Pirates and Philistines

A couple of events occurred last week that might have seemed completely unconnected but were, I think, flip sides of the same coin: in the first case, a Swedish court convicted the owners of the Pirate Bay file sharing site of copyright violations involving facilitation of theft, sentencing them to fines and prison time, and, in the second case, Oprah devoted valuable on-air time to the Twitter phenomenon, introducing her legions of fans to the service and calling out Ashton Kutcher as the first Twitter user to gain over 1 million followers. What ties these apparently disparate events together is the fact that they demonstrate in unique ways the mainstreaming of the internet as a medium and its changing character(s).

Piracy 2.0

As an invention of technology, it makes perfect sense that the early proponents of the internet were members of the “technorati” – the geeky folk who build and fund tech start ups and those who buzz around them. Back in the 90’s as the commercial internet was just taking off, one could read one after another manifesto from these folks proclaiming the nascent medium a digital Valhalla, revolutionary in its potential. A good example was [“Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age”] in which futurist Alvin Toffler, venture capitalist Esther Dyson and others attempted to spell out the game-changing nature of this new technology and what was needed to foster it:

To start with, liberation – from Second Wave rules, regulations, taxes and laws laid in place to serve the smokestack barons and bureaucrats of the past. Next, of course, must come the creation – the creation of a new civilization, founded in the eternal truths of the American Idea.

Likening themselves to frontier settlers, they wanted complete freedom to reinvent commerce on the web any way they saw fit. Such freedom would, of course, lead to the unfettered creation of enormous wealth and that is exactly what happened (well mostly for well-connected technocrats, anyway). But the lack of oversight also led to a Wild West ecosystem online where hordes of thieves committed untold abuses of intellectual property. Sadly, some who should know better even sought to undermine claims of intellectual property by basically implying the [inevitability of theft] and [apologizing] for it under the rubric of “free culture”.

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Who’s that girl? NYU artist Michael Cavayero examines our obsessions

If you’re in downtown Manhattan between now and April 19, stop by the [Broadway Windows] exhibition space to check out the work of [Michael Cavayero], a senior honors art student at NYU, who uses bold color and exaggerated line to deconstruct the tabloid princess. Lindsay then, now and — assuming she makes it — future.

A month following it’s release, it looks like Watchmen – while hardly a smash hit – has done respectably. At this writing, BoxOfficeMojo [estimates] that it has earned about $178MM, which means it will likely make back its costs (estimated somewhere between $120MM and $150MM), plus a modest profit. Still, that’s pretty impressive — considering it’s an R-rated movie, targeted to hard-core fans of a dark and violent story populated by not-very-nice characters, that was almost universally panned by critics. What impresses me most of all is that the movie was even made. I’m tempted to call it an act of love on the part of Hollywood – except we’re talking about Hollywood here. More likely, a few people who loved the graphic novel upon which the film is based managed to slip one by the suits. I’m glad they did. I’ve seen the movie twice and have been thinking about the value of comic dramas in general and this one in particular.

Many reviewers make the mistake of judging films taken from comic novels against the standards of a storytelling tradition that stretches back into the history of Western literature. In that context, the truer a movie stays to its comic origins the weaker it looks as a work of art: characters seem one-dimensional, plots are simplistic and the treatment of character motivation and emotions is clumsy. But, to me, comic novels stand outside of the literary canon. They’re more like Kabuki: representing the world through a brightly-hued prism that hardens edges and reduces subtlety. While there may be some conventional literary references (e.g., the tag line “Who watches the Watchmen”, taken from the Roman poet Juvenal) and appropriation of historical facts, comics are sui generis – designed for an audience that has not yet consumed the great works of literature. I suppose their success could be considered an indictment of a culture that cannot reliably transmit to its youth the collected genius of its classic literature, but it’s also evidence of an ingenious adaptation – reassuring us that even amid a cultural breakdown the important questions and challenges that humans must address (“What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of justice? What good is love?”) will be addressed anew by artists with aggressive imaginations. Their starkly drawn characters stand in for ideas that are contested on fields of epic proportion – those still standing at the end of the battle win. And make no mistake, the ideas that Watchmen takes up and the characters that represent them are big.

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(Bad) karma, Chameleon…

Time has not been kind to Boy George. Sentenced last week to 15 months in jail for brutalizing a hooker, The Mirror [gleefully reports] — courtesy of a loose-lipped fellow inmate — the pathetic state to which George O’Dowd has been reduced: blubbering in a corner of his jail cell and fearful for his life once he joins the jailhouse rabble. Ironically, according to the report of jailhouse insiders, upon his debut at the jail he was mobbed by inmates seeking his autograph, not his blood. The chatty inmate who provided The Mirror with their quotes remarks upon how he tried to comfort the distraught singer:

“I joked that it wasn’t all bad and said he might even find himself a new boyfriend inside prison. But he just started crying again.”

He could take a lesson or two from Martha Stewart on how to manage the slammer. Tears are probably not the best bet. One wants to laugh at the pathetic spectacle of it — and many will — but one also wants to kick O’Dowd’s fat arse from here to kingdom come for orchestrating this stunningly Grand Guignol downfall (he is currently on suicide watch in the prison). For many people (read “straight” people), Boy George was always something of a clown, but for some of us (read “queers”) he was a bona fide hero back in the day. My first awareness of him came while I was still living in my backwater town in upstate New York. One day while listening to the radio, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” came on. I enjoyed the unique, blowsy sound of the singer’s voice but what got my interest more was the brief exchange between the DJs that happened after the song. “So, is that a guy?” one asked. “I don’t know,” said the other, “the picture on the album looks like a girl, but I think it’s a guy!” I was hooked. I liked the music, but I admired George more, who pushed queerness so far into people’s faces that they couldn’t avoid it. What I admired most was that he didn’t hedge — in a decade when the most flamboyant characters could still play “Is he, isn’t he?” about their identities, George had the balls to accept Culture Club’s Best New Artist Grammy in 1984 by telling the world, “Thanks America, you’ve got style, you’ve got taste, and you know a good drag queen when you see one.” Heroic.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald published the story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in 1922 as part of a collection entitled Tales of the Jazz Age. As with so much of his work, the story, a fantasy about a man who ages in reverse, was a clever way of addressing pet themes concerning class, social standing and our tenuous hold on the conventions that root us to life. But, as Fitzgerald acknowledged, it was also about the meaning and value of maturity in a disordered world following the end of World War 1 where an entire generation of young men were robbed of the chance to grow old. The story begins in arch satire and ends in melancholy reverence of (lost) innocence.

Eighty-six years later, Hollywood and its special-effects wizards have discovered the story and brought it to the screen with Brad Pitt playing Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton playing his loves. Director David Fincher and his screenwriters depart from the original story fairly significantly and, sorry to say, not for the better. The film starts out promisingly with a parable — not in the original story — of a blind watchmaker who loses a son in the Great War and, out of his grief, builds a clock for the city that he lives in that runs backwards, as a tribute to all the boys who have lost their futures. It’s a moving little story unto itself, but the movie that follows doesn’t do it justice.

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Patented Diet Elixir Think of it as Drano for your own personal plumbing…

People often ask me (and by “people” I mean “no one” and by “often” I mean “never”) “Sprague, as a busy metropolitan blogger — hip deep in the hoopla — attending social events right and left, how DO you keep your lithe boyish body? Especially during the holidays?!” And I just shake my head, laugh quietly into my armpit and say, “Well, just between you and me, I’ve come up with a sure-fire method that lets me keep those unsightly pounds at bay while still allowing me to plow through food like Kirstie Alley at a Las Vegas buffet.” My secret? A simple elixir of prune juice with a few dashes of hot sauce.

Disgusting? You bet it is — like everything that’s good for you. Broccoli, fish oil, cigarettes — they’re all disgusting. “But wait a minute,” I hear you say, “how could something so simple be the answer to such a vexing problem?” Well. For the answer to that, we have to spend a few minutes talking about how your body works…

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An Army of Lovers: Hundreds of people protesting the California ballot initiative outcome.

Protests of the outcome of the California Proposition 8 ballot initiative were held all over the country today. I ran into the New York protest as it marched up Broadway toward Union Square. One of the protesters — the fellow in the leftmost image above, was running up to the windows of a diner and sticking his sign, which called for equal rights to love, into the faces of straight couples. They studiously avoided his glare as they ate their eggs. Walking west on 14th street I ran into them again as they came down 6th Avenue, heading toward Christopher Street. Ironically, they marched right past 15th Street, without being aware of the Mormon temple that resides there. Given the role of church organizations in getting the ballot initiative passed and the [extraordinary role of the LDS], I wish they had scheduled the protest for churches and temples on Sunday. Even still, while the marriage issue does not carry the gravity of the AIDS protests of the late 80s and early 90s — it sure was good to see angry queers in the streets, again.