Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

The answers are up for last week’s 10 so you can further educate yourself. This time, four tracks got guessed – I think that qualifies as a new record.

So here’s this week’s 10. If you know the artist and the title, drop it in the comments!

1. “Rider in the Rain,” by Randy Newman – “I’m the son of the prairie and the wind that sweeps the plain.”
2. “Beat on the Brat,” by The Ramones – “With a brat like this always on your back…”
3. “Popeye the Sailor Man,” performed by Robin Williams [guessed by Fred] – “I’m one tough gazookas which hates all palookas wot ain’t on the up and square.” [multiple artists possible]
4. “Unworthy of Your Love,” by Stephen Sondheim – “Let me feel fire, let me drink poison – tell me to tear my heart in two.”
5. “Easy Come Easy Go,” by Cinderella – “He said, ‘Today you may be rich, but tomorrow you’ll be poor, and the next day you could die.’”
6. “Straight Through the Heart,” by Dio – “Never tell a secret with your eyes – it’s the eyes that let you down.”
7. “Space Oddity,” by David Bowie [guessed by Fred] – “Your circuit says there’s something wrong.”
8. “A Watcher’s Point of View,” by PM Dawn – “I’m so great I amaze myself, explains just how vain is vanity.”
9. “Ring of Fire,” by Johnny Cash [guessed by Carl] – “I fell for you like a child.”

1. “Hollaback Girl,” by Gwen Stefani – “That’s right – put your pom-poms down.”

Cinematical reports that the DEG (Digital Entertainment Group) will be putting fliers into DVD cases informing the purchasers that buying bootleg DVD’s is wrong. Of course, the only way such a system would make sense would be if they were fliering bootleg DVD’s, and if they could find the bootleggers to give them the fliers, then it really wouldn’t be that much of an issue, would it?

I’m not sure, but I think most of the movie pirates out there do not buy DVDs. But if they do buy DVDs in addition to all the burned or downloaded titles they steal, they’re about to find out some horrible news: pirating movies is bad—illegal even. New DVDs released this year will include special inserts supplied by DEG (Digital Entertainment Group) urging people to buy authentic DVDs rather than pirated copies. Again I’m not sure, but I thought the unavoidable FBI Warning message that plays before the movie already covered this ground.

I watch a lot of movies. Lately, I’ve come across a few that featured an anti-bootlegging PSA that – naturally – the companies decided was so important that they wouldn’t allow me to skip over it to get to the DVD menu. That’s after I paid full market value for a legitimate copy of that movie. And what were the movies in question?

The Laurel & Hardy Collection (_The Big Noise,_ Jitterbugs, and Great Guns) and Night of the Living Dead (which – I might note – is in the freakin’ public domain).

What still gets me is the assertion those PSA’s make. It goes something like this. “You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a CD. Stealing is a crime. Buying bootleg DVD’s is stealing.” Actually, yeah, guess what? Selling bootleg DVD’s is a crime. Buying bootleg DVD’s makes you a victim. And sometimes it can be very hard to get redress for being a victim through the channels that are supposed to protect you.

So the MPAA, the DEG, and associated groups are attacking the victims in order to stop the crime and doing it through a medium where only those who have not fallen victim will get hit. Does anybody else feel that they’re living in an old Bizarro comic?

Looking over Digg today I’m overwhelmed by the number of links to do with the iPhone.# It’s not so much that I didn’t expect Digg to link that many articles on it – I didn’t expect them to link that many positive links on it. Of the twenty links I saw on the pages I took the time to click through, only two of them were negative reviews – and one of those was solely based on “it costs too much.”

I found it interesting though that at least one person is already seeing how it can reinvent the cell phone industry. It can reinvent those ringtone dealers right out of a job.

Let me be the first to say that the iPhone is huge problem for the ringtone industry. In many ways it makes the ringtone industry completely obsolete. It’s an iPod so any song that you own can be used as a Ringtone. Don’t want to pay $1.99 for a low-quality re-sampling of a song that you already own to be used as your ringtone? Great, you don’t have to. What about wallpapers? Well, any photo on the iPhone can be used as a wallpaper, so just download one from the iPhone’s built-in web browser and you’re golden. Goodbye $9.99 per month ringtone subscription fees!

Aw. Allow me to find the world’s smallest violin. I’m sure I have it here somewhere.

Seriously. I’ve never bought a ringtone. Especially since I discovered that my current cell phone will let me set an mp3 on my memory card as my ringtone. I have an entire “album” in my mp3 collection that consists of songs I’ve like re-encoded to a lower bit rate to be used as my ringtone. As a result, my ringtone at different times has been “VW Hatchback,” “The Ballad of Serenity,” “Dancing With Myself,” The Monkees’ “Saturday’s Child,” and Harry Nilsson’s “Cuddly Toy,” as well as They Might Be Giant’s “Call Connected Through the NSA,” which they made available as both a ringtone and an mp3 download. Some of the tracks were purchased from different digital stores, others were ripped from CD’s in my collection.

Give me a break. Ringtones have always been an overpriced technology preying off of the consumer’s readiness to whip out their checkbook. Anybody with basic editing skills can create a wallpaper for their phone, and most phones already offer the ability to turn an mp3 into a ringtone. Not to mention the annoying habit of ringtone companies to hire the original artists to rewrite their lyrics to be about phone calls. I have little interest in hearing Sir Mix-A-Lot chant “Baby. Got. Phone!” from my pocket whenever somebody calls, even less than I’m interested in hearing the Donnas sing “Pick it up, baby, for me!”

Will the iPhone really kill the ringtone industry? Goddess, I can only hope. Finally I’d be able to watch Comedy Central without that stupid crazy frog showing up.

Answers have been posted to that last, long-ago random 10.

And now here’s this week’s random 10. If you know the artist and the album, shout it out in the comments. Dig a pony, here we go –

1. “When the Saints Go Marching In,” by James Brown [title guessed by Sarah] – Now, when the sun refused to shine… (multiple artists possible)
2. “It’s All Right,” by Guns ‘n’ Roses – Told you once about your friends and neighbors – they were always seeking but they’ll never find it.
3. “When I’m Sixty-Four,” by The Beatles [guessed by Carl] – Yours sincerely, wasting away.
4. “Rocking in a Free World,” by Pearl Jam (Neil Young cover) – There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead. (multiple artists possible)
5. “Breakpoint,” by Megadeth – Point the finger, there’s three pointing back.
6. “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” by Tori Amos [guessed by Fred] – Made my own pretty hate machine.
7. “Front the Most,” by MC Frontalot – What am I, wrecking every breakbeat? That could take eight weeks.
8. “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond,” by Pink Floyd [guessed by Thud] – Come on, you target for faraway laughter.
9. “Lost in America,” by Alice Cooper – So I’m looking for a girl with a job and a car, don’t you know where you are.

1. “I’ve Got to See You Again,” by Norah Jones – I could almost go there just to watch you be seen.

I wanted to post something good for my first post of the new year. And I think I found two things that qualify.

First, BoingBoing reports that Creative Commons is getting ready to launch a tool that will allow artists to win back copyrights they might have signed over early in their careers.

Briefly, the U.S. Copyright Act gives creators a mechanism by which they can reclaim rights that they sold or licensed away many years ago. Often artists sign away their rights at the start of their careers when they lack sophisticated negotiating experience, access to good legal advice or any knowledge of the true value of their work so they face an unequal bargaining situation.

The provisions for getting one’s copyright back, however, are incredibly complex and involve a lot of jumping through hoops. CC is hoping that their new tool will make it easier on artists.

And second: I’m a big Tom Waits fan. And I knew that he had gained a lot of attention back in the early days of music television for his Ralph Bakshi-animated video for “The Heart of Saturday Night.” But it had never even occurred to me to think that he must be making videos for his new music, too.

If it had occurred to me, however, I’m fairly certain that this is exactly what I would have imagined them to be like.