by Rodney Eric Griffith | Armour of Rod | |
bp: 118/80
One month ago, my doctor comped me a two-month supply of Hyzaar in an attempt to get my blood pressure normalised. Of late, the numbers have been close to the test bar figure, which is encouraging.
Yesterday my copy of Maybe Tomorrow arrived, replacing the copy on cassette I’d owned (I’ve made an effort to divest myself of cassettes whenever possible, even something such as the Iveys). The j-card on the 1992 cassette edition includes two thumbnails of Iveys 7" sleeves; the CD booklet does not. The CD, of course, has a beautiful replica of the Apple Records label lacking on the cassette.
And this week iTunes released a 3-track live acoustic EP by Liz Phair, Live from the Apple Store – Chicago.
bp: 131/85
Have you seen Tyson, the Skateboarding Bulldog? (A QuickTime clip is here. I’ve watched it almost a dozen times.)
bp: 125/78
The consultant occasionally known as Consultimo is having an ongoing dilemma over the nature of choice, but the entire subject was covered more succinctly by Bill Watterson (cf. p. 105, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book).
bp: 117/83
I had doubts that VH1 would follow through and do its version of I Love the ’90s, since making fun of the 1990s would be sacrilege to 90% of their staff, but the series begins 12 July. (I Love the ’90s is one of the few BBC shows to get ported to Viacom with both its concept and title intact.) Whether or not the show is going to be good depends on the presence of Michael Ian Black, which makes me wonder how long it’s going to be before MTV2 starts running The State on MTV—probably just before the DVD set becomes available.
bp: 130/87
The Illegal Art Exhibit site, an incidental home of the DJ Danger Mouse remix project The Grey Album, mixes its message. What they do would ultimately suffocate freedom of expression by taking away the incentive protection offers to the creative.
The exhibit also neglects the two most famous examples of unauthorised use, one good, one evil:
(1) The Air Pirates, whose unauthorised underground comix published in 1971 tweaked an evil empire, Disney, whose legal response has been a commonly-cited case throughout the comics and mainstream media for years (it was even recently documented in a book, The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture), and
(2) The once-ubiquitous decals of Calvin urinating on the logo of an interchangeable auto manufacturer.
In the first case, Dan O’Neill has since claimed that the entire episode was a ploy to regain the copyright to his strip Odd Bodkins from The San Francisco Chronicle, which is why he considers it a victory.
The second is certainly more famous than The Grey Album. Bill Waterson refused to license the characters from his creation Calvin & Hobbes for fear that the world he created would be diluted and quickly rendered meaningless, resulting in the strip becoming a mere commercial. In spite of this decision, bootleggers began creating unauthorised Calvin & Hobbes products, including the decal seen on nearly every Ford/Chevrolet truck I’ve been stuck behind in traffic for the past 11 years.
In no way has this re-imagining of Calvin enriched my enjoyment of the source material. It’s simply crass. This is also unfortunately true of much of the Illegal Art Exhibit. There is little revolutionary in the works displayed. The results are simply parasitic; meaningless without the use of someone else’s ideas. They only demean, and in many instances they demean the good, not the ungodly.
The Grey Album is the joker in the Illegal Art deck, since malice on the part of its creator was never evident, but even with Jay-Z’s likely blessing, I doubt if either of the two surviving composers of the White Album were approached for their consent, which is the true issue at the bottom of the argument. The primary protection for works of art should go to the creator, or some protection should be awarded the creator or his or her successors in interest, simply because uncreative people are envious and will do anything to usurp your reputation to enhance theirs. The EFF, which I had presumed would have known better, issued a spurious analysis of the case which demonstrated an obvious lack of research. (It is hardly unclear, for example, “who owns the rights to the George Harrison songs” on The Beatles.)
Besides, the most recent site update claims that “an unauthorized re-envisioning of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in which the soundtrack is substituted with a voice-over by Brad Neely by means of syncing the DVD with a different audio recording is “an as-of-yet-unnamed new art form.” It’s not. It’s the exact same thing people have been doing with The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon for years, which shows that the Illegal Art staff don’t get around very much.
Steve Jobs wants to sweeten iTunes with out-of-print and unreleased recordings from the vaults of the five majors. (They have already begun to do so with the Motown anniversary, for which Motown provided digital masters for their first 45 singles and 45 LPs. Even knowing the miserly reputation of the US record industry, I find it amazing that 95 percent of the Motown catalog is currently unavailable in the US.)
Warner Bros. has had a boutique label for years in Rhino Handmade. Universal recently added a copycat, Hip-O Select. The requests posted to the messageboard for the latter (presently offline) are not particularly encouraging. The former occasionally releases some gems but (so far) nothing completely compelling (the complete session tapes for the Monkees’ Headquarters came close.) If iTunes is given the opportunity to cherry-pick from the last 50 years, it could be great. My favourite label, however, will not be involved.
bp: 114/70
I can’t remember the last time The Simpsons had a consecutive run of 6 really good episodes (well, okay, the previous episode, “Bart-Mangled Banner,” was a bit bizarre and out of continuity, but it worked). Caroline credits family-centric storylines, which are stronger in character than celebrity-driven stories, and I would expand that to include the rest of the people of Springfield, who have been underused without reason in the last two seasons.
bp: 126/81 (Saturday)
bp: 122/71 (Sunday)
