Links!

Where the Hell is Matt?
-- Seriously, this guy is my new hero. This is so wonderful in so many ways!

The Neuroscience of Dance.

J.K. Rowling gives an amazing commencement address at Harvard.

The Lego Secret Vault

Photography:
Silent World
Homo Sapiens
London Bananas
Bubbles (Flickr slideshow)

Gallery of SciFi & Fantasy Art

Greatest TV ad EVAR!
(This should have been two posts down.)

An Argument in Favor Of Copyright Law

Amidst all the controversy surrounding Digital Rights Management policies and copy-protection of digital music, and given my own vehement stand opposing all such policies and technologies, I sometimes lose sight of the fact that copyright law was created for very good reasons, and that it accomplishes very good ends.

For example, one of my coworkers this summer currently has a small role in a production of the musical “Ragtime” being put on by the Wilmette Park District, in celebration of their 100th anniversary. I suspect that the Wilmette Park District Board of Directors didn’t exactly know what they were getting into when they decided to do this play this summer; they probably remembered how popular it was a few years ago and thought it would be a big spectacular show that’s fun for the whole family. Anyone who has seen the musical or read the book it’s adapted from knows that this isn’t your regular ol’ fun-time musical. The purpose of this play is to explore the problem of racism and how ragtime music was so effective in combating it and bridging the gap between widely different parts of American society. There’s serious thematic intention here. Of course, like all purposeful explorations of the reality of racism in society, the script for “Ragtime” does feature the occasional use of racial slurs – particularly “nigger”, “kike”, and “mick”. None of these occurrences are gratuitous and all of them serve a necessary purpose. After five weeks of rehearsal, and only three weeks before the show was supposed to open, some members of the Board of Directors announced to the cast they were going to make some changes to the script: specifically, they wanted to remove all uses of the words “nigger” and “kike” from both the dialogue and the lyrics (although I find it very telling that no one on the Board had any objection to the use of the word “mick” – this is the North Shore, after all). The reaction from the cast was immediate and furious. Apart from the censorship and artistic insult, taking out all the references to racism completely undermines the entire point this play trying to make! You can’t talk about a problem without openly acknowledging the reality of the problem. The African-American lead – who is, by all accounts, spectacular in his role! – threatened to walk off the show then and there, and several other central cast members made similar ultimatums over the following days. By the time the Board of Directors made this announcement, they had already written to the publisher requesting permission to make these changes. Two days after they made their announcement, they received the publisher’s response – denying their request and refusing permission to make any changes to the script. Apparently, the publisher of the musical “Ragtime” receives such requests quite frequently, mostly from high schools and community theatres, and they refuse all of them. The authors unilaterally decreed that no one is allowed to change a single word of either the book or lyrics.

[An amusing side note: Rumor has it that someone from the Wilmette Park District Board of Directors wrote directly to E.L. Doctorow, the author of the novel, asking him to step in on their behalf and persuade the publishers of the musical to give permission just this once for them to make changes. While I gotta admire the sheer chutzpah of the act, the day E.L. Doctorow allows anyone to mess with his work is the day you can go buy Icees in Hell.]

This is why copyright law is so important – it’s what protected this production from interference that would have ruined the play. It places sole discretion for making changes to a work in the hands of its creators and keepers and gives them the power to enforce their decisions. Copyright law has become so entangled with sales and marketing, especially in this digital age of P2P networks and file sharing, that we forget that a profitable bottom line had nothing to do with the creation of copyright in the first place. The original intent of copyright law was to prevent plagiarism, to assure that the creator of a work retained exclusive credit for it, and to make sure that no unauthorized or unacknowledged changes could be made to it. The purpose of copyright law is to protect the integrity of creation. It was only as the entertainment industry became a Very Big Money business that the corporations that market and sell artists' work realized that they needed a way to protect their market share, just as the artists needed a way to protect their work. So they shanghaied copyright law to serve purely financial ends and it’s not an entirely natural fit. They had to twist copyright law in order to make it serve the task, and I believe this twisting is the cause of so many of the problems we’re seeing with DRM; they don't originate from anything intrinsic to copyright law itself. At its best, the protection that copyright law offers gives artists the freedom and security to work and create without fear that their creations will be stolen from them. At its worst, it’s been hijacked by a bunch of ridiculous Luddite reactionaries who want to beat the industry down and keep us stuck in a status quo that's already two decades old. I think the solution to the problems that plague the modern realm of digital media isn’t to get rid of traditional copyright law – artists still need the inviolable legal right to own their own work. Rather, we need to redress the backward financial notions still held by the media corporations and bring them kicking and screaming into the future. After all, there’s still plenty of money to be made in music, movies, books, and art… just not in the old ways that they're used to.

[UPDATE -- My coworker got a call from the producer of "Ragtime" this afternoon and was informed that they're canceling the show! One week and one day before their first preview, after seven weeks of rehearsal, after spending more money than they've ever spent on any production before, after boatloads of PR, and the Wilmette Park District is so frightened of saying a few offensive words that they're just going to scrap all of it! And there's no way they can get anything else up in time. It'll be the July 4th weekend of their 100th anniversary summer and they're not going to have anything to offer. Serves 'em right, I guess.]

There Is No Hyperbole In This Post

Awesomest apartment EVAR!

We're living in the least violent time in human history EVAR!
(A wonderful TED talk from Steven Pinker)

Biggest work of art EVAR!
(The artist's website)

The most detailed photographs of Saturn EVAR!
(A retrospective as the Cassini mission nears its 4-year mark)

Time-line of the biggest internet memes EVAR!

Who Says Science Can't Be Funny?

And cute...



And this is just beautiful...

The Music of My Life

Sorry I've been away for awhile. My old computer became non-functional a couple weeks ago and my new computer had trouble getting to me. But it's here now! And it's so beautiful!


Now that my new computer is up and running (and oh so wonderful!) I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time re-organizing my iTunes playlists. This has gotten me thinking about all the music I own and have owned, all the music that I love and that has played such an important role in my life. The music I listen to is one of the fundamental ways that I define myself. I've realized that there are ten albums that literally changed my life when I first heard them. I don’t want to downplay the role that all my music throughout the years has played, but these ten albums are the ones that led me to all the rest. The discoveries I made listening to this music are the keys that unlocked the doors and let music flood into my life.

Without further ado, the ten albums that changed my life – in the order that I first heard them – are:

1) Simon & Garfunkel: Sounds of Silence
2) Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison
-- My Mom listened to Simon & Garfunkel and Johnny Cash all through my childhood (and The Beatles and The Doobie Brothers and The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan and ABBA and Elton John). To this day these are the artists that all others must answer to.
3) Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
-- My first experience with Beethoven came sometime in my grade school days. It was through Beethoven that I first discovered what music could be, how powerful and undiluted. Taken with all the other music I heard growing up, Beethoven gave me my first taste of the limitless variety of music that is possible.
4) Metallica: Master of Puppets
5) Pink Floyd: The Wall
-- I first heard both these albums in 7th grade and until I had, music wasn't a very important part of my life. After hearing these two albums, music became a daily necessity for me. And being a metalhead was the first time in my life that I actually had a social circle I belonged to. Metallica brought me out of my shell and helped me find my way to being a fully social person. I was a pathologically shy child and my sister once told me that in 7th grade I suddenly stopped walking around staring at my shoes, my chin came up and I started looking other people in the eye. It was a change wrought by heavy metal and thus began some of the happiest years of my life. My experience is totally backwards from most metalheads, I know, but what are you gonna do?
6) Jane’s Addiction: Nothing’s Shocking
7) Nirvana: Nevermind
8) Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine
9) Duke Ellington’s Orchestra
-- I first heard all these in 10th grade. My eyes were opened and my life was altered forever in ways I can’t describe. It’s as though everything else I’d ever listened to was preparing me to finally hear these albums. I will remember every lyric to every song and every note on all these albums until the day I die.
10) Radiohead: Pablo Honey
-- Radiohead is my favorite band of all time (with Jane’s Addiction in a very close second). They are everything music should be – talented, inventive, intelligent musicians with absolute mastery of their craft making breathtaking, powerful, thought-provoking, untamed music. Need I say more?

(As an 11th album, I’d include anything by The Pixies, but I actually didn’t first hear them until late in high school and so they didn’t have as big an impact on me as maybe they would have if I’d heard them earlier in my life. They've since taken their rightful place as one of the most important and central bands in my personal pantheon of musicians; they are, in my opinion, the single most important and most influential rock band from the 80s to the present day. But while they are important to me now, my life had already been revolutionized by the artists they’d influenced before I had my first taste of them.)

So that’s my list. There have been an uncountable number of other bands and albums that have brought me tremendous joy, grief, release, and wisdom, bands that have challenged me, comforted me, and given me nourishment to grow, as I’m sure there will to continue to be for as long as I’m alive. But these ten albums are the signposts that will forevermore guide me.