You're terminated, f**ker!

I read the news today, oh boy. I'm just another statistic on the Dem's meeting points. And while the news was rather sad, still if I play my cards right, I may be just another blip on the scope, hoping to cope, and while nobody important wanted to pay attention at all...I'd love to earn some dough, so I can help the folks who depend on me...who I may be, after all, among those...so earn more money so I can take it away from you!

How many years?

I suspect in terms of accomplishment, there is no easy way to count. It is possible I am back. Jobless but back. What a combination!

Other People's Shoes, or The Writer's Complaint

It ticks me off when someone who earns a comfortable living as a writer complains about it. Oh, I’ve got three columns to write this week! Woe is me. Sure wish I was a bag boy at the local supermarket. Then this author goes out and buys a new car, or a new laptop, or what have you and never seems to worry much about the coming bills.

I would absolutely LOVE to earn my living—any kind of a living—as a writer. It galls me to see folks earn their living doing what they love (or maybe more what I'd love) and bitching about it. As opposed to us regular old folk, who have to toil away in whatever we’re handed, who get hung up by trying to do our job well, our hours pulled from us to do something we never intended to make a living at. At times, I’m appreciated where I work. But it takes every moment and exhausts me, physically and mentally, so I’ve got no time and no strength for shopping manuscripts to agents--or even finding an agent.

I’m sure the author in question, who’s a talented, intelligent and perceptive guy, would be caught off guard by my reaction to his complaint. But, after reading, he’d write some depressive piece about how he never gets to complain about anything, he has no right, etc, etc. Perhaps his complaint about mine is more justified than mine about his; I’m sure he got to where he is by hard work, and no magic fairy came down and said “Bazooks! You’re a writer now.”

The grass is always greener, I suppose, and one’s own shoes never feel as good as someone else’s appear to feel. It’s all moot anyway, no way is this blog even read by anyone, much less the famous.

Still, I love the guy’s work, and read it every chance I get, and have a number of his books. Maybe he’d love my work too, but seems unlikely he’ll ever read it.

Song of the Ones and the Zeroes

Finally getting my MP3 player up and going, I decide I need content for it. That means MP3 files. I have, for unknown reasons, not availed myself of Apple's iTunes store; a dollar a song just seems high to me. (Ed's note: yes, I know it's only 99 cents--a dastardly psychological trick I caught onto many moons ago.)

It should be noted as well that this dollar will only buy you songs less than ten minutes in length. There's no $1.25 or $1.75 for longer works; you have to buy the album if you want the song. This lack of compromise seems oddly disjointed. But the Apple music store is hugely successful, so perhaps I'm the one who is wrong.

A dollar a song also applies no matter how short a song is. Check They Might Be Giant's Apollo 18 album and look at the list price. If you don't have iTunes, I'll spare you the suspense: while most of their albums are ten dollars, that one retails for a wholloping $25. The reason? "Fingertips," a song-suite made up of twenty-one songs. You might think Fair enough,that's a lot of songs there, unless I tell you that most of those songs are under ten seconds each. If you want "I Heard A Sound," it's going to cost you a dollar for four seconds of audio. Granted, nothing is perfect and I think Apple on the whole does a very good job. It just isn't what I want. I'm also not really happy that you can't browse their store without their application.

Be that as it may, the next bit of this entry is What I Did Instead. I joined a music service.

Three of them, to be exact. Here's what they be:

eMusic. Taking advantage of an offer that they have, apparently, decided was too good to be true, I got fifty free downloads for signing up. (It has since been dropped to twenty-five.) I promptly used up a lot of these downloading Colin Newman's first three solo albums. That should tell you why I like eMusic's selection.

But they've got other good stuff, too. Henry Cow, The Residents, Metal Urbain, lots and lots of classical recordings (most on the Naxos label, but also some BIS and Harmoni Mundi as well). You won't find the Beatles or Michael Jackson here, but you will find a lot of second-tier obscure stuff. I got the Art Bears' Hopes and Fears and the first Ralph album by Tuxedomoon, as well as bunches and bunches of other stuff.

You can cancel the free trial and keep what you downloaded, so if I wanted, that was fifty free songs right there. (There is no length restriction on downloads; if you found fifty hour-long tracks, you could have downloaded them all.) But I went ahead and joined the service anyway, and now I get ninety downloads a month. There is a lot here to keep me busy, and if I run out of downloads one month, I can buy a "booster pack" and get more.

There are some downsides to eMusic. One of the most galling is that some albums are incomplete--the tracks are listed as part of the running order, but you can't download them. Apparently, this gets fixed sometimes, other times it does not. The reasons range from lost rights (in song or performer) to bad files being removed. As an album person, I find it frustrating. As a listener, I'm baffled that I can download part one of Charles Wuorinen's Time's Encomium, but part two is unavailable.

The second drawback is that the selection, as noted, can be pretty obscure and the artists are not always represented by their best work. Pere Ubu is here, but not their great first few albums; there's one Firesign Theatre CD, and it’s not one of their classics from the seventies. The more obscure the artist, the better off you may be. The Residents, for example, are well represented with some of their best stuff.

One also has to be wary of the K-Tel syndrome, especially with more popular stuff: some of it is re-recordings, not the original records.

I also joined LegalSounds. Gosh, with a name like that, what could possibly go wrong? For this one, you pay a certain amount into an account balance, and then download songs which removes nine cents from this balance. Most albums cost a dollar, some less. There’s a lot of stuff here—the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, to name some of the larger entries. Conversely, cultish folk like the Residents are sparsely represented with only two entries. They did have Pink Flag, however, and lots of Van Der Graaf Generator. There’s a lot of stuff, and it’s cheap.

The obvious downside is, can this possibly be legal? Apparently it is, somehow, but I can’t imagine how. A second downside is that there are missing tracks here, but unlike eMusic, they don’t tell you what you’re not getting. David Bowie’s Scary Monsters CD is missing the last track, “It’s No Game, Part 2.” Hardly an unsung classic, but still, I like completeness.

AllCoolMusic is the final service I joined. Unlike the others, this isn’t an online store—it’s a hub where folks Kazaa each other songs. (You can't find this out until you join, a drawback of most of these stores.) This one I’m sure is dubious, and I have tended to shy away. There really isn’t a way to browse for stuff, like eMusic or LegalSounds; you pretty much have to know what you want.

All three of these services require you to install their own download engine, which downloads the songs (duh) and ticks off your counter (money or downloads remaining). In all three cases for these downloads, I chose an old PC which I wouldn’t miss if it blew up with spyware, malware or viruses. Regular scanning has revealed no problems, but I was still sweating when I tried these things out.

As noted, most of these services require you to join before you can even browse for stuff. So you really have no idea if you’re going to find that obscure album by Gilbert and Lewis or not, until you’ve entered an email address and a password (you can get free email all over the place; I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about that). This is, shall we say, pretty damned annoying and it makes me unhappy at the start. Note: you don’t have to spend any money, or even give them a credit card when you join, so you’re really just activating an account. But an account I may never use if I don’t like the selection? Oh well. (Sometimes you can click on “Login” and it will give you a search page without an account, but this doesn’t work all the time.)

Bottom line: I like eMusic, I’m a bit dubious about LegalSounds, and I’m pretty sure AllCoolMusic is something I should stay away from.

Your mileage may vary.

Defeatism

I saw the remake of War of the Worlds last summer, and I didn't like it. When it came out on DVD some months later, I bought it, thinking it couldn't be as bad as I remembered. And I was right--it was worse.

Nonetheless, I've seen it a couple of times since buying it, because there's something about it I couldn't put my finger on that bothered me. That something compelled me to watch, in the same way that an insect bite compels me to scratch. And I think I've finally figured out what it is that bothers me. (Note: Spoilers follow.)

War of the Worlds is a celebration of defeatism. It's a song of praise to those who give up, who don't believe anything is worth fighting for, who want to do nothing more than hide and hope some deus ex machina comes along to make things better. There's no point to anything that Tom Cruise's character does, except to escape from everything. He wants to run away, and keep running, even though it's pretty clear that there really isn't anywhere to run to. He's playing for time, until some Ultimate Authority in Power comes along to make everything bad stop happening, preferably through magic, not through sacrifice and hard work. Hugs, maybe.

I understand that it is necessary, dramatically, to have the aliens seem completely omnipotent. They have to be seen as a creditable threat. Fair enough; this was the case in both H.G. Wells' novel and George Pal's 1953 film. In both previous cases, the aliens were creatures which could not be stopped by the hand of man. Resistance, to coin a phrase, is futile.

But only in this version is fighting back seen as utterly stupid or insane. Wells' narrator was an observer, only directly involved in a couple of main Martian sequences (the first landing and the ruined house), but the characters in Pal's film never gave up the struggle, futile though it might be. Here, the idea of fighting back is embodied in two characters--Justin Chatwin, who plays Tom Cruise's son, and Tim Robbins, who plays the owner of a half-wrecked house where Cruise finds shelter. (We do see some soldiers bravely going into the fray, but we never meet any of them as characters.)

Chatwin's not much of an actor, his main expression seems to be a toothy sneer. (He reminds me a bit of Ed Grimley.) His desire to fight the invaders (never referred to as Martians, by the way) is presented as wrong-headed, selfish and un-thought-through. He abandons his younger sister (to whom he is devoted, and vice versa) because he wants to snarl at the aliens and...who knows. Sneer them to death. I have to wonder if Chatwin was cast because his flat acting would make his desire to fight seem less valid to the audience (to contrast with Tom Cruise’s “run and hide” idea).

Robbins' character is more problematic. At first, he's seen as a strong, confident person, someone who is not going to go meekly into defeat. Despite the loss of his entire family, he doesn’t escape into despair but remains galvanized and is looking out for his fellow humans. Where the rest of humanity has turned into a ragtag band of dog-eat-dog refugees, he offers Cruise shelter. But it’s for a purpose. He’s going to survive, and he's going to fight back, to take the world back from the invaders. When the alien machines begin prowling around the house, Cruise meekly asks why Robbins offered them shelter if they’re only delaying their capture. (Cruise’s alternatives aren’t spelled out, but the only other option to the cellar seems to be more running and more hiding.)

Robbins blurts out some vague plan of coming up from underneath the aliens, defeating them from below. He vaguely thinks Cruise should help to fight back. But Robbins’ mumble-mouthed delivery and Spielberg’s kinetic camera here seem to say that this is an idea that shouldn’t be seriously considered. Indeed, this scene is followed by a brief creepy one where Robbins promises Cruise’s daughter that he’ll “take care” of her if anything happens to Cruise.

It’s the first indication that Robbins is a pretty damn crazy guy, and possibly something of a pervert. His idea of using strategy against the aliens quickly goes out the window as he gets more unhinged--when he wants to attack an alien probe with a hand ax, and later, shoot the actual creatures themselves with a shotgun. Both are incredibly short-sighted acts certain to get everyone killed for a very small measure of revenge. (He's prevented in both cases by Cruise's pleading desire to stay silent and safe.)

While we might, at first, see Robbins’ character as a focal point for audience sympathies (he wants to take action), Spielberg piles on the craziness until finally, Robbins “snaps” and starts yelling, risking exposure to Cruise and his daughter. And for the only time in the film, Cruise takes decisive, no turning back action—he kills Robbins so that he can remain safe and hidden. He takes action against his fellow man so that he won’t have to choose to oppose the invaders. I'm not sure what kind of message this is supposed to send, but I find it hard to believe there isn't one. Spielberg's been enamored of Messages with a capital M for decades, now; it’s been a while since he made anything that was “mere” entertainment.

Of course, the shadow hanging over any “sudden sneak attack” movie like this is September 11, 2001. It’s hard not to draw parallels, which is why the movie’s message of “if something bad happens, run away and hide until it’s all better again” is so troubling. More troubling still is the notion that it’s better to destroy those who want to fight back, rather than risk reprisals from those who attacked in the first place. The greatest enemies we face are our courage, our resolve, our unwillingness to be cowed. In short, the enemy is who we are; the enemy is not those who would kill us. That’s the capital M Message.

And that bothers me. It's a viewpoint that seems disconnected from the real world. Granted, War of the Worlds is a fantasy film. But aren't they all?

Like Toasting Something Twice

I hate dreaming that I wake up and go to work. It makes actually waking up and going to work that much more disappointing.

Man, I have to go through all this again? And the server is abending more? And it's because of something I did? Sure wish I was still asleep.

Your wish is my command. POOF.

Aw, damn.

Why I'm Angry

The thing that makes me angriest is probably stupidity, but which I mean the human tendency towards idiocy. Sometimes it seems as if all our technical and education advances are just making it easier for us to NOT think. We can drift along in our own entertainment-constructed shell, and come to screaming resentment when someone else's shell bumps against ours.

Unfairness also pisses me off, though not the bit about how some people have money and others don't. I figure that's simply how things get arranged, fair or not. The fact that I have no money (or at least not much) doesn't make me resent those who do. For the most part, they earned it and I spent it when I had it.

No, the unfairness I dislike is when it takes me twenty minutes to find my keys. That makes me pretty damned steamed.