Soft Skull Opines...

Lisa Carver "writer's block"

Lisa Crystal Carver is one of the finest transmuters of reflected-upon lived experience into the English language. But she has been forced to stop writing. It’s disgraceful.

Sparrow for Prez.

Sparrow ran for the Republican Party nomination for President in 1996 against Bob Dole. Here is a poem he wrote to memorialize it, and below this poem is a YouTube clip in which Sparrow outlines the campaign slogan for this, his third run at the Leadership of the Free World.

Yes, I Am Running for President Again

Yes, I am running for President again,
on this cool AM in March.
I have just awoken, my belly somewhat swollen from
too many All-Natural Cheese Puffs last night, the
air about me ringing with a burnished
bell-like silence—I am somewhat constipated, but
confident. My nation needs me,
several friends have told me
(including Jeff Piazza of Bellport, CT):
she is rudderless and vague,
choked with half-formed fears of
the Chinese, the Japanese, the homosexual,
the Jew. The wolves have been loosed, the peasant have been armed
with pitchforks, night is falling, and the sirens
have begun to wail. I cannot turn back.
I must step out onto this bleak, surreal landscape,
armed only with my standard—the black
flag of Doubt—and my lonely voice, calling:
“Come with me! Come with me!
We will fight the Famine, and the turbulent mob!
We will sing in the darkness, and strum mandolins!
We will hold each other as the mortars boom and echo around us!”

Margaret Cho wins a free copy of Bill Hicks's Love All The People...

…for saying this in a recent interview:

“That’s why he was such a genius: He knew they would crack. Ultimately, he knew that he was right,” Cho said, laughing. “It was irrelevant whether people laughed or didn’t laugh; he was right about everything. That’s why people fell in love with him: Because in our world there is so much insecurity, we are looking for people to stand up for us.”

For which, she wins a free copy of the newly reissued Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks (pubbing October; advance copies now available…).

But how am I to get her her prize?… If any one knows, email me.

FriendFeed

Obscene? Perhaps. But if you can’t get enough of streaming social media…

Copyright law too depressing

The pre-eminent legal scholar on copyright also happened, until Sunday, to be the pre-eminent blogger on the topic. He was also Senior Copyright Counsel at Google. The state of the debate has become so awful, however, he cannot bring himself to write about it any more.

I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners.

Emphasis mine, because in the long run, this intellectual property land grab eventually hurts the owners themselves, even if it allows monopoly rents in the short run…because it is impoversihing the soil from which those cultural artifacts are created. In the material world, the commons is destroyed by overexploitation, but in the creative world, the commons is destroyed by underfertilizing…

Counterfactuals

Mac Slocum at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change with a great counterfactual:

“Let’s say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called ‘paper.’…”

Now, here’s me with a far clunkier one: If an almost seamless and freely available network of trusted individuals served the function of examining, corroborating, ratifying, promoting, excoriating cultural content on behalf of the world at large, and then someone introduced the printed book review section, would the world’s publicists denounce this development on the Huffington Post?

Here’s Michael Cader’s extended take on the whole drama, synthesizing some excellent responses, including his own.

"Race card" on our dance card

I suspect I’m going to be offering a link to a Tim Wise essay each time any various bit of nonsense issues forth from the McCain campaign on Obama—let’s start with the “race card.”

Tim’s take, collected in our forthcoming Speaking Treason Fluently, is here.

Since the O.J. trial, it seems as though almost any allegation of racism has been met with the same dismissive reply from the bulk of whites in the U.S. According to national surveys, more than three out of four whites refuse to believe that discrimination is any real problem in America (2). That most whites remain unconvinced of racism’s salience—with as few as six percent believing it to be a “very serious problem,” according to one poll in the mid 90s—suggests that racism-as-card makes up an awfully weak hand. While folks of color consistently articulate their belief that racism is a real and persistent presence in their own lives, these claims have had very little effect on white attitudes. As such, how could anyone believe that people of color would somehow pull the claim out of their hat, as if it were guaranteed to make white America sit up and take notice? If anything, it is likely to be ignored, or even attacked, and in a particularly vicious manner.

That bringing up racism (even with copious documentation) is far from an effective “card” to play in order to garner sympathy, is evidenced by the way in which few people even become aware of the studies confirming its existence. How many Americans do you figure have even heard, for example, that black youth arrested for drug possession for the first time are incarcerated at a rate that is forty-eight times greater than the rate for white youth, even when all other factors surrounding the crime are identical`?

The UK starts to weigh in on Alex Cox's X Films... and word of a Repo Man sequel.

The Independent

A whole generation of film buffs grew up with Alex Cox. From 1988 to 1994, he presented Moviedrome for the BBC, his soft voice guiding you into the nether regions of cult film. After making Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, he wasn’t just a hipster but a film-maker with credibility, and a moral compass that appealed to fellow artists including Joe Strummer, with whom he worked over many subsequent films. He always looked cool, in an etiolated, desert-bleached, Nick Cave kind of way.

His new book doesn’t offer much in the way of anecdotes, but is a very revealing look at the day-to-day difficulty of being an independent film-maker. Every student at film school should be obliged to read it. It shows how bad things can get: throughout his 30-year career, Cox provides ample demonstrations of how crass industry lawyers are, how bonds and copyright issues destroy the artistic impulse (intriguingly, he argues for a massive deregulation of copyright), and how big companies refuse to distribute films after having bought them. But it also reveals the sense of fun, of purpose, of liberation, that being a low-budget film-maker can bring.

Film in Focus

[N]ot quite a memoir so much as a highly detailed, hugely compelling tour through the making of each of the entries in his body of work, beginning with Edge City, his graduation project at UCLA, through Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker and so on, right up to Searchers 2.0. As such X Films is a workbook for any would-be cineaste of the independent/”guerrilla” stripe, and also a vital contribution to film history, insofar as it records with honesty and exactitude what were the creative and logistical decisions that went into making these bravely unclassifiable movies. The book…reflects Cox’s own generous, passionate, instinctively polemical nature: he makes a great teacher both of film production and film history.

Also, word of a Repo Man sequel.

Herkes Pek Seker

I love the covers of international editions of our books—this is particularly delightful. A free copy of the English-language edition of this to the first person to e-mail me the English title.

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