Or maybe not quite hell - Bernie Madoff got 150 years today - but if hell had been an option, I'm sure that most people would have cheered such a sentence. Or, perhaps, like Prometheus, he could have been chained to a rock at the end of the world for a few thousand years with his guts eaten out of him every day by vultures, only to be replaced overnight so the punishment could begin anew each day. Would that have brought the money back?
Madoff is clearly a world-class asshole. I have a hard time understanding how he could have even perpetrated such a collosal swindle without being some kind of psychopath, in a certified, DSM-IV kind of way. What he did was despicable and disgusting, an infliction of suffering if not, as Judge Chin would have it, "extraordinarily evil," than at least ordinarily evil.
But I wonder, what is the price of freedom? I mean freedom in the sense of not being in prison. Can we put a price tag on the workaday freedom that we all take for granted? Being able to go outside, walk to the store, see a movie, make love to our wife, go to the library, call friends on the phone, have a beer, work? What is that worth?
Well, if Bernie's scam was worth $65 billion, and he got 150 years, the cost of freedom in the United States in 2009 is $1,187,214.61 per day.
Maybe that kind of reckoning doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it makes about as much sense, to me, as someone getting 150 years in prison - for any crime. That's supposed to make us feel better? That he won't even be up for parole until he's been dead for a hundred years?
We're told that this sentence, which was the harshest possible under the law, will deter other fraudsters. What a load of horseshit. Like I said, Madoff is probably a psychopath. What deters such a person from anything? This sentence is ridiculous mob-justice, period. What happened to life in prison, which is what this sentence is, of course?
Or what happened to letting the punishment fit the crime? Why not send Bernie to jail for a while, take every last penny from him (mostly already done, or underway) and everyone who benefited from his fraud and pay back as much of the money as possible. Then, let him out of prison and give him an electronic bracelet, a shitty apartment and a shittier job, perhaps something that involves actually working with, and having to touch, shit. When did the answer to every conceivable crime in this country become lock them up for ever!
The United States has the highest documented prison population in the world. Not per capita; the highest in raw numbers! China ranks second - and they have a population of 1.3 billion people. We need prison reform in our country, desperately; our habit of locking people up is a sad legacy, especially given our stated values as a nation and as a people.
It does not need to be this way in order to teach people like Bernie Madoff a lesson. Let's use some common sense. And while we're on the subject - I said what he did was terrible, even evil - but people might also want to consider that something that looks too good to be true, like double digit returns on investment for years at a time, probably is! I am not blaming the victims for Madoff's scam, but his fraud certainly does not seem to have been particularly sophisticated. It was garden variety bullshit and people just spread it around and spread it around for twenty years.
Insanely greedy bastards who rob people need to be punished. Doing so is also a fine opportunity to consider the ways in which greed blinds us all.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Whatever Works
According to the IMDb, Whatever Works is Woody Allen's 44th film as a director, if we include a couple of TV movies and segments from TV specials. His first such credit was What's Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966. By any reckoning this is a stunning achievement, and Allen as compulsively prolific an American filmmaker as any who has ever lived, save only the earliest Hollywood filmmakers, who churned out dozens of films a year in the silent era (though these were shorts) and managed multiple features each year under the studio system. These days, the most respected filmmakers in the world are lucky to put out a film ever three years or so - and if they manage that, they will probably spend the next couple years resting.
This is strikingly true of the younger generation of established American independents, like Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson and their ilk, who have taken years and years between films. A newer crop of filmmakers has come along in the meantime, among them Kelly Reichardt and Ramin Bahrani, who seem to need less time, thankfully. Still no one (in America) approaches Woody Allen in terms of speed and efficiency of production, not even Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg who have both, on occasion, managed to release two films in one year (last year saw Eastwood's Changeling and Gran Torino) but have not kept up the one-movie-per-year pace for over 40 years like Allen.
I have seen every one of Woody Allen's theatrical films, most of them more than once, some of them many, many times. I have read mulitple books about Allen and by Allen. I am a fan, in the true sense of the word: I am fanatic about this filmmaker. He is one my idols, and I know more about him than any other artist. I see his films in the theater, each year, on the first day of their release.
I am not an apologist for Woody Allen. I have a particular view of him and his work - I tend to think that he peaked, not in his conventional-wisdom 1970s heyday, nor in the midst of his extraordinary artistic exploration and expansion in the 1980s (1985's The Purple Rose of Cairo is his oft-stated personal favorite and it's easy to see why), but at the end of that period with 1992's acid and hilarious Husbands and Wives. I am, on the contrary, a tough critic of his work and certainly will not deny that late period Woody, for the most part, stinks.
Of course, lately, hopeful critics and fans have talked about a renaissance for the Woodman, beginning with 2005's London-lensed Match Point, a sexy thriller in a Claude Chabrol mode, of all things. Certainly, MP was an entertaining film but, for long time fans, it was also an obvious Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) remix, transplanted to London, with hot young stars, a bit of tennis and much less moral seriousness. That MP came after a decade of dispiriting decline, which included several contenders for Worst Woody Allen Film (Anything Else, anyone?), certainly helped its reception and it does seem to be an instance of Woody Allen, suddenly, caring about filmmaking again.
Last year, he released Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for my money his funniest and most charming film in at least a decade or more. It demonstrated that he can still be fresh and vibrant, if wholly unaware of what decade it is. Now we get Whatever Works, as stale, unfunny and sloppy a film as he has made.
Originally written for Zero Mostel, then moth-balled when Mostel died in September, 1977, Woody recently told Terry Gross on Fresh Air that he dusted off the script in a big hurry when he thought SAG might strike last year. (By the way, it was a fascinating interview, catnip for any critical fan, especially in how skillfully and disingenuously he dodged most of the more interesting questions about his art imitating his life.) The film feels exactly like this, as if he literally pulled the script out of an old filing cabinet and sent it with his assistant to Kinkos while he was driven to the set to begin shooting. Apart from one or two nods to 2009 (a Taliban reference here, an Obama reference there), the film feels decades out of touch.
Watching Larry David helplessly mugging, grinning and flailing in the Woody Allen role as one of the crankiest assholes ever to appear in a Woody Allen film, I kept imagining Zero Mostel in the part. Whatever Works might have worked in the 70s, with tighter, more imaginative direction, Mostel's sublime misanthropy, a half dozen rewrites, a daffy Diane Keaton in the role of the country bumpkin come to the big city, snappy editing, and somewhere to go storywise. In the version we have, Evan Rachel Wood is leggy, adorable and drowning, hopelessly undirected, as an insultingly stereotypical, but unbelievably, "stupid" southern girl. David, a comic whose one note rings perfectly on Curb Your Enthusiasm is an unlikable, unlikely "genius" whose broken-record hatred for humanity and existential gloom become instantly tiresome.
Naturally, these two, separated in age by forty years, get married after David rescues Wood from being the hottest homeless girl in New York, takes her in and half-heartedly does a Pygmalion on her (a perennial theme in Woody-world, done much better in Mighty Aphrodite). Wood can be a good actress, but I suspect she needs the firm hand of an involved director, not Woody's famously hands-off approach with actors. For seasoned actors, however, that approach almost always yields strong performances, and Patrica Clarkson makes the absolute most out of her ridiculously stereotypical Southern Baptist Blanche DuBois character, Wood's mother, who comes to New York to find her runaway daughter, only to be seduced by the city's art scene when her family album is mistaken for outsider art.
Other actors, like the normally wonderful Michael McKean are wasted in empty supporting roles and some, like Ed Begley, Jr., just seem miscast. Harris Savides, one of my favorite cinematographers, manages to bring some panache and some nice movement to Allen's otherwise lazy, distracted mise-en-scene - which feature of his films used to be among the more interesting in contemporary cinema. All in all, a disappointment, and a bigger one than usual. Let's hope his next film - another London-set number - swings him back the other way.
This is strikingly true of the younger generation of established American independents, like Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson and their ilk, who have taken years and years between films. A newer crop of filmmakers has come along in the meantime, among them Kelly Reichardt and Ramin Bahrani, who seem to need less time, thankfully. Still no one (in America) approaches Woody Allen in terms of speed and efficiency of production, not even Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg who have both, on occasion, managed to release two films in one year (last year saw Eastwood's Changeling and Gran Torino) but have not kept up the one-movie-per-year pace for over 40 years like Allen.
I have seen every one of Woody Allen's theatrical films, most of them more than once, some of them many, many times. I have read mulitple books about Allen and by Allen. I am a fan, in the true sense of the word: I am fanatic about this filmmaker. He is one my idols, and I know more about him than any other artist. I see his films in the theater, each year, on the first day of their release.
I am not an apologist for Woody Allen. I have a particular view of him and his work - I tend to think that he peaked, not in his conventional-wisdom 1970s heyday, nor in the midst of his extraordinary artistic exploration and expansion in the 1980s (1985's The Purple Rose of Cairo is his oft-stated personal favorite and it's easy to see why), but at the end of that period with 1992's acid and hilarious Husbands and Wives. I am, on the contrary, a tough critic of his work and certainly will not deny that late period Woody, for the most part, stinks.
Of course, lately, hopeful critics and fans have talked about a renaissance for the Woodman, beginning with 2005's London-lensed Match Point, a sexy thriller in a Claude Chabrol mode, of all things. Certainly, MP was an entertaining film but, for long time fans, it was also an obvious Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) remix, transplanted to London, with hot young stars, a bit of tennis and much less moral seriousness. That MP came after a decade of dispiriting decline, which included several contenders for Worst Woody Allen Film (Anything Else, anyone?), certainly helped its reception and it does seem to be an instance of Woody Allen, suddenly, caring about filmmaking again.
Last year, he released Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for my money his funniest and most charming film in at least a decade or more. It demonstrated that he can still be fresh and vibrant, if wholly unaware of what decade it is. Now we get Whatever Works, as stale, unfunny and sloppy a film as he has made.
Originally written for Zero Mostel, then moth-balled when Mostel died in September, 1977, Woody recently told Terry Gross on Fresh Air that he dusted off the script in a big hurry when he thought SAG might strike last year. (By the way, it was a fascinating interview, catnip for any critical fan, especially in how skillfully and disingenuously he dodged most of the more interesting questions about his art imitating his life.) The film feels exactly like this, as if he literally pulled the script out of an old filing cabinet and sent it with his assistant to Kinkos while he was driven to the set to begin shooting. Apart from one or two nods to 2009 (a Taliban reference here, an Obama reference there), the film feels decades out of touch.
Watching Larry David helplessly mugging, grinning and flailing in the Woody Allen role as one of the crankiest assholes ever to appear in a Woody Allen film, I kept imagining Zero Mostel in the part. Whatever Works might have worked in the 70s, with tighter, more imaginative direction, Mostel's sublime misanthropy, a half dozen rewrites, a daffy Diane Keaton in the role of the country bumpkin come to the big city, snappy editing, and somewhere to go storywise. In the version we have, Evan Rachel Wood is leggy, adorable and drowning, hopelessly undirected, as an insultingly stereotypical, but unbelievably, "stupid" southern girl. David, a comic whose one note rings perfectly on Curb Your Enthusiasm is an unlikable, unlikely "genius" whose broken-record hatred for humanity and existential gloom become instantly tiresome.
Naturally, these two, separated in age by forty years, get married after David rescues Wood from being the hottest homeless girl in New York, takes her in and half-heartedly does a Pygmalion on her (a perennial theme in Woody-world, done much better in Mighty Aphrodite). Wood can be a good actress, but I suspect she needs the firm hand of an involved director, not Woody's famously hands-off approach with actors. For seasoned actors, however, that approach almost always yields strong performances, and Patrica Clarkson makes the absolute most out of her ridiculously stereotypical Southern Baptist Blanche DuBois character, Wood's mother, who comes to New York to find her runaway daughter, only to be seduced by the city's art scene when her family album is mistaken for outsider art.
Other actors, like the normally wonderful Michael McKean are wasted in empty supporting roles and some, like Ed Begley, Jr., just seem miscast. Harris Savides, one of my favorite cinematographers, manages to bring some panache and some nice movement to Allen's otherwise lazy, distracted mise-en-scene - which feature of his films used to be among the more interesting in contemporary cinema. All in all, a disappointment, and a bigger one than usual. Let's hope his next film - another London-set number - swings him back the other way.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Michael Jackson is Dead at 50
When I was a dorky kid in the 80's, I didn't really listen to a lot of popular music. There are many reasons for this, foremost among them that there was no one at home who had any interest in such things. Still, there were of course plenty of songs and artists who were inescapable in the culture. Only a handful of these were truly worth listening to, and almost none of them could claim the mantle of genius.
But Michael Jackson was different. He was a genius, a true king of pop, if not the only king. He didn't do it alone - we wouldn't have the brilliance of Off the Wall and the perfection of Thriller without Quincy Jones, for example - but it was his music, his words, his sound, his moves, his glove.
In spite of everything that happened since - as MJ got crazier and crazier and creepier and creepier, though I still don't believe he actually touched those kids - we have Thriller, the ultimate, get-off-your-hipster-ass dance album, a desert island disc for all time, and so much more. He gave us the greatest gift of all, an eternity of booty-shaking, pure pop joy. I dare you, put on Thriller and try not to move.
I, for one, am damn sorry you're gone, Mike. For all your insanity, the planet is poorer tonight. Thanks for the jams, baby!
But Michael Jackson was different. He was a genius, a true king of pop, if not the only king. He didn't do it alone - we wouldn't have the brilliance of Off the Wall and the perfection of Thriller without Quincy Jones, for example - but it was his music, his words, his sound, his moves, his glove.
In spite of everything that happened since - as MJ got crazier and crazier and creepier and creepier, though I still don't believe he actually touched those kids - we have Thriller, the ultimate, get-off-your-hipster-ass dance album, a desert island disc for all time, and so much more. He gave us the greatest gift of all, an eternity of booty-shaking, pure pop joy. I dare you, put on Thriller and try not to move.
I, for one, am damn sorry you're gone, Mike. For all your insanity, the planet is poorer tonight. Thanks for the jams, baby!
SCOTUS rules 13 year old girl should not have been strip searched
Yeah, so this school in Arizona thought it had the right to strip search a 13 year old girl, including searching her underwear, to look for...ibuprofen. Turns out, heh, that violated her Fourth Amendment rights. Says the NYT:
"Thursday’s ruling sends the case back to the lower courts to assess what damages, if any, should be paid by the school district. But, by a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court held that the individual officials in the case should not be held liable, because 'clearly established law' at the time of the search did not show that it violated the Fourth Amendment."
Jesus, fine. Because adults definitely ought to rely on "clearly established law" rather than common sense when it comes to questions of "should we make this child take off her clothes while we look for Advil." On the main issue, the court ruled 8-1. Now who do you think was the dissenter?
Let's see...underage girl, strip search, underwear, stubbornly opposed to the "basic reasonableness" interpretation...ah! Thomas, of course. What is with that guy?
"Thursday’s ruling sends the case back to the lower courts to assess what damages, if any, should be paid by the school district. But, by a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court held that the individual officials in the case should not be held liable, because 'clearly established law' at the time of the search did not show that it violated the Fourth Amendment."
Jesus, fine. Because adults definitely ought to rely on "clearly established law" rather than common sense when it comes to questions of "should we make this child take off her clothes while we look for Advil." On the main issue, the court ruled 8-1. Now who do you think was the dissenter?
Let's see...underage girl, strip search, underwear, stubbornly opposed to the "basic reasonableness" interpretation...ah! Thomas, of course. What is with that guy?
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Wunderkammer
This film is by a CalArts classmate, Andrea Pallaoro. Nice work, Andrea! It is, I'd have to say, highly in character.
Vacation movies
While we were on vacation in Texas, Kim and I took advantage of the grandparents by slipping out a couple of times to go to the movies.
First, we saw Pixar's Up, in 3D, in San Antonio. I thought it was a lovely film, certainly worthy of the Pixar name, and a charming, unusual, original story until the final act. The first ten minutes of Up is probably the best storytelling we'll get at the movies this year, compact, funny and heartbreaking. Flawless, really. What comes after is truly entertaining and only at the end does the film become louder and rougher and a bit less imaginative, and more like all non-Pixar American animation.
Plus, they had these funky 3D glasses that you could keep if you like to collect junk. Which I do.
Backing up a step, in case anyone is curious about why Pixar just keeps making one good movie after another (with the arguable exception of Cars), I revealed the key a moment ago. They tell original stories. Look around at the studio animation scene: is anyone else doing that? Their films also somehow manage to feel auteur-driven, in spite of the thousands that work on them, rather than made by committee. It's hard to understand how they have such balls, but god bless 'em!
Up is currently on track to be the biggest grossing film of the year, after Wall Street analysts initally thought it might do poorly because the story and characters are a little unusual (the star is a grumpy old man) and there isn't the merchandizing potential of, say, Cars or Toy Story. As Bill the Cat would say, THPTH!
Secondly, we saw Sam Raimi's deliriously entertaining horror film, Drag Me to Hell. I suppose I should say, deliriously entertaining for a horror film. Occasionally I have participated in marketing surveys that ask which types of movies I like best, with the option to select from a big list of genres. This always baffles me, because I like any film as long as it's good. (In an earlier post, I describe what I mean by "good.") I see very few horror films because my perception is that almost every single one is a piece of shit. I need to be told to see one, like when my friends recommended the movie, The Descent, a solid example of the form on its better end.
Raimi, of course, has already made a couple of deliriously entertaining horror films and, no, DMTH is no Evil Dead. But it couldn't have been because he had way more money this time and Raimi's humor and perfect timing are intact from those days of yore, so it was great fun to see him cut loose. He's also just a terrific B-movie filmmaker, no matter the budget - I mean, if the Spiderman films are not B-movies, what is these days? The theater where we saw the movie, unfortunately, had the volume up to 11 which is hurting my ears even now, so that was a shame. But the movie was propulsive, disgusting, hilarious, timely, creaky and scary in all the right places, and it ended with a bang.
I admit to some mild disappointment, along with my wife, who pointed out that the heroine of the film, played by the hot but somewhat uninteresting Alison Lohman (whose blandness, nevertheless, works really well here), has very little agency throughout the film. She never actually does anything, until the very end, which one could not say about, say, Ash. She merely reacts to events and allows herself to be pushed and pulled around by every man she knows. A pretty, passive heroine, which, for me is a mixed bag. One does not much like her character or care very much about what happens to her, a bold and interesting choice. In other words, you almost root for the evil gypsy spirit to win which, I think, is really how these films ought to work.
In looking up a couple of things on IMDb for this post, I noticed that one of Raimi's next films is The Evil Dead! Apparently, Ghost House Pictures is trying to remake the original film for some reason. Raimi seems to be into it, for some reason. There's going to be a new director. It's not going to be Evil Dead 4. Whatever. Raimi already remade Evil Dead, calling it Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. The whole ED saga is already completely self-referential and meta. So this remake idea is pretty darn stupid. Oh, well.
First, we saw Pixar's Up, in 3D, in San Antonio. I thought it was a lovely film, certainly worthy of the Pixar name, and a charming, unusual, original story until the final act. The first ten minutes of Up is probably the best storytelling we'll get at the movies this year, compact, funny and heartbreaking. Flawless, really. What comes after is truly entertaining and only at the end does the film become louder and rougher and a bit less imaginative, and more like all non-Pixar American animation.
Plus, they had these funky 3D glasses that you could keep if you like to collect junk. Which I do.
Backing up a step, in case anyone is curious about why Pixar just keeps making one good movie after another (with the arguable exception of Cars), I revealed the key a moment ago. They tell original stories. Look around at the studio animation scene: is anyone else doing that? Their films also somehow manage to feel auteur-driven, in spite of the thousands that work on them, rather than made by committee. It's hard to understand how they have such balls, but god bless 'em!Up is currently on track to be the biggest grossing film of the year, after Wall Street analysts initally thought it might do poorly because the story and characters are a little unusual (the star is a grumpy old man) and there isn't the merchandizing potential of, say, Cars or Toy Story. As Bill the Cat would say, THPTH!
Secondly, we saw Sam Raimi's deliriously entertaining horror film, Drag Me to Hell. I suppose I should say, deliriously entertaining for a horror film. Occasionally I have participated in marketing surveys that ask which types of movies I like best, with the option to select from a big list of genres. This always baffles me, because I like any film as long as it's good. (In an earlier post, I describe what I mean by "good.") I see very few horror films because my perception is that almost every single one is a piece of shit. I need to be told to see one, like when my friends recommended the movie, The Descent, a solid example of the form on its better end.
Raimi, of course, has already made a couple of deliriously entertaining horror films and, no, DMTH is no Evil Dead. But it couldn't have been because he had way more money this time and Raimi's humor and perfect timing are intact from those days of yore, so it was great fun to see him cut loose. He's also just a terrific B-movie filmmaker, no matter the budget - I mean, if the Spiderman films are not B-movies, what is these days? The theater where we saw the movie, unfortunately, had the volume up to 11 which is hurting my ears even now, so that was a shame. But the movie was propulsive, disgusting, hilarious, timely, creaky and scary in all the right places, and it ended with a bang.
I admit to some mild disappointment, along with my wife, who pointed out that the heroine of the film, played by the hot but somewhat uninteresting Alison Lohman (whose blandness, nevertheless, works really well here), has very little agency throughout the film. She never actually does anything, until the very end, which one could not say about, say, Ash. She merely reacts to events and allows herself to be pushed and pulled around by every man she knows. A pretty, passive heroine, which, for me is a mixed bag. One does not much like her character or care very much about what happens to her, a bold and interesting choice. In other words, you almost root for the evil gypsy spirit to win which, I think, is really how these films ought to work.
In looking up a couple of things on IMDb for this post, I noticed that one of Raimi's next films is The Evil Dead! Apparently, Ghost House Pictures is trying to remake the original film for some reason. Raimi seems to be into it, for some reason. There's going to be a new director. It's not going to be Evil Dead 4. Whatever. Raimi already remade Evil Dead, calling it Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. The whole ED saga is already completely self-referential and meta. So this remake idea is pretty darn stupid. Oh, well.
Shells
We spent a couple of weeks in Texas recently, in San Antonio and on the gulf coast near Corpus Christi. If you're ever in that area, I recommend Shells, a restaurant in Port Aransas, a small beach town. It's a small place, probably with a bit of a wait on weekends and holidays, and might be tough for a larger group at any time, but if you're a couple escaping together for dinner while grandma watches your infant, say, it's pretty ideal.I had a smoked rack of pork that was, no joke, one of the finest pieces of meat I have ever had in my life. As soon as I began to eat it, I was sad that soon I would be finished eating it. I probably slightly disturbed our waitress by informing her that it was so good, I wished I had a time machine so I could go back in time and have her bring it to me again. Later I realized that what I really wanted was to become unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim, and loop for a while during the meal, so I could just eat it again and again and again.
Monday, June 22, 2009
North Village
Here, the Alameda Bike Posse encounters North Village, an abandoned Coast Guard housing complex. Surely, it is the future site of the zombie apocalypse.
Loyal readers will remember the site from an earlier post...
Finally, an end to music piracy!
Now that the latest trial of international digital music thief, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, has ended with a fine of $1.92 million levied against the Brainerd, Minnesota, mother of four, for having offered 24 songs for free download on the Kazaa file-sharing service, I must express some relief that digital "piracy" has finally been stopped once and for all! I have lost so much sleep over the last decade on behalf of the noble corporations that produce our music and other popular entertainment, just thinking about the sadness and sense of helplessness they must have felt as they've watched themselves get robbed again and again by their own "fans."
Real fans--for these despicable scofflaws do not deserve that name--know that the only morally correct way to consume media is to do so in exactly the way the giant media corporations tell us to. So if we have to pay $18 for a new CD of mostly filler from a mediocre band that cost perhaps $6 to actually make, so be it. Or if we have to keep buying the movies, music and television shows that we have already bought each time a new format is introduced, well, of course we'll do it. It's only fair.
We are here--the fans, the real fans--to prop up the old business models for as long as necessary--maybe forever! Consumers, after all, are not the leaders in the marketplace. Just because we have the capability and the technology to consume media the way we want to when we want to, there's no way we should do so until the corporations have given us permission. It's so cool of them that they are slowly beginning to do so, too! Now a lot of music can be bought on the iTunes store--movies, too! Of course, these files can't be given away, swapped, shared or remixed in the same way that, say, a CD could have been, but that's probably for the best--I mean, I'm sure that the corporations have the best interests of their fans at heart. If they think I don't really need to be able to copy and remix a digital movie--or that I should pay more for that ability--well, surely, they know best, right?
I do, I do trust them--the media corporations and their consortiums, like the RIAA--and I just know that they all do business fairly, with integrity, and without a whiff of greed. I mean, if they didn't--perish the thought--the people just wouldn't stand for it, would they?
Real fans--for these despicable scofflaws do not deserve that name--know that the only morally correct way to consume media is to do so in exactly the way the giant media corporations tell us to. So if we have to pay $18 for a new CD of mostly filler from a mediocre band that cost perhaps $6 to actually make, so be it. Or if we have to keep buying the movies, music and television shows that we have already bought each time a new format is introduced, well, of course we'll do it. It's only fair.
We are here--the fans, the real fans--to prop up the old business models for as long as necessary--maybe forever! Consumers, after all, are not the leaders in the marketplace. Just because we have the capability and the technology to consume media the way we want to when we want to, there's no way we should do so until the corporations have given us permission. It's so cool of them that they are slowly beginning to do so, too! Now a lot of music can be bought on the iTunes store--movies, too! Of course, these files can't be given away, swapped, shared or remixed in the same way that, say, a CD could have been, but that's probably for the best--I mean, I'm sure that the corporations have the best interests of their fans at heart. If they think I don't really need to be able to copy and remix a digital movie--or that I should pay more for that ability--well, surely, they know best, right?
I do, I do trust them--the media corporations and their consortiums, like the RIAA--and I just know that they all do business fairly, with integrity, and without a whiff of greed. I mean, if they didn't--perish the thought--the people just wouldn't stand for it, would they?
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Twenty Years Ago in China
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." Thomas JeffersonChina can shut off the Internet, crowd the square with P.L.A. thugs, jail dissidents and oppress and murder its own people, but the courage of the man in the picture above is eternal. His act of quiet resistance will last forever and, one day, he will be a hero to all the people of China, who will know his name and his story, as he is to all the rest of the world.
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