The streets are paved with pyrite

David Lowery wrote a fascinating article about the music business, and it got me thinking.

I met Mr. Lowery right when Cracker was new (right after Camper van Beethoven broke up) – they played a little show in the University of Utah student union building. That was the first time I was start-to-finish responsible for running sound (such as it was – it was a mostly acoustic show, with vocal and acoustic guitar reinforcement). I’m still mystified that “Low” became the big radio hit rather than “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)”, but hey, you can’t understand them all.

I was pretty happy with how nice he was to me – I was the 18-year-old student promoter who thought I was all worldly, and he humored me and was both professional and charming.

Now, on to the essay – I think he’s on to something: that while the de jure royalties and margins nowadays look better for artists, de facto they are not, and the reason is that we no longer have labels making bets on bands (where the bands fundamentally keep the bet if it’s a loser).

However, I’m not sure that a single variable is the way to view this. Start by imagining sales as a curve, where some bands are ultra-mega-sellers, some are in the middle, going all the way to the band who sold 11 copies to friends whom they dragooned into buying it (no, I don’t resemble that at all). Then it becomes clear that (as he says) the folks in the middle (the “unrecouped”) benefited tremendously from the old system, and pretty much get the shaft in the new one. The ultra-mega-stars? They’re making boatloads of cash either way, and their attorneys can fight it out. However, there are some winners in the new system: the long tail bands (like mine) – these are bands who aren’t doing this for their primary living, and yet can make some music that (a small number of) people like. The new system lowered the barrier to entry to the point that you don’t have to be able to convince a label to fund you – you can save up and record your own album.

This is a pretty nice thing – I’ve encountered some bands who came nowhere near a label, and yet made music which is on my top rated list (ADHD, Hudson River School, Welbilt (cheating slightly – Virgin records did fund a demo of theirs, but then passed on it), and of course my hero Jonathan Coulton) – each of these are bands I never would have heard of had it not been the random drift, and they’ve all had the option of making some money from me. Other little bands like Dayglow and Grandma’s Mini I discovered (and fell in love with) due to playing shows with them.

I do think Lowery is right on the money in one sense, though – the folks advocating for “free stuff” and thinking that creators shouldn’t get paid for stuff they create are behaving in a jerky manner.

The Rubicon is wider than I thought

So I won’t be the president.  I have mixed emotions there: on one hand, I have the clearest vision of the transformation I’d like to see; on the other, presidency is a super-sized load of responsibility and tzarot (constraining troubles).

The gripping hand in this case is that I spoke to the slated president, and I believe she’s on board with as much of my vision as I can communicate verbally.  So perhaps the result will not fully match my vision – but perhaps it will.  I suspect I’ll end up with plenty of work to do.

Pax Romanum

Sarah’s silent retreat was good. Of course, when the cat’s away, I and several other mice go wild.

Now, “going wild” for me involves having pizza for Shabbat dinner and playing board games (gettin’ jiggy with it, oh yeah), so a civilization game came to be. One player had verbally committed, but ditched, so we ended up with six players on a full size board. I think this configuration plays to my strength, because there isn’t a need for a whole lot of conflict, and I excel at peaceful gaming.

I was clearly in the lead at the end of the game (by which point Egypt had had to drop out), and I was extremely surprised that there wasn’t a “dogpile David” moment (and it was even discussed!) but that let me really run out ahead.

Final scores:
Italy (me) 4499 (I think that’s my all-time high)
Illyria (Michael) 3637
Thrace (the other David B) 3304
Africa (Shoshana) 3300
Egypt (Jared) 1568
Assyria (Josh G) 1473

We’re losing David B and Josh to other places soon, so its probably time to teach more new players.

Can I play with [Katniss]?* (spoilers below the ===)

I had had The Hunger Games on my “to read” list for a long time – I had seen a quick synopsis, and it sounded great. Then it started to get more attention, and I heard things like “If you liked Twilight. you’ll LOVE this,” which was a humongo-turnoff, so I put it out of my mind. Sarah read and devoured the books, and she’s normally a slow reader, so I looked at that as a vote in favor, but then again she did actually *like* Twilight, so it was still a mixed vote. When the movie came out, she and I saw it on opening day (!) in good seats at the Uptown (!!) and it was excellent. So it got back onto my list to read.

I figured that it would be a good airplane read, so I picked it up from the library last week when I found out I’d be going away. Well, I was wrong about one thing – I couldn’t wait for the flight, and finished it within about 30 hours of starting, which then left me extremely hungry for the remainder of the series. Happily, the airport bookstore had used copies of the other two, and I made equally short work of those.

These are excellent books – they are everything that a “classic” juvenile novel (in the tradition of Robert Heinlein) is supposed to be: thought-provoking and challenging, rip-roaring, and extremely relatable. To really talk about the book requires spoilers, so if you haven’t read it, go read it and come back: I’ll still be here.

===========Spoilers Below!==============================

Welcome back. The libertarian sensibility of the overarching story is appealing to me – that the biggest enemy is the government, and that the government would think nothing of drafting its children for gladiatorial combat is a classic SF extrapolation of the evils of the totalitarian states of the 20th century. I particularly like the book-not-movie-Tolkien-style demonstration of how being in and complicit to warfare changes a person for the worse – even a just war is still dehumanizing. Apparently the revolution will be televised.

I didn’t catch until it was pointed out that the name of the country, Panem is Latin for “bread” (my old teachers are certainly shaking their heads at the schoolboy fail there), but I should have – certainly the Roman allegory is played up in the dystopian environment.

I thought that Collins did an excellent job of making Katniss appealing and competent without any of the hyper-competence which is all too common in much fiction (Harry Potter, I’m looking at you) – her failures and mistakes are the teaching moments which allow her to grow, and allow us the readers to be brought along in the narrative. Collins did abstract the world – as far as we know, there aren’t any countries other than Panem: if there were, why wouldn’t district 13 (or the capitol for that matter) have enlisted aid?

There was one blind spot – the books had a complete absence of religion, which calls out for an explanation. During all of the other oppressive regimes in human history, religion has been one of the things to which the subject population has turned – think of American slaves singing spirituals, or of the various folks who rebelled against the USSR or currently against China – religion ends up being a non-state-based force (not always for the good). It’s possible that Collins didn’t want to go into it in the context of a YA book (in much the same way that there is no sex, although there are oblique references to it), or it’s possible she’s making some larger point, but if the latter is the case I would not consider the point fully made.

========Spoilers End here============================

All in all, these are fabulous, worth reading, and exceedingly thought-provoking.

* Paraphrased from Iron Maiden.

…, We Have a Problem

Business travel used to excite me, but no longer does so – now I just look at it as time spent in beds which are more comfortable for others than for me, away from Sarah and Kacy. So Houston for me has been a bit of a blur – it’s almost all driving from hotel to work to restaurant to work to restaurant to hotel – I’m certain that there’s interesting things to do here, but I’m not doing any of them.

Except – the (kosher) food here is surprisingly good. Nothing is “fancy” – but they’ve been uniformly pleasant and tasty (2 pizza places, a shwarma place, and a vegetarian Indian place so far…). While the food is a treat, the two things which really have caught my eye are the freeways and the adult stores.

The freeways here are massive – One I’ve been taking (Tx 59) is 6 lanes of freeway in each direction with three lanes of frontage in each direction. For those playing along at home, that’s significantly bigger than the Capital beltway or Interstate 95 near Washington. And that isn’t even an Interstate. Adding to the effect are the number and chaos of the various flyover mixing-bowl lanes – I’ve seen several four and five-stack freeways, all done with a brutalist artless efficiency, as though the engineers agreed to give up their souls for the duration of the construction projects. I honestly can’t think of freeways anywhere else (that I’ve seen) which are as ugly as the ones here.

I had multiple people run Houston down to me before the trip, saying that it was a mess because there was no zoning. Now, living under the thumb of the Old Georgetown Act, “no zoning” sounds like a Libertarian paradise, but reality finds ways to intrude upon the noblest of visions. The way it does so here is the proliferation of adult stores. The funniest I saw is “Zone d’Erotica”, which is on the apropos Westheimer Road, but they’re everywhere. Or maybe Houston is actually just a hornier town than others.

So the verdict is that I can’t wait to be home.

A beautiful tragedy of the commons

Discovery with carrier 747 and escort T38 approaching Dulles Airport, as seen from Herndon

So I got to see Discovery on her final flight today, and was able to watch from both from the Roosevelt bridge and from Herndon. This is the first time in my life I’ve seen a spacecraft in flight, and she was beautiful. I had previously written about seeing the Enterprise docked at Udvar-Hazy, and this had a similar effect on me.

In one way, this is beautiful: American engineering at its most triumphant – this is the culmination of vast quantities of time and treasure spent in an entirely peaceful pursuit. But in another, this is tragic: this marks the end of an aspirational era. Now our horizons are that much closer, and our world is that much smaller.

Now I know, there’s other countries out there doing stuff – the Chinese are aggressively working on developing their space program, the Europeans have a well-established commercial industry for LEO work, and of course the Russians are still keeping the ISS going via Soyuz. I have some hope that the various private American firms working on commercial manned space work will have some success – heck, I saw that the SpaceX Dragon has received permission to dock with the ISS on April 30, and that’s an excellent accomplishment. But honestly the Dragon looks a lot like a more slightly larger, more modern version of a Gemini (Titan II) capsule. I know it’s more cost effective, but it sure doesn’t seem like this is much of a step forward. Then again, the success of Ethernet and IP over the past 30 years was significantly aided by them being cheaper and easier than their competitors, so perhaps cost-effective really is the thing for which we should aim.

But it sure doesn’t feel like we’re swinging for the fence on this one.

Marion Barrycuda, MVP

Yesterday, the DC All-Stars beat Buffalo’s Queen City Lake Effect 175 to 77, and for the first time I got a little bit of the hometown rush that my sports-fan-friends have described about baseball and football. Also, Scare Force One continue their undefeated streak against the Cherry Blossom Bombshells in a very close match.

I think Marion Barrycuda is my favorite jammer (skater who can score) – she’s extremely fast and nimble, and was a big part of the DCAS blowout. However, both DCAS Barbra Booey (described by the announcers as “sex on skates, and who wore a gymnast-style skirt rather than trunks like most others) and QCLE’s Bikini Whacks deserve shout outs- excellent jamming.

I was thinking about why I like this sport so much, and I have a few ideas: it certainly appeals to my DIY punk aesthetic- nobody makes any money, and this is all about raw talent; it’s physical and even a bit violent without being gratuitous or vicious; and there’s a playfully naughty thing going on in the sexual entendre, rather than the far more common sleaziness.

Perhaps that last is why old-school pin-ups are so much more appealing to me than the photoshopped grossness which pervades the modern visual landscape.

The comfort of the second derivative

The trees at the Georgetown waterfront are the same age and species. They are all at different places in their seasonal leafing. I find this comforting.

Cheesecake or Cheesy-cake?

I recently read Kelly Thompson’s excellent essay regarding sexism in comic art, and I think there is more here. Thompson limits her critique to superhero comics (thus, no “despair of the endless” as a monstrous woman), and it seems that the relatively small number of exceptions prove her point- Kate Spencer as Manhunter (which totally sounds like a porn star name) is covered head to toe, and her physique is less pornified than others, but even so she has a more buxom than average (as opposed to more athletic than average) build, at least when drawn by Javier Piña or creator Jae Lee- Michael Gaydos’ style gives her a more realistic build.

But that’s an example of one of the good ones.

Now, as for me, I tremendously prefer the less-objectified comics: give me an 80′s Suicide Squad (Amanda Waller is hardly a porn star, at ~350 lbs), the Sienkiewicz-era New Mutants (who looked like terrified, but realistic teenagers [no muscle tone on any of them]), or the John Byrne through Paul Smith X-men (a little cheesecakeyness, but not all-porn-all-the-time) any day.

I do think that there are some in-book explanations for a few of the items Thompson calls out- Storm’s classic swimsuit (which she did ditch during the mohawk phase) made some sense in that she could have wanted to feel the elements she was controlling, and while she and Phoenix were portrayed without any muscle tone, neither of them were muscular heroines: ranged powers meant they didn’t brawl much. I also think that that period was more balanced: Storm showed a lot of skin, but so did Colossus, and all of the new mutants wore the same duds.

So how did we go from a period where the cheesecake was an element to now, where it’s all the time? My theory is two words:

Art Adams.

I loved his stuff when I was a kid- Longshot, Excalibur, and the assorted other things he drew were such a treasure! But now as I look back on them, one thing I do notice is that his stuff was the first place where I really noticed the brokeback-style hip thrust. I o remember thinking that that was an unrealistic pose (when I was 14!), but I glossed over it at the time. His style made everyone look like Ziggy Stardust- absolutely fabulous in a mega-mullet way.

So, when he did it, I worked, and wasn’t problematic- possibly because he did this to men and women, and possibly because his style was extremely distinctive.

So where’s the problem? Well, copies are never as good as the original, and Adams was big shortly before the “Image explosion”- Lee, McFarlane, Liefeld, Portacio, and many others completely took over the comics world, and blew away the generally accepted bias toward realistic anatomy in favor of dynamic action scenes. While more artistic freedom and leeway might sound like a recipe for more creativity, it instead served as a removal of the restraint imposed by reality.

Sadly, the trajectory here is familiar to any junkie- as GnR said, “I used to do a little but a little wouldn’t do it so the little got more and more”. Without the realistic restraint, there was nothing to tell artists when enough was enough, and the resulting work bears no small resemblance to Claremont’s take on Tom Corsica and Sharon Friedlander after their possession by Empath: the sensations quickly paled, and the search for more left them hollow and empty.

And that’s one reason I buy very few modern Superhero comics (Fablesand Girl Genius are not superheroes, and Freefall is not for sale).

Dynamic Tension

Freefall captures precisely a tension I experience – when the question was asked of RDBF “could Commander Data convert to Judaism?” his answer was “yes, assuming that he could (a) survive immersion in a mikvah, and (b) understand kabbalat ol mitzvot” (acceptance of the yoke of the commandments). So in that way, the current guidance is that traditional Jewish thought would place a greater differentiation between man and woman than between human and non-human. Hm.

Something doesn’t quite fit right here – and yet there is certainly truth to the idea that the sexes are qualitatively different. No matter how much a man could want it, he can never give birth. Unsurprisingly, this leads to differences in physiological structure which appears to give rise to differences in thinking patterns and aptitudes, which leads the difference between the perspectives of men and women to routinely be the subject of oodles of comedians. So this certainly seems like a real and valuable difference – I’m extremely glad that Sarah thinks differently than I do, and there have been lots of times that one of us has been able to bail out the other from some problem which looked insurmountable.

The rejoinder to the argument is that the differences between individuals are greater than the differences between the averages – i.e. that two men can be further apart on whatever measurement than the average man and the average woman. I buy that too. But if the differences between the averages weren’t a useful or widely-observed phenomenon, comedians wouldn’t get much mileage out of it.

I think my favorite split-the-baby proposition is that of Rabbi Roth, the Conservative thinker who had the idea that women were not automatically obligated in all of the mitzvot, but could accept upon themselves the obligation and burden, and at that point could serve in any ritual capacity. The problem is that in practice, vanishingly few people actually follow R’ Roth’s position. so I think it falls into the category of “idea that is widely ignored.”

So I’m not sure where I am here, and there’s a big dialectic (hehe) clash. Fortunately I’m not in a hurry.