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The D.C. Madame Jeane Palfrey, whose clients include prominent politicians (Senator Vitter, R-Louisiana), lobbyists, and other power brokers (Randall L. Tobias, a senior official in the State Department), was found hanged on Thursday. In mid-April, Palfrey was convicted of money laundering, using the mail for illegal purposes, and racketeering. She remained free while awaiting sentencing on July 24.
Palfrey’s death was pronounced a suicide, and she was quoted as saying she’d rather die than go to prison. One of her former employees, Brandy Britton (her real name, are you serious?), was arrested in January 2006, and committed suicide before standing trial. Needless to say, the names of most of their clients have probably died with these women.
This sure looks like the plot of a movie.
I saw Errol Morris’s film Standard Operating Procedure, the “documentary” about the Abu Ghraib photos. I have the term documentary in quotes because, as the interviewees describe past events, the film re-enacts scenarios not filmed or photographed at the time. For some, these re-enactments are a problem, as documentary convention prescribes a style and logic that, in most cases, simulates truth telling and objectivity. Many assume that in documentaries, the camera is a mute witness to “facts” and “events” and any interference or fictional techniques or touches destroys this, well, myth.
The re-enactments do not adhere to the form typical of those criminal investigation TV shows, which recreate the crime scenes with actors, out of focus, slow-motion shots, and voiceover narration. Instead, Morris employs fragmentary images: a close up of snarling dog, its teeth lunging at the camera; a close up of skin covered in swarming ants; and most expensive, a helicopter exploding above our heads, the flaming parts descending on the camera.
It should be obvious that all documentary filmmakers have an agenda they hope to put forward. I’m not talking about Michael Moore and Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, The Smartest Guys in the Room) who obviously have a polemic to deliver, but about the countless docs, TV shows, news reports and educational pieces that evince a style that says, “We don’t have a point of view. We’re simply recording what’s in front of the camera and you make up your own mind.”
These ostensibly objective works invoke specific filmic devices that audiences have come to accept and recognize as indicators of truth telling and impartiality. Upon examining these “unbiased” films, we may sense their deep, inherent agendas, but for the most part, the style masks the filmmakers’ underlying prejudices, and we buy into it.
In a sense then, fiction films are also just recording what’s in front of the camera, but in their case, it happens to be costumed actors staging events. Fiction films are documentaries of the performances of actors.
Next, I watched Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA, an incredible, award-winning documentary about a violent mine strike in Kentucky. It took her four years to make the film, which she originally intended to be about something related, though different. It’s obvious that Kopple was embedded with the miners. During some particularly violent confrontations, the camera is clearly on the “side” of the striking miners, as scabs and corporate toadies take shots at them. The filmmaker hung with the mining families and otherworldly community in these hollers in order to secure some of the intimate details. Upon release, the film was an exposé, drawing attention to lives and injustices that otherwise would have been ignored.
Likewise, as Errol Morris and some of his interviewees point out, the photos taken at Abu Ghraib are responsible for drawing attention to the prison’s systemic practice of abuse. Had these photos never surfaced, the whole situation would have been swept under the rug, as was the violent, habitual torture practiced by the CIA and MI, never photographed. Since these practices can’t be proven, most media outlets pretty much ignore them. To paraphrase one of the film’s talking heads: ‘These photos made the President of the United States have to apologize to the world, so someone was going to pay.’ Unsaid, although implicit, is that those who caused the embarrassment to Bush would pay over those responsible for setting up a situation where abusive behaviors were condoned and encouraged.
Morris doesn’t broach the “Chain of Command” issues Seymour Hersh examines in his book of the same title. Hersh carefully traces the legal maneuvers of Gonzales and the policies of the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush tripartite, effectively encouraging and excusing torture and anything goes behavior.
The film details the fascinating use of forensics to establish accurate information about the photographs. Metadata embedded within the digital images is extracted and cross-referenced to handwritten logs to recreate a timeline, and uncover who took the pictures and with what camera. Morris limits the focus to the Americans, not the Iraqis. Some interviewees have the look of those whose experiences have twisted and mangled their souls deeply. They seem haunted and possessed. Especially the young women, former innocents who, like characters out of some horror movie, were fucked over by some invisible, monstrous entity.
So maybe the film is not a documentary in the accepted sense, or maybe we must realize that docs are not exactly what they appear to be. At any rate, by examining a set of infamous photos, how they came to be, who authored them, and how they survived, Morris creates a meditation on the meaning and reception of images—particularly news images—in our culture at large.
As these photos are reexamined, one can’t help but wonder whether a people often rounded up, imprisoned and tortured for no reason—many prisoners are simple cab drivers and local shopkeepers—will keep their grudges and desire for revenge close. And of course, one wonders whether a terrible price will be paid somewhere down the line. George Bush might be dead by then, Cheney will surely be gone soon—he’s running on watch batteries as it is—but some naïve and “innocent” generation will pay for our current government’s policies and actions and wonder, “What did I do to deserve this?”
I expected the mortgage credit crisis to affect the super rich here in NY and around the world, as did many of my friends. We gaze out at the skeletons of condos being erected in every neighborhood, with their toppling cranes and occasional shards of falling glass, and wonder aloud who is going to fill these expensive monstrosities? With the dollar so low, haven’t the Eurorich already bought their pieces of NY real estate? And if there is a financial crisis, doesn’t that mean that hedge fund guys and others whose wealth is based on not making anything will be less flush? Aren’t those guys the intended buyers for these apartments and bachelor pads? We wonder if these condos will end up empty if these guys fall on hard times.
A couple in a restaurant introduce themselves to me. She is a real estate broker mainly in the Upper East Side. So I ask her if there is a downturn in her market, and she says no, not in the slightest. The truly rich are barely affected, she says, and the hedge fund guys make so much money that even if they make ten million less, it’s not all that significant to them. Maybe they will forgo the Miami condo, for now, but this rarefied part of NYC will remain unaffected, so she claims.
Others make similar assertions. A few recent articles mention that the spending of the super rich continues unabated. It’s written about because, like my friends and I, many assume that everyone will be hurt by the falling house of cards. But so far, at least according to these articles, the super rich are immune, and they will go on partying, buying contemporary art and building condos as the bottom falls out for the bottom half of society.
So far, it seems there is some invisible financial dividing line below which low-income homeowners and all the companies that depend on their dollars—the Foot Lockers, Zales, and Office Depots—will go completely bankrupt. This is happening right now, and it’s happening amazingly fast. It’s not just one or two bankruptcies, and not just mom and pop stores on main streets, but huge chains that used to seem invulnerable in their ubiquity. These were the stores that put mom and pop out of business and now they’re going under?
What will happen when half the country is unemployed, with no medical insurance, stuck in a sheet rock house miles from public transportation? They’ll be ripe for religion or revolution if you ask me. Bibles and bullets.
Will they still support the billions a day spent in Iraq? I don’t think so—even now they don’t. One would expect they’ll be pretty pissed off watching the rich and famous party endlessly and continue their glamorous lifestyle—or maybe not. Surprising to me, those being duped and exploited by banks and entrepreneurs often envy their “betters”—they want to be that person in the Beemer or Lexus, and will mortgage everything they’ve got to have a symbolic piece of it. Instead of anger and action we get envy—the bane of every outside agitator, union organizer, and young revolutionary.
I remember when MLK decided to tie the Vietnam War in with domestic issues like poverty and racism, and many thought it ill advised. They assumed he would lose some support—there were still some in favor of the Vietnam War at that point—and that it might dilute the focus on jobs, racism, equality and votes.
I think he was right. This stuff is tied together. Katrina and Iraq are not separate issues. The securities and safeguards guaranteed to the super rich by the Bush administration and the credit crisis are probably linked as well. I don’t mean conspiracy linked—the connections and actions don’t have to be premeditated or thought out in advance to make a network. There are organic emergent forces at work, self-organizing systems arising that benefit some and not others. That too sounds complex and conspiratorial, but it’s not.
Torch Song
I don’t often indulge in the usual blog thing of aggregating, i.e. pointing to articles in newspapers and magazines, but there’s a lovely and surprising piece in the NY Times Arts section disguised as yet another article on the China Tibet issue and the Olympic torch relay. The piece points out that the torch relay originated with the Nazis. It was a bit of stagecraft thought up by Carl Diem and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl for her 1938 hymn to Aryan supremacy, Olympia.
The Wagnerian imagery is mythic: within a landscape of Greek ruins, a naked and pure human specimen holds a javelin as it is lit by a bowl of fire, and then transports the burning torch to the Rhineland—well, the symbolism is pretty obvious.
Clients One Through Eight
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was referred to as client number nine in the prostitution sting this week. Assignations run around $4,500 for the top gals in this house, so I ask myself: why haven’t we been provided the names of clients one through eight? It goes without saying that all are wealthy men, and there are probably a few other politicians among them. The prostitution ring — the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. — was under federal wiretap, so they MUST know the identities of the others. There are probably a lot more than nine clients too, eh, so why have their identities not been released? Though they vigorously deny it, it sure smells like a Republican setup.
Alberto Gonzales was Attorney General at the time this investigation was begun — he who fired a whole slew of high level federal prosecutors because they wouldn’t kiss Bush’s ass. It’s just the sort of thing he would do, with the quiet urging of Karl Rove or Dick Cheney. The dirty trickster Roger Stone — whose work goes back to Nixon days — has been after Spitzer for some years. He was behind a threatening phone call to Bernard Spitzer, Eliot’s father, regarding campaign contributions to his son’s election campaign for attorney general in 1994. Here is part of the voice message he left: “There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.” Stone was being paid by a group of Republicans to bring down Spitzer, and now he may have succeeded. (He was also involved in orchestrating protests against the Florida vote recount, the debacle that allowed George Bush to become president.)
Like a lot of politicians and people in power, it seems Spitzer believed he could get away with some shit. He should know that if he’s going to play moral crusader, he’s got to be a saint. People like Roger Stone are all too willing to make a quiet call and tip off whomever at the slightest slip or indiscretion of their enemies.
News
Good news, I hope: the city has given the Red Hook ball field vendors a reprieve, allowing them time to get their kiosks and trucks up to health code. The articles don’t specify exactly what that entails or whether the requirements are ridiculous or not. And it’s a little unclear whether each vendor or all of them together need to raise the 30k estimated to get up to code. 30k is a lot of money to come up with when you’re selling huaraches and pupusas as cheaply as they do at the ball fields. These vendors are one of the things that make New York a good place to live. They represent the opposite of the mallification of the planet.
Other good news: the city (specifically the Department of Transportation) is proposing to make Prince Street car-free on Sundays from 11am to 6pm. This experiment faces some opposition from car owners in the hood, but for most local residents, and for all the local businesses, it will be a big improvement.
A friend passed me a link to a survey website with a list of about thirty statements on current political issues. You mark whether you agree or disagree with each statement, and then select how strongly you feel about it. Then, when you’re done, it tells you which presidential hopeful comes closest to your beliefs, and ranks the rest in descending order.
http://www.dehp.net/candidate/index.php
Sort of sad to say, but many of my friends and I got Kucinich as our top response.
I wonder if the mortgage and credit debacle is a clue. Could it reveal one of the reasons poor or working people voted for Bush last time around? I wonder, because for working folks voting Republican is usually and traditionally a vote for Big Business, and therefore against the working man’s self interest.
In writing the following explanation of the current mortgage/credit collapse, I’m explaining it to myself as best I can. As I understand it, this is what happened. Loans, lines of credit and mortgages are all essentially lending money at interest. As long as it is guaranteed that the loans will be paid back, the loan is as good as money — better actually, as it accrues interest. I can therefore sell a loan I originally made to you to my pal Bob, a third party. And if you are good for repayment, the sale is as good as a money transfer and Bob is happy to purchase this promissory note. My pal Bob’s worth will increase in the future as you the debtor repay the loan, and my worth has gone up immediately, as Bob just paid me.
So, in various ways making mortgage/loans is like printing money — easy to do, and secure, if the payback is guaranteed. Prime Loans are so named because the risk of default is very low and repayment a pretty sure bet. The more loans one makes in this scenario the richer you can become. I can take the money Bob paid me for your promissory note and lend the money to someone else — I don’t even need more cash or capital.
One of the reasons this all worked, or seemed to work, is because of the housing and real estate boom. I know that loans — a mortgage for example — use a person’s house as a guarantee. Over the past years, the values of houses and condos were continually rising. So, if a mortgage holder defaulted on a loan, chances are the house, now the property of bank or note holder, would be worth more than the money that had been originally lent out. It paid to have suckers default on their mortgages(!), as long as the value of their assets continued to rise. And of course, no one believed that the rising cost of real estate and the boom in housing could ever end. Easy for me to say this in retrospect.
However, as one can imagine, anything akin to printing money is awfully tempting — maybe even irresistible — to avoid abusing. As assigning loans and mortgages became easier and easier, the temptation arose to give mortgages to people who in all likelihood wouldn’t be able to repay the loans. Subprime lending, which entailed a higher degree of risk, was redefined. Subprime rates are given to borrowers who do not qualify for the best interest rates because of their deficient credit history.
The recipients of such loans are often described as NINJAs — No Income, No Job, No Assets. Others were known as “liars”, because their claims of income and employment were never crosschecked. (I would think the burden for cross checking falls on the institution, no?) It seems that some banks were relaxing the standards for subprime mortgage loan approval, and assigning the loans in a way that increased the likelihood of borrower default or other loss to the bank. (See the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s testimony before the senate for further reading).
According to my business managers, this problem was compounded by the effect of the interest-only loans that everyone was signing up for: “These allowed home-buyers to pay only interest at a very low ‘teaser’ rate for two years, but after the two years, the rates can double and the payment will include principal as well. The result is that the homeowners can't afford the payments, and if they had planned to refinance after two years based on appreciation in the equity of their homes, that hope is gone because home prices have only dropped.”
In their heady euphoria, the institutions charged with monitoring the lenders and wheeler-dealers looked the other way as these iffy deals were made. It was just too tempting, I guess.
So, if one can sell a mortgage from a NINJA or a liar to Bob (without Bob knowing that’s the status of his supposed asset?), then the incentive to make more loans — to everyone — and sell them to Bob and to Bob’s friend is immense. The “value” of these companies and banks making, buying and selling these loans skyrocketed. And, why not? Very few people want to be spoilsports and actually look at whether or not these loans and mortgages have a good change of being repaid. Huge fortunes were being built on air — or on self-deception — like Enron and Tyco a few years ago.
Meanwhile the recipients — the workingmen and women who are barely eking by — suddenly have loan offers thrown at them by the truckload. They feel richer, more flush; things are going well it seems, and their situations improving. It’s not so hard to pay the bills. They worry less and sleep more. A sense of blissfully ignorant well-being pervades the land. The working class and the under- and unemployed assume that the Republicans are somewhat responsible for this new (virtual) wealth — and maybe they were. It would follow that Mr. Joe Average might vote for the administration seemingly responsible for his new sense of well-being. Now, the bills are coming due — the housing market stalled, as I understand it, triggering the collapse of the whole house of cards.
The other day I was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV with my mom and I noticed that there was a Jeff Koons bunny float/inflatable balloon in the parade! The humongous silver balloon was a blow-up replica of one of his shiny stainless steel versions of kitschy children’s toys. It was a bit of a shock: while the contemporary art world and some museums are a big deal these days, they’re still the preserve of a certain social set. And the audience for the Macy’s parade (on TV and on the streets), would seem to be contained in a separate circle in that particular Venn diagram.
C said that Tom Otterness had one last year, which makes perfect sense as his pieces are clever and funny and kids love them. The Koons balloon, not having a face and all, is kind of scary for the little tykes. We joked about what would come next year — a Richard Serra balloon? A big inflatable version of a twisty slab of rusty steel floating down Broadway?
What’s going on here? Who paid for this? These things must cost a fortune and I can’t find out who underwrote this thing. Who decided a Koons balloon should be included in a parade focused on children and children’s favorite characters? (The other balloons were Shrek, Mr. Potato Head, Kermit, Snoopy and Pokeman.)
I suspect that, as with all branding urges, once a product catches the eye of the public (or a specific subset of the public) and sells, then other consumers — in this case collectors and museums — will want the same thing, or as close to it as possible. Art dealers and collectors might then tactfully urge a successful artist to make more pieces like the one successfully branded, as the “brand”, the icon, is easy to sell and easy to identify. Within such a model, a successfully branded artist might go on to make more or less the same piece over and over again, with slight variations.
We applaud this stick-to-a-good-thing in a classic English shoe, a stapler, or a band saw, but in art it’s mystifying.
Oddly, in the fashion megaverse and some other retail areas, a brand, design or image accepted and successful amongst a tiny (usually wealthy) social demographic means that it will inevitably be desired by those lower down on the social and economic ladder, either via logo imprinted items, knockoffs, counterfeits or copies. The fact that the hoi polloi will now be interested in the item makes it naturally less interesting to the elite. It will go out of favor, and becomes last year’s model, soon to be relegated to the closet or the giveaway pile. If it’s too popular, it can’t be cool anymore. As a result, the creative folks, the designers, feel pressure to come up with a new and different line to appeal to these elites, and as quickly as possible. That’s why it’s called fashion.
Sarah R. suggests the development of fashion trends can occur in reverse as well. This happens all the time, as subculture style is appropriated and adopted by the designers or elite/wealthy, and then sold back to the masses. A classic example is of course the punk style of the mid-70s — by 1977, Cosmopolitan had a fashion spread featuring plastic and safety pins (the punks of course initially borrowed the safety pin from the working class culture where it was used to correct ill-fitting/torn clothing). The article ended with "To Shock is Chic" — so much for subversion! We see this again and again over the past 30 years: grunge fashion for instance, made it on to the runways in the nineties, and the big eighties revival started with street culture before it hit the couture houses. Today corporations have coolhunters to identify trends, and the designers look to them to tell them what will sell. She thinks the emergence of trends is less unidirectional and more of a multi-sourced dialectic these days. And the faster trends are identified, the faster new ones emerge.
Happily, this system of economic and social snobbery (along with the rapid appropriation of designs by the hoi polloi) has become a prod to innovation and invention. The designers and the creative teams have to constantly stay one step ahead of the knockoff merchants and the taste of ordinary folks. Elitism — a natural Darwinian part of sexual selection — is, in this system, a goad to creativity. Not only in the fashion world, but for anything that can be fetishized: electronic gadgets, video games, bands and singers, cars, bikes, and restaurants.
Oddly, it doesn’t seem to work that way in the realm of contemporary art. In the art world, once an artist succeeds in branding his or her name, the system seems to favor steering the artist towards the repetition of that object, with slight variations, for decades. The incentive for innovation and change isn’t there for some mysterious reason. With success, creativity often (not always) comes to a halt, and production begins. To be fair, there are plenty of exceptions, but the numbers that follow this rule are astounding — at least to me. Maybe my definitions are misaligned with those of everyone else?
Perhaps the explanation for this exception lies in the fact that art is not mass-produced, not in the same way as fashion or cars are anyway. Each object is somewhat (albeit subtly) unique, and if purchased, resides in the ownership of a collector or a museum — an individual or a single entity — and its public availability henceforth restricted. So, in order for the whole little art world to consume this brand, it can take decades of production by the artist and his or her staff. These days, Jeff Koons can have a bunny in the Macy’s parade, Richard Prince can print images on Marc Jacobs dresses, and Murakami can design the icons on Louis Vuitton handbags, which only reinforces the art brand as icon. The artist’s status is “safe”, possibly even enhanced, because the “originals” remain forever in limited supply and can only be afforded by a wealthy “discerning” few. However, it’s one thing to be enhanced by luxury goods and another to be featured on cereal boxes, and ads for hair products.
In the last few months there have been a lot of articles in newspapers and magazines about the danger that the new art bubble will burst. Recent auctions at Sotheby’s and Christies would either confirm or deny whether the ever-rising, astounding prices for contemporary art will continue to head skyward. The articles ranged in their positions, and most were simply about the bubble itself and what it means to contemporary art.
It was interesting and a little sad to me that most of the focus in these articles — and there have been lots of them — was on the sums and not the content of the art. But, as more than one writer implied, in many cases the money has become the content. In The New Yorker, Calvin Tompkins quoted a gallerist who stated that the value of artwork is now tied to its monetary worth, which means what it sells for at auction. In this system, you are a better artist because your work sells for more money. (Everyone knows this can’t possibly be true — monetary value is about desire, status and scarcity and not about quality. But according to this gallerist, this is the way it is right now.)
Souren Melikian, the auction writer for The Herald Tribune, was the only writer to offer an opinion on the quality of the some of the works on offer. He was scathing, intimating that a Van Gogh was not a very good one, and that a Picasso was “from his cartoon period”, which was not meant as a compliment. He didn’t venture into the contemporary territory too much, though he did submit that Hugh Grant’s Warhol (a portrait of Liz Taylor) was grossly overvalued in the press. The implication was clear: according to Melikian, our valuation criteria for art have become skewed, and money and the auction houses are responsible.
In particular, Melikian worried about the auction house practice of offering guarantees to favored customers selling “important” works. Assuring a customer a dollar amount for the work, whether it is sold or not, is a way for one auction house to grab a customer and a work from another house. In effect, the auction house buys the work and then becomes the seller. In Melikian’s words, “This is a flawed system. It distorts the principle of an auction that is supposed to be an open contest between sellers and buyers, with the auctioneer as a neutral arbiter.”
Of course, there are always fashions and trends in buying art, old and new. Various movements go in and out of favor — some artists become newly appreciated and others are forgotten. That’s where, on a longer time scale maybe, the art world is similar to the fashion world, although it’s dealing less with new creations and more with preexisting works.
An article by Jori Finkel in the Sunday NY Times mentions that certain powerful galleries are providing financial assistance to fund museum shows of their artists at museums (which increases the value of the work). And many of the same galleries now publicly engage in the practice of either bidding up the works of their artists at auction, or buying the works at premium prices, also a way of keeping the perceived monetary value of a work high. (If suddenly one can get the work of a premium priced artist for much less than the ascribed value, the value of ALL that artist’s work — much of it held by esteemed collectors, or the galleries themselves — will drop). This practice, not exactly Kosher, was once semi-secret though insiders knew it went on. It hardly makes for a level or objective playing field. Now, as with many things in the Bush era, formerly hidden practices are brazenly played out in open. The idea of shame has disappeared, probably because in a market driven, dog-eat-dog world, any practice that benefits you is in turn reflexively defined as legitimate.
Of course, the museums deny that their curatorial decisions are affected by the money coming in from galleries, but that’s simply too silly to believe. While the galleries may not be dictating what artists the museums show (though that does seem to happen), the internalized decision process among museum directors and curators cannot help but be affected by what is financially feasible. Some women don’t up and announce that they are attracted to a man because he has money — they just naturally find him more “attractive” and “interesting”. The knowledge of the money figures in some calculation performed by the amygdala region of the brain and voilà, one feels differently, strangely attracted.
One wonders if the quality work by emerging artists who fall outside of the circus tent will necessarily get lost. Some emerging artists are thrown into the limelight perhaps a little too quickly, with detrimental effects. Take some of the bands from the nineties: early on their work was overvalued and written about extensively, leaving them no time or room to develop as the branding process had already been set in motion.
The money amounts are truly astounding. In a speech delivered at the Burlington House in 2004, Robert Hughes, quoting Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, asserted, “[…]no painting is worth $100 million dollars” (though $100 million dollars isn’t worth $100 million dollars any more). He claims that these amounts inevitably distort the perception of any piece of art.
All that said, I find there is still a lot of interesting and inspiring work being done. In some cases the flood of money has allowed some lesser-known artists to be seen and funded, and in other cases the money carrot may unconsciously inspire some creative types to make stuff that they otherwise wouldn’t. Despite all the shouting, noise and crap, one can choose to look the other way and see something genuine and fascinating.
Went to see Sufjan Stevens’s piece at the BAM. The first half was a new “cinematic suite” called “The BQE”. Various elements evoked semi-romantic film soundtracks and the Phillip Glass movies (there were three projected videos running simultaneously). But it didn’t matter; the nutty celebration was so inventive and wacky and sometimes genuinely loving that none of those connections affected my enjoyment.
The inclusion of hula hoops, both live and on-screen, juxtaposed with car wheels, Coney Island rides, fireworks and traffic at night, was out of left field and pretty wonderful.
The second half was a sort of greatest hits with expanded orchestrations. Essentially similar to, though shorter than, his last touring show, which was good.
Today was the NY marathon.
Wanted to bike to Long Island City, but the Queensboro Bridge bike lane was closed (for the handicapped they said, though it was completely empty). Took the Roosevelt Island tram instead (the view is from there), and rode down by the abandoned lunatic asylum. There was no one around. From the tip of the island one has a great view of the UN building and a rocky island filled with cormorants — an odd sight for NYC.
We had a snack at a nice Hunters Point café and watched outside as the cleanup crews picked up the piles of paper cups and tissues that had been handed out to the runners. Here the streets ran bright yellow with Gatorade — it looked like the marathoners had all peed themselves. A few stragglers limped and walked by, and I wondered if I would be privileged to see the very last person in the marathon, a sight more rare and more difficult to establish than who came in first. I think it was a man in a multicolored headwrap with a few-days-growth beard, who might have been smoking a cigarette as he made his way up the street, listing slightly towards the curb.
Social "Hateworking"
The Financial Times reports on the dark side of social networking sites:
Enemybook:
An adjunct to Facebook, with page additions so you can list enemies as well as friends.
Snubster:
Select Facebook contacts will be sent a snub that says they are now “on notice” or “dead to me”.
Hatebook:
A standalone site. Identical to Facebook except you befriend other haters. And you can build an “Evil Map” that tells you the location of your hater pals.
It seems to me that this was inevitable. Once you have the existence of social networking sites you have to take the bad with the good. While it might be nice to think that they are a place to meet “friends” and like minded folks, it is just as likely to be a place to make enemies, engage in gossip, spread rumors, scratch and claw. These are a big part of social life in the real world, and to think that the online world would just be about nice stuff and making friends, well…
Walk-in Videogame
My sister had the idea that we would take my parents to IKEA to look at possible replacements for their kitchen cabinets, counters, sinks and storage. I loved the idea of a trip to IKEA since I’d never been there ever. And as it was to be a look-see and not a buying trip, the pressure would be low. I was looking forward to the famous Swedish meatballs for lunch too.
IKEA is huge. We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?
Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could**:
BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA
One soon realizes that one of the goals of this “game” is to decide which cabinets, in which wood or wood-like material, would, could or should be combined with which counter materials, and then to match them to a particular style sofa and upholstery, and finally, to select the color and texture of floor material that would coordinate best with all the above.
There are free measuring tapes available to help you, dotted lines are painted on the floors (to help determine square footage), and personnel hover at computers waiting to guide you through the whole mix and match system — game spoilers, one might say.
Once one gets some of this figured out — scratch pads might help — moving on to the next level of game play is a possibility. One goes through the restaurant wormhole (the food was good) and emerges at the next universe: picking out the flat-packed cabinet and furniture bits stacked in a world of endless towering shelves. As far as the eye can see there are shelves, tall shelves, much, much higher than a person can reach. The weird language is used here too.
Of course, the tables don’t look like tables any more in this world, thus some conceptual skills are needed here. Memorizing some of those strange words helps a lot too, I would imagine. Players drift about here, aimlessly, haphazardly, but soon they begin to put the clues together and the young couples — there are a lot of young couples — pull what will become their dream home off the shelves and head for the checkout counters. Only when they get home will they know if they have truly exited the game, or if they need to return for another round.
**Where IKEA gets the names (from Wikipedia)
IKEA products are identified by single word names. Most of the names are either Swedish, Danish, Finnish or Norwegian in origin. Although there are some notable exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA.
Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
Bookcase ranges: Occupations
Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
Chairs, desks: men's names
Materials, curtains: women's names
Garden furniture: Swedish islands
Carpets: Danish place names
Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones; words related to sleep, comfort, and cuddling
Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives
Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames
Halloween
Walking around town I have to constantly remind myself it’s Halloween. It might explain that woman in a white gown across the street — isn’t her makeup unusually white? And the couple in front of me as I walk to the deli — the woman sort of looks like a Raggedy Ann doll. They’re really not that far from how people normally look around here. And where’s the Birdman?
Speaking of scary…Bush’s nominee for Attorney General still refuses to call waterboarding torture, amongst many other sleazy things. He’s clearly an apologist for the policies of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush. And if the Democratic congress passes this man — who by nature of this absolution puts the US and its citizens in harms way, to say nothing of the boys in the services — they will be as guilty as he is. It goes without saying that the Bush crew does NOT support our troops, providing every justification to render our soldiers the pariahs and targets they are fast becoming.
Martin Puryear
Went to see a MoMA show surveying the sculptural works of Martin Puryear, old and new. In my opinion it’s incredible. I found his work both beautiful and moving. I got choked up.
They sculptures are all wood mixed with other materials, partly abstract but with recognizable elements and shapes too: wheels and an axle from an old fashioned cart, but giant; an old wooden wheelbarrow; baskets, upside down and out of scale; fishing nets, the kind used by native Americans; yokes, fence posts, ploughs, tools and their handles, worn into smooth biomorphic shapes with use and age. The works evoke the lyrics of gospel songs and spirituals, and the novels of William Faulkner and Flannery O‘Connor.
Ladder for Booker T. Washington
Photo by Mark Interrante
There are references to the history of Africans in the New World, to traditional African cultures, to farming, working the land and making things by hand — the way one comes to know one’s tools as if they are extensions of oneself, the way they almost come to have a life of their own.
The pieces are calm, but highly charged, both conscious and comfortable with what they are, but also aware that there are layers to get lost in.
None of this is obvious — the scale has been changed and the references are not right upfront or blatant, instead embedded in the shapes and materials, in how they must feel to the hand. (There were more “Do Not Touch” signs than I’ve seen in a long time — maybe they knew the urge to touch these would be strong).
Here is an outdoor piece that wasn’t included in the show, though there was one sculpture with one of these impossible needle like trees that seem to point to the sky just as its diameter dwindles to nothing.
From an article in The New York Times:
According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.
This is part of wider horrific epidemic, and this little excerpt makes it sound like some bizarre nightmare union between William Gibson and Cormack McCarthy.
Went to some art openings on Thursday and Friday. Thursday night in Chelsea was unbelievable — the increase in the number of people in the streets had me stunned. I recognized some of the “regulars” and some actual artists amongst the throngs, but where did all the rest come from? The crowds were bordering on street fair San Gennaro festival levels — but here they are all hipsters. From Williamsburg and LES some of them? I made a joke that someone will soon be selling tube socks and Italian sausages from tables.
My first thought as I rounded the corner of 25th St. and saw the crowds was “that’s it, it’s over, art is just TOO popular now!” This is a quantum leap in attendance, and the change in scale isn’t insignificant. It is the end of something, and the beginning of something else.
Went to see a show by Tucker Nichols, and his gallerist was thrilled by the crowds. He viewed it as “isn’t it great that everyone is interested in art now!” Cindy was more skeptical — she suggested they might not all be here primarily to view art. I could see both sides: there were indeed, as she implied, a lot of people, young men and women, just hanging out, mostly on the sidewalks, hoping to “make some new friends.” It’s a social scene as much as anything. Art has become a thing, a life accessory, which one must become knowledgeable about. In that sense it is a lifestyle and status marker — being aware of art implies that you are refined, interesting, and possibly… rich. The comment by the gallerist also seems to imply or infer that art appreciation is somehow good for you. In fact, it might even make you a better person. The increased interest in art is not just good for his business, but for the minds and souls of the public.
I don’t believe that. I don’t think viewing art makes you more moral or better in any way shape or form. I believe that this idea might be a holdover from the past, when art collecting and appreciating was the preserve of the landed classes. Since — subtly now, but more obviously in the past — the upper classes let everyone know that they are more refined than everyone else, then by inference, liking what they like might make you better and more refined too. Right? Some of it might rub off. At least it would get you closer to money and power, and that couldn’t hurt. Imagine if someone said that stamp collecting made you a better person.
I think it’s not surprising that the values and public behaviors of the upper classes became considered more moral, refined, stimulating and well, high class — being the upper class, or wealthy or powerful you would want to give that impression — except for fox hunting? Fox hunting too. We know that hunting fox, peacock and small game became something the nouveau riche adopted too. The morals of the upper classes are probably no better or worse than your average double wide inhabitant, but somehow most people believe that attending the opera and drinking fine wines makes you a better person. It does not. Living in a double wide does not make you a lesser person either, though financial pressures would be more acute.
I think there are reasons for the existence of popular myths of the noble poor person, the immoral poor person, the decadent rich and the high-minded philanthropist. We’ve seen them in a million movies.
So, if the arty world becomes too popular, there will probably be a strong desire by certain parties to form a new, gated community — otherwise, where is the status in liking what everyone else likes? All the collectors hate when their field becomes popular — there’s a built in snobbism that is the same whether it’s a MoMA board member or a stylish skateboarder.
The next night was not quite as crowded, but at Pace 22nd St. there was a line to get in to Keith Tyson's show. I was told later that there were over 100 assistants and fabricators working on this “piece” (it is actually over 230 individual pieces) for 2 years. The sheer amount of fabrication boggles the mind — there were realistic sculptors of people and animals, odd biomorphic shapes and what looked like a titanium hip hop artist. 
Inside I was chatting with Andrea, wife of gallerist Mark Glimcher, and up walks Alan Yentob, the (to me) famous BBC Creative Director. We all chatted briefly about the blow up, the explosion in attendance, and the interest in art — if indeed it is interest at all.
Yentob is making a doc, for the BBC I guess, on “How To Get On In The Art World” — that's how he put it. I saw two camera operators elsewhere in the gallery. Yentob casually asked more questions and then I noticed he was wired — he had a mic clipped onto his jacket collar. I could see one of the distant cameras pointing at us. I began to feel a little uncomfortable. I commented on the fact that some UK artists get covered in the daily tabloid press over there — it would be like a Mike Kelly show here for example, getting big coverage in the news pages of the Post, which is not going to happen. But, I offered, the interest by the British tabloids in what Tracy and Damien are up to is not, in my opinion, a sign of arty interest on the behalf of the UK workingman. Instead, it is an effort by the Murdoch owned papers to reinforce the idea that artists are nothing but fucking nutters and crafty conmen to boot. It sells more papers if you can work up some class outrage at the shenanigans of the art world. Yentob remarked that Damien and Tracy earn so much they are crying about the press slagging them off all the way to the bank. I excused myself.
From MediaGuardian.co.uk:
“A senior corporation source admitted to MediaGuardian.co.uk that Mr. Yentob often does not conduct all the interviews on Imagine, even though he appears nodding or reacting to them.”
The British refer to this as the “ nodding” scandal. Well, he was conducting this one himself, though he didn’t tell us.
If the crowds and interest in art explodes further, then simply managing the crowds will become part of the scene: there will be door people everywhere, with lists and velvet ropes and bouncers. Galleries will have VIP sections. Hip Hop stars will want to hang with Koons and Serra.
Gallerists used to bemoan the smallness of the art world, the same people and players every year. So this recent blow up will be a welcome change. (I can imagine in the former, smaller world if you couldn’t sell something, well, that was it, you didn’t have somewhere else to turn. Now you have crowds waiting in line.)
Despite my criticism of some of these antics, I won’t take the tabloid view that all artists and their dealers are scammers out to fleece the wealthy and the great museums of the world — and the public too, who pay for those museums, at least a little bit. I think a few are indeed corrupted by their own success, or are partly coerced into making “salable objects,” but most are just doing what moves them. As I noticed on last year’s trip to Miami-Basel, despite the focus on money, status, fame, power and class, there is still work that inspires and has heart. In that sense, it’s a lot more interesting and moving than stamp collecting.
JT show on HBO
I cooked Mexican food (sort of) — fajitas with chicken and nopales (cactus) — and a group of us joined Malu watching an HBO broadcast of Justin Timberlake’s MSG concert. He’s confident without being too overly obnoxious about it, and the amount and variety of dancing and stage business was mind-boggling. The action never stopped; of course, this was a video edit, so maybe it was tightened a little. For an all out pop extravaganza, it was remarkably tasteful, even chaste.
The stage appeared to be a large Maltese cross shape in the middle of the arena, with the live band tucked into some eye-shaped pits, though it was hard to see with all the dark lighting. Many sections rose and fell; sometimes the band seemed to be at stage level and other times, sunken. Sometimes, massive semi-translucent curtain screens descended with projected images.
While performing “in the round” makes sense in some ways, in these arenas at least one third of the audience will always be left out no matter what the performer does. One can only play to all quadrants so much, and when those screens come down, I imagine half the crowd is wondering what they’re missing — well, I’m sure it’s all on the screens. But on the whole, I was super impressed.
9-11
So, Bush and Cheney's General plays Westmoreland and says, "There's light at the end of the tunnel." What did anyone think he was going to say? Get the hell out? He's as full of shit as Westmoreland was about Vietnam, and so is Bush for claiming that if we leave there will be havoc like in Cambodia. The US brought the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields into existence with Kissinger's illegal bombing raids. They didn't simply erupt because the US was no longer "keeping the peace." Somebody needs to be called for this bullshit.
Here's my argument. Nothing much could be worse for Iraq than the US presence. Their superstructure has been destroyed, and left unrepaired. There is civil war. Their own oil isn’t bringing in money for them. So how could it be worse if we leave? It can't, really. Some folks are saying we broke it we should fix it. Tell that to someone who comes into your house and smashes all the furniture. That’s not the repairperson I would call. You might want to sue them, or kill them, or have them thrown in jail, but you don’t want them in your house ever again.
It's time to shamefully get the hell out before the incompetents in the Bush government make it even worse. These guys can’t fix or manage anything. I believe they will make it worse, given the chance. And the US media is giving them one by taking this General even a little bit seriously. He's a sock puppet and a liar; everything he says is bullshit.
The U.S. Homeland Security Dept. has initiated a policy that makes it harder for folks to visit the U.S. on short notice. Mainly business travelers from Europe and China will be affected, which is odd, as this seems counter-productive for the supposedly business-friendly conservatives. Combined with the current attitude towards immigration this adds up to doors creaking closed. To his credit, Bush’s amnesty program for immigrants at least recognized that they prop up the U.S. economy and that retaliatory policies from foreign markets would be disastrous.
Other countries that closed their doors in the past were (or are) Albania, Burma, North Korea, Turkmenistan and Red China (before their conversion to glorious authoritarian capitalism). It really worked well for all those guys.
According to Einstein we’ve got a little over 4 years. Here’s a quote from him: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
And in today's NY Times it says that more than a ¼ of the honeybees in the U.S. have vanished. The article continues with a lot of head scratching as to why but sort of says “gee, we dunno.”
In Speigel, the German newsmagazine, they say, “Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.”
A month or so ago I read a similar article that said the bees were disappearing out west. Then, a few weeks later, I read a seemingly unrelated article that said that growers of GM tangerines were furious with beekeepers for allowing their bees to wander into the GM-planted fields.
The explanation for their anger is simple. GM crops have been carefully and sometimes expensively modified to have certain desirable characteristics — seedless tangerines, in this case. Bees, as an important part of the chain of life, cross-pollinate plants by “accidentally” rubbing pollen from one flower onto another further away. This is not really an accident, for, as Einstein points out, life as we know it has come to depend on it happening. If this “accident” or “byproduct” ceases we are goners.
Anyway, though it was not mentioned in the tangerine article I asked myself if the two articles could be related — if GM agribusiness could be trying to eliminate bees.
Call me a conspiracy nut, but it sure sounds likely to me. They are the ones who would principally benefit — they have a motive and incentive.
Would a civilization commit suicide? You bet they would — they’ve done it all the time. I read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse and, sure enough, according to him culture and greed trump common sense and reason every time — although in many cases it took a disaster like a drought or war to push things over the tipping point.
Links:
Are GM Crops Killing Bees? Spiegel, 3.22.07
The Vanishing, OnEarth, Summer 2006
Last night at a dinner the subject was Don Imus the radio talk show host who recently let loose some racist slurs regarding a women’s sports team. (He called the girls “nappy-headed hos”.) There has been a hubbub in the media and the station’s advertisers pulled out and now he’s been fired and his career is probably over. The story has a happy, or at least just, ending. One dinner guest suggested that all such incendiary shock jocks should be canned, as they attract listenership principally by spewing hate. Hate drives ratings up. (And therefore advertising dollars.) But initiating a reign of terror against talk show hosts and other loose canons is heading for a slippery slope, as we all agreed.
More interesting was the suggestion that the market had been the deciding factor — and that somehow the market could be a way, a device, a lever, to eject poison from the social system from time to time. That it was the advertisers pulling out, because they didn’t want to be seen as supporting a pariah, that helped to keep the social body healthy. Another guest said that it was Al Sharpton who brought this racist remark to greater attention, and that Imus has said similar things before but they’ve slipped by — that the advertisers didn’t distance themselves until Sharpton and the media made everyone aware of Imus’s remark. And isn’t it the advertisers who support and benefit from the vitriolic and incendiary attitudes fostered by these shows? Even if the hosts are sometimes careful not to cross certain lines they make it clear that they would like to.
I asked if the publishers and artists of the Danish cartoons should, in a just world, likewise be canned. Someone said, “but those were not attacks on people they were attacks on a religion.” I responded that they were in fact veiled attacks on people — on the tiny minority of Muslims in Denmark. They were a way of saying to these “foreigners” in their midst, “Your religion is stupid and you are stupid for believing in such nonsense”. Note that the cartoons did not make light of Christian imagery or mythology, nor did they accuse pious Danish churchgoers of brainless stupidity. My position is that most religions are equally based on insupportable myths and if you attack one you should attack them all. (That said, the myths and imagery are beautiful, moving and powerful.) Religions do a pretty good job of attacking one another as it is — by nature only one can be true, so all the rest must therefore be infidels. To its credit, North America is more mixed and therefore tolerant than many European and Asian countries. Those places have ingrained ideas about what is means to be German or Danish or French and the idea that Turks or Algerians might be considered German or French is slow to be accepted. The “foreigners” in those countries are usually ghettoized, so interaction with people different than oneself is rare.
There is a banner of free speech that gets waved in these discussions. The idea that anyone should be free to say anything, however hurtful, anytime, anywhere. And the question of whether the ACLU should be defending neo-Nazis who march in Skokie, Illinois is an example often quoted. I asked if one could shout fire in a crowded theater and was told that, no, there is in fact a law against that. I had hoped to make the point that we voluntarily limit our free speech in order to get along, but I picked a completely wrong example. I’ve come back to this topic more than once. I think we’re left with our social sense — a sense of getting along and living together — and not a set of absolute rules. This possibly innate social sense should govern our behavior. It’s more work than falling back on rules and it isn’t fixed like rules, either. We are social animals, and if one member of the group decides to be anti-social — which is their prerogative — they will, as in any social group, soon be ejected. (Unless they have loads of money or weapons or some other leverage that would outweigh their harmfulness.) Of course the group has to disagree with them, find their behavior disruptive and harmful to the future well-being of the group as a whole in the first place. Many times we tolerate the existence of anti-social individuals; they might be good at something else, for example, or we are not sure it is worth the necessary effort to scour out the filth. We can live with a bit of filth, but if others begin to notice it and point it out then it’s time for housecleaning.
Someone at the dinner pointed out the coincidence that as Imus was being vilified the North Carolina lacrosse players — all white — were being declared innocent of rape. They are considering suing the woman who accused them, the prosecutor and Duke university. The woman had been “hired to dance at a party”. She is poor and black, the lacrosse players are wealthy and white. There is a lot of money and popularity involved in university sports. The incentive for the “marketplace” would be to look the other way. I don’t think we can leave the oiling of the social gears to the marketplace, but economic pressure sure has an effect. Globally, though, it seems complicated. It doesn’t always work as planned. The U.S. embargo has made the lives of Cubans worse, and has possibly achieved exactly what it sought to prevent — it has provided Castro with an excuse for everything and an obvious and clear enemy. The embargo unites the Cuban people — well, sometimes — rather than spurring them to rise up against Castro. Likewise the Israeli blockage of Lebanon simply reinforces the idea of Israel as an enemy of the Arab world. It makes Hamas stronger, not weaker.
In South Africa the embargo eventually imposed against the apartheid regime seemed to have had a different effect. From over here it did seem to weaken the regime and remove their economic foundation…which eventually led to a relatively peaceful change.
Why did that one work while the others did not?
I would suggest that on a smaller scale the same thing happens. Giving people convenient scapegoats and adversaries is sometimes an unintended consequence of trying to punish or enforce “correct” behavior. The victim and the persecutor become weirdly co-dependant. We need our enemies — and they love us too, in a sick kind of way.
Had a very exciting meeting on Wednesday re: the Bike Forum project. The New Yorker will produce this event as part of their fall festival. It will be a forum, with entertainment, at Town Hall on Saturday October 6 on the subject of bikes in NYC. I’ve been trying to get this to happen for a while and now it’s picking up steam and momentum. As someone who has biked here as a means of transportation for many many years I sense a growing acceptance of the human-powered machine with two wheels. Some fears and hurdles to be dealt with for sure — but I sense a tipping point looming.
At the meeting were representatives from the city Health and Parks Departments and from the Dept. of Transportation, the New Yorker magazine, as well as designer Yves Behar who is currently working with the Health Dept. on NYC condom dispensers throughout the city — we are talking about urban bike helmet design. To get all these people together was an achievement in itself — we had to put two tables together — I was incredibly excited at the possibilities opening up.
More news and details to follow.
[A special bulletin brought to you by DB and Danielle Spencer]
[Link to savenetradio.org]
The Copyright Royalty Board is proposing a large increase in the performance royalty rates for “non-interactive streaming services”. This means web radio, cable radio and satellite radio will pay more to SoundExchange in royalties. Presumably those royalties eventually dribble down to the artists getting “played”, but it’s never that simple. It’s a little complex and difficult to understand but let me see if I can describe what is in the offing. (My own streaming web radio would be affected, and since I derive no income from it, that, among other things, makes this an issue of personal interest.)
Web radio is different than broadcast radio in that the hosting costs increase precisely as the listenership increases. With streaming web radio, information on the exact number of listeners accessing the stream at any given moment or period is available, and easy to obtain, unlike broadcast radio which is just out there and no one knows how many people are listening (so how do they determine ad rates?) The more listeners you have the more you pay in hard costs — some server’s gotta host the stream. Of course stations like mine and the network of NPR stations that have no commercial revenue eventually run into a financial wall once that audience figure reaches a certain amount.
With royalties it gets more complicated. While traditional terrestrial radio does pay songwriter/publishing royalties for the musical work itself, in the U.S. they don’t pay performance royalties for the sound recording under the rationale that airplay promotes the songs, which benefits the copyright holders. (This determination was mostly due to the radio industry lobbying congress not to collect these royalties.) Web radio, however, along with satellite and cable services, does pay performance royalties — these are the rates that are being raised now. (If this discrepancy sounds illogical, it’s because it is.) Now, broadcasters are eligible for statutory licenses for these new performance royalties. These statutory licenses set royalty rates so that each station doesn’t have to license each song individually. Until now, if a webcaster’s profit was below a certain amount, they have been eligible to pay a set yearly fee, and if they met certain criteria they have been able to pay royalties as a percentage of their profits, not as a per-song fee. Registered 501(c)(3) non-profits have been eligible for reduced rates regardless of their stream traffic.
With the proposed changes the royalties can no longer be based on a percentage of revenue, but on a fee for each listening hour — how many folks are listening and for how long — and there will be a minimum fee per radio “channel”. Also, above a certain aggregate listening hour amount, non-profits have to pay the same per-listening hour rates as commercial broadcasters. So now there will be no distinction between a large-scale non-profit station (like KCRW or WXPN) and Z100. The threshold for non-profits is proposed to be 159,140 listening hours per month. Where did this bizarre number come from?
For perspective, on my web radio I get an average of about 40,000 listener hours per month. At present I pay small mechanical royalty fees that go to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC (presumably these dribble down to the artists whose songs I stream); performance royalties that get dispersed via a company called SoundExchange, and a fee to Live 365 for hosting and doing all the paperwork. I pay about $2,000 a month, based on the above listening hours. That’s rent for an apartment for many people (at least in some cities.) I can afford it, I enjoy doing it, and people seem to like it, so it’s OK for me that I’m out of pocket. I do however realize that I am in a special position — not just anyone can afford to start a streaming web radio service if it has this many listeners. If this ruling goes through it’s likely that my costs would go up about 20%, which is not crippling, yet. But one can see where this road leads — the door will have been wedged open. It’s estimated that the per-play rates will put many webcasters out of business, all but the largest and most commercially successful.
For NPR stations it is a different story as they have wider listenership than I and would pay the same royalty rates as commercial broadcasters. KCRW estimates roughly that as this ruling is retroactive they would owe $130,000 in additional fees for 2006 and $237,000 for 2007. WXPN in Philly estimates $1,000,000. In some worlds this is not a big deal but as one can imagine many of these stations barely eek by as it is, so this could very likely shut down the webcasting side of many of them. That would be a shame, as these stations are the only source of, well, good music, alternative sounds and innovative and informative programming in the U.S. It would be a loss for, well, democracy, as democracy depends on availability of many points of view untainted by commercial concerns and pressures. A truly informed populace, in other words. It points to another victory for the oligarchs — the big 5 record companies and the media companies that own them. Count one more for the big guys. The reasoning that it’s for the benefit of the artists rings a little hollow as most artists heard this argument re: cracking down on file sharing, and most never see money from their record companies anyway — so the line about “we’re doing it for you” is pretty suspect.
Who is this agency that is proposing making this change? They are not an elected body — the Copyright Royalty Board is made up of a few people appointed by the Library of Congress Copyright Office. They used to be a group of arbitrators but since 2004 they are a group of judges. (I wonder if Gonzales, Cheney etc. have any pals in there?)
The new rates are supposed to have been based on the model of the so-called willing buyer and willing seller in the marketplace — this according to the wording of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1996. But where does this “market value” come from? Does it mean that if I play more popular music on my streaming radio I should pay more? I’m confused. (I think I’m supposed to be confused.) Who is determining this value? In this case the CRB seems to be looking towards agreements made between the major record labels and the largest commercial webcasters, but this is hardly a free market model. It also seems to ignore the fact that the “value” of a song would change depending on the context — if I’m listening to a web radio stream I can’t control what I hear, which is different from purchasing the track.
The new rates are being appealed — to join a petition (against the rate changes) or learn more about this, go to savenetradio.org.
—DB/DS
+++
Some further notes, for those who are really interested:
Commercial broadcast mediums in the U.S. mostly derive their income from advertisers. Nielsen systems — boxes attached to a random sampling of viewers’ TV sets — are supposed to determine what shows are being watched, and the more popular shows can therefore demand more money from the advertisers as they are “delivering” a larger audience to view their ads and presumably buy their products. I suspect it’s a more complicated algorithm than that, as some shows will have a wealthier viewership than others, and presumably one could market more expensive items to this crowd than to Super Bowl fans even though their numbers might be smaller. You might charge more to deliver potential buyers of jewelry and designer clothes than drinkers of Bud Lite. And with cable it might be possible to determine more accurately who is watching what.
From an audience perspective we are used to receiving radio and TV more or less for free. We see it as a God-given right, and our perception is that the stuff is simply “in the air” and there for the taking. Of course the fact that we “pay” by being forced to listen or watch lots of ads is somewhat ignored. Subscription services that reduce ads like Tivo, cable, and commercial-free satellite radio are increasingly popular, but I would argue that ads are not consciously viewed by the public as a cost. To some extent free programming is simply an elaborate means of getting us to sit still and tune in to the ads. With cable we pay a blanket fee, which helps fund the channels — and we still feel we can and should have complete access to the cornucopia of programs, some with ads and some without. NPR and PBS stations are funded by viewers like you, as we are often reminded, and by miniscule government grants. They don’t solicit ads. Though they pay a fee for their license and pay royalties for playing music, these amounts are not too high. And being non-profits they get a tax break. (I do not.) Broadcast radio has been traditionally viewed as a kind of free promotion of the artists and record labels’ products, and therefore the idea that the stations should be paying performance royalties was waived. The same “promotional” logic was applied to MTV in the past; the videos, for a certain period, were provided free and seen as publicity vehicles for CDs. After a while the big record companies extracted fees from MTV — which they didn’t share with the artists — and now there are hardly any videos shown at all. (Since, in the past, TV had no “product” to sell, this “promotional” reasoning was not possible in that medium. For example, Seinfeld or American Idol are not broadcast without ads under an assumption that folks will rush out an buy a video or DVD…it’s also true that, unlike music, TV shows are not quite as endlessly repeatable.) With web radio that logic seems to be partially being left behind.
—DB
The “promotional” rationale for not collecting performance royalties from terrestrial radio is more of a reflection of the radio industry’s powerful lobby in the 1940s than an ideological decision. The RIAA calls it “an historical accident”, and the U.S. copyright office has acknowledged the asymmetry of collecting publishing royalties but not mechanical royalties. We are one of the few industrialized countries that doesn’t collect these royalties. The EU nations do collect performance royalties for terrestrial radio, but because we don’t collect them here, they don’t distribute those revenues to U.S. artists.
There are of course many examples of broadcast mediums that are essentially promotional as far as the copyright holder is concerned and don’t earn direct royalty revenues. However, the songwriter/publisher royalty income from terrestrial radio is more than token. As for web radio, the “promotional” logic was never applied, dating back to the initial decision to charge performance royalties in 1995 with the DPRA (Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act). The performance royalty rates have always been significant for webcasters (12% of profit for commercial broadcasters above a modest profit threshold) even before these proposed rate increases, despite the fact that the revenues don’t amount to much for the artists.
—DS
+++
4.17.07
Here are some links/articles on the web radio issue that was decided yesterday:
The Death of Web Radio? [Business Week Online]
Net Radio Operators Lose Appeal Over Fees [c|net news.com]
Interesting that SoundExchange initiated the whole thing…and that they are a non-profit created by the big record labels. Hmmm. One could say conflict of interest but cleverly held at arm's length by the creation of this mouthpiece?
Bush and Co. are now telling us that Iran is funding and arming the rebels in Iraq. This is obviously an attempt to beat the drums for a new invasion, and given that their prior record of war justifications was based on lies and false connections — that Iraq was connected with Al-Qaeda, for example — it’s remarkable how the media isn’t calling them on this shit. At least put the word “alleged” in front of everything that comes out of the White House press office, for God’s sake! Their previous tack — Iran’s supposed nuclear weapon development — doesn’t hold much water, according to all reliable intelligence, so on to plan B, I guess. Funny, reliable intelligence didn’t stop them previously; they just found or made up the intelligence that fit their plan and most American news media outlets duly reported it as fact, and the majority of the American public and most politicians said OK. At least now these latter 3 might possibly not fall in line as they did before. There is hope.
New iPod ads and an image from the Men in The Cities series of drawings by Robert Longo. Coincidence or conspiracy?
Well, should we? Are individual soldiers responsible for their actions? Or are they merely machine parts? “I was only following orders” is the often heard claim when a soldier who committed a human rights abuse or worse is challenged. It is a way of absolving themselves from responsibility. “I just drove the train, pushed the button, flew the plane because my commanding officer told me to.” If we follow this argument, it would be the higher-ups who are then always responsible, yes? But the higher-ups will always absolve themselves of responsibility for My Lai, Chechnya and Abu Graib. They’ll always say that those incidents were the work of “rogue” soldiers, bad apples — or that there were higher-ups yet higher above them who made the order. Or, in the case of Rumsfeld, restructured things to make abuses easier and more likely to happen — and the attendant destruction of civilians and a country. Ultimately, following that logic that makes about 3 or 4 people ultimately responsible, if the buck continues to get passed on up the chain of command. Of course, those 3 or 4 will blame “faulty intelligence” or try to absolve themselves one way or another, and they usually succeed.
But what about the hundreds of thousands who simply do as they are ordered and whose actions in some cases destroy a nation, a population, and hundreds of thousands or millions of lives as a result? People whose actions have devastating and long-lasting repercussions? Sometimes they do these things unwittingly, but what I am dealing with here is the question of what happens when they do realize what is happening. Have participants no will of their own? Do they deny that they have free will in this case? Those who make sure the bombers are running smoothly but didn’t actually shoot anyone — are they not as guilty as those who pull the triggers? (Anyone see the footage of U.S. soldiers zapping Iraqis for a lark? It’s typical war stuff, it always happens. They act like they’re playing a video game, vaporizing civilians.) Are the guys in the green zone in their air conditioned offices and boozy evenings not as guilty as the grunts who massacre civilians? Don’t they, the officers and bureaucrats, facilitate the dehumanization of the locals, and as a result, the rapid dehumanization of their own soldiers? Those who do as they have been commanded, but abandoned all reason, free will, responsibility and common sense? Do soldiers have no apparent impulse or incentive to think about or question a policy or their own actions? Do none of these folks bear any responsibility for their actions? Will Paul Brenner eventually step forward and say, “Oh, sorry, it was my fault, hang me too — I caused as many deaths as Sadam” —? Would Rummy take the heat? Will the gang who beat the war drums armed with lies and deception — Wolfowitz, Perle, Armstrong, Rice, Powell etc. — admit they hold responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths? Would Jeff Sacks admit he helped deliver the Russian people to the gangsters, KGB and oligarchs? Not likely.
I am reminded of the employees of most businesses whose owners are so distant that the employees never think or ask why they are doing something, how the product works, or just as often doesn’t work, why a policy does or doesn’t makes sense, or if a policy might even be counter-productive. Go into almost any store or office cubicle. Alienation, I believe Marx called it, based on his experience in Manchester during the industrial revolution. Most employees as a result of this disconnect simply cover their asses and have no personal investment in making things work better, knowing about the product they sell or how to fix it. It sometimes seems as if war, specifically the soldier, is the model for the alienated worker from his job. The workplace is modeled after the military. This can be a scary efficient machine, when all goes well.
Or, a little voice asks, does each individual soldier have a moral responsibility, and as a human being should he ask of him or herself, “Is my cause just, are the means just, or was I tricked, and if so, should I refuse, or should I lay down my guns and leave?” Do any of the additional 20K troops Bush just ordered (by what right?) into the trenches have any say in the matter? “Am I fighting for what they said I was fighting for?” The reasons for the invasion of Iraq have changed so many times, surely no one believes any of them at this point. Does the foot soldier have a duty to ask, “Is this old man, mother or kid I am about to kill really a terrorist?” Does the ordinary soldier have ANY responsibility to behave morally? If the troops are tired, and if they feel the war is a quagmire in which they are among the unfairly unprotected victims, should they lay down their weapons and walk away? Do they have a moral duty as human beings to do so? Should they be held responsible if they do not act? Is it more patriotic to refuse than to obey? At this point “support our troops” for most Americans means bring them home, quickly and safely.
Cindy Sheehan: "If every peace person just stops one kid from joining the military, that’s one potential American life saved.”
The implication I infer here is that the “kids” she refers to are either being duped or are too stupid to decide or see what’s going on for themselves. Her quote implies, to me, that we have to stop them; alert them, educate them, and deprogram them, because they won’t figure it out for themselves, not until it’s too late. So much for believing in informed citizenry — and, I would argue, so much for democracy as well, because you can’t have the latter without the former.
From the BBC news website: U.S. war objector pleads not guilty
A U.S. army officer who refused orders to deploy to Iraq has pleaded not guilty to several charges at a court martial.
First Lt Ehren Watada is charged with missing movements and two charges of conduct unbecoming an officer. Lt Watada told the military court at an army base in Washington state that the order to go to Iraq was illegal because the war itself was illegal.
'Illegal and immoral'
The other two charges against Lt Watada stem from statements he has made criticising the war as illegal and immoral. He has said he would have served in Afghanistan, but not Iraq. The military judge, Lt Col John Head, has ruled that Lt Watada can not base his defence on the war's legality. He also ruled that Lt Watada's statements are not protected by the right to free speech under the U.S. constitution. Lt Watada faces up to four years in prison if he is found guilty on all charges.
Talk about disincentive! Why aren’t the church and the temples — the high moral arbiters that they presume to be — jumping up to applaud Watada’s moral stance? What soldier will risk jail and humiliation to speak out? Most just want to serve their time and get out alive.
Danielle says soldiers’ moral accountability has to be put in the context of their limited options, that economic necessity is a form of coercion. They enlisted, in the case of most U.S. troops, because they had no other economic choice. Their poverty, poor education, and lack of career opportunities back home made those seductive Army ads look pretty enticing and exciting — “Get a college degree! Courtesy of the Army!” Help your country, drive a tank, shoot a missile, and be a respected and honored hero back home! — even if the folks back home doing the honoring and respecting have no idea what nastiness you are now mired in over there. (There are TV ads to join the CIA now too! It’s all good.)
When joining the Army may be the best, or maybe the only, viable life choice, then how can you be held to blame for what you and the Army do? You had no options. Survival is always the prime directive. No other information was available to you at the time. It was either join the Army or deal drugs. What you want a poor boy to do? And besides, how can the foot soldier, the poor grunt, the jarhead, be expected to be up on world politics, history, local culture and language — all the information one might need to weigh the morality of an action? The reporters and news media don’t even do that, so how can the poor soldier be expected to be an informed citizen when the rest of the country isn’t even made of informed citizens. The information to inform them is often so biased, skewed and spun that no intelligent decision can possibly be made. The citizens, here in the U.S. at least, are in a consumer trance most of the time anyway.
The ordinary soldier is trained not to question. To obey without thinking. It sounds like an insult, a criticism, but it’s not. That’s what makes a well-oiled war machine function — you don’t want a discussion when the general commands a forward movement into scary obvious danger. Presumably he knows best and he sees the bigger picture and knows that a reasonable percentage of deaths might be needed to secure a town or accomplish a goal. He has weighed the odds. He may ask you to act against your instincts, against your common sense — and if he is right then he may have saved some lives. It’s for the greater good and he has the big picture. A pause to discuss the matter would be deadly. It would be hilarious as a movie scene — a bunch of dudes having a moral and ethical discussion as the bullets and bombs whiz by. All this assumes our side is the good guys, and the cause is worth fighting for, so the unthinking action is justified in the end. But of course, everyone thinks their cause is just. Maybe right and wrong causes are not the point. Maybe the means, from a moral point of view, is equal to the end. The end does not then justify the means. We have the Geneva conventions for rules defining warfare, as if such a thing is possible. A rulebook for when all hell is breaking loose and people are losing their minds — right.
Circles of Responsibility
If we assume that one does have some responsibility for one’s actions then I ask myself how wide does that responsibility extend? If the American people seem to have grave doubts about the wisdom of committing additional troops to Iraq…and if even the elected president of Iraq, our boy, does not want these troops in his country, then is it not immoral for the American people, and not just W, to send them? Are the people complicit? Are the people not responsible because they have been being willfully misinformed, like DS’s poor uninformed desperate soldiers, and does that then absolve them? Are the hypothetical 3 or 4 guys + Condi Rice truly the only ones responsible? Isn’t that saying that leaders dupe populations and an aggressive nation’s people are as much victims as those they slaughter and abuse?
Let’s assume (big assumption) that the American people suspect that the consequences of these additional troops will not only be additional U.S. casualties, which is obvious and undeniable, but that there will be larger repercussions, which will be tragic, dangerous and long-lasting. Repercussions along the lines of 9/11, but who knows what, when, or where. For example, since the troops are not wanted, even our paid Iraqi friends might turn against the U.S. and join the insurgents. Both Sunni and Shiite will have a common enemy — the U.S. That’s a possibility just for starters.
The question is, at what point do a nation’s people bear some of the responsibility for not stopping illegal unjustified actions? For not even protesting? Does the world hold a generation of Japanese and German citizens “responsible”? Not really, but they sort of do. Ask the Israelis this question about a certain generation of Germans. “Never forget” sort of means “never forgive”. Much of the world is now, if they haven’t already, beginning to hold the American people responsible for the actions of Bush and his crew. Here is a real repercussion — deep distrust and hatred. It can last for generations. For some people in the world, this distrust and hatred will trump the immediate financial incentives the U.S. and the global economy hold out — even easy money, and potential quick profit, which might be gained by cooperating with the Americans, will be seen as undesirable if it means giving up your principles. Shiite philosophy privileges sacrifice if it means adhering to principles over monetary gain.
I would personally love to be more absolutist — to say that every person has a moral obligation to justify his or her own actions. To say that every person has an obligation to dig for the truth and then act accordingly. That every person is responsible for their own actions. All of them. Everyone is accountable. 100%. I would love to take an absolutist stance and say that we all have a duty to know what we are doing. However, I know that absolutism, black and white, good and evil — those hard, clear, simple divisions are how we get into the violent messes in the first place. While everything may not be excused with relativism — surely at some point when babies are being killed (as in Vietnam) “I was following orders” will not hold up as a valid excuse. The divisions, though, are not in fact hard and absolute. Morality and common sense are fuzzy — they’re not forms of binary logic. They do exist, as concepts, and they do guide and inform our behavior, and their levels do seem to rise and fall. But they’re slippery to define. The fever of war sweeps over a people and common sense, morality and reason sink to a frightening low. How do we discourage this fever, this disease, and keep the levels or common sense high and the social body free from infection? Is there such a thing as a psychology of nations, of people? Do nations get neurotic? Crazy? Sad and angry? Bitter and resentful? Proud and arrogant? I think maybe they do.
I suspect that digital thinking, binary logic, the yes/no, pass/fail, good/evil legacy of the enlightenment in some ways fails to match the pragmatic needs of dealing with the real world. Sure, if the digital resolution is high enough, if one has enough variables plugged in and if the computing power of a processor is sufficiently high the result LOOKS like the real world. You can’t see the pixels and it all looks like the multifaceted analog world. But ultimately, breaking the world down into ones and zeros is a form of absolutistism. Doesn’t quantum theory tell us that it’s not in fact an either/or world? That particles are neither here nor there, but can be unsure, or even be in two places at once, or indeterminate?
William Vollmann spent thousands of pages in his multivolume tome The Rising Up and The Rising Down to come up with what he calls “a calculus of violence”. It’s a weird and resonant phrase — I’m sure he made it up for that reason — a phrase that combines and applies the rigor of mathematical logic to passion, death and violence. His aim in that study was to establish guidelines, for himself mainly, that tell when it is morally justified to resort to violence. He asks can we break it down, and are there times when it is indeed justified, maybe even necessary? (I think he says yes.) The book describes various criteria, and if they are met, then violent means are justified as all other means have been exhausted or are not available. It’s hardly a simple Boy Scout manual, though. My abridged copy is 700 pages long, so you can’t easily refer to it on the battlefield or if your spouse pulls a knife on you. And the word calculus is probably very intentional — as I remember it, calculus is system that accommodates multiple variables and values. The curves that calculus generates are movable, they can morph as the variables change. It can accommodate varying contexts and situations; it’s fuzzy, sort of.
So are there no definitive answers to the “support our troops” and the free will questions? Maybe there are not. Ian Buruma, when I saw him talk about the killing of Theo Van Gogh, suggested that context, compassion, common sense and reason can be encouraged and even learnt, and that situations each require their own unique responses. Van Gogh was assassinated for his involvement in a film that offended (Islamic) religious sensibilities. By all accounts he was somewhat insensitive, a provocateur who would have loved to shout out that he has the right to “free speech” and that entitles him to be as offensive as he wants to be. That’s an absolutist point of view — that any racial slur, insult or religious mockery should be allowed, as free speech needs to be absolute. There are, however, limits, says Buruma; limits to tolerance, lines that should not be crossed on both sides — and those limits are justified, given specific circumstances. But he says circumstances are fuzzy, there are no set rules, one has to weigh each situation, each context, use common sense — and what exactly it that? What it isn’t is absolute.
I ask myself who espouses this absolutist black/white view these days? Bin Laden, certainly. Axis of Evil namer and head decider George Bush and Dick Cheney, probably. On and on, right? On every side. Pretty much anyone who is convinced that God is on their side. That covers quite a few. Me, if I think of these folks I’ve just mentioned as absolutely evil, which is pretty easy to do. Does that mean it’s all relative? That there no fixed moral guidelines? If one could but see from their point of view then all ways of thinking might make sense and might even be justified? No, I don’t think so. Not always. I agree that there are limits. There are lines you don’t cross — but they are continually shifting, made of contingencies and the common sense analysis of a situation.
Imagine two dogs meet. The Alpha dog typically demands that the lesser dog back down. Now, imagine that the lesser dog, believing in his rights and the liberty and equality of all canines, refuses to back down. In most cases the Alpha dog will succeed in quickly frightening the lesser dog off from trying to make any inroads, and no harm to either animal results. Maybe a bruised ego for the lesser dog, but that’s all. Some harbored bitterness too, maybe. But suppose the lesser dog, being a principled soul, holds firm to his convictions? (Sometimes that “conviction” is simply equal access to Miss Dog.) Now someone has to get hurt. Pushed to its ultimate conclusion someone has to be incapacitated or killed.
Who was right? Was the lesser dog “right” in sticking to his convictions? What does “right” mean when you are dead? Isn’t “right” actually using common sense — and in this case it might mean backing down? (At least until you’ve got Big Guy outnumbered, outflanked or he’s become too old and your odds of toppling him are decent.) Does Mr. Alpha also have an obligation to back down before it’s too late? I am assuming that, given the usual circumstances, he can’t, or he won’t, unless he determines that he might possibly lose — if he’s outnumbered etc. — in which case he can slink away in shame to an early retirement, leaving lesser dogs to fight it out and determine amongst themselves the new Alpha hierarchy. The rightness, the rules of engagement, change all the time, determined by the situation and circumstances. Experience and common sense teach us how to judge each situation — ideologies and dogmas lead us to behave like deadly idiots. Not everything can be argued to be justifiable, if we can only find the angle from which to view it — there are indeed some wrongs, but maybe they are never hard and fast.
[Continued from Free Will Part 1]
Watching the Italian epic, “Best Of Youth”. Beautifully done and written. There’s metaphor and thought in every scene, yet it feels somehow unforced, except for the fact that everyone is much better looking than they have a right to be. The 2 brothers, the main characters, are reunited during the catastrophic floods in Firenze. All types chip in to save the books and the city. Can you imagine that here? Elliot G. and family just returned from NO working for Habitat for Humanity, but for the most part I can’t imagine the feeling that a city, its artifacts, are precious, important to humanity as a whole. And it’s hard to imagine acting on it en masse, bipartisan. Of course home and infrastructure is necessary for the folks who live there or are homeless. We might think of saving businesses and homes, schools and hospitals — but books? Maps and manuscripts? Artworks? Don’t we normally |
