Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Thomas Kinkade is being sued by some of his gallery owners. Say it ain’t so! Say it ain’t so!

The ex-owners allege in arbitration claims that, among other things, the artist known for his dreamily luminous landscapes and street scenes used his Christian faith to persuade them to invest in the independently owned stores, which sell only Kinkade’s work.

“They really knew how to bait the hook,” said one former dealer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. “They certainly used the Christian hook.”

You mean a Christian used his own Christianity to bilk other Christians out of money? Such a thing has never happened before!

All sarcasm aside, I will admit that I don’t care for Thomas Kinkade. I think that his paintings – while not bad – are bland and without purpose. What I don’t like is his business practices. The man will print off hundreds of prints of paintings on canvas, then walk by with a detail brush to add highlights to a tree here, a window there, before finally labelling it an ‘original’ and selling it at collectors’ prices. At the same time that he laughs at people who trade in ‘art,’ he declares that he is the one true artist because he paints paintings that sell.

What the ex-owners suing Kinkade now experienced was a sad fact that you would think they should have learned by now. Just because somebody is a Christian doesn’t mean that they are not going to try to separate you from your money. Kinkade may be a Christian. He may even be a good Christian (I don’t know, I don’t know the man). But he is first and foremost a businessman. He is firmly focused on the bottom line and he is very good at finding ways to improve it. If he knows he can get a sale out of you by putting a cross on the wall of his office, he will.

And he is not unique in this. In my short time on this earth, I’ve seen overt displays of Christianity in used car dealerships, auto parts dealers, real estate agents, home loan companies, CPA’s – I’ve met business people who would not go anywhere without a gold cross displayed somewhere on their clothing. And it is not being a bad person necessarily – it is being a smart entrepreneur.

So what does this mean? Well, to the Christians who look only to deal with other Christians, there’s a lesson to be taken from the Thomas Kinkade’s of the world. You may wish to deal only with Christians. You may give every Christian you meet in business an advantage because of their faith. But when they smile and tell you they’re being honest with you because you’re Brothers in Christ, maybe it’s time for you to put away the secret handshake and ask to see the ledgers.

There’s a long-standing charicature of the ivy league know-nothing who rode through a selective school on his parents’ coattails. But it says something when the most prominent of the Yale Doofuses (Doofii?) happens to be not a villain in an 80’s romantic comedy, but a real person.

And that’s what Lakehead – a small university in Ontario – is banking on. BBC reports that one of the university’s new recruiting campaigns uses George W. Bush’s picture above the legend, ‘Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.’ That’s the driving message behind their new recruiting website, YaleShmale.com

Once there, users are invited to click on a link if they agree with the caption, and are taken through to a page promoting Lakehead, which is based in Thunder Bay and has 7,600 students.

“There are universities and then there are universities. So let’s not beat around the bush,” it says.

“Lakehead is different. We believe the person you become after you graduate is even more important than the person you were when you enrolled.”

The campaign is drawing down a lot of fire from people who feel it’s inappropriate. But perhaps these people should also be asking questions about the fact that Yale admitted Bush in the first place. This is a man, after all, who only applied to Yale after he was rejected by the University of Texas. When Yale prides itself on being one of the most exclusive colleges in America, why does it go around admitting public school dropouts? And then allowing them to barely scrape through? And then letting those graduates proudly proclaim themselves to be Yale graduates?

If anything, Lakehead’s tongue-in-cheek campaign should send a message to the ivy leagues – be careful who you admit. If you want to be considered more than a fraternity for sons of privilege, then you should start paying attention to more than just your applicants’ families.

By the way – while we’re on the subject, being associated with Lakehead doesn’t necessarily indicate your intelligence, either:

The university has defended its campaign, which also includes prizes of a car lease and handheld computer games consoles, saying it has had a positive effect.

“It was literally a tongue-in-cheek way of getting attention,” university president and vice-chancellor Frederick Gilbert told Reuters news agency.

Of course, the quote probably sounded more like ‘Id wahr lidrully uh thun in teek why…’ if it was literally tongue-in-cheek.

Browsing through articles over at Slate, I came across wine columnist Mike Steinberg’s analysis of what champagne Jay-Z should drink now that he’s no longer down with Cristal. It’s a funny article that places the boycott in the context in which it has the most significance – the sales of wine. Trend followers may have to fall in line, but the changing of a brand of champagne will mean little to them. It’s the manufacturers who depend on the money they’re making from those followers.

So Steinberg analyzes what this means to other manufacturers in the parket place. With Cristal now unwelcome on the hip-hop stage, other manufacturers have a golden opportunity. Dom Perignon should have people on the phone. So should Krug (who should be taking advantage of thug recognition by noting that Krug was also the name of the sadistic villain in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left). Steinberg, however, prefers Salon – because it scans the same as Cristal. But it does cause problems when Cristal is used in the rhyme (‘I walk on over with my Cristal, put away your pi-stal’). Even so, I’m sure that rap troubadors will adjust.

The real fun, however, begins in the comments – which seem equally upset with Cristal and the hip hop community. The hip hop community for being largely misogynistic and given to conspicuous consumption, and the manufacturers of Cristal for being too snobby to just be glad they’re making money.

Apparently these elitist clowns don’t want to be associated with nouveau riche hip hop, because they’re “too classy” for them. Lets see here. Their argument is that hip hop bling bling promotes misogyny, criminal behavior, getting high, and tacky materialism. Right. Because who would want to be associated with that when you’re cheating on your trophy wife driving around in your Lexus you paid for with embezzled money getting hammered off of wine. I think I’ve seen Lewis Black making fun of corporate CEOs paying 20 grand for a miniature umbrella. I am so glad you have such moral scruples to pass up millions worth of dollars in revenue for that. Typical old money snobbery. Go figure.

Classic.

What do you do when the madness just won’t stop? Why, add to the madness, of course!

That’s why I am now one of five editors working on a new anthology, It Came From Airport Security. And you can find details on how to submit to this grassroots anthology at its current home, ItComesFrom.blogspot.com.

In a nutshell. Submit a story of no more than 4,000 words regarding the results of someone (or something) being exposed to the contents of one of those infamous bins where confiscated liquids and gels are being dumped. It can be any genre – horror, science fiction, mystery, hell – you may want to consider the idea of romance blossoming over the fumes of nail polish and Mountain Dew. There are prizes (yes, it’s a contest), and every story submitted will be considered for publication on the website.

Check it out – and feel free to spread the link around. http://itcomesfrom.blogspot.com

The Record Industry wants to talk to you.

Wait! It’s not about file sharing! We promise!

See, when one person makes a copy of a song and gives it to another person—
Where are you going? We swear it’s not about file sharing!

Okay. So young people like to make copies of songs, see? And they put them on these outmoded delivery systems that use a storage device called a ‘CD.’ It’s pronounced like it’s spelled. Then these young people take these CD’s and give them to each other for free.

The Record Industry wants you to know that that’s wrong. That’s very, very wrong. In fact, the Record Industry wants you to know that it’s worse than filesharing.

Among teens ages 12 to 17 who were polled, 69% said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21% said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music free. Similarly, 58% thought it was legal to copy a friend’s purchased DVD or videotape, but only 19% thought copying was legal if the movie wasn’t purchased.

Those figures are a big problem for the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the Motion Picture Assn. of America, both of which have spent millions of dollars to deter copying of any kind. The music industry now considers “schoolyard” piracy — copies of physical discs given to friends and classmates — a greater threat than illegal peer-to-peer downloading, according to the RIAA.

See, here’s the thing.

I remember buying a couple of CD’s back in the days before you could download music off the interweb. This was the typical scene. I would walk up to the counter with my CD’s and my money in hand. The clerk would ring the CD’s up. Then, invariably, the clerk would turn and gesture to a display of blank cassettes sitting right next to the register.

And the clerk would say, ‘Would you like some blank tapes with that? This brand is special and makes near-perfect copies of CD’s.’

Criminal masterminds! Corrupting our youth!

See, ‘schoolyard piracy’ has been going on for ages. You can find any number of people who are willing to confess to it. And in most cases, it actually seems to be legal under federal copyright law (civil or state laws, however, may apply).

Even lawyers say the law is hard to understand. Distributing free copies of a purchased CD or DVD is only a federal copyright crime if the value of the copied discs exceeds $1,000, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Elena Duarte.

I need to track this down and see if it says the value of the album or the value of the media – ‘cuz $1,000 is a lot of blank discs.

The argument that peer-to-peer filesharing was a plague that had to be wiped out when friend-to-friend copying has always been par for the course went something like this. If I buy a CD and make copies for my friends, I also buy blank media. I then have to copy said media, which takes time and equipment. I then distribute these to my friends, which also takes time. On top of that, there’s a limit to the number of friends a single person has that they can hand the copied CD to.

Meanwhile, p2p filesharing allows copies to appear anywhere on the world in a few minutes’ time. You don’t have to know the person you’re giving the copy to – they just have to be connected to the same network. And it doesn’t really take that much time to make a copy any more, because you can make many copies simultaneously.

But after years of selling that argument, the RIAA wants to say that li’l Billy handing a couple of burned CD’s to a girl he likes in homeroom is worse than all of the filesharing they’ve been filing massive lawsuits about.

These numbers don’t reflect a new trend toward schoolyard piracy – that’s been around as long as there’s been home recording capabilities. I will tell you what these numbers reflect, however. They reflect that kids expect to be able to use what they paid for. In the case of both CD’s and DVD’s, over half of the kids presume legality for copying legitimately-purchased media, and under a quarter of the kids presume legality if media was either stolen or even rented.

One final comment (hopefully) on this latest scare –
If you check out pesky’apostrophe, Mac says something that actually matched up with a concern I had. That the fact that my initial reaction was “Just in time for midterms!” may be just a bit cynical.

I admit that the first thing I thought this morning when I heard about the foiled UK airline plot was, “Hey, just in time for mid-term elections!� All this cynicism is completely unbecoming, but the last five years have been hard on my optimism meter, truly. After all, you have to admit that the current administration and the current incarnation of the Republican party has done for terrorism what Calista Flockhard did for eating disorders in the 90s.

It would be nice to believe that the administration isn’t quite nefarious enough to out and out team up with al Qaeda in order to scare the pants off the electorate enough to keep voting Republican [and, in truth, I just can’t quite bring myself to be that cynical]. Even if they’re not, one has to wonder whether terrorists are keeping an eye on elections, knowing that whenever there’s the slightest bit of noise about terrorism ma and pa get scared and decide they don’t want to switch horsemen in mid-apocalypse. And since the horsemen in question have seriously aided their recruitment efforts and have made big in-roads into turning America into the Christian Iran, well….I’m sure you can understand why I might be tempted to wear a teeny foil chapeau.

I now dig the phrase “teeny foil chapeau” and intend to add it to my vocabulary. It’s the least I can do after giving her “ship in distress, yo.”

Anyway – I, too, was concerned that maybe I was getting a bit too cynical for my own good. Then Joe Lieberman weighed in:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut seized on the reports of a terror plot yesterday to attack Ned Lamont, his Democratic opponent for re-election, saying that Mr. Lamont’s goal of withdrawing American troops from Iraq by a fixed date would constitute a “victory� for extremists.

“If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England,� Mr. Lieberman said at a campaign event in Waterbury, Conn. “It will strengthen them, and they will strike again.�

Mr. Lieberman said yesterday that he was trying to stay above the fray of partisan politics and sidestepped a reporter’s question about Vice President Cheney’s remarks about Democrats. The senator said he was focused on Connecticut, not on the rest of the country.

“How the heck can we be in a battle in which we are fighting as Democrats and Republicans against each other, when these terrorists certainly don’t distinguish based on our party affiliation?� Mr. Lieberman said. “They want to kill any and all of us.�

We’re all gonna die! Quick, confiscate the Diet Mountain Dew!

Okay. So Da Leeb is desperate. That much is clear. I mean, one Senator fighting for his political life is capitalizing—
Oh, wait. There’s more? Yahoo! News, do you have anything to add?

Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush and his aides have tried to shift the national political debate from that conflict to the broader and more popular global war on terrorism ahead of November 7 congressional elections.

The London conspiracy is “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation,” the president said on a day trip to Wisconsin.

“It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America,” he said. “We’ve taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously we still aren’t completely safe.”

His remarks came a day after the White House orchestrated an exceptionally aggressive campaign to tar opposition Democrats as weak on terrorism, knowing what Democrats didn’t: News of the plot could soon break.

Didn’t you hear me? We’re all gonna die!

Oh – wait – there’s more from the same article?

“I’d rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn’t done well,” one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals.

“Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big,” said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won’t “look as appealing” under the circumstances.

Yeah. I’m not so worried about being cynical any more.

Over at Kung Fu Monkey, John Rogers also doesn’t think getting scared is a good idea.

Maybe it’s just, I cast my eyes back on the last century …

FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike … NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

... and I’m just a little tired of being on the wrong side of that historical arc.

Ah, yes. Barely censored profanity and obscure cult film references. Yet another reason I have yet to be contacted to write a column for a major syndicate. John Kovalic, I feel your pain.

We’ve foiled another terrorist plot! Terrorists have been stopped from bringing chemical bombs onto planes! Granted, they hadn’t even started obtaining the materials for their plot yet, but isn’t it great that we stopped them that early?

And now within 24 hours of the results of the mid-term Democratic primaries – and while the news is still full of conservatives bemoaning the loss of Da Leeb (liberals, interestingly enough, are quiet – well, not so much quiet as that other thing, um, celebrating) – we have a terror alert pushed to Red and another addition to things that you can’t bring on a plane: drinks. As a way of tying those two together, let me just say that I love red Kool-Aid. ¹

There are many things that are wrong with the breathless news coverage telling us that we’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die! and with the accompanying response from the government and the airlines. But let’s consider just a handful.

1. Airlines have not installed suspended animation capsules in their airplanes. This is a serious oversight, given the fact that we are now just a few steps away from only being able to sit completely still in our seats with our hands in full view on the trays for the entire duration of the flight. Don’t drink. Don’t eat. Don’t talk. Dont. Blink. Oh, and thank you for flying Scared Stupid Air.
2. When we say drink your milk, we don’t usually mean drink your milk. Currently, many airlines are only allowing milk for babies to be carried onto planes – and then only if the accompanying parent tastes the milk first to prove that it isn’t a deadly chemical masquerading as expressed breast milk. There’s a whole potential level of wrong here that I don’t want to get into. Parents travelling with babies – maybe you’ll want to switch to formula for the duration of your trip.
3. We seem to be logic-impaired. Consider this. The plan involved carrying bottles of chemicals onto the plane. The chemicals would be inert on their own, and only become explosive when mixed together in what many news sources have referred to as a “chemical cocktail.” So as we confiscate these bottles, what are we doing with them? Apparently we’re mixing all their contents together in giant plastic tubs in the middle of crowded airports. [note: link contains very strong language – but so does this blog on occasion. still may not be suitable for uptight work environments] Yes! This makes perfect sense! I see no possible way in which this security measure could backfire.
4. Average people are brighter than we might think. I’m thinking of a passenger who calmly called the stewardess over and said, ‘Excuse me, but the man in the seat across the aisle appears to be trying to smoke his Reeboks.’ If the plan involved mixing together chemicals from different drink bottles once on board, don’t you think someone might have noticed that kind of activity? And maybe called a stewardess over to see what was going on? See, when they’re not too busy being scared out of their wits, people can actually be smart sometimes. I know. I was shocked, too.
5. There are mean people out there. Yes, there are bad, nasty folks. Yes, they want to kill you. Yes, they will try to blow things up. But you can’t live your live in fear that they will succeed. Do you want to spend the rest of your life encased in plastic sheeting and duct tape, cowering in your creepy bomb shelter bed? Why are you letting this guy scare the pants off of you (when most analysts disagree with him) and thanking him for the privelege, but you shrug off An Inconvenient Truth (which is backed by the whole freakin’ scientific community) as being mere scare tactics?

It’s not often that I point to the Cato Institute for anything (I don’t like regulation of individuals, but think that corporations could do with a whole heckuva lot more of it), but I wish more people would read A False Sense of Insecurity. [PDF link] Suffice it to say that there are bad things in the world – but we’re not nearly as bad off as you think. Worldwide, more people are killed in car accidents each year than are killed by terrorist activities. In an average year, more people will accidentally drown in their own bathtubs than will be killed by terrorists. But when you elevate terrorism to your chief concern, guess what? The terrorists have won.

¹ Yes, it’s late. No, that joke wasn’t good. Maybe I care.

Minutes after I posted on medical records being locked out, I found this article on Wired about cars being locked up in a robotic parking garage because of the city’s decision not to renew its license agreement. [link via BoingBoing]

The Hoboken garage is one of a handful of fully automated parking structures that make more efficient use of space by eliminating ramps and driving lanes, lifting and sliding automobiles into slots and shuffling them as needed. If the robot shuts down, there is no practical way to manually remove parked vehicles.

In the days that followed, both sides dragged each other into court. Robotic accused Hoboken of violating its copyright. “This case is about them using software without a license,” said Dennis Clarke, chief operating officer of Robotic Parking, in a telephone interview last week.

When additions are made to the history of great cons, I think the rampant propogation of the license agreement will make the list. Once pretty much limited to computer software and specialized hardware, the past few years have seen us bombarded with companies that no longer wish to sell us a thing – they wish to sell us a license to that thing. We no longer buy music – even if we still buy those little plastic disc thingies. Rather, we buy a license to listen to that music. Similarly, we don’t buy a movie any more, we buy a license to view a movie.

Sony’s new technologies – both Blu-Ray and the upcoming PS3 console – work very hard to reinforce this idea. You don’t buy a game for the PS3, you buy a license (and a non-transferable one, at that) to play the game. When you buy a digital song from iTunes, you buy a license for the song. To carry it even farther, services like Napster sell you a license for the music that can expire if you fail to pay your monthly fees.

And that’s where things start to get sticky. The South Florida Business Journal reports on what happened when a doctor declined to pay the increased tech support fees on Intracare’s popular Dr. Notes software – and they effectively revoked her license. [link via Free Software Magazine]

Dr. Meghan McGovern, of Savannah, Ga., said she couldn’t access her patients’ records or use the program to document patient visits for a week in March. Her tech support contract with Boca Raton-based Dr. Notes was originally for $1,200 a year but the company wanted her to pay $5,000 a year. When McGovern refused, the company didn’t give her an updated monthly password needed to access the program and view records, she said.

Three other doctors – Dr. Thomas Jhee, of Atlanta; Dr. Jonathan Weeks, of Layton, Utah; and Dr. Benzel MacMaster, of Dallas – said they also were denied access to the program for a while by Dr. Notes or its successor Intracare. The owner of Intracare is Maricarmen Beltran, the wife of Dr. Notes CEO and founder Angel Garcia. Clients were told in May Intracare had purchased Dr. Notes’ software.

I can think of few situations worse than a company deciding that it can cut off a doctor’s access to their patients’ records, but I can think of many smaller situations that are still troubling. For writers, consider the effect when a word processor program suddenly started charging yearly – or even monthly – fees to use their software. Fail to pay and lose access to all of your manuscripts. Imagine Adobe deciding you needed to pay by the month to use Illustrator or Photoshop. Freelance designers would find their intellectual property and their livelihoods held hostage.

None of which is quite as creepy as holding your medical records hostage for an exorbitant yearly fee, but all of which are still creepy. One of the drawbacks of the increase in connectivity and power in software appears to be that we may soon not actually own anything, not even the things that we, ourselves, produce.