Oh well, I needed to weed out my inbox anyway

A word of advice to EEE users: If you’re in Advanced Desktop Mode, DO NOT upgrade all packages in Synaptic. (I know, if you don’t use an eee or some Linux system only 25% of the words in that sentence mean anything. I know.) Because it will cause your eee to go into a boot loop which you do not have sufficient knowledge to fix, even with a free morning and lots of googling, and you will have to restore your computer to factory settings and lose all the emails you’ve received in the past six weeks, including ones with audition dates and bookers’ emails and reference letters in them.

Because I really, really should have known better, this being about the 4th time I’ve done this exact thing, I’m not that pissed off. And my inbox was getting awfully full and unwieldly anyway, and I don’t need any reference letters right now. And the only audition I have coming up is on February 4. And I have that booker’s email address written down somewhere else.

And to stop this from happening in the future, I have acquired a copy of “Linux for Dummies” and am thinking of taking a Linux class, because obviously I am not to be trusted with root access without some more training.

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Don’t have a seizure in Chicago!

Or you might get tased.

Personally I intend only to travel to Chicago with my own personal staff of bodyguard, detective, and physician with complete mobile emergency room.  I’ll bring along a Canadian consular official as well, because apparently accidentally hitting a cop while you have a diabetic seizure is grounds for being tased ELEVEN F*CKING TIMES.  Really.

I guess that means I won’t be going for the Civic Light Opera auditions.  Oh well.

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Signs that you may be dealing with a crackpot

I try to give people, even people with apparently bizarre beliefs, the benefit of the doubt.  Lots of things which are at first glance ridiculous – the success of the Left Behind books comes to mind – turn out to be real or true, after all.

But when you’re talking with someone, there are certain red flags that may indicate that they’re not altogether on the same reality train as the rest of us.

1. Insistence that they’ve discovered a hidden truth no one knows.

2. Vague plans to inform the authorities.

3. They are being stalked or harrassed in subtle ways by the nefarious evil-doers in question.  Such stalking might take the form of property damage that is too minor for others to notice, but that the putative crackpot insists was done.

4. Either no one else or a only select few are aware of the truth.

5. Yet any oppression the nefarious evil-doing group has experienced is because people won’t tolerate their wicked, wicked ways.

6. The evil that the nefarious evil-doers do is all-encompassing and vague in nature, ranging from sex crimes to drug dealing.

7.  The nefarious evil-doers are in some way sub-human.

8. Saying, “Really?  All the [insert name of purported nefarious evil-doing group here] that I’ve met have been really nice,” gets the response, “They’re good at putting on an act.  They’ve been pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes for centuries.”

9. The putative crackpot claims to practice extreme caution in spreading the truth, because the all-powerful nefarious evil-doers will come after him if he goes public.

10. Yet he’s telling total strangers at the pub all about it: in case they DO come after him someone will know why.

And lastly…

11.  General craziness red flags such as nervous laughter at odd times, an unwillingness to engage in different topics, and a moustache.

So, as you might guess, I ran into someone yesterday who displayed all of the above signs and more.  Guess what group of nefarious evil-doers he thought were making small dents on his car, staking out his house, and reading his emails.

No, it wasn’t the Jews.

Seriously, not the Jews.  Not the Illuminati, not the Pope, not the reptoid aliens.

Click through if you want to know who, according to this guy, are just as bad as the Mafia.

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I just want to put this envelope in your hand.

Two scenes from the past week

Scene 1: Me at the bank, trying to get the ginormous cheque for the real estate lawyer:

Teller: [frowning at my passport] This signature doesn’t match.

Me: I know, it was issued before I was married.  I don’t have any ID with my married name on it.  I do have my marriage license though.

Teller: Do you have the ID you opened the account with?

Me: The account was opened for me when I was about five years old, so no.

[….]

Time passes, in which several supervisors get involved and I produce every piece of ID I’ve ever owned.

Teller: Do you have anything that has your current signature on it?

Me: Do you have any doubt that I am the holder of this account?

Teller: No, but…

Me: So what’s the problem?

[…]

I emerge from the lion’s den, carrying a bank draft for the remainder of the down payment, the lawyer’s fee, and my first-born child.  I run into our mortgage person at the door.

Me: That was the most stressful part of the whole home-buying process.

Scene 2: At the drugstore, 9:50 AM this morning.

I arrive at the drugstore with a completed application form for something I’m applying for.  All I need is to print off another headshot, then I’m going to go drop it off.  But the photo counter is closed.

Me: [addressing one of the cashiers] Excuse me, do you know when the photo counter is opening?

Teller: Ten o’clock.

Me: Oh, OK.

I order my single print through the automatic system, then wait.  And wait.

10:05 – I stand at the photo counter, drumming my fingers impatiently.

10:15 – I wander through the store and contemplate buying more allergy pills.

10:20 – I drop one of my gloves.

10:25 – I notice I’ve dropped one of my gloves and search frantically for it.

10:30 – Photo counter woman finally arrives.

Me: Hi, I put in this order a little while ago.

Photo counter woman: I can’t possibly do it right away, I have seven orders in front of you.

Me: Do you know how long it’ll take?

PCW: No, I don’t know.  I can’t do anything about it.

Me: Is it worth me even standing here and waiting?

PCW: I don’t know.

Me: OK, cancel the order then.  I’ll go somewhere else.

Which I did, after retrieving my lost glove from one of the cashiers.  I got the photo printed at another place without incident and dropped off my application.

You know, all I wanted to do in either case was get some vital but incidental thing, put it in a goddamn envelope and hand it to someone else.  I just want to put this envelope in your hand.  Is that too much to ask?

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An extremely civilized Facebook flame war

One of my Facebook friends (Ali Berkok, of the excellent jazz group Arkana Music and others) posted a link today to Nina Paley’s essay, Artists are not inherently entitled to monetary compensation for their art. The ensuing flame war was both educational and relatively civilized.

Paley’s point appears to be that, like no one feels like they have to pay the squeegee guy who randomly walks up and squeegees their car, no one has to pay you to make your art.

Art is a gift. An artist creates Art (not to be confused with skilled labor) on their own initiative. An artist “labors” in service of their vision, their Muse, the Art itself. The Muse alone is the Artist’s employer. It’s debatable whether the Artist can negotiate with their Muse before performing the labor — I certainly try to — but like most labor, terms are dictated by necessity. Just as economic necessity forces many workers into hard labor for low wages on their employer’s terms, so does suffering force many Artists into labor on the Muse’s terms. But unlike corporations and human employers, the Muse turns out to always have the artist’s best interests at heart. I’d much rather serve the Muse than an employer; but the Muse doesn’t negotiate a moneyed wage. Monetary compensation is not part of the deal.

The Muse “pays” me in Life. “Do this,” she says, “and you will Live. Turn away, and at best you will only survive.” I do have a choice: I can make the Art, or not. I accept the Muse’s terms. I perform the labor, and receive my “payment”: Life.

Congratulations, Nina!  Both true and utterly beside the point.

The point I made in the flame war – which I think is good enough to recycle here – is that there’s a difference between the work you do as an artist and the work you produce. No one has to pay me to practice.  I’ve been doing it every day for more than twenty years and no one has *ever* paid me for it.  But when I produce a recording or put on a show I sure as hell expect to get a fair payment for it from those who are interested.

Paley’s problem is that she keeps casting the artist as an employee (either of a commissioning agent or of the Muse) rather than a producer.  Those of us who produce independent artwork are much more like extremely idealistic entrepreneurs than employees.  I say “extremely idealistic” because most of us aren’t in it to make lots of money, and considerations that are not financial are the most important ones.  But all the same, we do lots and lots of work for which we are never paid to produce something (recordings, writings, performances) that we sell with varying levels of success.

Paley’s other problem is that she appears to be a libertarian hippie, which is just weird.  After all the stuff about the Muse paying her with Life, we get:

The Free Market only works without monopolies. Information monopolies like copyright destroy that system. I’m all for allowing the Free Market to function, but it can only function without copyright.

I have a lot of sympathy for Paley, who has been truly screwed over by the copyright system, but she is out to lunch here.  Before copyright an artist had no way to protect their work and their income from large publishing companies.  Mozart was frequently pleasantly surprised to see his string quartets for sale in music shop windows.  Of course, he never saw a penny from any of the sales, relied on patronage for his living, and died a very poor man.

The patronage system still exists in a limited way, mostly through government grants.  The patronage systems produces music that the patrons want to hear.  The main system of support for artists is now a popular mass media one, where the record companies produce music that large numbers of people want to hear.

But now we have the opportunity to create unique work outside of the popular/patronage straitjacket and find an audience for it. And some kind of copyright system is necessary to ensure some kind of income for the artist, because what we do requires something approaching full-time effort and commitment, and there’s only so long you can burn the candle at both ends. I don’t think DRM and the DMCA are the right way to do it, but something has to be done.

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Perhaps I am doing Ralph Nader a disservice, but…

…has he lost his mind?

Go here, listen/watch, and tell me what you think.

The title came from—Warren Buffett was watching post-Katrina in his living room in Omaha, and he saw these streams of poor people fleeing the floods and the winds, and no food, no water, no shelter, on the highways north of New Orleans. And no one was helping them. And so, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he got a whole convoy of supplies, and he took them down to the New Orleans area. He went down himself and distributed all the food and the tents and the medicine to these desperate families and came across an African American family, who was helping, and the grandmother grabbed his hands, looked up at him and said, “Only the super-rich can save us.”

And that haunted him all the way back to Omaha, where he developed a plan to get seventeen older super-rich enlightened Americans at a hotel on a mountaintop in Maui, Hawaii, and basically asked themselves, what is it going to take to turn this country around? It’s going to take mass media. One of the seventeen is Barry Diller. And it’s going to take a reversal of the insurance industry. It’s Peter Lewis. It’s going to take dealing with deficits and subsidies and organizing the veteran and veteran groups and the women’s clubs around the country. Ross Perot. It’s going to take a real coordination and putting in a lot of money. That’s what they all represented. Bill Cosby is one of them. Phil Donahue is one of them. Yoko Ono is one of them. William Gates, Sr., Leonard Riggio, Bernard Rapoport. These and others get together, and it all happens in one year, 2006.

So apparently Ralph Nader has written a novel, using real people as characters, about how the super-rich save the world.  It’s called Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, and I’m sure it’s a rollicking read.

Anyway, I was listening to this interview with Nader today while going about my housewifely duties (laundry, packing for the big move, drinking coffee and petting the dogs) and I kept having to say to myself, “Wait – did that actually happen, or was it part of the book?  Because if it did happen, that would be AWESOME.  No, it didn’t.  What?”

I mean, having written some works of fiction myself, I know that a writer gets totally and unhealthily obsessed with their work, and frequently ends up talking about their characters as if they were real people.  But this is just a little…creepy.

So what is it?  Is he crazy?  Or am I?

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The Blag Hag goes to an anti-porn rally…

…so the rest of us don’t have to.  Go read her take on it.  It’s hilarious.  An excerpt:

God created sex so you could be one with your partner. Every time you have sex, you’re creating oneness with that new person, so you’re fracturing your soul into pieces. OMG SEX CREATES HORCRUXES. That’s really how Voldemort was doing it, but Rowling had to keep the book rated PG-13. Man, so does that mean when I reach 7 sex partners I’ll become all powerful? Sign me up!

Now if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you will know that I am not a fan of porn. (If that’s what turns your crank, though, I say go right ahead and enjoy.)  So it’s not like I’m laughing at these people and their sincere religious beliefs because it makes me feel better about having a closet full of Tristan Taormino videos or something.  I’m laughing because they’re ridiculous buffoons, and because ridicule is the best defense against idiocy.

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In case you didn’t listen to the podcast: Cat, get out of the bag!

So in case you didn’t listen to my podcast, or you got bored halfway through my trawl through Wikipedia’s pages on chromosomal disorders, this is the big secret I was supposed to have confirmation by 8 PM yesterday: We are buying a house.

The saga began this August when I realized that, against all odds, we had assembled a decent down payment.  At least in a down market.  So we told the landlady (who is also a realtor) that we wanted to start looking at houses.

It took a while to get the mortgage organized – look, we are both self-employed, and Ben has *no* credit history – but by the beginning of September we had it in process and started looking.

Our landlady’s husband, Lorenzo, took us around to a bunch of houses.  Most of them were basically one bedroom apartments in house form – an open living area, a bedroom, a kitchen, a loft.  Many didn’t even have basements.   None of them had enough space for us to both live and work in, though we considered one that had an electrified shed.  (“Ben, you can write in there!” I said.  “That’s what Mahler did!”)  But finally we saw one that was just right.

When I say “just right” I don’t mean that it’s perfectly maintained or well decorated or has nice floors or a granite countertop.  It has none of those things.  It is a very narrow semi-detached house with many small rooms, currently stuffed full of Buddha statues and fake flowers by the elderly Vietnamese couple who live there.

Most people would not want this house.  It’s old but not historic, it needs work, and it lacks all those nice little amenities that people like.  But for us it’s perfect – lots of rooms so we can each have a private workspace, a separate entrance for the studio space, a fully fenced backyard for the dogs, and all the Buddhas you could ever possibly need.  And it’s really cheap.*

So we put in an offer, haggled a bit, and they accepted.  We got the inspection done (some old wiring, an old furnace, and a couple of missing roof shingles).  We impressed upon the bank the necessity of getting the mortgage finalized before the deal fell through.  “OK,” our mortgage person – Lisa – said, “It should all be done by Friday.”

That was yesterday.  As it stands, the bank has approved us, but the Canadian Mortgage and Home Corporation has yet to approve the house.  (That’s the mortgage insurer.)  I think they are trying to kill me.

Anyway, it has to be done by Monday or else the damn thing falls through.  Lisa has assured me that she’ll make it happen, and she’s good at her job, so keep your fingers crossed for me.  I want that goddamn house.  If the CMHC keeps jerking us around and the approval comes on Tuesday I will have to seriously consider a letter bomb.**

I’m tempted to go buy a bottle of Scotch and drink it now, but I think I’ll try to do something productive, like go through the books and decide which ones to throw away, or make a dog coat or something.  Then Scotch.

*As in, a vacant lot across the street sold for $50,000 more than we’re paying for this house.

**Kidding!  Honestly, just kidding.  Don’t send the Canadian version of Homeland Security after me.

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Worth a thousand words

This is a picture of a hair elastic that fell on the floor. I did not tamper with it in any way.

I swear I didn't touch it

Compare it with this:

Look familiar?

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The simple joys of dog ownership (Warning: Very, very disgusting)

I need to buy a new bike helmet.

If you want to know why, click through.  On second thoughts, don’t.  You really don’t want to know.  Trust me.

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