The description of evil through art

East Coast intellectual Simon Grigg has written a great piece on the subject of MegaUpload:

Given that, really, [MegaUpload's] offences seem to be little different in scope to the rogue YouTube, as documented in that Viacom indictment, one wonders why the 'man' is so keen to stomp so visibly and brutally on the founder and face of the site.

Because people are killing music. But remember the days when music was killing America? In 1995 Bob Dole wanted to be the Republican nominee for President and his campaign was searching for ways to distinguish him. Writes Bob Woodward in The Choice (1996):

The plan, as [advisor William] Lacy had proposed in April, was to attack Hollywood directly on the grounds of sex and violence in movies and popular music. [Speechwriter] Mari Will... had spent some time drafting the anti-Hollywood speech... Dole needed to step up in a forceful and direct way if he was going to get and retain attention, particularly with conservative voters.

Dole was to give the speech in Los Angeles. Will had "injected some high voltage rhetoric into the speech" which Dole approved. Later he began to express reservations. Revisions were made and the language softened, but the Senator's doubts persisted. "Maybe it was generational, Dole figured, but he was very uncomfortable with the Hollywood value speech... He considered not giving it."

On the night of the speech Lacy went over it with the candidate word by word, "a diversionary tactic so that Dole wouldn't toss out the entire speech." Dole even wavered once he got up on the podium, improvising an introduction. But eventually he reverted to the words on the teleprompter:

A line has been crossed — not just of taste, but of human dignity and decency. It is crossed every time sexual violence is given a catchy tune. When teen suicide is set to an appealing beat. When Hollywood's dream factories turn out nightmares of depravity.

You know what I mean. I mean "Natural Born Killers." "True Romance." Films that revel in mindless violence and loveless sex. I'm talking about groups like Cannibal Corpse, Geto Boys and 2 Live Crew. About a culture business that makes money from "music" extolling the pleasures of raping, torturing and mutilating women; from "songs" about killing policemen and rejecting law...

Today Time Warner owns a company called Interscope Records which columnist John Leo called the "cultural equivalent of owning half the world's mustard gas factories." Ice-T of "Cop Killer" fame is one of Time Warner's "stars." I cannot bring myself to repeat the lyrics of some of the "music" Time Warner promotes. But our children do. There is a difference between the description of evil through art, and the marketing of evil through commerce.

The speech was a big hit -- "giant news. The impact was way beyond anything in Dole's entire political history."

Dole hadn't seen the movies he was talking about. Not sure if he'd heard the rap tracks either but "teen suicide set to an appealing beat" has the air of authenticity.

Love is the cure for every evil

It's been a good week for lawyers. The Pirate Bay founders were denied appeal. Kim Dotcom was denied bail. US authorities seized file-streaming domains ahead of the Superbowl.

Neil Young says piracy is the new radio. Twitter user @rupertmurdoch says it's stealing and wrong. EMI's Craig Davis calls it a service issue.

If all three share a common point it's that old guard has been scooped. Users want what they want, and now. Traditional distribution can't keep up. Much like a determined journalist who disguises herself as a maid to steal a story from a rival,  the audience has taken an alternative route.

Piracy is not just about theft: it's about who controls the sea lanes. Legislators and enforcers are trying to regain control and steer everyone back into safe water.

In the meantime a record label has used the internet to crowd-source publicity for a new artist and rack up #1 sales in 14 countries and counting. See what happens when we all work together?

(Pic: Judex)

The cigarettes, the magazines all stacked up in the rain

People have been enjoying City Lights very much. Ta muchly -- it's nice to get nice back from the web. I've written the second part of the story. I just haven't typed it up yet.

Stephen Stratford is writing. You know he will be in the home stretch when he Twitpics bourbon or reaches for an awkward metaphor like "zebra hunting."

In the last month I re-read Woodward and Bernstein's All The President's Men and watched the movie (yet) again. Screenwriter William Goldman is always good on the writing process:

"One of the things I love to do when I work with young writers is to disabuse them of the notion that I know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm writing a script now, and as we are speaking, I am looking at my computer, tearing out my hair, thinking, well, is this horrible, or is this going to work? I don't know. Storytelling is always tricky."

I been reading many comments from authors about their mid-career anxieties -- what's the point, maybe it's all over, etc. Writers feel that every day, even the Nobel Prize winners. Writes Kevin Rabalais of Ernest Hemingway:

Once the 1930s rolled around, many critics believed he had seen his day, and by 1954, the year of the aeroplane crashes and Nobel announcement, he had become, for many, a parody. Following his suicide, Time magazine reported on the life "which led Hemingway himself not only to some mechanical, self-consciously 'Hemingway' writing, but to a self-conscious 'Hemingway' style of life". That life grew increasingly desperate after the crashes from which, writes [biographer Paul] Hendrickson, "he never really recovered in either his body or mind".

Writing is a lonely full-time job that doesn't pay very much. But the solitude of the task is balanced by the way fiction taps into and feeds the continuum. In the New York Times last year Pixar's John Lasseter summed this up in a story about Steve Jobs summing it up:

Steve Jobs and I were very close, and early on when I was making "Toy Story" we started talking and he said, "John, you know at Apple when I make computers, what is the lifespan of this product, two years, three years at the most, and then about five years, they're like a doorstop. But if you do your job right, these films can last forever."

On hiPod-rotate: Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine. In 2005 she explained the four-year break between her second and third albums to Rolling Stone:

"The first couple of years, I didn't have anything left in me to write about. That was a good thing, because it meant I'd done my job on the last batch of songs. I was riding a wave of independence. I wasn't trying to write; I just figured if the songs came to me, they came to me, and if not, 'Oh, well, it's been fun.'"

That's a pretty lovely way of thinking about it.

Good things

The Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit talks to screenwriter Pablo Fenjves about the ten years it took to get his script Man on a Ledge made into a movie. Says Fenjves:

"I jokingly say that this [movie] is a metaphor for the life of a Hollywood writer... You sell something that everybody is excited about, but the next thing you know they have notes, and they are basically slowly pushing you out onto a ledge. And then they hire other people. And then things happen to the script that you are not to happy about."

I like this story because Fenjves is 58:

"I'm 58 years old... and I don't mind having a movie made now because most guys are still talking about the movie they had made when they were 38... There's an old saying that says in Hollywood things come to those who wait. It's wrong. It's good things come to those who write."

Full story is here.

I've heard a rumour from Ground Control

Jonathan King and I have a new comic out. City Lights is a science-fiction story hosted at Jonathan's tomorrow-themed site The Brighter Future. I wrote the story and scribbled some thumbnails and Jonathan drew and painted all the finished art, breaking it down into frames and making it look just like a bought one. The development process consisted of me liking everything he did, although we did debate moving a word balloon on page five. A tense moment, but it passed.

The story was inspired by astrophysicists Ed Turner and Avi Loeb's proposal to search for alien life by detecting light from cities on other worlds. The idea of discovering aliens living so far away that you can't communicate with them in any normal sense is romantic and strange, and I've always been interested in scientific communities based in exotic locales such as Hawaii (they're featured in Electric). I wrote the script in three acts: a storyboarded intro and outro bracketing a long dialogue sequence. The wordless set up and conclusion meant the story would work better as a visual piece.

City Lights was conceived with Jonathan's previous comics in mind: he contrasts big empty spaces with intimate storytelling details and frames the action in a cinematic way. When he is not drawing strips he is making movies. The above still is a good example of his style. I love the way it's 3D but flattened, naturalistic yet stylised, clean but atmospheric. You can see for yourself here.

What you like is in the limo

The Megaupload arrests are doing more to contemporise New Zealand's image than sport ever could. Reports the New York Times:

The Auckland police arrived at Dotcom Mansion on Friday morning... Kim Dotcom... ran inside and activated several electronic locks. When the police "neutralised" those, he barricaded himself in a safe room. Officers cut their way through to nab him.

Repeat: Cut their way through to nab him.

Also in the NYT, Ms Melanie Lynskey:

Melanie Lynskey has playing wacky down cold. She's done it for years on "Two and a Half Men" as Rose, the off-kilter neighbor. And she shines in dramatic parts, as when she played Matt Damon's wife in "The Informant!" Yet job offers are almost always the same: a fifth lead here, the best friend there. She's 34 and was recently cast as Aunt Helen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." Can't she — just once — land the big, meaty, carry-the-movie role?

Does she need it? Since starring with Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures in 1994 Lynskey has gone on to make fewer movies about the Titanic and not married as many directors but her career is arguably the more interesting. (Also: sexier.)

(Pic: Ann Summa / NYTimes)

Short cuts

Joe Brown about his favourite pocket knife:

I check luggage when traveling so I can bring it with me because, for my purposes, it's perfect. You never know when a pocket knife will come in handy. The world is full of things to cut.

My favourite pocket knife was the sort you used to be able to buy at any dairy or tobacconist's: about 1.25" long, single blade. Excellent for peeling apples, cutting string or quietly sawing articles out of newspapers that belonged to other people, it stayed on my keyring until it cracked. It has since been replaced with a 1.75" Laguiole.

Because I also like to watch TV seasons all in one go I was interested to read what Marty McNamara in the LA Times wrote about the effects of binge-viewing on modern TV:

Serialization has served many masters — the Greek gods, Charles Dickens, Wonder Woman — but none so faithfully as television. No other genre, save the comics page, is as eternally open-ended, elastic to the point of incredulity. The beauty of the successful television show is that it uses a finite number of characters to tell a never-ending story or a story that ends only when the audience and occasionally the creator loses interest.

Full article is here.