Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Fact: Part of working in theatre is networking.
Fact: Networking sites are hot, now.
Fact: I’m obviously not harried enough, these days.
Fact: There is no all-purpose theatre tribe on tribe.net.
Fact: There is one, now.

The news today is full of reports over the RIAA’s much-ballyhooed lawsuits which have finally seen the flickering flourescent light of day in a courtroom. In particular, everybody’s talking about the 12-year-old girl smacked by the RIAA, whose mother has settled out of court to the tune of two-thousand bucks.

“Are you headed to junior high schools to round up the usual suspects?” Durbin asked RIAA President Cary Sherman during a Senate Judiciary hearing.

Durbin said he appreciated the piracy threat to the recording industry, but added, “I think you have a tough public relations campaign to go after the offenders without appearing heavy-handed in the process.”

Gee. I dunno. I mean, on the one hand, we have a twelve-year-old honors student living in a city housing project on the Upper West Side who claims that she thought her downloads were legit because she paid thirty bucks for the software. On the other, we have a massive, bloated, multi-billion dollar parasite demanding that people shell out major moolah for mass-produced pabulum, all the while claiming that their main customers are thieves and liars.

Yeah, I can see how that would be a hard sell.

If nothing else, this case is a public relations disaster for the RIAA, who – let’s face it – didn’t really have the people’s support to begin with. And it’s one that somebody in the company should have seen coming. Yes, there are a lot of college-age techno-anarchists trading music on the web. But they don’t listen to much Britney Spears (trade the videos, yes – but they’re not interested in listening to the music). The people trading on p2p networks these days represent a cross-section of the tech community in America – you cast out a net and file lawsuits against randomly selected traders, and you’re going to snag a few preteens.

Now, consider: A typical user goes searching online for a new act. In this case, the user is a 12-year-old girl who has caught some of the industry’s advance buzz for The Cheeky Girls (who are quite hot in Europe now, I’m told). She goes first to Barnes & Noble, where she finds that the album is only available as an import for $37.49. But the hype is good, so even though she can’t afford the album she still wants the music. She logs onto Gnutella and searches, and finds five people with it in their collections.

Now, maybe the girl likes the song. She then plans to buy the album when it comes out, because like any good technophile she knows the mp3 she just downloaded isn’t good audio quality. Or maybe she thinks it’s all right, but she’s glad she didn’t pay thirty-eight bucks for it. Or maybe she hates it and deletes it immediately (although it is now, unfortunately, stuck in her head to return and haunt her throughout her life – “We are the cheeky girls / We are the cheeky girls / You are the cheeky boys / You are the cheeky boys – / Oo, Cheeky cheeky.”)

But in an era of shrinking attention spans (as the media keeps reminding us—Oo! Shiny!), the hype produced by the industry has managed to get a twelve-year-old girl to complete a multi-step process just to get her hands on their product.

There are politicians out there who would kill to get their hands on that kind of marketing (not to give them any ideas). The music industry has on its hands a ubiquitous product that is one of the easiest sells in history.

Except that it’s not an easy sell, goshdarnit. Because the industry doesn’t want it to be. They want to gouge you for every cent that you can get.

But, honestly, I wish I could hear the conversation that took place over this settlement.

Lawyer: Well, sir – case 527 is… Brianna LaHara.

Executive: Great. What’s her deal? Member of the Green Party? Enrolled in an undecided major at her local university? Posts Communist propoganda on public message boards?

Lawyer: Well, it says here that she’s… [flips pages] twelve.

Executive: Twelve?

Lawyer: Twelve. And she’s [flip, flip] in New York, on the upper [flip, flip] west side, living in a housing project. Oh. And it says here [flip, flip, flip… flip] that she’s an honors student.

Executive: Hm. Well.

[Pause]

Executive: See if we can get a couple thousand out of her.

How silly of me! Here I was, criticizing the music industry for not providing us with any real content, when all the while they had a brilliant hitmaker just waiting to be discovered!

“I’ve never been humble in my whole career, so I’m not going to start now,” Macho Man, appearing at MTV’s VMA radio forum, said last week of the love he was getting from all the radio DJs and fellow celebrities like Lil Jon. “Once again the madness is running wild. October 7 is the launch. [The album] is called Be a Man. It’s got 13 hits on there, and it’s gonna be rocking the house. Ooooh yeeeaaah!”

Why, this could be the biggest thing since Hulk Hogan and the Wrestling Boot Band!

In a last-ditch effort to rid the world of P2P sharing, the RIAA has appointed itself the guardian of American Morality – charging that P2P networks traffic largely in pornography. Child pornography, at that.

The industry is trying to enlist broader public support with a campaign intended to show that its nemesis — the peer-to-peer networks for swapping files like KaZaA and Morpheus — are used not only to trade songs but also pornographic images, including child pornography.

“As a guy in the record industry and as a parent, I am shocked that these services are being used to lure children to stuff that is really ugly,” said Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment.

Let me digress for a moment. I like how Andrew Lack phrased that. “As a guy in the record industry…” See? He’s not the chief executive of a major record label. And he’s not one of the many corporate stooges that have been accusing music fans of being thieves, lately. No, he’s just “A Guy in the Record Industry.” A guy. Why, he’s practically family.

To bring us back to the subject, the RIAA’s statements would carry a lot more weight if the recording industry didn’t have such a bad history of kiddie sex, itself.

Tom Petty has been one of the major people to speak out on the issue, commenting in a 2002 Rolling Stone article:

It’s disgusting. It’s not just pop music, it’s fashion, it’s TV, it’s advertising, it’s every element of our culture. Young women are not being respected, children aren’t being respected. Why are we creating a nation of child molesters? Could it be that we’re dressing up nine-year-old women to look sexy? And even if we’re wrong, let’s not do it anyway. I really don’t put it past these advertising people to say, ‘Well, look, we made a lot of money when we brought the nine-year-old out and made her look like a hooker. Let’s do it again.’

Now, before the shouting starts, let me say – what the record industry does is nowhere near the behavior of true child pornographers. Child pornography is abusive and despicable.

But when you put an underage girl into situations where their sexuality is used to sell units (in this case, CD’s and posters), then you’re trafficing in child sex. You fuel the atmosphere in which child pornography exists.

Britney Spears in a plaid dress and pigtails. Underage couple TATU standing in the rain, making out. The latest 16-year-old pop phenom wearing an American Flag bikini and sprawled on the hood of a sports car for Rolling Stone magazine. And endless “Has she or hasn’t she?” headlines all over the tabloids. All of which sells albums, sells t-shirts, gets TV ratings, and moves posters.

Meanwhile, studies show that very little child porn actually finds its way onto P2P networks – instead being traded through chat rooms and web pages, just as in the bad old days of the Internet’s birth.

Perhaps the RIAA has a point accusing P2P networks of distributing child porn. After all, TATU’s video for “All the Things She Said” is a hotly-traded file. As is the video for “Baby One More Time” – even years after its release. And as the industry’s growing fascination with Christina Aguilera seems to illustrate, the industry loves nothing better than a former sexy good-girl turned slut.

Surrounded by accusations, constant harping over inaccurate statistics, and contradictions between their behavior and their message, we have to recognize that no matter what the RIAA says, they do not have people’s best interests at heart. They don’t even have good business at heart, any more. The battle against P2P trading has become a sticking point for them. A battle they can’t win, no matter how many lawyers and bank accounts they throw at it.

One of my favorite quirks of human nature is our willingness to be guinea pigs. Give us a chemical that alters our state of being in one way or another, and chances are that there’s some human out there who will be determined to pump themselves full of it without knowing anything about possible side-effects. For example – a little under a year ago, I guest-blogged for Thudfactor and wrote an entry about anti-narcoleptic stimulant Provigil and its attractiveness to human guinea pigs. During the course of the article, I mentioned (casually) that Provigil had become like Viagra – a black-market drug that some online pharmacies would sell without a prescription.

Check the comments left by “jax” at the bottom of the page for a perfect example of one of those guinea pigs.

I’ve been thinking about that article today. Back then, I wrote:

MDMA [Ecstasy] – outlawed before good clinical trials could be completed – has become the willing guinea pig’s drug of choice in recent years. Originally developed as a battlefield stimulant before being tested in association with psychotherapy, MDMA has a longer history than most people realize. Without good clinical trials behind it, however, the illegal users are paying for the benefit of being our true guinea pigs. We have no idea of the true long-term effects of MDMA, but give us twenty years to round up the ravers and see.

Thud wasted very little time in pointing me to an article published in AAAS’ Science that showed Ecstasy caused Parkinson’s-like symptoms after only one dose.

Why am I thinking about this today?

Because TalkLeft reported that the same study has just been retracted.

A leading scientific journal yesterday retracted a paper it published last year saying that one night’s typical dose of the drug Ecstasy might cause permanent brain damage.

The monkeys and baboons in the study were not injected with Ecstasy but with a powerful amphetamine, said the journal, Science magazine.

The retraction was submitted by the team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that did the study. [...]

The study, released last Sept. 27, concluded that a dose of Ecstasy a partygoer would take in a single night could lead to symptoms resembling Parkinson’s disease.

TalkLeft has come under fire from one of their more faithful readers who claims TalkLeft is announcing that Ecstasy is safe because the study has been retracted. Me? I just think that TalkLeft is stating the obvious. The study has been retracted, so we still don’t know what – if any – dangers Ecstasy holds. The amphetamine accidentally used in the study has almost nothing in common with Ecstasy chemically, and was already known to be very dangerous. But since the chemical used was not Ecstasy, we can’t infer anything about it from the study.

So, I stand by my previous statement. We’re just going to have to round up the ravers in 20 years and see. After all, they’re not only volunteering to be guinea pigs – they’re paying for the privelege.

It wasn’t hard to see that Johns Hopkins’ study was flawed, however. Given that their study showed a 20% fatality rate from a single dose of Ecstasy, I don’t think the market for electronic music would have been able to sustain itself for long if the study was accurate.

For now, the majority of fatalities reported as being Ecstasy-related are not cases of an Ecstasy user dying – they’re cases of an unscrupulous dealer passing off a dangerous cocktail of chemicals as something it isn’t without worrying about the consequences. For those of you who like paying to participate in unregulated drug studies, please Rave Safe.

And before anybody asks – don’t bother. I don’t deal in (or use) illegal drugs, and I will not sell you or tell you where to buy Viagra, Cialis, Provigil, Prozac, or Propeachy (or anything else) without a prescription. I recognize people are stupid – I just don’t encourage it.

It appears that Republicans working on a new energy plan following the big blackout have decided it would be more efficient for them to just write it, themselves.

“There were too many multiday meetings, too many offers and counteroffers, instead of conferees and the staff simply sitting down, rolling up our sleeves and working it out,” Mr. Domenici said after gaveling the meeting to order.

He added that he had had “many conversations with Chairman Tauzin, and I believe there are no issues on which the two of us cannot reach agreement.”

The prospect of perhaps just one other conference meeting to consider a plan written mainly out of sight immediately alarmed Democratic participants. They said they were worried that they would be cut out of shaping a measure that will touch on nearly every aspect of energy supply.

Considering how often it’s been said, I shouldn’t have to remind anybody that “Democracy dies behind closed doors.”

The Republicans behind the controversial move have many reasons behind it. They say that it’s more efficient this way, it’ll take care of the problem more quickly, and that it makes our teeth whiter and our breath fresher…

Poppycock.

That’s right. I said it. Poppycock. And I ain’t talkin’ caramel-covered nuts and popcorn, either. I’m talkin’ pure, grade-A nonsense.

As much as we may hate art by committee or the idea of committees overseeing our business life, there’s a reason the government works in committees. And that’s to ensure that everything is checked and re-checked. See, it’s a whole “checks and balances” sort of thing.

But it’s no big shock to see the Republicans pulling the doors closed behind them as they retreat into their sanctuaries, free from the influence of bleedin’-heart lib’ruls like yours truly. After all, it’s been the general policy of the Bush administration from day one. This is a President who has dealt behind closed doors, under the table, and behind our backs for three years, now – and he and his party show no signs of stopping. Not even with their hands getting smacked time and time again.

But as of this moment, there’s little to do about it. The Republicans have already barricaded themselves in and are working out the plan without the input of the Democrats or of their constituency. At this point, all we can do is wait and watch the lucrative contracts come flowing out to the GOP’s closest friends.

And when the time rolls around, make certain we kick the bums out.

A sweater walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Are you sure you’re twenty-one? Let me see that cardagain.”

By now, the word has gotten out that John Whitmire – one of the eleven Texas Democrats that’s been holding off from giving Gov. Perry a quorum on re-redistricting – has returned to Texas. Other Texas Dems are crying foul, while Whitmire insists that he just wants to try a new strategy.

Whitmire: What have you got for me?

Merlin: This is going to take precise timing, John. Perry’s going to call for another vote on redistricting, so we need to act before he can call the vote.

Whitmire: All right. What’s the plan? What do I do?

Merlin: (handing Whitmire two glasses) You’ll need to propose a toast. Now, repeat after me: The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle. But the flagon with the dragon holds the brew that is true.

Whitmire: The pellet with the pestle’s in the flagon with—
Merlin: No, no, no! You can’t afford to mix this up, John. “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle. But the flagon with the dragon holds the brew that is true.”

Whitmire: The pellet with the poison’s in the dragon flagon pestle vessel—
Merlin: Let’s take this one step at a time. The pellet with the poison…

Whitmire: Poison pellet vessel flagon—

Part of me can’t wait to see what bit of political strategy Whitmire’s got up his sleeve. I keep wondering if it’s going to be like something out of a Frank Herbert novel – or maybe something based on Nicci Mach’s The Prince.

The other part of me says that Whitmire’s playing a dangerous game.

The runaway Texans took a dim view of Mr. Whitmire’s move. “He was one of the main cheerleaders in terms of keeping us together, talking about the things we should be doing,” Senator Royce West of Dallas said. “And then to see one of the main cheerleaders quit in the second quarter of the game, you feel betrayed.”

Mr. Whitmire said that he still strongly opposed redistricting as “a horrible power grab and waste of time and money,” but that he was now prepared to carry the fight to the floor of the State Senate.

Whitmire – having broken with the other ten Dems and returned to the state – faces a very real possibility that he could wind up being dragged into the legislature in handcuffs in order to force a quorum. A possibility that he’s dismissing – at least partially on the grounds that even the Republicans wouldn’t dare to do something so ridiculous.

Oh, no? This is the same Republican party that used the Department of Homeland Defense to track down the Democrats the first time they fled. Proving that not only is the DHD useful for protecting us from the Growing Terrorist Threat^TM, but also for enforcing the will of the Republican power structure.

Whitmire, however, does have a point. As he states, when the Texas governor started threatening to call special sessions on re-redistricting, the Texas Democrats were left without an exit strategy. And as the constant attacks on our troops in Iraq has been showing us, there’s nothing worse than going in without an exit strategy (President Bush, I’m looking in your direction). Now, the Democrats face charges of holding up the Texas government. And while many people – on both sides – realize that the Democratic absence is a necessary evil in order to avoid a power grab by the Republican party, that won’t stop the Republicans in Texas from harping on it come election time.

It’s not enough to merely leave the state, now. Somebody has to take the fight to the floor.

But maybe the strategy could have been discussed with the rest of the group beforehand?

Here’s hoping that Whitmire’s risky gamble has a good plan – complete with exit strategy – solidly behind it.

Found at the New York Times

Battered by online piracy, the Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company, said yesterday that it would cut prices on compact discs by as much as 30 percent in an aggressive attempt to lure consumers back into record stores.

The deep price cut — the only one to apply to new CD’s since the format was introduced in the early 1980’s — represents a gamble by Universal that more consumers will buy more CD’s once the price dips below $13. It also reflects the profound degree to which Internet file-trading has managed to undermine the music business, Universal executives said.

Funny, I thought when they sued to take down Napster that was supposed to push their sales up.

Yes, it’s the return of the RIAA’s favorite Boogeyman, Internet file swapping. Apparently, people are still trading music instead of paying for the industrial-grade crap pushed by the major labels. Of course, there’s no way that the average music consumer might be waking up. There’s no way that people might be starting to think that the recording industry is pushing an inferior product at an inflated price.

There’s just no way that – between Britney Spears (1999) and TATU (2002) – people could possibly have gotten sick of seeing underage girls in trashy make-up and Catholic school uniforms.

No, it’s the internet file swappers. Definitely.

I’ll say this much for Universal – they’ve learned quickly that a major part of the problem is the retail price of their CD’s. When the standard price of a new CD is eighteen bucks, it’s just not worth it to keep up with the trendy music. And when a CD that’s over four years old and has already topped the bestseller list fetches the princely sum of $16.48, it gets downright ridiculous.

But, seriously – you’re kidding, right? Between eMusic and the iTunes music store, Universal’s price cuts sound like a major case of too little, too late.

It might be just me, but I really can’t see the logic behind this Boston Globe article.

A separate problem has beset the Democratic National Committee. The DNC has relied on large, unrestricted donations for a greater percentage of its funds than have the Republicans. Those donations were banned by the campaign financing bill. Partly as a result, as of June, Republicans had accumulated an advantage of almost 3 to 1. And the financial gap has exposed a glaring Democratic weakness: The party has a weak base of smaller donors.

The article then goes on to characterize the Democratic party as funded entirely by overnight stays in the Lincoln bedroom and wealthy movie star donations. The article works very hard to point out the irony in the campaign finance bill being pushed through by Democrats, only to result in “a disaster for the Democratic Party in 2004”.

Here’s what I don’t understand.

The article in large part paints the Democratic party as a rootless, elite organization funded entirely by captains of industry and wealthy benefactors. Meanwhile, it praises the Republicans for the work they’ve done in grassroots campaigning and paying attention to small donors.

But at the same time, the same article mentions that Bush’s last campaign ducked the limitations on spending and some donations by turning down public funds so he could run off of his support from the oil industry, as well as other large corporate interests (“The Bush Administration is brought to you by the following sponsors…”).

In short, the record fundraising by the GOP would seem to be not the result of a clever grassroots campaign, but rather the result of a candidate with major corporate ties bucking public funding in favor of private interests. The selling of the Presidency to the highest bidder.

Don’t get me wrong. The Republicans have, in fact, done a fantastic job of grassroots stumping. They’ve infiltrated the churches, taken over the networks, and used grassroots campaigning to draw attention to “good Christian values” (making me wonder what scripture they’re working from) while deflecting attention from their harmful economic policies.

But the Democrats are far from being out of the fight. Tell me – if it’s grassroots campaigning that’s allowing Bush to raise so much money, how is it that the Dean campaign can outraise Bush administration fundraisers with a lower average donation? On a weekend when Cheney participated in a much-hyped fundraiser – netting Bush’s fund a whopping $250,000 from special interests at an expensive luncheon – Dean’s campaign raised over $500,000 from over 9,000 Americans.

Yes, the Republicans may have a head start on grassrooting it, but the Democrats are far from being a “permanent minority”.