20071115

In a piece* discussing the current Writers Guild Strike and the death of television, written by the head writer and co-creator of Lost (a piece linked pretty much everywhere), we find an amusing sentiment:

I am angry because I am accused of being greedy by studios that are being greedy. I am angry because my greed is fair and reasonable: if money is made off of my product through the Internet, then I am entitled to a small piece.

While I understand his point and agree that the corporate overlords are greedy rapscallions and scalawags (and maybe carpetbaggers too!), I'd like to focus on the author's sense of entitlement for a minute. "If money is made off of my product, then I am entitled to a small piece."

The thing is, as nice and reasonable as that sounds, I'm not sure that it's true.

Certainly it would be both good and nice for him to get money for continued profits made from something to which he partially contributed, but entitlement? Imagine if we applied this across the board. Ebay and pawn shops would immediately shut down because it would no longer be easy to resell items - as a portion of a seller's profit would have to be sent to the item's original producer (so that producer could apportion the dough to the suitable contributors to the product's creators). Airlines should be entitled to a portion of the money made from those who use their service to ship goods for sale or ferry businessmen to money-making meetings with clients. The guy who designed the vaguely slick interface for Amazon.com should receive residuals from every sale made through that site. And the growers of Limes should be granted a small piece of the action from every guy who used Coronas as moral lubrication to pry the pants off a normally sensible girl.

After all. They're entitled.

The fact of the matter is: sometimes, you're just payed to do a job. Once the job is done, it's not your business what happens to your work. I've done work for people and seen that work end up not being used at all. I've seen other things help net an employer a pretty penny. In either case though, my involvement and entitlement ended the moment my contractual obligation was fulfilled. I.e., the moment I finished the job.

Look, it's fine if television writers want to renegotiate their deal. It's fine for them to want a bigger piece of the pie, more money. And if their employer wishes to give them such a deal, to cut them into a shared profit in hopes of, perhaps, inspiring a better product from them, then good for them. But to speak and act as if that cut of future profits is owed them, something they are entitled to, is an offense to reason, to reality, and to the rest of the working world who realizes that they are getting paid to do a job and any extra money on top of that which is contractually owed us is what we call a bonus.

*note: any time you want to read a protected article on the New York Times website, just use guest1 as both your member ID and password for free access.

The Problem with Adjectives

Just before my vacation, Kalinara engaged my interest with a post discussing just what was offensive and sexist. Or at least that's what I turned the post into in my mind, because that's what her words got me thinking about. Because of my impending vacation, I didn't really get to explore the ideas that were slogging through the muck of my consciousness. So let's do that now. Keep in mind that this is not so much a response to K as it is a rumination inspired by her comments.

So K suggested that if something offends anyone, it is offensive. She also suggested that if anyone finds something sexist, it is sexist. At first, I wasn't so into this as it allows terminology that has strongly negative import to be applied to things that might not actually deserve such negativity. I brought up the tired old example of how David Howard didn't utter a racist sentiment by his use of niggardly, even though it was racist to those who possessed a limited vocabulary. But then I thought more about it and while I'm still unsatisfied, that lack of comfort comes more from the nature of adjectives than from K's application of them.

The problem with adjectives is that, largely, they are relativistic. Perspectival. They are comparative to a usually unstated standard. And it's the unstatement of the standard where things get tricky.

At 6'2", I am tall for my age. If the standard is the average height of the 33-year-old male population of Japan. If, however, you compare me to the average height of a 33-year-old male professional basketball player, I'm not actually tall at all. The adjective's accuracy is entirely dependent upon the standard by which we measure it.

Now there are numerous standards to keep track of at any given time. Personal standards. Cultural standards. Sub-cultural standards. Statistical standards. Religious standards. Particular standards. It can easily get confusing. And we grant differing weight to standards according to circumstance.

As an artist, when I create something for print publication and it needs to be blue, I rely less upon my experience of blue (my standard for blue, as it were), and more upon both industry standard and client standard. I also don't give much weight to your mother's standard of blue.

When speaking of religion, a man of Islamic faith will more greatly grant to the weight of an Islamic understanding of what is moral than he will to the Hindu understanding of the same. Even an adjective like Christian will be applied or not applied based upon differing standards. Some will say that Mormonism is Christian because according to their standard, Mormonism is Christian. Others, of course, will fight tooth and nail to refuse use of that particular adjective to the Mormon faith—instead offering an adjective like "cult." It's all dependent upon the standard for comparison.

And so it is, I think, with adjectives like offensive, sexist, and racist. If we do not define our standard, things get really tricky. Kalinara, fortunately, does define the standard to which she appeals, stating that something is offensive or sexist if a single person finds it to be so (she also claims, then, that something being offensive isn't necessarily a bad thing).

I'm mostly okay with how she's treating the terms here save for the fact that I don't think that this is the normal way in which we use the terms. I think that generally when we say something is offensive (without using further qualifiers), we are appealing to some standard beyond simply our own personal standard—or even another's personal standard. If I say that Hitler's ideology is offensive, I'm not just saying that I am offended by Hitler's ideology (unless I add to me to the statement: "Hitler's ideology is offensive to me"). I'm saying that his ideology offends some greater standard.

The problem is ambiguity. What greater standard am I referring to? Now Hitler's pretty easy as his ideology likely would be considered offensive by quite a few standards. But let's take Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. If some one said the movie was offensive, there are many less standards by which the film would be considered offensive. Offensive to Jews? Evidently. Offensive to some Christians? Sure. Offensive to people who wanted Jesus to speak in Greek? I guess. Offensive to the rabid materialists? It would almost have to be. Offensive to practicing Roman Catholics? Probably not so much.

A large number of people wouldn't find it offensive. Another group of people would. So was the film offensive? Depends on the standard. Dictionary standard? Well, yeah, because it caused offense to some. Cosmic standard? Probably not, as little offends the cosmic.

So when approaching a particular instance, say a work of art or a corporate graphic depiction, what do we want to mean when we describe it as sexist, racist, or offensive? What standard are we appealing to? What standard should we appeal to? I think that by arguing whether something is sexist or not, we are usually less arguing over the appropriateness of adjective itself, and more just arguing in favour of one measuring stick over another.

Obviously, I don't have an answer for this yet. But I think my dissatisfaction has done well to prompt me to consider the question.

Spectator Sports & Gardening vs. the Awesome Might that Is Power Chompsky

I've been reading more in Chomsky's Understanding Power. It's kinda cool because the way it's laid out, you can just flip around and read on whatever subject you want - since he's basically just taking random questions from a variety of audiences. So the other night, I ran across an interesting subject of which I completely agree with one facet of his discussion and pretty much disagree with the other facet. He's kinda like Leithart in that.

So he's talking about spectator sports. You can read the whole thing on the internet (it's only a page and a half), probably illegally. He's talking about the role of sports in de-politicizing people (which is a pretty dicey concept, if you ask me), but when he's talking about the nature of sports team support, I think he's right on the money.

I remember very well in high school having a sudden kind of Erlebnis, you know, a sudden insight, and asking myself, why do I care if my high school football team wins? I don't know anybody on the team. They don't know me. I wouldn't know what to say to them if I met them. Why do I care? Why do I get all excited if the football team wins and all downcast if it loses? Anti it's true, you do: you're taught from childhood that you've got to worry about the Philadelphia Phillies, where I was. In fact, there's apparently a psychological phenomenon of lack of self-confidence or something which affected boys of approximately my age who grew up in Philadelphia, because every sports team was always in last place, and it's kind of a blow to your ego when that happens, people are always lording it over you.

I spoke of this penchant we have for identifying ourselves with arbitrary communities way back when in discussing team support in the Olympics and it essentially boils down to Yay-This-Side-of-the-River and Boo-Your-Side-of-the-River. In 1963's Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut describes these imagined communities as granfalloons and says (through story device) "If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

Essentially, the truth is that there is no rational reason for me to root for one athletic club over another. Real Madrid vs. Barcelona? Who cares. Cards vs. Tigers? Who cares. Flyers vs. Sabers? Who cares. Well the thing is: people care and they care by the masses.

Chomsky's answer for why they care, though, is a bit off, I think.

In our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way - so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folk. So what's left? Well, one thing that's left is sports-so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter.

Rather than point to what I think is probably a more readily intuitive answer - that people might actually really and honestly like either watching sports or the idea of competitiveness - Chomsky presumes that people are encouraged to devote themselves to something meaningless like sports fanaticism by the power structure in order to prevent them from mucking around in things that matter. I think this is what happens when one takes on a dogma. All things becomes filtered through dogma-coloured lenses. This is why for conspiracy theorists, everything becomes a conspiracy and for persecutionist Christians, every movement by the government or society is seen to be a particularly designed sleight to their way of life.

This is one of the things I'm observing in Understanding Power. Chomsky has a lot of interesting things to say and sometimes has a compelling view of the facts as he presents them (this topic deserves another post), but essentially, you know that no matter what he's talking about, he'll tie it into the US power structure and how it's all designed to keep power out of peoples hands. I'm awaiting pretty anxiously the part where he explains how the invention of Americanized pizza is evidence of power conspiracy.

Anyway, to be fair, I think there may be some people for whom sports fanaticism is an escape from a world out of control. But I think that to generalize that this is the case for the masses is inaccurate and a pretty big leap. It's a judgment of motive that really probably doesn't bear itself out under any real scrutiny. In support of the idea, I had a friend once who worked with troubled teens at a youth shelter sort of place. He would get home everyday from work completely drained. The job, as rewarding as it was, was also completely deflating. He recognized that the baby steps he was able to make with these truly disturbed and, indeed, broken kids were mere drops in the bucket. These were kids he could never fix. So, in order to not grow despondent himself, he would throw himself into gardening in the evenings and weekends. We had a large garden and we could watch it take shape as he took control over it. It was a relief for him to have control over something - for him to see the benefit of his actions.

Gardening, for him was a coping method. More on coping methods in a second.

Still, it would be inaccurate to say that everyone - or even most people - dive into gardening as a coping method. Some people, and there are a lot of them, really just love flora. Gardens can be especially fun for people who love plants but are trapped in areas where plants don't naturally find themselves in abundance. A friend of mine is leaving for Japan this week to view the cherry blossoms (something for which I may be eternally envious). It's not because his life is out of control. It's 'cause they're freakin' beautiful.

Myself. I know far more about comics and movies than the average citizen. I have poured a lot of my waking life into studying in these fields. I am not unlike the sports fanatic in my affection for comics and film. And you know what? Psychologically, there's little more to it than the fact that I enjoy those things. I really enjoy storytelling, but even more I enjoy the way stories can be told through these two media. It's not an act of escapism. I'm pretty grounded and disillusioned. And I'm content in that. I don't feel the need to reillusion myself. I don't specialize in this way because better things are unavailable to me.

As well, most sports fanaticism develops in childhood (the human era when many obsessions are developed). My brother, The Li'l Dane, developed into a sports statistician early in elementary school. And I think we can comfortably say that this didn't happen as a coping mechanism for him to deal with the fact that he held little political influence as a fourth grader.

And now that we've come back to coping mechanisms, a point I made a couple years ago is similar to Chomsky's but has, I think, a little more real world validity. Political interest itself is, for many, a coping mechanism.

Nobody is happy with the world around them. We live in a cursed world, so this lack of contentment with a world filled with death, disease, pain, and other people is expected. Simultaneously, people come to believe with conviction that the things they believe about government, its purpose, and where its goals ought to lie - they begin to believe that these opinions they hold are more than just correct - they are right. Now this conviction is not of its own a problem, but when combined with the lack of happiness in one's world, he comes to believe that the reason he is not happy is that the world is not run according to the way he believes it should be run.

I think that what Chomsky is doing, in many ways, is exactly that for which he chastises (indirectly) the sports fanatic. He feels powerless in the face of the world-machine that operates entirely without his say-so; and so he throws himself into something he feels he can keep a pretty good expert's grasp on: power conspiracy. The difference is that he chooses to label his fanatic's interest as worthwhile while the sports fanatic's interest is trifling. In the hierarchy of things, political interest and commentary is probably actually more important than sports commentary. But probably not by some overwhelming degree. It's probably up there with a fanatical interest in cooking or health food or the stock market.

Salute!

I'm actually pretty surprised at how cordial real motorcyclists are to me, as a rider of a Vespa. I initially thought they'd be down on me as a rider of something substantially less powerful and girthy than their machines of might and splendor.

And yet, a good percentage of motorcyclists do that left hand out to the side thing. That note of acknowledgement that passes between riders. That way of saying, "Hey cool, you're not stuck in a gas-chugging car! Me neither! Keep on trucking, my brother."

Or at least, I imagine that they're trying to say something to that effect. I guess. I haven't quite figured it out. But I do my best to return the greeting to those that offer it and give a polite head nod to all others.

It's a strange world and I haven't yet found my place in it.

Pirates vs. teh Dumb

Universal Music Group, a unit of France's Vivendi SA, had threatened to sue YouTube, saying it was a hub for pirated music videos.

In an article that shows that large media corporations still don't know how to relate with either a) their consumer base or b) digital piracy, this particular sidenote stuck me as really funny. Universal Music Group doesn't want YouTube showing UMG music videos? What are they thinking. Do they even understand what music videos are for?

Yes. That's right. A music video is an advertisement for the music (and maybe even the band). And here's the thing about advertising: you want people to see it. Even better if they want to see it.

So what if YouTube users are pirating UMG music videos and putting them online for people to see? YouTubers are selling albums for UMG by their piracy. If MTV (the way I remembered it) had any slogan back in the day, it shoulda been something like MTV: Selling the Music.

Personal anecdote time:

I would have never really listened to Weezer if it hadn't been for the ready availability to view their video for "Buddy Holly" on the internet. I watched the video, thought it was a crack up and so watched it again. Then the song kinda started creeping around in my head. So I bought Blue. Then Pinkerton. Then Green and Maladroit. Then the two-disk special edition of Blue. Then Make Believe. And then the Weezer dvd. Watching a single pirated dvd, got me to spend a hundred bucks on a label's band.

Now, I wasn't ever going to run into the video that started all that through any venue outside the internet. I certainly wasn't watching music video stations. I was barely listening to the radio by then. I was, however, on the internet about ten hours a day.

I'm not sure if UMG decided not to sue because they realized they couldn't win or because they realized that having their pirated music videos (advertisements) showing up on YouTube was actually good for them. But seeing as how they're a traditional company, I'd bet that it was the first.

HT to Alex for the article.

Not Quite Hip

I read an article a couple days ago called Starbucks' 'venti' problem that was vaguely interesting. For now, I'm going to skip over the ridiculous editing standards (standards? what standards?) of the L.A. Times and the fact that ever so thankful that I'm not a journalist if opening lines like "COFFEE ADDICTS WERE SHAKEN, and stirred, recently when a memo written by Starbucks Corp. founder and Chairman Howard Schultz was posted on the Internet" are de rigueur for journalists these days.

Anyway, the article goes on to quote Schultz, who says that there are those who "even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee." Pretty honest appraisal from the big man who more than likely looks around and doesn't even recognize the coffee haüs he founded. And what's more?

It's true. Starbucks may have once been right at home with the indie-hip scene, providing a gypsy sort of ramshackle ambience. At some point in distant memory, Starbucks may have been a labour of love. But, as has been no doubt remarked thousands upon thousands of times, the road to success is paved with broken dreams - with the most broken of dreams being that of he who succeeds.

The price of ubiquity, it seems (at least in Starbucks's case), is the dry, hermetically sealed sterility that only corporate mandate can forge. Gone is the personality that may have once been intimate with the brand. Fled is the conception that there is any heart beating behind the vast, juggernaut machine that is the Starbucks Empire. And really, according to how they currently present themselves, "Empire" is the last thing they want you thinking.

The sad thing is that Starbucks is desperately trying to maintain that bygone aura of relatability and personal relevance. It wants to be cool. Hip. Indie. Whatever the cool kids are saying these days. It promotes its we're-still-one-of-you image all over the place, but the people are wise to it. We may like the coffee okay, but we don't imagine we're taking part in some cool community of fresh new voices and indie-chic hipness. Nowadays, Starbucks comes off like a mom who shops at Wet Seal and wears clothes that no one who isn't sixteen should be wearing. And that contributes to the Fake that gets in my eye whenever I see Starbucks trying to promote itself as the Place Where It Happens.

First clue: the Place Where It Happens doesn't have time to promote itself as said Place because its to busy being that Place.

That said, there is nothing inherently wrong with Starbucks. It just needs to grow up and embrace itself for what it is. "Hi. We're Starbucks. We're everywhere so it's kind like introducing yourself: 'Hi. I'm Tom Cruise.' You know who we are. We're huge and we are going to sell you fairly decent coffee-drinks at fairly not small prices. You can customize your order. And while you're customizing. We'll give you a slick experience. After all, if you wanted 'hip,' you'd have gone to that little shop down the street that no one's really heard of - except maybe the people in-the-know (e.g., not you). But you didn't go there because you're interested in slick and clean and corporate. That us and that's why you love us. Peace out, droogies."

Vespark

So a couple mornings back, I left Ye Olde Domicile in preparation for my five-day-a-week trip to the office. Down, down the stairs I trudged. Up, up the sidewalk I padded. Past, past the mailboxes I sauntered. Over, over to the space into which I had parked Bartleby the evening past.

And yet the little fellow was not to be found in the spot into which I had so lovingly deposited him.

Gasp, shock, and horror. Until I saw him a good fifteen feet away, parked up upon the sidewalk. At that point, Gasp, Shock, and Horror took off their masks and revealed themselves to be none other than Perturbation, Peevishness, and Ire. Who would perpetrate such a foul deed? Who would usurp dear Bartleby's rightful asphault throne?

My theory rules as thus: The complex in which my abode resides is, how do you say, strapped for parking. As I work close to home, I rarely experience this crush firsthand - arriving home, as I do, between 15 to 30 minutes after 5:oopm. What likely occurred is that as the lot filled up, some dastardly fiend, infuriated by the fact that such a small and fuel efficient vehicle should have taken up a whole parking space when really its mass only fills about 15% of said space. He and a cohort must have left their car, hefted poor Bartleby into the air, and carried him over to the sidewalk. When I arrived in the morning full of righteous anger and the wrath of a thousand suns, I thought of writing a dissembling note and placing it through the windshiled of the car in my space, but then I thought better of it.

I mean what if the villains had moved the Vespa, parked, done whatever black magic they had come to do, and left? The car currently parked there would not have known that its lucky find of a parking space was, in actuality, a Space Claimed. And so, it would hardly have been fair of me to deposit my wrath in such a way, against a potential innocent. And this. This is why I am a better man than George W. Bush. The end.

Land of Confusion

One of the problems that often crops up in those who are political active (whether in government or merely from the decrepit old office chair upon which their perch before their computer) is an acute lack of perspective. I've spoken before about the reasons for this deficit in the realm of a Well-Ordered Sense of Reality, but today I was driving behind a simple example of this myopia in practice. It was a bumper sticker.

While its true that the sloganeering in bumper stickers is by its nature imperfect and we shouldn't expect a brief juxtaposition of words and symbols to carry the finely honed nuance of a full-bodied ideology - still, the choice of a bumper sticker says something about the individual who sees the sticker and thinks: "Oh, man! I so completely want to put that on the back window of my SUV. Yes!"

Now it's one thing if your window is less window than sticker and you have almost an indiscriminate selection of slogans, perpetrating a rainbowed galaxy of ideologies inconsistent with any hegemony or movement. If this is the case, you can be forgiven the content of your selections - if not for the absence of taste that birthed your rear-window monstrosity in the first place.

But this guy was different. Only a single sticker. That means that out of all the stickers he could have gotten, he chose this one in particular because he like it better than everything else he could have put there. This sticker is the One that best defined his ideology:

Huh. Where to begin?

Forget politics. Forget whether you think that Bush is a great president or that Bush is perpetuating the slaughter indicative to the world-dominating terrorist state that is the U.S. of A. That doesn't matter, really. This guy professes love for a social construct. And then he doesn't love a human being.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem I'm talking about. George Bush is a filthy, rotten human being. Just like you. just like me. And just like the author of that bumper sticker's slogan. He's also crafted in the image of God. Just like you. Just like me. And just like the author of that bumper sticker's slogan.

What is he talking about when he says he loves America? The nation: some socio-political construct that exists only as a fabrication we've socially devised as a means of organizing ourselves? The geography: a chunk of real estate that is artificially demarcated in such a way to keep others from enjoying the real estate as much as we do? The ideology: a winner-take-all, scrape-yourself-from-the bottom -at-the expense -of-all-others type of success glorification?

The sticker might as well say:

It would be equally sensible.