Month: May 2002

I supported the recording industry’s legal fights against Napster and other such services, not so much for the good of the record companies but for the artists. No one will claim that the artists have been fairly treated by the record companies; in fact, their track record in that regard is two steps removed from indentured servitude. But I failed to see the logic, argued heatedly by Napster proponents, that since record companies so often treated the artists unfairly viz. the compensation they paid the artists for their efforts, it was therefore an improvement to switch to a system whereby there was no compensation whatsoever for the artists, whose work was distributed without their consent. I called this the “Robin Hood argument”, and I never bought it; instead, I suspected ulterior motives on the part of the pro-Napsterites — and my suspicions were in part born out by the tone many of them took in their argumentation. They usually ended up sounding like nothing so much as pale imitators of the Veruca Salt character from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: “Daddy, I want my free music now!!!”

But now, just a year and a half later, the recording industry has shot itself in the foot with their clumsy attempts at copy-protecting CDs. They are terrified of piracy, which is made absurdly easy by the prevalence of CD-R drives. The problem, though, is that their copy-protection schemes frequently render CDs unplayable in some players, and in any event are easily circumvented. The whole enterprise is glaringly disrespectful of the idea of fair use, and is in all likelihood ridiculously futile anyway. The record companies need desperately to get on the bandwagon of new technology, or they will soon be extinct.

A good article on the quandaries facing the recording industry appears in the current issue of Time, and also appears online here. (ASIDE: for some unintentional hilarity, check out the article’s accompanying photograph of Morpheus founder Steve Griffin. His picture is taken sitting down, and behind him is a wall-hanging hung in such a way that the picture makes it appear as if Griffin is wearing some kind of gonzo Ancient Egyptian headdress.) A sidebar article features a guy who created a site to let music consumers pay artists directly for the music they download, eliminating the record company as middle man entirely. That article is here.

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(WARNING: RANT AHEAD!)

George Lucas has been blamed for a lot of things. The most common charge against him, mainly by film critics, is that he paved the way for Hollywood’s ever-increasing obsession with huge blockbusters at the expense of quality films. The road leading to Armageddon, Godzilla, and The Scorpion King begins, they say, with Star Wars. This may be partly true, but to blame Lucas for that seems harsh. After all, Lucas had absolutely no idea how Star Wars would be received when it opened, and in any event the first real huge blockbuster came two years earlier, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Additionally, one need only watch AMC for a week to see that the idea that cinema used to produce films the caliber of Casablanca on a regular basis is false. There have always been bad movies; we merely remember the hits and forget the misses. So George Lucas isn’t totally to blame for the blockbuster mentality of Hollywood these days. But there is one thing that I will blame on George Lucas: the evolution of the lunatic fanboy. Witness this AICN review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

I have not yet seen the movie. I will be seeing it on opening day, three days from now. Thus, I do not challenge this person’s view of the film, and even if after seeing it I disagree entirely, I still won’t challenge it. Opinions are tricky things, not usually governed by reason (although reason can and should be brought to bear). A cut of meat one man wouldn’t use to make shoe leather is another man’s beef brisket, and we all would do well to remember that. This reviewer was decidedly unimpressed with Attack of the Clones. Fair enough.

But not fair enough is the vitriol with which he attacks the film and, both implicity and explicitly, George Lucas. It is no secret that many (if not most) filmgoers were disappointed with The Phantom Menace (I am one of the few who liked it; we are sufficiently low in number that we have petitioned EPA Administrator Christie Whitman for “Endangered Species” status). But the sheer hatred that film seems to engender is utterly mystifying to me. Consider the third paragraph of the review in question, and try while reading it to not hear in your innermost ear, as I did, the voice of William Shatner intoning “Get a life….it’s just a movie….”. I find it somewhat disturbing that some people would form such angry hatred for a Star Wars movie, and I would be bothered enough by this review if that paragraph stopped just after the first sentence. But then the reviewer goes on to intone the single most repugnant phrase I’ve ever heard from any sector of fandom:

“George Lucas raped my childhood.”

I barely know where to start. First, I am baffled by the idea of one’s childhood as something that can be harmed retroactively, as if we didn’t learn until we were thirty that Christopher Reeve was buoyed by wires in Superman. When I learned that Errol Flynn, star of many films that I watched and loved when I was a kid, was a drunk and a rascal to such a degree that he basically drank himself to death, did learning that somehow harm the experiences I had enjoyed years before? If a heretofore unknown JRR Tolkien manuscript, detailing the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, comes to light and turns out to be a complete dud, has Tolkien somehow done injury to my original experience of reading The Lord of the Rings? The reviewer says, “Something died in me — and George Lucas killed it. Bastard.” No, he didn’t. He did nothing except fail to live up to one person’s expectations, and to call Lucas a “bastard” on that basis makes me wonder what we would say if George Lucas eventually was revealed to be the Zodiac Killer. (And of course, encountering such name-calling just three paragraphs into a lengthy review doesn’t bode well for what one would hope to be a piece of rational criticism.)

But in any event, the truly disgusting thing about the whole thing is the idea that one’s childhood could be “raped” by something so trivial as a movie. Sorry, folks. If you don’t like this Star Wars movie, the last one, or any of them, fine. But let’s reserve the overwrought hyperbole for people who really have a right to use it — the children of Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, or Bosnia, for example. Or how about all those children who lost one or both parents on 11 September 2001. Their childhoods were raped. Anyone who wishes to claim that their childhood was raped by a Star Wars movie should be aware: they are still in their childhood, and really should grow up.

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I am not certain if this is a joke or not. Either way, I find it rather depressing.

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After my rant the other day on the City of Buffalo and its haphazard pursuit of casino gambling, there comes a bit of good news in the form of possible economic development that is real and not just one more example of a reeling metropolis grasping at whatever it can graze with its bony, weak fingers. Buffalo is trying to get in on what is supposed to be the Next Big High-Tech Thing: bioinformatics. (I’m not entirely sure what “bioinformatics” is, but I know it involves advanced biological research and supercomputing.) In their pursuit of this endeavor, city and state officials have come up with a lot of money to jumpstart the project, beginning a research center and, according to this article from The Buffalo News, getting the right guy to head the whole project. I’m still a bit wary that this will be the next “silver bullet”; Buffalo leaders tend to focus exclusively on one large-scale project at a time, ignoring nearly everything else (an attitude which, just for one example, very nearly led to the demolition of a Buffalo house that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright). The Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics may be the first step on a long and properous road that could give Buffalo some much-needed credibility in the high-tech world, but there are so many other things that need to happen for this city to finally move out of the doldrums. Anyway, here’s hoping.

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A couple of book notes:

:: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is now available in mass-market paperback.

:: A few weeks ago I reviewed longtime White House reporter Helen Thomas’s book Front Row at the White House. She has a new book out: Thanks For the Memories, Mr. President. This is a “wit-and-wisdom” book, with a chapter devoted to each President that Thomas has covered in her long tenure at the White House. It mostly presents presidential humor, but there are some sober moments as well. This book is a very quick read, being basically a collection of anecdotes — I polished it off in a single evening. Nevertheless, it’s quite entertaining.

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Is there anything wrong with getting misty-eyed over the death of a fictional character? I think not.

Godspeed, Dr. Greene.

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The West Wing is ramping up toward the season finale, and is doing so very effectively. Last season’s end-of-year build-up was dominated by a single storyline, President Bartlett’s disclosure of the multiple sclerosis which he had carefully concealed during his first campaign. This year, though, Aaron Sorkin is weaving together a number of plots. The President’s reelection campaign is heating up, there is increasing tension regarding a possible terrorist threat, and someone is stalking CJ Cregg. Sorkin is an amazing writer, and I’m sure he’ll have this pot boiling quite nicely by the time the season finale airs.

My other favorite NBC show is on Wednesday nights. It’s not Law and Order. It’s Ed, a consistently smart and literate show about a former big-city lawyer who has returned to the small Ohio town where he grew up. With its quirky cast, Ed is reminiscent of Northern Exposure, without that show’s flights of fantasy. The season finale of Ed is next week, and I’m a bit apprehensive. The show has been developing a love triangle of sorts between Ed, his dream-woman Carol Vescey, and high school principal Dennis Martino. The problem with this triangle is that Dennis, who should be the odd man out, is actually a very likable character, and his romance with Carol has been handled with aplomb by the show’s writers. This should lead to a bittersweet ending, which is precisely the type of ending that can be really screwed up. Stay tuned.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Olmec Stone Head, Mexico. (Photograph by Santha Faiia)

One of my guilty pleasures (actually, sometimes I wonder if all of my pleasures are guilty, but that’s for another post) is gonzo theories of human origins, the kind of theories that might be breathlessly expounded by Agent Mulder on The X-Files. Some of the most enjoyable such theories are currently found in the books of Graham Hancock, a British writer who has hypothesized that a great human civilization, technological in nature, flourished more than fifteen thousand years ago before the most recent Ice Age. This, needless to say, flies in the face of all established anthropological and archaeological theory. The Olmec stone head pictured above is one of many that can be found throughout Central America. What interests Hancock in this case is the stone head’s Negroid features, when there is no evidence at all of any Negroid dispersion from Africa to the Americas (before they were helped along by Caucasian slave-traders). This is just one piece of “evidence” for Hancock’s theories, which can be found in such books as Fingerprints of the Gods, The Message of the Sphinx, and Heaven’s Mirror. An earlier book by Hancock, The Sign and the Seal, proposed an intriguing theory of where the Ark of the Covenant currently rests. The photograph links to Hancock’s official website.

(I am actually very skeptical of theories such as Hancock’s; my recommendation of his books should not be taken as an endorsement of his hypotheses. I will recommend some good books on skepticism in a future post.)

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In possible violation of my “No Politics” policy, I’m going to rant a minute or two about my city of Buffalo, which has reached what I perceive to be a crossroads.

An upcoming vote by the Seneca Nation of Indians will decide if casinos are built in the downtown areas of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, NY, as well as a third in some as-yet undetermined location in Western New York outside of those two cities. The idea, of course, is that the new casinos will rejuvenate the moribund downtown sections of these two cities by drawing large numbers of people from the surrounding regions to spend (and lose) money. This will be just the latest in a long line of silver-bullet-style projects at which local politicians have grasped, each time promising that this is the one that will lift Buffalo out of the doldrums (the boom of the 90s completely bypassed Buffalo, a city that is still reeling from the losses of thousands of manufacturing jobs twenty years ago), each time lining up for state aid to get the job done (whilst teachers and school aides — and never administrators — are laid off and fire department precincts are closed), and each time chanting that wonderful mantra, “If we build it, they will come” (note to people who insist on using this cliche: It was a MOVIE, and the line is “If YOU build it, HE will come”, and the “he” refers to the main character’s father, not an unending flock of deep-pocketed tourists who theoretically could find nothing better to do than gamble). Casinos are a bad bet for any number of reasons. Of course there is the fear that gambling addiction will jump in this city, as well as prostitution; but what galls me are the claims that casinos will generate spinoff economic development as restaurants are opened nearby, shops move in, et cetera. Clearly people who say these kinds of things have never been in a real casino, where shops and restaurants and entertainment are all there under the same roof as the gambling machinery. The entire premise behind a casino operation is, “Get them in the door and then keep them here”. The benefit to other local businesses is negligible, if not downright nonexistent.

In the last fifteen years, Buffalo has built new sports venues, each time insisting that they will stimulate downtown business development. The ballpark is lovely and I really am glad they built it, but how a minor-league baseball stadium that is only open at most ninety times a year is supposed to jumpstart local business investment is beyond me. Buffalo has also built a light rail system which did, in fact, seem like a good idea — until they only built it along one street, and they stopped it virtually on the border of Amherst, Buffalo’s richest suburb. There was a big ceremony last year announcing the construction of a big new office building in downtown Buffalo, but that project’s other shoe dropped recently when the company behind that project — Adelphia Cable — suffered a calamitous drop in its stock value. And while cities like Cleveland, Baltimore, and Milwaukee have in the last ten years or so rebuilt their historical waterfront districts into exciting hubs of small business, entertainment, and residential activity, Buffalo’s waterfront development is still mostly on the drawing board. One other weird thing about Buffalo that I have noticed: our tourist literature always seems to point out, as a “selling point”, our proximity to places like Toronto, Montreal, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and NYC. You really have to wonder about a city that sells itself on the basis of how short a drive it is to someplace else.

There are hopeful signs on the horizon for Buffalo. The state has committed large amounts of money to help launch a state-of-the-art Center for Bioinformatics, which should — if the cards are played right, which is by no means a lock — help Buffalo get involved in what many say will be the next boom-sector in the high tech economy. Also, developers are currently renovating a number of buildings in downtown Buffalo into residential buildings, which seems to imply that the powers-that-be are at least starting to recognize that a city’s vitality lies not in how many people come there for a few hours at a time, but in how vibrant a community actually lives there. The County Legislature, usually quite willing to let the City of Buffalo twist in the wind, is actually scrambling to find some money to at least partially restore the city’s arts funding, which was cut off after the latest round of deficits. (Deficits are actually par for the course, but the State of New York is usually good to cover the difference — at least in years when the State Government isn’t preoccupied with other financial demands, such as rebuilding the state’s other large city which was the unfortunate victim of a terrorist attack last September.) Buffalo has an arts community that is larger and more vibrant than one would expect in a city this size. It seems to me that if a “silver bullet” exists, it is far more likely to involve the arts than sports or casinos. One striking statistic that I recently read in Artvoice is that while the HSBC Arena, the home of the Buffalo Sabres of the NHL, is open perhaps 120 nights a year for various events, the Shea’s Buffalo Theatre (the city’s largest theatre, where the largest traveling Broadway productions are mounted) is open over 220 nights a year. And whereas the Arena is ringed by parking lots, Shea’s is surrounded by restaurants and is within walking distance of Chippewa Street, downtown Buffalo’s “party area”. Any politician — indeed, any person at all — who can claim that the arts are a luxury to be dispensed with in times of fiscal hardship is simply unaware of reality.

From my perspective, the next five to ten years will make or break the City of Buffalo. At the end of that time it will either be a bustling community and a destination in its own right, or it will be a mere waystation on the way from Boston to Chicago on I-90.

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POETICAL EXCURSION #2

Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

———-

This poem has stuck in my mind for years, ever since a high school English teacher forced it on us. I suppose the most memorable thing about the poem, especially to a young reader, is the visceral image with which the poem closes. But what makes it more remarkable, upon rereading it, is the juxtaposition of fetal imagery (“From my mother’s sleep I fell”, “I hunched in its belly”) with that of war (“I woke to black flak and nightmare fighters”). The poem’s first line is the most interesting, with its implication that the narrator — still a child, really — exists for no other reason than to die in the belly of an airplane. “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State”, Jarrell writes — implying that we exist for the State, to live or die by its whims. The poem contrasts maternal instincts with cold, impersonal duty to Our Nation, and does so with a shocking image that is hard to dislodge. And all that in five lines.

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