Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

We are often told that the great thing about a free capitalist system is that corporations actually get regulated by the people. After all, if a corporation isn’t any good, then people just won’t buy from them. Eventually the corporation will bleed dry and go out of business, and unscrupulous business practices will vanish. Who needs regulation? We have the power of the purse string!

Yeah. Right. See, a major problem with that is that it can take a long time for a corporation to run out of money.

And in the meantime, guys like the shop in this story get to stay in business, despite some of the strangest business practices I’ve ever heard.

The first thing that happened was I received a call from an individual who identified himself as Joseph telling me that there was a “problem” with my order. He said he needed to “verify” the security code on my American Express. Although I had given that security code in the order I gave him this code again. He then tried to explain to me that I was going to need some accessories with this camera. For starters I was going to need a new memory card. When I told him that I already had a memory card he became somewhat insistent that mine was not good enough. After I wouldn’t buy his memory card he said I’d need new batteries for the camera. Again I told him that I already had two batteries at home and would not be needing to purchase these from him. And of course he then tried to sell me the ever famous “extended warranty” that I politely declined. He then thanked me for my time, confirmed my order verbally, said that it would be shipping out in the next few days and hung up.

That’s how it starts. And that’s bad enough. A person shouldn’t have to be abused for not purchasing extra accessories with a product because – as was apparently the case here – they might already have them.

But it gets better. Thomas Hawk – who wrote the above – then called the company several days later when the online order tracking system showed that his product still hadn’t been shipped. Even though their own store still showed the product as “in stock – ready to ship,” he was told that it was out of stock and they couldn’t fill his order.

It is at this point that we see capitalism at its finest in action.

At this point I thanked him and informed him that I would be writing an article about my experience with his company. It was at this point that he went ballistic. He first told me that if I did this that he would not cancel my order but just never fill it. If I cancelled it he said he’d charge me a 15% restocking fee. When I told him that that would be unethical he went nuts. He accused me of trying to “extort” him and said that he was going to have two local police officers come over and arrest me. He then went on to say that as a “professional photographer” I should have known better than to try and buy a camera this way and that he was an attorney and would sue me if I wrote an article about my experience.

He told me that I had no idea who I was dealing with and that as he had my work contact info that he was going to call both my immediate supervisor and the CEO of my company and tell them that I was trying to extort him.

“I will take this very personally,” he said. He claimed to have recorded our phone call and said that he would make sure that I would “never be able to order anything on the internet again.”

Among other threats, Hawk was threatened with having his credit card charged for the product without it ever being shipped.

Other feedback that Hawk found after the fact reflects a bizarre set of business practices that seem to indicate to any sane consumer that such a company should not be allowed to operate. Among them, somebody who really did have his credit card charged for product that never shipped. Also, there are stories of the company forcing customers to sign forms that state they agree to have $100 charged to their credit card if they should post negative feedback online.

So, what now? Apparently, telling the banks that this company is committing fraud isn’t enough – and shouldn’t the banks then be passing on accusations of fraud to other authorities? Yet this company remains in business. It may be true that we regulate businesses by word of mouth and purchase (or failure to do so). But with the massive amount of people posting negative feedback and encouraging boycotts, this company keeps on going. Perhaps this much-touted form of “consumer-based regulation” isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be?

The Nameless Dread – a mash-up of Family Circus frames with actual text from H.P. Lovecraft stories. Oddly enough, it works quite well most of the time.

And, speaking of mash-ups, have you heard of Gray Tuesday yet?

It’s a day late, but I figure – Hey! I don’t have enough readers to pull this off, anyway, so I might as well try it.

Thud and Fred have been playing this game. Instead of 10 random songs, here are 10 lines from songs in my music collection. If you know the artist and song, post it in a comment. And don’t Google the lyrics, durnit – the only person you’re cheating is yourself.

Edit: Answers posted.

1. Tom Waits, “Clang Boom Steam” [no guesses] – “Even her car looks good from behind.”
2. Jerry Garcia and David Grusman, “Walking Boss” [no guesses] – “I belong, I belong, I belong to the steel driving crew.” (multiple artists possible)
3. Jonas Crenshaw, “Crazy, Stupid, and Scared” [no guesses] – “I get stupid when you’re away, but that’s no different than any other day.”
4. Randy Newman, “Land of Dreams” [no guesses] – “It’s a rough, rough world, it’s a tough, tough world – Well, you know, and things don’t always, things don’t always go the way we plan.”
5. Johnny Cash, “Sea of Heartbreak” [no guesses] – “Oh, what I’d give to sail back to shore.”
6. Miranda Sex Garden – “With Open Eyes” [no guesses] – “Lonely as they breathe as one, she sees him.”
7. Crash Test Dummies, “The Unforgiven Ones” [no guesses]- “Some are sinners, some repent, some are never done.”
8. Agents of Good Roots, “Mercury Jones” [no guesses] – “Now he’s knocking at your door – better come back to the giver of the loan.”
9. Harry Nilsson, “Jump Into the Fire” [no guesses] – “You can shake me up, or I can break you down.”
10. MC Frontalot, “Indier Than Thou” [Thud] – “I was worried for a second that I’d started to earn love.”

“This is the kind of story that could launch a thousand indie comedies.”:
http://www.uberreview.com/2005/11/cleaners-clean-out-slot-machines.htm

The bosses at the casino grew suspicious when money started disappearing from slot machines after the casino closed for the night. That is when they called police who believe at least two of the casinos cleaning ladies had been using the giant vacuum cleaners for months to suck cash out of the machine’s slots.

This is why writers need to pay attention to the news. If you just wait, somebody will actually try an idea ten times better than the funniest one you could come up with.

Because it’s traditional to celebrate Thanksgiving with a turkey, we at Anvil & Sprocket are pleased to bring you our thoughts on Barb Wire.

Star Wars opened with a crawl in a nod to its movie serial roots. Dune opened with a voice-over because it was already confusing enough as it was. The producers of Barb Wire open their flick with a crawl because they are concerned that their audience won’t grasp the simple premise of the story. Then, because they really don’t want to take any chances on their audience’s intelligence, they provide a voice-over that reads the crawl aloud.

Our apologies to our tofurkey-eating friends, but I cannot guarantee that this movie is cruelty-free.

Thud did it, and now I’ve done it, too. It’s the latest, greatest quiz!

You scored as The Amazing Spider-Man. After being bitten by a radioactive spider, Peter Parker was transformed from a nerdy high school student into New York’s greatest hero. Peter enjoys the thrill of being a super hero, but he struggles with the burdens of leading a double life. He hopes someday to win the heart of his true love Mary Jane, the woman he’s loved since before he even liked girls. Right now, he just wants to make it through college and pay his bills.

1. The Amazing Spider-Man – 75%
2. Neo, the “One” – 75%
3. Captain Jack Sparrow – 75%
4. Batman, the Dark Knight – 67%
5. Indiana Jones – 63%
6. Lara Croft – 63%
7. Maximus – 63%
8. The Terminator – 50%
9. El Zorro – 50%
10. William Wallace – 50%
11. James Bond, Agent 007 – 38%

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com

All right. So I haven’t been around lately. Let’s see. What could I possibly have that could explain such a prolonged absence?

Well, there’s moving into a new apartment that still doesn’t have cable or internet access (internet, by the way, is fast becoming a necessity – and if you’re an actor, cable is not a luxury). That will help to explain some of the absence.

There’s the end of the semester. Considering I’m an M.A. student right now, that means term papers, final research projects, and registration for new classes. Such fun.

And then there’s the fact that this weekend is the run of my show – William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Picnic, in which I play Howard.

Aaand my mp3 player’s battery is completely run down, not to mention that my iTunes is on my home computer and the campus system won’t let me put my music software on the campus network. So I can’t put up a Random 10 this weekend.

Instead, I’ll drop a couple of links – one for the CD I’m listening to currently and one for the movie based on the play I’m currently acting in. And in the interest of full disclosure – yes, these are Amazon links. If you purchase through them, I will receive pennies on the dollar. Ho hum.

Soundtrack: The Cradle Will Rock
Picnic, starring William Powell and Kim Novak

I love cultural elitism. And you can find it in all its glory over at La Scena Musicale, where Norman Lebrecht discovers the wonders of DVD in Scenes From a Revolution

To have and to hold every film that guided your artistic and emotional maturation, through adolescence and beyond, is something many will find irresistible. Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky and the Ealing comedies are equally on offer. What was formerly part of a romanticised past, glimpsed infrequently on late-night TV, has become urgently present (perhaps the perfect present). The eternally elusive turns up in plastic boxes.

What this means, in cultural terms, is that film now takes its place beside literature, music and visual imagery as an art that can be owned and bookmarked. Where once you had to visit a cinema or spool through half a mile of clunky videotape in order to access a seminal scene in an essential movie, you now zone into it on DVD as quickly as finding a name in the index of an artist biography.

Granted, Lebrecht is a little bit behind the times – this kind of raving over DVD’s has been going on since well before the format even became available for public consumption. As the next big thing, DVD’s would make movies more affordable (which they have – slightly), make the release of older films easier (which they have – a cheap quality DVD is much more watchable than a cheap quality VHS ever was), make the home movie experience more exciting (commentaries and deleted scenes, anyone?), as well as making our teeth whiter, our girlfriends prettier, and our country stronger (well, you can’t have everything).

And this included talk about the boon DVD’s would provide to the academic study of film. No more cueing up videotapes or seeking out obscure films on 16mm prints for your basic film class, and no more VCR’s eating the school library’s last copy of Un Chien Andalou. Chapter markers and the less-fragile (though still somewhat fragile) media would make DVD’s a common part of classroom learning, while commentaries and special features could be used to add material of further academic value.

So Lebrecht may not be visionary. It’s hard to blame somebody for that when they’ve just finally caught up with the rest of us, however – we can forgive Lebrecht’s “Oo, shiny!” response.

What really caught my attention, however, was this segment:

It will, for instance, make it that much harder for Hollywood to remake its own milestones when half the world has the originals to hand for instant comparison. The Manchurian Candidate (1962), with its dream cast of Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh was unlikely to be bettered by Jonathan Demme’s 2004 reshoot with Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep. But if anyone had foreseen that the original DVD would be around in the public hands, Demme’s studio would never have raised the finance, let alone the enthusiasm, for an otiose update.

If you’re like me, you probably have to look up the word “otiose.” I did it for you. It means “producing no useful result,” “being at leisure,” and/or “lacking use or effect.” Those could also be re-stated as “futile,” “idle,” and “functionless,” according to Webster’s. But “otiose” sends people scurrying for dictionaries, so it must be the better word for this situation.

I will agree with Lebrecht that there are an awful lot of remakes out there that don’t live up to their originals. I’ve reviewed at least one such movie over at the Anvil & Sprocket. But I think his example is poorly chosen and his prediction is overly-optimistic. 2004’s The Manchurian Candidate is possibly one of the better remakes in recent memory and successfully updates what was an old-fashioned Cold War scare flick into a film that plays off of modern concerns without taking the obvious track. Viewed side by side, 1962’s and 2004’s Manchurian films stand as skillful suspense films and as a single document of the shift of social concerns in the four decades between their releases. Lebrecht’s view of the movie however gives away his prejudice with his statement that “its dream cast of Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh was unlikely to be bettered by Jonathan Demme’s 2004 reshoot with Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep.” Lebrecht doubtless knows that there are no good actors in Hollywood any more and that the only thing produced by the modern film industry is tepid pablum ready for consumption by the masses. Give us the good old days, dammit! I want to see Matlock! _Maaat_lock!

Okay. Maybe that last statement was a trifle unfair. But it was fun.

What Lebrecht has missed in coming late to the field of DVD praise is that Hollywood’s remake machine has exploded since DVD’s became the industry’s weapon of choice. What better way to make people buy the 1962 The Manchurian Candidate on DVD than to have a remake coming out in theatres? If anything, the prevalence of DVD fuels further remakes. Go to a studio, offer them a remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and the dollar signs dance in their heads as they consider the money-making potential of your movie released to theatres combined with the release of a super-packed special edition of the original on DVD.

And it works on many levels. I own Willy Wonka on DVD and will eventually own Tim Burton’s version, as well. I own the first because it’s a part of my childhood and I bought it as soon as it hit DVD – and I may even invest the money in the new deluxe edition. The remake brought about the release of a new edition of a movie I loved, and tickets were sold to the remake and a DVD sold of the original.

At the same time, a rental of the remake of Rollerball sent me hustling to the store to pick up a copy of the original, hoping to erase the soulless action-packed, leather-clad redo from my mind and remember the solid acting James Caan brought to a movie that could have been another Charlton Heston disaster. I hated the remake and it inspired a desire to get and hold onto the original.

As more and more classic movies are slated for release to DVD, you can expect to see the number of remakes hitting the theatres to grow. It’s just good marketing.

By the way – speaking of remakes, you might want to check out Joss Whedon’s film remake of his own TV series. Serenity (rated a Keeper over at A&S) is the film based on the short-lived TV space western Firefly (also rated a Keeper – me likey the smart sci-fi). The TV series has been available for a good while on DVD, and while Serenity has disappeared from most theatres Universal has just announced that it will be released on DVD on December 20th.