So it's gettin' on tax time hereabouts, and there's things gotta be done. 1099s and W2s to send out, and so forth. Exactly the sorts of things I like doing the least, but they've got to get done and I'm the guy's got to do it. Okey-doke.
Making it all survivable are the lovely random offerings served up by iTunes all morning long. For no reason except that I needed a five-minute break from it all, here's a list of the last ten numbers I've been treated to this morning:
1) "Serve Yourself," a home-recorded screed from John Lennon shortly before he died
2) "Underdog World Strike" by Gogol Bordello--the irresistible combination of punk rock and gypsy fiddle
3) "Galaxy of Emptiness," Beth Orton--too long at ten minutes-plus, but nice to zone out to while working the numbers
4) "The Good Intent," Rosanne Cash--from her devastating tribute album to both her parents and her step-mother as well
5) "Waltz in A Minor" by Chopin, played by Vladimir Ashkenazy--simply great
6) "Contemplation Rose," Van Morrison--from his ridiculously strong collection of "cast-offs" called "The Philosopher's Stone"
7) "Earth Angel," the classic recorded by The Penguins in 1954
8) "Fancy Free - Finale," by Bernstein--not my favorite of his pieces, but still pretty good
9) "Baci, soavi, e cari," a 16th-century song recorded by The Deller Consort
10) "Song Song Song," by an outfit called Final Fantasy (yes, after the videogame)--I have two tracks from this album and they're both catchy as hell
And playing right now? Well, when I started it was Wyclef Jean's "Fresh Interlude" from his first "Carnival" album, but now it's the first movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, conducted by Karl Bohm.
Quite a lot of variety. No jazz on the list, though this morning I've had some Mingus and some Ellington. But now, alack and alas, numbers beckon and I am obliged to respond.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Optimism vs. Cynicism: A Polite Smackdown
The Strike
So there's good news regarding the Writers Guild strike. As has now been reported broadly (but I heard it first from Nikki Finke), United Artists struck its own deal with the WGA, reportedly agreeing to all the proposals the WGA was about to make when the producers walked out of the last negotiation.
And why is that good news? Neil Gaiman tells us why in his blog, reporting Monday that he had just gotten "a phone call from my agent letting me know that United Artists was the first studio to sign a deal with the Writer's Guild, and that if I wanted to write a film for them, or sell them the rights to a book, I could." UA has now become, essentially, the only game in town for feature writers, thus giving the studio first access to every screenwriter on earth, basically. (Or at least those not locked into first-look deals with other companies, who are truly screwed.) It makes a world of sense: since taking over UA, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner (she too started out as an actor) have had only one major release, Lions for Lambs, which, to put it politely, didn't do well. And since they only just took over, that's a lousy track record--with investors breathing down their necks. So anything that gets them back in the producing game, particularly with exclusive access to primo material, had to be like a deal from heaven. (It also honors the original imprimatur of United Artists, which was created by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford precisely to honor the work of artists rather than businessmen.)
It sounds fantastic. The optimist in me is thrilled.
But there's also the cynic in me. And he got busy fast. What if? I wondered. What if this is just a cynical ploy by the big conglomerates who run the studios? Sure, we heard rumors that the other moguls were royally pissed at MGM's Harry Sloan (a major investor in UA) for "allowing" the deal to happen, but what if that was actually the plan all along? Because the studios are clearly unified under the banner of the AMPTP, and that smacks a little too much of collusion, which is of course illegal under federal labor laws. What if the studios are allowing their smallest fish to make this one deal, so that they can then claim there can't possibly be collusion because, come on, look at UA!
Rumors abound that other companies, most notably Lionsgate, The Weinstein Company and Lucasfilm, are now also considering side deals. If one or all of those happen, fantastic. But if nothing further happens, if there are no more side deals, I'm afraid the cynic in me will start exulting in victory.
UPDATE: The Weinstein Company just announced their own side deal. So hey, maybe there is a little domino thing happening here after all. Reason to be cautiously optimistic.
The Primaries
So Hillary won New Hampshire. Good for her. That tearful moment certainly answered the craving for authenticity that people feel--particularly when she has seemed so lamentably inauthentic all along. It's almost as if people have been waiting for her to give them some reason, any reason, to vote for her, and all along she's been doing exactly the opposite--but finally succumbed, just in time, with spectacular results. Bravo Hillary.
But here's the thing. As much as I love Bill Clinton, I can't help remembering that infamous moment when he was attending the funeral of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, his good friend who had died in a plane crash. He was laughing with someone, then spotted a camera and immediately turned to tears. Politicians are politicians, and, as I said, though I am overall a big supporter of Big Bill and would love to see him back in the White House, still, it cannot be denied that he understands the PR value of emotion and might have advised Hillary at some point that a few tears couldn't hurt.
HD DVD vs. Blu Ray
Several months back, despite knowing the dangers, I bought an HD DVD player. The price had dropped dramatically, into the under-$300 range, which turned out to be my trigger point, while Blu Ray players were all still well above that price. And it seemed to me, optimistically, that if the under-$300 range was my trigger, that would probably be true for a lot of other people, too.
Then Universal went exclusively with the HD DVD camp, and that seemed a justification of my decision. Now Warner Bros.--the big fish in home video--has announced an exclusive deal with the Blu Ray people, and news reports trumpet the end of the format war in favor of Blu Ray. They may be right.
But there have also been plenty of sales reports that sales of HD DVD players have been exploding lately--and it can't be such a stretch to imagine that sales of the discs themselves will soon follow suit sales-wise. So why does Warner Bros. pick this moment, this particularly unsettled moment, to make its major announcement? They swear that no money changed hands, that they weren't paid off by any Blu Ray backers, but I mean come on.
Insult to injury: my HD DVD player is currently broken, and today I'm going to have to ship it off for repairs.
The cynic in me dances its happy-joy dance.
So there's good news regarding the Writers Guild strike. As has now been reported broadly (but I heard it first from Nikki Finke), United Artists struck its own deal with the WGA, reportedly agreeing to all the proposals the WGA was about to make when the producers walked out of the last negotiation.
And why is that good news? Neil Gaiman tells us why in his blog, reporting Monday that he had just gotten "a phone call from my agent letting me know that United Artists was the first studio to sign a deal with the Writer's Guild, and that if I wanted to write a film for them, or sell them the rights to a book, I could." UA has now become, essentially, the only game in town for feature writers, thus giving the studio first access to every screenwriter on earth, basically. (Or at least those not locked into first-look deals with other companies, who are truly screwed.) It makes a world of sense: since taking over UA, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner (she too started out as an actor) have had only one major release, Lions for Lambs, which, to put it politely, didn't do well. And since they only just took over, that's a lousy track record--with investors breathing down their necks. So anything that gets them back in the producing game, particularly with exclusive access to primo material, had to be like a deal from heaven. (It also honors the original imprimatur of United Artists, which was created by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford precisely to honor the work of artists rather than businessmen.)
It sounds fantastic. The optimist in me is thrilled.
But there's also the cynic in me. And he got busy fast. What if? I wondered. What if this is just a cynical ploy by the big conglomerates who run the studios? Sure, we heard rumors that the other moguls were royally pissed at MGM's Harry Sloan (a major investor in UA) for "allowing" the deal to happen, but what if that was actually the plan all along? Because the studios are clearly unified under the banner of the AMPTP, and that smacks a little too much of collusion, which is of course illegal under federal labor laws. What if the studios are allowing their smallest fish to make this one deal, so that they can then claim there can't possibly be collusion because, come on, look at UA!
Rumors abound that other companies, most notably Lionsgate, The Weinstein Company and Lucasfilm, are now also considering side deals. If one or all of those happen, fantastic. But if nothing further happens, if there are no more side deals, I'm afraid the cynic in me will start exulting in victory.
UPDATE: The Weinstein Company just announced their own side deal. So hey, maybe there is a little domino thing happening here after all. Reason to be cautiously optimistic.
The Primaries
So Hillary won New Hampshire. Good for her. That tearful moment certainly answered the craving for authenticity that people feel--particularly when she has seemed so lamentably inauthentic all along. It's almost as if people have been waiting for her to give them some reason, any reason, to vote for her, and all along she's been doing exactly the opposite--but finally succumbed, just in time, with spectacular results. Bravo Hillary.
But here's the thing. As much as I love Bill Clinton, I can't help remembering that infamous moment when he was attending the funeral of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, his good friend who had died in a plane crash. He was laughing with someone, then spotted a camera and immediately turned to tears. Politicians are politicians, and, as I said, though I am overall a big supporter of Big Bill and would love to see him back in the White House, still, it cannot be denied that he understands the PR value of emotion and might have advised Hillary at some point that a few tears couldn't hurt.
HD DVD vs. Blu Ray
Several months back, despite knowing the dangers, I bought an HD DVD player. The price had dropped dramatically, into the under-$300 range, which turned out to be my trigger point, while Blu Ray players were all still well above that price. And it seemed to me, optimistically, that if the under-$300 range was my trigger, that would probably be true for a lot of other people, too.
Then Universal went exclusively with the HD DVD camp, and that seemed a justification of my decision. Now Warner Bros.--the big fish in home video--has announced an exclusive deal with the Blu Ray people, and news reports trumpet the end of the format war in favor of Blu Ray. They may be right.
But there have also been plenty of sales reports that sales of HD DVD players have been exploding lately--and it can't be such a stretch to imagine that sales of the discs themselves will soon follow suit sales-wise. So why does Warner Bros. pick this moment, this particularly unsettled moment, to make its major announcement? They swear that no money changed hands, that they weren't paid off by any Blu Ray backers, but I mean come on.
Insult to injury: my HD DVD player is currently broken, and today I'm going to have to ship it off for repairs.
The cynic in me dances its happy-joy dance.
Friday, January 04, 2008
For What It's Worth
There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
As the winner was quick to point out last night, something very like a revolution--the clean, mostly bloodless small-d democratic kind--may have begun at last. "Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope," Senator Obama said last night. Wouldn't it be great if that were true? If it were actually true?
John Edwards, who came in second in the Iowa caucuses, pointed out that by a two-thirds majority, the people of a staid, mostly-white, conservative state have voted for "a change candidate," by which he of course included himself. The same can be said on the Republican side, where Mike Huckabee (whose name, I just can't help it, always makes me think of Python's "Eric the Half-a-Bee" song) posted a win that the Wall Street Journal snarked was a victory for the evangelical left. And if the very idea of an evangelical left makes your head spin a little, then that could be taken as yet another endorsement of this notion that there's a groundswell for change, beginning right there in little ol' boring ol' Iowa.
It's the sort of thing that a lot of us dared to hope, just a little bit, after Obama's now-legendary keynote speech at the Democratic convention in 2004. His rise was so meteoric that, even as a former Chicagoan (I moved away in 2002), I really wasn't aware of him till that keynote moment. But I sure was aware of him after it, and I was delighted when he was elected to the Senate--but found his actual career in the Senate a little disappointing. I was hoping for fireworks, but he seemed to settle into the career Washington path a little too easily.
So when he announced for President, I was, initially, a supporter. Then came the Jefferson-Jackson event on November 10th last year. Purely by chance, I was home that night doing nothing, just switching channels at random, which I really don't do much since the advent of TiVo (I've got 20-plus movies stored on it right now, waiting for me to get to them). Even less often do I check in on C-Span, but that night I did, just in time for the Jefferson-Jackson speeches. Where I was surprised to find that Obama's speech, while excellent (right from the git-go, with the Chicago Bulls-style loudspeaker announcement), was only the second-best of the night.
The best? For me, it was John Edwards. (You can catch the whole thing here.) Now this, this was a man breathing fire. And given how bad things have gotten over the past eight years, fire was and is my minimum requirement for taking office. (For the record, my mom is a Ron Paul supporter, who is also most definitely a fire-breather--but I just can't quite bring myself around to the whole libertarian thing.)
As I've said any number of times here, I am now firmly of the belief that poverty is, worldwide, the key problem that sits underneath every other problem--and all along, for years now, Edwards has been talking about poverty in much the same way that Al Gore talked about the environment. He has credibility on this issue because it's not just something he tossed into a stump speech while running for office, it's something he's been actively working on for years. And yes, I know there have been presidents who've tried to tackle poverty before--most notably Lyndon Johnson's failed "War on Poverty" forty years ago. But past failure doesn't at all mean that the fight should be abandoned, and even a good effort that doesn't accomplish what it seeks is vastly superior to no effort at all--which is what we've had for way too long now.
So I already knew this about Edwards, and every once in a while I would think to myself that I really should take a closer look at him. But the Jefferson-Jackson event was the moment that did what the 12,000 debates didn't--it allowed every candidate to speak for several minutes at a time, not several seconds at a time, but the evening was still compact enough that everyone could get a turn without wearing out the audience. So that where the debates did nothing to change my thinking about any of the candidates, this event did. Because although Obama's speech was good (and so was Hillary's), Edwards was fired up and saying things I believe desperately need sayng. For example: "...we do not believe in allowing lobbyists to write the laws of the United States of America...."
This was part of a rhetorical run in which Edwards attempted to define what progressives like himself stand for, in a speech I've wished for years that a Democrat would make. It's a truism that he who defines an argument wins the argument, and for too long now, conservatives have been brilliant at defining the argument. "If you don't support the war in Iraq, you're not a patriot" is only one absurd example. By making that argument stick, they made every reasoned objection to the war into an emotionally-packed declaration of anti-Americanism, so that reason went out the window and people only heard what they had already been emotionally primed to hear. In such an environment, for years now I've been desperate for a progressive to make a positive affirmation of what we're for, and why we're for it. Edwards finally did that.
So I came away from that C-Span session with a new candidate to back. And although he only came in second last night, I think he's right that he and Obama represent the "change candidates." And that although Obama was speaking specifically of his candidacy, this night may in fact represent that broader change that could signify a real revolution in what this nation is about--a change to something that might actually represent the promise of America, the fulfilled promise rather than the promise betrayed over the last eight years.
"Hope," Obama said last night, "is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be." Every single commentator last night seemed awestruck by this speech, and while it's still much too early to declare that a revolution is really underway, still, I feel just enough cautious optimism to dare to set it forth in print.
Edwards or Obama, in the end I will enthusiastically vote for either one. And if in the end they could maybe pair up somehow, well, that would be pretty great too.
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