Differentiating The Douchebag From The Martyr.
This little .jpg has shown up about three times on my facebook feed over the last two days. Have a look.
(Click me to embiggen).
That fellow on the far left, the one we’re supposed to feel sorrow and outrage for is a guy named Kim Dotcom, nee Kim Schmitz. Let’s first clear some air: Mr. Schmitz has not been sentenced to 50 years in prison. He was only arrested last week, and has not yet even been extradited to the United States from New Zealand, where he was placed in custody by police there. So there’s that. But there’s more here.
Kim Dotcom did not get arrested for “sharing” anything. Kim Dotcom was arrested for being the man behind the popular file upload/download site Megaupload, because Megaupload–according to the Feds–knowingly engaged in internet-based IP piracy and conspiracy of same.
Let’s understand what’s going on here. Megaupload is/was one of many sites that are known as “cyberlockers”. Others include Rapidshare, Filesonic, Mediafire, etc. These sites all have similar models for what they do and how they make money. They offer a service by which users can upload files. When the file is uploaded, the site generates a unique URL address which the user can then share with others who may then download the file. When users go to these sites, they’re typically assaulted with a variety of ads, popups, and perhaps even adware/malware downloaded to their own computers. Users who wish to download a file are normally given a choice involving a slow download, or a faster one available with a monthly membership, typically in the $10/30 days model. There are legitimate uses for such sites, but they are also a haven for uploaded copyrighted music, movie, and game files as well.
To understand what happened here, it’s also necessary to understand how these cyberlocker sites save money and space in bandwidth and storage. If you’re uploading a file, you may not be the only person who’s done that with that particular file, and in the exact same format. It would be inefficient for these sites to store all these exact same files as different files on their servers, and the uploading of these files likely clogs their bandwidth, so what they do is “hash” their files. Let’s say that you’ve uploaded a public-domain movie to a cyberlocker. That cyberlocker sees this, and simply gives you a unique URL for the movie file that you can share, but doesn’t have you actually upload anything. They know they’ve already got a copy in the same format and don’t want to waste the space on redudancy. Where this comes into play on Megaupload is that folks were uploading movies, music, and games that were under copyright. When Megaupload hashed the files, it would simply generate unique URL addresses for users to share, all of which pointed to the same file on their servers. So…if a thousand pirates uploaded a Radiohead album in the same format, (which happens; you, Mr. Pirate, are not the unique snowflake your parents tell you that you are), Megaupload would generate a thousand different, unique URL’s, but they’d all point to the same file.
Now we get to the problems. Youtube (which isn’t a cyberlocker, but which I included to prevent jackholes from commenting “What about Youtube!”)and various cyberlocker sites that aren’t in trouble have been diligent about removing content when a copyright holder complains about it. For right now, that’s enough to satisfy US laws; if you are a musician and see your copyrighted music being shared and want to stop that from happening, you file a complaint and the offending site removes the file. What Megaupload would do (and you can see this coming, can’t you?) was to remove the offending URL that had been complained about, but KEEP the actual file on their servers, with potentially thousands of other URL’s out there still pointing to it and making it a valid link. In seized emails and chatlogs, Kim Dotcom of Megaupload and various others in the company actually discuss this practice as a matter of policy and allegedly admit to fostering piracy through their site.
And so that’s bad.
But there’s more.
I understand that there are a lot of folks out there in the “Information just wants to be free!” camp. I get that, even if I disagree with it. Let’s be clear here, however. Kim Schmitz/Dotcom did not “share” anything. Mr. Dotcom made a ridiculously posh living off of it. By visiting Megaupload, he got money off of clickthrough’s from advertisers. He got money off of subscribers who paid him $10/month. He “shared” files in the same way that McDonald’s “shares” food: you give them money, they give you the goods.
How much money did this “file sharer” make off the copyrighted works of others?
Here’s his house. You tell me.
(If you’re struggling with this, Kim Dotcom’s net worth is estimated at $200 million USD)
There are legitimate and useful cyberlocker services out there, and this is not a condemnation of them as a blanket by any means. Even more than that, many of these sites are smart enough to put their server farms in European countries with more forgiving “fair use” laws than those in North America (Megaupload had a huge server farm in Ashburn, VA and also in Canada). What this is is a condemnation of one person and one site whose willful and gleeful scofflaw activity emboldens politicians to send legislation like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA on through.
Here’s Your Strange But True Factoid Of The Day.
(Courtesy of Dan Lehr at NewsChannel 9 in Chattanooga; I actually knew this little factoid, but earlier today Dan–one of my dearest friends from college–tweeted it and I remembered it again and how odd and interesting this really is and decided to share.)
John Tyler was born in 1790, a little more than a year after the United States became the United States by ratifying the Constitution. Tyler grew up in Virginia as a member of a proud family who could trace lineage back to the colony at Williamsburg. One of the heroes of the War of 1812, William Henry Harrison, selected Tyler to be his running mate, and won the election of 1840. When President Harrison died shortly after taking office in 1841, Tyler became the 10th President of the United States. He wasn’t really much of a President. The major accomplishment of his career in the White House was annexing the state of Texas to the union–which is why there’s a city in Big Tex called Tyler. His second year in office, the First Lady, Letitia Tyler, died of complications after having suffered a stroke years earlier. President Tyler ended up taking a second wife after leaving office. He was 56 by then. She was 26. Good on him. With his second wife, Julia, John Tyler had 7 more children very late in life.
Wacky factoid, coming up. Really. Promise.
One of his sons was a fellow named Lyon Tyler, who was born in 1853, when his father was 63 years old. Lyon Tyler had a personal life very similar to his father’s. Lyon’s first wife, Anne, passed away in 1921. Lyon Tyler was 69 years old. He married a much younger woman and had three children with her, including Lyon Jr. and Harrison Tyler, born in 1924 and 1928 respectively. (For his part, Lyon Senior lived to be 82 years old, passing away in 1835.)
Lyon Tyler, Jr. and Harrison Tyler are both still very much alive. They’re the grandsons of the 10th President of the United States, who was born in 1790.
Have You Written Your Congresspeople?
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Art As It Happens, Or Not.
Should the purpose or intent of an album/song be something you consider when weighing quality and worthwhile-ness of the experience?
I pose this question as I look over the flaming wreckage of the best records I heard in 2011. A “band” called National Skyline, which originally consisted of a couple of Jeffs: Jeff Dimpsey of sometimes-talked-about-here 1990′s Illinois group Hum and Jeff Garber of Castor. National Skyline has been just Garber for a while now. In 2009, under the Skyline name, Garber released a terrific “comeback” album called Bliss & Death. I didn’t hear that record until late 2010, but it sure made me interested in hearing more from this project.
And so back in February, National Skyline put out two EP’s. I loved them. Then in May we got another full album, called Bursts (Amazon lists it at just self-titled) of new material as National Skyline. I liked that too, but in smaller doses. Individual songs sounded great, but it was nothing I could listen to for extended periods. It was a classic case of “I like two songs”, but in this case the odd thing was that it could be any two songs, depending on which two songs were the first two I heard.
Then in August he/they released another full album’s length of material called Broadcasting. All new. All sort of sounding the same tones and themes of his previous work in 2011. Then in December…another new album (Primitive Parade), all new, same deal. All of that stuff sounds….really good on first and even second or third listens. At first I was thinking that if you cobbled together an album of 12 of the best National Skyline songs of the many released in 2011, you might really have something.
But there’s a catch.
Seems that the 2009 return to grand form Bliss & Death attracted the notice of some tastemakers with deep pockets, namely MTV. Garber signed on with a music publishing company/label/promotional entity called Hype Music. Hype is an MTV affiliated thing that basically act as a conduit between non-musical commercial entities who need music, and artists who create said music. In this case, MTV and some associated Viacom networks needed music for TV series, specifically for a show called Teen Mom which I have never seen. And so guess what all that prolificness was for? The uniformity of tone, palette, and style on all three National Skyline full-length releases this past year was because those “albums” were actually songs that were written for Hype that appeared in that show and others of similar inane (I’m assuming) ilk (Jersey Shore was another show to feature National Skyline, so inanity confirmed).
Let me be fairly clear here: I am the world’s least-opposed music snob/geek/asshole-senile hipster when it comes to music artists making money off their craft. I’ve seen musicians who I love and adore struggle to make ends meet with “real” jobs, and have seen promising music careers derailed because frankly the money sucks and it is damn near impossible to get paid for creating it, much less carve out a living doing it. So. If National Skyline–who is just Jeff Garber now–is making some decent money by writing songs for teen angst reality shows, good on him/them. I am wholly and 100% in favor of that. What I am less in favor of is the releasing, for commercial sale, this same music under the name of a band that spent a good number of years toiling in the underground building a pretty nice vault of indie goodwill capital. I must look at the pleasing nature of that music as me being somewhat deceived. I must consider that the striking similarity of tone, lyrics, and overall sound that these songs possess are stitched together through copying and pasting in Pro-Tools or Garage Band as if they were random prose generators.
To be more stark about it, in National Skyline’s previous creative peak from 1999 through 2001, they released something like 21 songs. In the 2011 calendar year under the name “National Skyline”, Garber has released 44 songs. After playing around with trying to make my own album of the best dozen of those 44 I’ve concluded that I could throw darts at a board to pick any 12 and they’d sound no different from 12 other songs chosen by some other random method.
That’s a problem. Perhaps I should let this go and say “I like the songs on these records, even if they are created to plug into TV shows to create easy mood and emotional audience manipulation”. Perhaps I may end up hearing enough difference to get there.
Then again, perhaps I won’t. I’m not sure I’m all that interested in listening much more.
The Making Of The Making Of A Christmas Tradition.
Perhaps you may have guessed that I sort of have some affection for Christmas and holiday themed music. Time to confess that this wasn’t always the case.
Let’s flash back to Christmas, 1991. I’m a part-time 9-hours-semester college student spreading my time between working at a restaurant in the college town of Columbia, Missouri, while also working for the student radio station there (good ol’ KCOU-FM). Since it’s late December, classes are done for the semester at Mizzou and most of the students have returned to their homes for the month-long holiday break. As for me, I’m still in Columbia. The restaurant I’m working at, Katy Station (it was a converted rail station on the old MKT line), has recently made me a server trainer and as such I’ve got responsibilities…like staying in town when school is out because even though things slow down, there are still 50-60,000 folks in the area, and someone needs to be around to work.
And so somehow that December I get conned into working Christmas Eve. No real biggie, I’m assured. It should be a slow night, I’m told. I’m in Station 1, which means I should be the first station cut when things slow down, and I’ll get out early. That’s good. A few years prior to this my mom and I had established something of a new Christmas tradition; instead of Christmas at her house with family going there, we started going to my brother’s home in rural Missouri. His five kids back then were all pre-teens or barely-teens, so Christmas was a Big Deal. As a country doctor he has a huge house that is always incredibly decorated inside and out; my brother and sister-in-law know how to keep an amazing Christmas to this day, and that was just as true 20 years ago. Anyway, he’s in Sedalia, a mid-sized town of about 30,000 folks about an hour or so from Columbia. I figure I’ll get done with work by 7:30 or so, and be in front of a Christmas Eve fire sipping red wine or holiday beer or eggnog or something by 9pm at the latest.
Well. If you’ve ever gone out to dinner on Christmas Eve, you’re already laughing at my stupid 1991 self. If you don’t do that, here’s what you don’t know: Christmas Eve in a restaurant is insanely busy. I used to manage at an upscale steakhouse in a Washington DC suburb, and Christmas Eve was the busiest day of sales dollars per hour of the year. I know this now, and that knowledge can make working on Christmas Eve kind of fun. Everyone’s in the holiday spirit, it’s busy like crazy, but there’s an indescribable energy in the air that just makes it a neat day to work.
But…these things I did not know in 1991. For our family, Christmas Eve was a big deal. Big dinner at Grandma’s, then presents there, then back home, more presents, and then midnight church. You hung with family on Christmas, at home, or so I thought. As you might imagine, I got a rude awakening that Christmas Eve night of 1991. I was completely mentally unprepared, and as the minutes and hours ticked away and my station was still full and we were still on a wait at the front desk, my mood got blacker. 7:30 came and went. Then 8:00. Then 8:30. I finally managed to get out by about 9:30 or so, but I think I had to double-tip a busboy to do my station and rollups at the end of the shift, and if I did my assigned sidework, I’m pretty sure it was done rather shoddily. What made the passing of time even worse was that a winter storm was rolling into mid-Missouri that night. Freezing rain that wouldn’t turn to snow until Christmas morning. Not only was I going to get a late start on getting to my brother’s house for Christmas, but it was also going to be a painfully slow trip to get there. I called from my apartment (which seemed gloomy and empty; my girlfriend had already gone back home to St. Louis for the holiday) to let my sister-in-law know that I was getting a late start. She promised that she or my brother would keep a light on for me, and the front door would be unlocked.
Honestly though, at that point I was ready to bag the whole thing. I was in a terrible, Christmas-hating mood by that point. I was tired, I was bummed out, and the thought of taking a shower, putting the TV on and sleeping was a lot more appealing that driving through freezing rain that night. I was downright gloomy (2010 Chris would probably slap 1991 Chris in the face with a curt “Get over yourself”.) To make matters worse, I’d bought Christmas presents for the family, but needed to still wrap them. I’m almost helpless when it comes to wrapping presents. I got out the stuff for wrapping gifts and my thoughts turned to what I’d listen to on this painful drive ahead of me. Back then a CD-player in the car was an unheard-of luxury, so if I wanted to listen to something I’d have to tape a CD or record onto a cassette to listen to it. I thought about taping a couple of CD’s I’d gotten as gifts earlier in the week, but something in my head made me decide that if I had any chance at all of getting out of the self-pitying grouchy mood I was in, it would have to be something that got me in the Christmas spirit.
And so I started to tape songs as I wrapped. I grabbed a bunch of Atlantic R&B Christmas tunes (Ray Charles, The Drifters, etc.) from the 8-disc box set I’d gotten as a gift. I grabbed some Christmas songs from the Stax Volt box I’d bought that fall at one of Streetside Records “20% off all CD’s on Tuesday” sales (Otis Redding, of course). For some reason I had this Christmas sampler CD that had been sent to the radio station–I think it was an IRS Records thing–and I noticed there was a song by The dB’s, one of my favorite bands on it. It was a song called “Home For The Holidays”. I taped that, too. I also grabbed a certain Pogues song that night.
I’d made my first Christmas mix.
I didn’t roll into Sedalia until about 2 in the morning, and the driving was just awful–25, maybe 30 mph down Interstate 70. Not fun times. I was tired to the point of complete mental and physical exhaustion, barely keeping it going by the power of a bottle of Mountain Dew. I think I listened to talk radio for as long as KFRU could hold a signal that night. Then I put some random music in the car’s cassette player. It was a good while before I thought to put in my cassette of Christmas music.
Of course you can probably guess at the effect. Despite my nerves being frayed by driving that night in icy conditions with wakefulness only preserved by excessive amounts of stomach-destroying caffeine, and despite my earlier dark mood, that Christmas tape was like all three of Mr. Dickens’ ghosts visiting Ebenezer Chris in one fell swoop. Clyde McPhatter’s lilting alto on “White Christmas”, Otis Redding’s infectiously joyful “Ha ha ha!” on “Merry Christmas, Baby”…yeah, they did the trick. And there was that dB’s song, which was recorded in a rather loosey-goosey recording session the band had done about 5 years earlier. Most of the songs from that session sound as if everyone having a bit of a drunken goof, but then there’s “Home For the Holidays”, in which Peter Holsapple sings with his plaintive Carolina voice “Every year as I get older Christmas gets to me/More and more I want to be home by the Christmas Tree”. The song is gorgeous and evocative, and by the final verse when he strains to sing “and maybe you can make it next year” I think I probably had tears in my eyes.
After that song, I know for a fact that “Fairytale Of New York” came on. I remember it because I’d just turned onto state highway 65, which meant just another half hour or so until I was at my destination. I also remember it distinctly because I ended up behind a salt truck and snow plow from MODOT, and that truck was moving surprisingly fast and I settled into its wake and was able to drive at 45 down that four-lane highway and as the boys of the NYPD Choir were singing “Galway Bay”, and as Kirsty MacColl was calling Shane a scumbag and a maggot and a cheap lousy faggot and as the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day, I realized I was going to get to my brother’s house soon, and safe, and that Christmas was still going to be pretty awesome and I think I was smiling ear to ear in the car.
So that’s what Christmas music is to me. It helps me recapture that moment of pure holiday joy, of thinking of friends and family and giving and all the other happy trappings of the season. If it brings anyone else even a fraction of the happiness that holiday music has brought to me over the intervening 20 years…well then we’ve done our jobs.
Popnarcotic’s Christmas Music Mix, 2011!
Yeah, finally time for this!
As ever, doing this mix dragged me kicking and yelping straight into a healthy dose of Bob Cratchit-esque Christmas spirit. Heck, yesterday it was 60 degrees in the environs of the greater DC area–tough to get all hyped about Christmas with that sort of weather unless you’re Australian, y’know? Still, Christmas happens like a big train coming down the tracks, and you can either let it go by, get run over, or jump on and dig the ride.
You know which one we chose, right?
This year’s mix is called “I Still Believe In Santa Claus (Even If No One Else Does)”. I’ll leave it for you to listen to find that triumphant refrain in the mix, but I think it expresses the sentiment I feel for the holiday each year. I realize that I have some fairly religious friends who are recoiling at the invocation of believing in–of all things–Santa by a grown adult during this holiday, but so be it. It isn’t really “Santa Claus” per se, but rather a feeling of joyfulness and happiness and nostalgia and hope that the season can confer. Whatever the source of that feeling, once you catch that Christmas feeling during the season there’s little to be done about turning it off. Calling it “Santa Claus” is as good a name as anything.
This caveats around this years Christmas Mix are the same as they ever were: the songs are mostly secular thanks to my Christmas Card list being improbably populated by folks of all faiths and creeds. Everything’s a single mp3 stitched together and crossfaded and normalized so that everything should play at the same volume.
This year: 17 new songs, 5 repeats (including two old friends who weren’t around for last year’s mix but had to come back.) We’ve got terrific originals from The Boy Least Likely To, The Summer Fiction, The Leisure Society and a host of others. We’ve got some great interpretations of standards old (Richard Hawley’s amazing “Silent Night”) and new (Bettie Serveert’s Carol Van Dijk handles a Joni Mitchell tune like she was born to sing it, while Superchunk turn a John Cale bit of weird brilliance into a neat fuzzpop concoction). We go from joyful (the LeeVees giddy Hanukkah song) to morose (Isaac Hayes) and pretty much everything in-between. Enjoy, and Happy Holidays everyone!
I Still Believe In Santa Claus (Even If No One Else Does)
Track List:
1. Kimmy Liston, Live At Five Is Wrong.
2. “Christmas With The Snow” Marah
3. “A Happy Christmas Baby” The Boy Least Likely To
4. “Stoned Soul Christmas” Binky Griptite
5. “Walking In A Winter Wonderland” Goldfrapp
6. “The River” Bettie Serveert
7. “For The Holidays” The Grip Weeds
8. “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” Lenny Kaye
9. “How Do You Spell Channukkahh?” The Leevees
10. “Christmas Is Coming Soon” Blitzen Trapper
11. “Christmas Mistakes” The Leisure Society
12. “Run Away With Me” Jens Lekman
13. “Winter Snow” Isaac Hayes
14. “Sleigh Ride” The Ventures
15. “Believe In Me” .fun
16. “Hey Parker, It’s Christmas” Ryan Adams
17. “Secret Santa” Buffalo Killers
18. “Christmastime Is Here” Ivy
19. “A Child’s Christmas In Wales” Superchunk
20. “Another One Of Those” Deleted Waveform Gatherings
21. “Christmas Eve For Two” The Summer Fiction
22. “Silent Night” Richard Hawley
23. “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” (Muppet Remix Version)
