, I can tell myself that she’s been sculpted and smoothed to death, but I’m riveted and transfixed nonetheless. Instinct triumphs over intellect. Pascal Dangin, a well-known retoucher who works on a lot of the images in fashion magazines (and for some fine artists as well), naturally doesn’t see it exactly that way. He makes photos that “improve on life,” in his words. But if I can paraphrase, he might say that he makes an image more like what it wants to be — and therefore it ends up being closer to what we desire to see. That doesn’t necessarily mean perfect — he is careful to avoid airbrushing the personality out of a person — but it does mean he’s certainly not against making quite a few (what he has determined are aesthetic) improvements. The health departments are alarmed at the effect all this is having on young people. Boys hanker for steroids, and girls, a session with the knife, in order to look more like what they see in the magazines. Unfortunately, the magazines don’t just feature physically enhanced people — they’ve been heavily retouched as well. We would have to hand out some kind of high-tech, rose colored, photoshopping glasses in order to achieve a visual simulation of the media population.
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.
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.
There’s been a lot of buzz in the last week or two surrounding some scientists’ claims that, with about $10 million, they could bring a woolly mammoth back to life. DNA from the mammoth’s hair samples could be used to fertilize an elephant egg, if a modification allowed the egg to accept DNA with a few mismatched genes. Then the fertilized egg would come to term inside an elephant, and whoosh — mama would have a surprisingly hairy baby. Whether this Jurassic Park scenario is followed through now or later (when further developments might make it easier), it does seem fairly inevitable. Another article lists, somewhat facetiously, some of the other extinct critters that could be brought back — among them a 6-foot marine scorpion that lived in shallow waters. Imagine treading on one of those when you go to the beach. And, of course, people have wondered whether or not our own ancestors, like the Neanderthal man, might be resurrected from hair and other samples belonging to the proto-human. (To be accurate, some believe Neanderthals are NOT our direct ancestors, but a distinct line of proto-humans that fizzled out.) They probably could be revived, as could the “Hobbit” people who used to live on the island of Flores in the Pacific, though convincing a person, obviously a woman, to volunteer to bring a caveman to term in her belly might be a bit much to ask. But who knows? Imagine the publicity! 
This notion brings an interesting scenario to mind. I seem to remember reading some years ago that Neanderthals had larger brain capacities than we do. (This is debatable, but let’s accept it for now.) Maybe it was relative to their body mass, but at any rate, judging by brain size alone they must have been pretty smart. Most likely, they were smarter than us. Maybe not smarter in ways that we would instantly recognize — say, sitting down and taking an SAT test. But definitely intelligent in ways that would have given them the needed survival skills for life in a harsh environment, featuring encroaching ice (due to climate change), saber-toothed tigers, and our woolly friends. These guys may have been quick-on-their-feet thinkers, and WAY more street smart and cunning than we are now. Could it be that over eons, as the world warmed up and societies formed and grew, the world may have become a somewhat cushier place, in which all of the skills that Neanderthals possessed are no longer needed in such abundance? In nature as in life, why try harder? So, as I imagine it, evolution would eliminate — select against — this animal with the oversized brain, as it would any other animal with some superfluous organ or appendage. Brains require a lot of blood and care, so reducing its size to just what was needed would give a definite advantage. Most people will find this idea hard to believe — that evolution would dumb us down. But why not? We wrongly, I think, persist in believing that evolution is some kind of “progress” — a series of more or less linear improvements in each species — and that animals alive today, including us, are therefore “better” than what came before. Xenophobic thinking, seems to me. Critters that came before, and stayed around way longer than we did, were extremely evolutionarily successful in that they had adapted beautifully to the environment that existed around them. For example, if present-day animals were somehow transported back millions of years, we might find ourselves less suited for survival than our hairy pals. We’d be the ones that would go extinct. Evolution is not absolute. So then what happens if we bring Mr. Smarty Pants back to life? If he were joined by some of his mates, wouldn’t they eventually realize that they were smarter than us? Would they bide their time, hiding their agenda, and ultimately sabotage our world, taking charge of our pathetic unintelligent mobs? Cornelius may indeed have been smarter than Charlton Heston; those movies might not be as far-fetched as we thought. This does seem like an interesting basis for a film — done somewhat differently than “Planet of the Apes” or “Caveman” — in which a frozen guy is thawed out. It’s often portrayed that we’ll build machines that will become our betters, that will eventually dominate us. But wouldn’t it be a curious twist if it were our own past that came to dominate us? Consider a prequel to “Planet of The Apes”: if Neanderthal dude lived in our world, perfectly adapted for hunting and other survival skills, with heightened senses and quick reflexes, wouldn’t it make sense that he’d have no use for cushy bachelor pads, molecular gastronomy, universities, books, computers or money? No doubt he could master that stuff, but he might find it all boring and unnecessary. Our super-smart new rulers would let our infrastructure and institutions slowly crumble, having no need for them. We ignorant mobs may cling to our money, comfortable suburban houses and celebrity culture, which soon might wither from lack of support from the new hairy bosses. We'd be back to the Planet of the Apes scenario, with dust and dried leaves blowing through Redmond and Cupertino. We might fight and struggle, for a while, and strike back with our bulky, inefficient WMDs, but the infinitely wilier and cleverer proto-versions of ourselves would outsmart us every time.
Last week GM — once one of the largest, most powerful companies in the whole world — went begging for a government bailout, along with the other 2 big U.S. automakers. Needless to say, Bush got this country is such deep debt that the prospect of bailing out all these entitled knuckleheads seems less and less do-able, never mind whether people agree and can stomach the idea. These companies do not have the country’s best interests at heart — for years they have fought tooth and nail against fuel economy, defeating 2 bills in congress that would have resulted in cars that use less gas and burn cleaner. They saw that they could sell the macho U.S. car buyers on gas-guzzling giant SUVs and pickup trucks, and got the government to exempt those vehicles from many of the rules that apply to cars — and we’re supposed to help these guys? They could give a shit about us! I feel bad for the working stiffs who will be and have been laid off by the thousands — though I didn’t see too many of the unions fighting hard for fuel efficiency and smaller cars — they mainly fought for more pay for less work and they aren’t getting much public sympathy either as a result. I guess I’m in favor of a bailout, with severe conditions applied. Ideally all the managers, every last one of them, including the union management, would be replaced by Japanese and Koreans, and told we also need mass transit, light rail and an end to fossil fuel consumption. The Japanese/Korean thing is a bit of a joke — but seriously; these guys should NOT be replaced by their brethren. Their thinking is stuck, frozen, blinkered, no matter how much they might claim they’ve learned their lesson. They haven’t. They flew to DC on separate private jets while their companies have less than no money. They should be replaced by either foreigners or managers outside the auto and oil industries. Then their companies might stand a chance of reviving — but if these same guys are left in charge, say goodbye to that money. Their thinking is too ossified to change. They’ll claim that they know their business, so they should be the ones who should be allowed to fix it. But them “knowing” their business is exactly the problem. Oil is down to $50 a barrel from a high of $145 during the summer. Why? The newspapers claim it is because of lowered demand, meaning that as (Americans) drive less they force the oil companies (and the Arab states who supply the oil) to lower the price in order to increase sales. I don’t think I’m buying this explanation. As much as they might wish to decrease their spending on gas and heating oil by 2/3, it’s just not possible that most businesses or ordinary folks could do that kind of reduction in a couple of months. People live in places that necessitate commuting, driving their kids to school, to the mall, etc. etc….and businesses are the same, they are set up in ways that demand the consumption of a large amount of oil and gas just to move the product, heat the buildings and run the machines. They can’t all of a sudden be closer to their warehouses and retail outlets, closer to their sources of supplies. Decades of cheap gas has created a world, a continent at least, in which everything is spread out all over the place. Moving goods and people was always relatively cheap and fast — though this summer gave a hint at things to come. But all of that can’t be readjusted in a few months to reduce demand by 2/3. It’s just not possible — or so it seems to me. Here’s a wacky but not altogether unrealistic alternative explanation. I remember as a kid there would be 2 — sometimes 3 — gas stations on some street corners in suburban Baltimore County. Occasionally there would be what came to be known as gas wars, in which one station would lower its prices to drive more business its way, and the others would have to follow suit. Usually the station that initiated this “war” was a big company like Esso, Texaco, or Amoco. The Seven Sisters. The indie gas dealer across the street was then forced to lower his prices too, or risk losing all his business, though the indie owner didn’t have the deep pockets to allow him to survive when the prices got so low that they didn’t cover his overhead. The little guy would then get driven out of business, and the big company’s station would pop their prices back to where they were before the gas war. They would have successfully driven out the competition — I saw it happen over and over — and not just in the gas station business; look at the policies of Microsoft over the years. Anyway — could it be that the Saudis might have initiated a gas war here? It would be plausible to use the economy as an explanation for lowered prices, but here the lowered prices seem to be running ahead, anticipating the collapsing economy. I suspect the Saudis see the looming oilfields, pipelines and refineries in Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Brazil and a host of other places — places who, with the price of oil as high as it was, could afford to fund all the capital-intensive ancillary aspects of the oil business. However, if the price got lowered, as it has, they won’t (and it turns out aren’t) able to finance the building of those refineries, pipelines, shipping terminals, drilling and exploration. The rivals will, if the prices stay this low for long, be driven out of business, just like the independent gas stations I saw go under in suburban Baltimore. Call me conspiracy-minded or a crackpot, but why should OPEC behave differently than Exxon, Shell and Amoco? As soon as the rival oil producers stop production and go bankrupt the big boys will swoop in, take their corner and jack the price back up.
I stayed in as the election results came in. Checked the TV now and then as Obama pulled ahead. Steven says he was on St. Mark’s Place and the street was closed and filled with people; Paul said the Lower East Side was like a huge party; Ray was in Times Square and Rockefeller Center and said it was just a wonderful heartening feeling to see all kinds of people of all races and nationalities out there celebrating; Graham was in Harlem at Sylvia’s and, needless to say, there were celebrations up there big time; and Kaïssa’s mom in Cameroon got up at 5 a.m. to follow the election progress. As one might expect, much of the rest of the world, even those who traditionally are critical of the US, are heartened and overjoyed at Obama’s victory. It renews their faith in the myth of a country where miracles can happen and where a child of immigrants can be elected president. Not just his person and his history, and what that represents, but his policies and voting record have instantly turned the Empire into a less belligerent and bossy world power and a little more the beacon of democracy, possibility, and equality that is always espoused. There might even be a return of some respect, maybe, though years of work by Bush and his cronies did an amazing job of trashing that around the whole globe. People do want the hope and possibility that the US stands for and sometimes even offers. It’s amazing how so quickly the US might regain that, in the hearts of its own people and of those watching around the world. Yes, we can. Not to put a sour note on the celebrations, but I can’t help wonder at what will happen to race relations in the US now. I suspect a lot of folks will feel that if a black man can be elected president, from a single parent household and with not a whole lot of connections and help, then why should other black folks deserve help and assistance? There may be a feeling that if Obama can do it, why can’t the rest of you out there pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps? There might be a feeling that, “Hey, how can anyone claim that there is discrimination now? So why are we spending all this money to help folks?” Well, the US is still largely a racist country that discriminates — that isn’t going to change in one night. But the election definitely does give one hope that most of the country can put that aside and inch a little bit closer to being colorblind. A friend who was going door to door for Obama in Pennsylvania, hitting the houses where the voters were undecided, got into discussions during which many of the white folks claimed to agree with Obama’s positions, but some, mysteriously, just couldn’t take the next step of saying they were going to vote for him. She, the volunteer, suspected it was race that might be holding them back, and carefully pressed them on that point. Some of them admitted that that’s what it was, whereupon she sometimes said, “It’s OK to be racist [or something to that effect] but don’t you want to vote for what’s right for your country? You can still be racist and vote for a better life for yourselves.” Wow, don’t know if I could have pulled that line of reasoning out of a hat! No doubt about it, it’s a huge step that’s been taken. Gives one a little faith in human beings for a change.
C flew in from New York and met us in Santa Barbara, and after the show, she joined us on the bus to San Francisco, about a 5-hour ride. We took the back lounge, which sounds nice, but it turned out to be a bad idea. The lovely back lounge is the noisiest and bumpiest part of the bus; we got very little sleep. I was worried that our drowsiness would mess up the plans for the upcoming day off — a bike ride with Dave Eggers, Danielle, and her boyfriend around Tiburon Peninsula — but we were OK. It was a beautiful day and we circled around the peninsula. A pregnant Vendela and young October joined us later for sandwiches and salads. The next day, Jenni organized a bike trip to Muir Beach and Muir Woods and then a lunch at the Pelican Inn over there. It was gorgeous, even if Muir Woods are a teeny bit crowded at times. 
© Jenni Muldaur, 2008
A representative for Specialized, the bike company, generously lent us 4 bikes here in San Francisco to complement those that we’re carrying — so, no one in our group is without one. The hills (and our hotel is on top of one) are a bear, but one can get around the other areas of town relatively easily. At sound check the next day, Miranda July and members of the Extra Action Marching Band joined us — not at the same time. I had an idea about our dancers teaching audience members some steps and phrases, and Miranda seemed like she would instinctively know how to structure something like that, having done something vaguely similar in a performance piece I saw last year. I was right about her instincts; she instantly emphasized that it would be important to put the audience participants at ease, not to make them feel like they’d end up being made to look foolish. The marching band is, as far as I’m concerned, a San Francisco institution. They’d joined us on a few dates a couple of years ago (Hollywood Bowl, Fillmore) so when they contacted us recently, I immediately suggested they pull out their horn charts for “Burning Down The House” and that we rehearse it together at sound check. (Before this went into motion, it had to be cleared by the symphony hall folks, as the marching band would enter from the rear lobby. It being SF, the hall was game.) Kelek (one of the Extra Action pom pom gals) suggested they teach some of their routines to our dancers, which seemed like a perfect idea to us. Lily, Natalie, and Steven were issued regulation silver pom poms (and skimpy sequined outfits the second night!) and it went off, well, incredibly. Jon P turned on the house lights illuminating the whole theater when the song kicked in and the entire symphony hall was on its feet, dancing wildly. John Waters came backstage afterwards and said he saw a rather large elderly lady shaking with shocking abandon. Jerry Harrison and wife came backstage too. We were planning on having drinks afterwards, but he said he was feeling under the weather. The marching band crashed a nearby restaurant after the show but by the time I got done saying hellos backstage and went over to see how it was going, most of them were out on the street, wandering around in their spangles and hot pants. The restaurant was pretty fancy, so maybe they were done — perhaps playing on the bar was not welcome at that place. I, Nero Every morning the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times give fresh reports of the spreading financial and economic collapse now spreading to Europe. It feels at times as if we’re fiddling while Rome burns. I suspect the repercussions will spread out a lot further before this thing settles down. Some CEOs are still bailing out with hundreds of millions in bonuses — for lying and fucking up — it’s disgusting. They get rewarded for bilking millions and doing a lousy job. There is no shame. 
© NICHOLAS ROBERTS/AFP/Getty Images, 2008
Iceland, the country, has just gone bankrupt (their banks invested heavily and ended up in serious debt). I wonder how Russia and China are weathering this crisis. I know Russian politicians have been gloating as the US economy falls off its pedestal, but the ripples and fallout are spreading fast, so we’ll see how long they can keep laughing. If they and China (and, who knows — Brazil, Dubai, Venezuela and others) can get through this relatively unscathed, then the era of US world hegemony will be incredibly short lived. Russia and China will be the two giants still standing, with the oil monarchies holding the rest of the world’s feeding tube, at least for the time being. While billions a week were being spent on a “War on Terror,” the US, and the whole world, were becoming increasingly vulnerable to this economic collapse and no one in power sought to regulate or put a stop to it. I feel that though the link is not linear, the connection between the Iraq invasion and the collapse of the US economy is inescapable. The next afternoon C and I biked over to 826 Valencia, bought some pirate supplies, and went to Ratio 3 gallery to see a Barry McGee show he has under the name of Lydia Fong (some great ball point pen drawings, but out of our price range). We stopped at Darcy’s Heartfelt store in Bernal Heights and had a pork taco and tamarind juice at La Taqueria on Mission Street, which was wonderfully fresh. I know Mission taco fiends all have their favorite places, but this place has to be up there. The 2nd show at Davies Hall went just as well as the first night. We tried out the Miranda gag, which worked, but we’re not all sure it adds significantly to the show. Maybe it just needs some refining. It wants to pull the audience into our creative process somehow, at least that’s what I imagine it could do, and be entertaining as well. Afterwards some of us made our way to Place Pigalle, a nearby bar, where the marching band was also headed. By the time C and I got there, they were in full swing. In the close quarters of a bar, the band is even more transcendent and most of us ended up on the dance floor with pom poms in our hands. 
© Natalie Kuhn, 2008
Biking back to the hotel burned off what remained of the adrenaline from our own show and dancing to the Extra Action crew.
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