Talking to Girls About Lawsuits

Right on Track - Breakfast Club (mp3)

Bottom of the Glass is going to sue Rob Sheffield. We're gonna take that sucker for every penny he's got and every penny he ever dreams about earning. We're gonna take the shoes off his feet, and the socks are coming with 'em, unless he's the kind of wild leftist that only wears Birkenstocks or some other kind of Jesus sandal.

Based on a hearty recommendation from loyal follower Troutking, I bought Mr. Sheffield's collection of essays, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran. Hilarious book. I love it. Except for this one little detail.

Y'see, dear readers, the organization of these chapters follow a very familiar pattern. Every chapter leads off and is inspired by a song. Except the chapters don't always obsessively investigate the history of the song or the band. Rather, the song tends to be merely the jumping-off point for Mr. Sheffield to fall into a reverie of past memories, particularly from his teenage years. Reminiscences about his family, or his awkward social life, or his troubles with religion.

Any of this sounding familiar, dear loyal readers?

Yes, of course it does. This has been The Great BOTG Formula for, like, 90% of our blog entries since we started this damn thing back in 2008, which is precisely two years before this loser put out his book.

Now, for the sake of argument, let's ignore a few things. Let's ignore that songs inspiring essays isn't a notion we invented. Let's ignore that Mr. Sheffield is a writer for Rolling Stone and has written several books that intertwine his love of music and his personal life. Let's ignore the fact that BOTG has been cited and warned for DMCA violations on any number of occasions.

Instead, let's simply focus on this: If we sue, even if we lose, we might get lots of publicity, be invited on talk shows, or even get hired to move beyond Chattanooga and into the greater world of opportunity. We even have a chance to be, like, the James Carville and Mary Matalin of rock music. Or something.

So we're gonna sue that loser's ass off. We'll probably aim for $4M, just because that sounds like the kind of amount journalists make, especially journalists who cover the music scene. Those dudes are loaded. Anyone who's watched Almost Famous knows Lester Bangs was swimming in money. There's that one scene where Lester Bangs is rolling around on a bed with Demi Moore in Vegas. Remember that? And then Robert Redford pays him another pile of cash to sleep with her?

Oh yeah, $4M is totally the right amount.

To make this work, we need the help of our readers. I need you to go out right now and buy a copy of this guy’s book. I promise you, it’s pretty fucking hilarious, and if you have any love of the ‘80s, New Wave music or just cheesy syntho-laden ‘80s music, and if you love nerdy awkward socially-challenged men -- and seriously, what loyal readers of BOTG don’t?? Or aren’t?? -- then this book will be read cover to cover, probably several times.

I’ve already read the chapter on Hall & Oates twice, and I guffawed both times. Chapters on A Flock of Seagulls, Paul McCartney, The Replacements, Bonnie Tyler, and even the New Kids on the Block.... these are just a sampling, and you really never know where Mr. Sheffield is gonna go with it. It's like hopping on a ride called "Tunnel of Love" and thinking you know what's gonna happen just 'cuz you've listened to Bruce sing about it.

Anyway, if all of you buy his book, he makes more money. And the more money Mr. Sheffield makes, the more publicity and attention we get when we sue that bastard for every last red cent he’s ever imagined possessing. You might even enjoy the book. And then, when Mr. Sheffield is penniless and destitute and a sad hollow shell of the man he is at the moment, you can write him nice sweet notes about how sad you are that he could write such funny stuff yet be poor and lonely.

God we're brilliant.

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

It's Always Something - Rick Springfield (mp3)
Lose You - Pete Yorn (mp3)

Last Friday, Tax Day, the FBI shut down the three largest online poker sites in the United States.

Saturday night, I rewatched Chinatown for the first time in over a decade and watched one of the special features that came with the movie, where screenwriter Robert Towne and Jack “Jake Gittes” Nicholson were both interviewed about the experience.

Towne’s script was inspired by a number of very real experiences and conversations, which is how a movie originally titled “Water and Power” -- a great title, by the way -- could end up being named after a location which only shows up for the last three minutes of the film. Towne explained that, in conversation with a friend who had once worked law enforcement in Chinatown, the man had said the best thing for American law enforcement to do in Chinatown was “as little as possible.” Because they were surrounded by a people and a culture they couldn’t translate and couldn’t understand, they were never sure whether they were doing something that would benefit justice... or whether they were being played and manipulated by various nefarious forces.

Or, as SparkNotes puts it: “Chinatown, a place where secret organizations rule, the law is meaningless, and good intentions are brutally suppressed, serves as the symbol for the true nature of every city.”

If you haven't seen this amazing film and don’t feel like reaching back to what a panel of Guardian (UK) critics declared “The greatest film of all time,” then how about a reference to Die Hard?

“You asked for miracles, Theo? I give you the F.B.I.”

These are the words of Severus Snape (he went by "Hans Gruber" in 1988), smiling with maniacal glee as the feds follow their playbook and provide the criminals with exactly the help they need to rob Nakatomi Plaza of its precious store of barabonds (not to be confused with Barry Bonds).

In regards to the shutdown of online poker, the owners and CEOs of casinos all over this great land of ours are smiling maniacally, watching as the FBI follows its playbook and buffs out one of the biggest dents in their Indian Reservation business.

"These defendants, knowing full well that their business with U.S. customers and U.S. banks was illegal, tried to stack the deck," said Janice Fedarcyk, FBI assistant director-in-charge. "They lied to banks about the true nature of their business. Then, some of the defendants found banks willing to flout the law for a fee. The defendants bet the house that they could continue their scheme, and they lost."

I can’t personally recall the last time a high-ranking law enforcement suit, upon making a serious criminal bust, found himself or herself so tickled with puns. “Stack the deck”? “Bet the house”? I somehow doubt that if she had just busted a child pornography ring or captured a serial killer, she would be having fun using words involved with the trade. Strangely, she never chose to utter the phrase "victimless crime."

It’s just online poker. It’s hardly even illegal, really, otherwise we wouldn’t have entire cities and towns built around monstrosities erected merely for such activity, and we wouldn’t have hundreds of hours worth of TV programming dedicated to the “game of chance.”

It’s hardly illegal, but it’s illegal enough, and the FBI has every right to act. Even if Bugsy Malone and Noah Cross and dozens of wealthy shady figures sit in their back rooms, counting their extra money and laughing at how beneficial the FBI can be for their own business. I’m sure those men will kick a little extra here and their to some elected officials. Legally, of course.

As a regular online player who rarely won much and rarely lost much, online poker was merely a cheaper and more convenient way to throw away money than golf. It was cheaper than World of Warcraft or keeping up with the video game universe. It was a modestly-competitive but ultimately harmless game. I will miss playing it, but the system wasn’t getting rich off me, and I wasn’t getting rich off the system. My reaction to all this news was simple:

Forget it, Billy. It’s Chinatown.

Musical Genocide: The Record Industry

Temptation - Duquette Johnston (mp3)
Valessa - Glossary (mp3)

Did you know that a bar that plays the radio in the background is expected to pay BMI and ASCAP royalties? Same goes for a restaurant that uses a jukebox. If you let bands play live at your dive, then expect this cost to go up a good bit, unless they play only original material. And maybe even then a royalty check is still expected.

Did you know that these companies can track, with mind-blowing accuracy, what songs get played where and how many times across most media formats? At present, humming earworms like "Blame It On the Rain" at your desk is still beyond their reach, but give them a few years.

I'll get back to this. First, I have an important statement: Devo can eat my gnarly, grody to the max shorts.

On July 7, I wrote a post bragging about the surprisingly enjoyable new album from '80s new wave demigods DEVO. The post was entitled, "Oh No! It's... Been 20 Friggin' Years!" You won't find this post on here anymore, because lawyers have requested it be removed three times.

The first time was de rigueur at this point. I'd posted two of their songs. Lawyers didn't approve. They sent cease and desist orders to Box.net and Blogger. As our side note says, I quickly and respectfully removed them, as I always do upon receiving notice. I then re-published my complimentary review of Devo sans music.

This is where it gets fun.

Four days later, the post was again removed for copyright violation. Assuming this time was somehow an error, I reposted it with no changes, and three days later, it was removed again.

I want you to think about that for a minute. Lawyers demanded the removal of a post, without any copyright violations, that proclaimed good and complimentary things about the band they represent.

So here's my new post, and the lawyers won't get this one removed, because it won't have any music on it that they care about: Devo's new album isn't that good. It's certainly not good enough to survive a boatload of lawyers and their fees rowing along the waters of pop culture.

This is why, this is why, this is why they suck.

There's Devo on one side. On the other are bands singing songs in living rooms.

I spent last Thursday at a really cool living room concert with members of the band Glossary with a dude named Duquette Johnston opening up for them. These cool and dedicated folks played with the kind of relaxed swagger and passion that reminded me what being a great modern musician takes. It takes being able to play in a living room, with only 40 or so people sitting around, most of them mostly paying attention, yet pulling it off like you were at Radio City Music Hall.

You don't need a stunning voice like Dennis DeYoung. You don't need to chop a guitar like Clapton. You just need to hit the notes and do it with a presence that lets everyone hearing you know you mean it, that it's coming from somewhere deep and valuable inside you.

Duquette was kind enough to chat with me in the kitchen between shows about his experiences with the kraken known as The Music Industry. It's devoured and destroyed more musicians than it will ever save. Some of the better ones figure out how to work around it. Superdrag, Patty Griffin, Nate Ruess (fun., The Format) and others have been determined and amazing enough to come through the jet engine alive.

But how many others -- hundreds? thousands? -- had their talents murdered by the same kind of idiots that now work for Devo (and, to be fair, Rush, who has done the same thing to me)?

As if anyone who truly loves music needed one more reason to hate the industry.

"The Music-Copyright Enforcers," a detailed piece in New York Times Magazine, is as even-handed and fair a piece on the music industry as you'll find. Reading this piece, you can't help but appreciate the significance of BMI's role in the Business of Music. Music is that rare product of creativity that, like kudzu, can grow and spread almost uncontrollably, and unlike architects or oil-based painters, the creators of these strings of notes and lyrics have virtually no way of keeping a leash on their creation and earning what is, debatably, due them. [NOTE: The awesome co-creator of Creative Commons, is quoted late in the article.]

Read some interesting responses to this on TheNashvilleScene's site. Especially the one about record stores:

Lately ASCAP has been hitting up independent record stores asking for fees. There is an exemption for record stores since we sell the music we play in-store but the greedy bastards have been sending those letters, hoping to dupe some unsuspecting stores.

Life would be too easy if everything were as black-and-white as Sarah Palin sees it, if there were bad guys and good guys and no one in-between. But for all the nuance and good intentions, BMI makes me seethe more than smile. They work against The Better Angels of Our Nature, as Glossary might say.

Oh yeah, and I guess you better start getting ready to pay a few bucks for the "privilege" of singing some Billy Joel song at a karaoke bar. Yes, BMI, that deserves a big fat WTF.

If the Music Business is right about one thing, it's that too many people steal too many songs without doing anything to help money get into the hands of the artists. Please consider joining eMusic, buying a few dozen songs each month, and helping some passionate and creative artists make a few bucks the right way.

American Society of Curmudgeons, Assholes and Paternalists (ASCAP)

Catch Me Now I'm Falling - The Kinks (mp3)
Attitude - The Kinks (mp3)

If you are remotely educated into the actual world of The Music Business (TM) -- say you know someone fighting for a record deal, or you write a music blog, or you have ever investigated why it took forever for Freaks & Geeks to make it to DVD, or you obsessively follow any band or artist -- then I almost guarantee you that you have an entirely different opinion of copyright law than the rest of America.

And here’s another thing you’d know: the bigger the organization or company that claims to represent your rights and your freedoms, the more likely that organization is a leviathan more interested in feeding its very large and cavernous belly than it is in looking out for li’l ol’ you.

It’s a story as old as Jerry Maguire. OK, even older. As old as the NEA, a group that once sincerely fought to protect a very deserving collective of teachers that became obsessed with protecting idiots and failures at the expense of every teacher’s reputation. (Rejected NEA slogan, by a 17-15 vote: “If we’ll fight tooth and nail for the apathetic retards in your profession, just imagine how hard we’ll fight for YOU!”)

Whenever the teaching profession seeks comfort that their representatives and their public perception could be much worse, they look to one place: The Music Business (TM).

Trust me on this one, the idiots running The Music Business make the folks at BP look like Gordon Gecko, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and all those dudes in Danny Ocean’s famous 11. The Music Business is run, in all ways, by idiots who were better-suited for the oil industry, because their best skill is digging large holes into the ground and tossing talent into them.

And with that, I offer you an open letter from the amazing Lawrence Lessig, a man I’ve had the wonderful privilege of hearing speak in person, and a man who actually does have the best interests of artists and musicians and creative types the country over. His target of disappointment? The incompetent, oversized, and bungling ASCAP.

His letter:

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has launched a campaign to raise money from its members to hire lobbyists to protect them against the dangers of "Copyleft." Groups such as Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are "mobilizing," ASCAP describes in a letter to its members, "to promote 'Copyleft' in order to undermine our 'Copyright.'" "[O]ur opponents are influencing Congress against the interests of music creators," ASCAP warns. Indeed, as the letter ominously predicts, this is ASCAP's "biggest challenge ever." (Historians of BMI might be a bit surprised about that claim in particular.)

As a founding board member of two of those three organizations, and former board member of the third, I guess I should be proud that a 96 year old organization would be so terrified of our work. And I would be — if there were anything in this fundraising pitch that was actually true.


But there is not. Creative Commons, Public Knowledge and EFF are not aiming to "undermine" copyright; they are not spreading the word that "music should be free"; and there is certainly not yet any rally within Congress in favor of any of the issues that these groups do push.


I know Creative Commons best, so let me address ASCAP's charges as they apply to it.


Creative Commons is a nonprofit that provides copyright licenses pro bono to artists and creators so that they can offer their creative work with the freedom they intend it to carry. (Think not "All Rights Reserved" but "Some Rights Reserved.") Using these licenses, a musician might allow his music to be used for noncommercial purposes (by kids making a video, for example, or for sharing among friends), so long as attribution to the artist is kept. Or an academic might permit her work to be shared for whatever purpose, again, so long as attribution is maintained. Or a collaborative project such as a wiki might guarantee that the collective work of the thousands who have built the wiki remains free for everyone forever. Hundreds of millions of digital objects — from music to video to photographs to architectural designs to scientific journals to teachers lesson plans to books and to blogs — have been licensed in this way, and by an extraordinarily diverse range of creators or rights holders —  including Nine Inch Nails, Beastie Boys, Youssou N'Dour, Curt Smith, David Byrne, Radiohead, Jonathan Coulton, Kristin Hersh, and Snoop Dogg, as well as Wikipedia and the White House.


These licenses are, obviously, copyright licenses. They depend upon a firm and reliable system of copyright for them to work. Thus CC could have no interest in "undermining" the very system the licenses depend upon — copyright. Indeed, to the contrary, CC only aims to strengthen the objectives of copyright, by giving the creators a simpler way to exercise their rights.


These licenses are also (and also obviously) voluntary. CC has never argued that anyone should waive any of their rights. (I've been less tolerant towards academics, but I have never said that any artist is morally obligated to waive any right granted to her by copyright.)


And finally, these licenses reveal no objective to make "music free." Nine Inch Nails, for example, have earned record sales from songs licensed under Creative Commons licenses.


Instead, the only thing Creative Commons wants to make free is artists — free to choose how best to license their creative work. This is one value we firmly believe in — that copyright was meant for authors, and that authors should have the control over their copyright.


This isn't the first time that ASCAP has misrepresented the objectives of our organization. But could we make it the last? We have no objection to collective rights organizations: They too were an innovative and voluntary solution (in America at least) to a challenging copyright problem created by new technologies. And I at least am confident that collecting rights societies will be a part of the copyright landscape forever.


So here's my challenge, ASCAP President Paul Williams: Let's address our differences the way decent souls do. In a debate. I'm a big fan of yours, and If you'll grant me the permission, I'd even be willing to sing one of your songs (or not) if you'll accept my challenge of a debate. We could ask the New York Public Library to host the event. I am willing to do whatever I can to accommodate your schedule.


Let's meet and address these perceived differences with honesty and good faith. No doubt we have disagreements (for instance, I love rainy days, and Mondays rarely get me down). But on the issues that your organization and mine care about, there should be no difference worthy of an attack.


Meanwhile, you can read more about Creative Commons here, and support its response to the ASCAP campaign here.

The story of America, of humanity, of growth, is the story of people with grand ideas and heroic, unselfish hopes, people eager to watch our backs and look out for us and help us all be better, becoming people looking out for their own puffy and oversized asses. Our history is a never-ending tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, a man who at some point in his youth was a decent, generous, kind human being, who grew too big and successful for his own good, lost his way up his own ass, and became... well... Scrooge.

ASCAP? You, my friends, are Scrooge. You might at some point in your history have been good and decent. But you are now in serious need of ghosts coming and haunting you into liberation or death. Either option is fine by me.

The music business deserves every negative comparison it gets, and it deserves to die a slow and painful death. And I can only hope, at some point down the line, some well-intentioned and good-hearted collective can come around and, at least for a decade or two, get the priorities right.

I bet... if someone did that, they might even be able to turn around all those embarrassing and pathetic falling numbers.

Weak Parent Sauce and the System That Slurps It Down

Like Whoa - Aly & AJ (mp3)
Who Will Comfort Me - Melody Gardot (mp3)

Please read the following very carefully:

     The girl’s parents, wild with outrage and fear, showed the principal the text messages: a dozen shocking, sexually explicit threats, sent to their daughter the previous Saturday night from the cellphone of a 12-year-old boy. Both children were sixth graders at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J.
     Punish him, insisted the parents.
     “I said, ‘This occurred out of school, on a weekend,’ ” recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. “We can’t discipline him.”
     Had they contacted the boy’s family, he asked.
     Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together.

The New York Times article goes on to explain and explore the very delicate legal challenge facing (public) schools when it comes to cyberbullying, and it's a very good read. But I can't get past these first eight sentences, because they ultimately explain exactly why we're in this pickle to begin with.

Many parents, myself included, will literally go to the mat for our children during an intense sporting event. When we see them wronged, we get angry. When we see an act of intentional viciousness -- even if it's not directed at our child -- we will get vociferous, and sometimes arguments or worse will ensue.

But when we see that some young punk has been sending our daughter sexually-explicit and unwelcome text messages? We go crying to... well, I'd say "Mommy & Daddy," but we're s'posed to be Mommy and Daddy!

Even more pathetic is the excuse listed above. The father in question doesn't want to upset his coaching relationship with this other dad. The guy probably coaches a mean offensive line, or maybe he hits grounders like a mofo. Anyway, clearly the relationship on the athletic surface is far too important to risk by informing this other guy that his son is sending X-rated Buffalo Bill "it rubs the lotion on its skin" shit via cell phone to sixth-grade girls.

That these parents are pathetic, weak and utterly focused on the wrong things doesn't make the problem for schools easier. We can acknowledge the idiotic parenting strategies that explain away almost every problem we see in children, but none of that seems to let schools, teachers, or administrators off the hook for trying to solve these problems. Educators, whether we like it or not, spend more time with kids than most parents. Far too often, educators know kids better than parents. Many times, kids feel closer to and are more likely to heed the words of a teacher. None of this is right; none of it should be OK with us; but, as they say, it is what it is.

Every year, some dozen or so parents call our middle school administrators to complain about their own children's hair. "Please make my son get a haircut," these parents will say.

"But... you're his parent..." our Middle School head will say.

"Yes, but he might listen to you. If he knows he'll get in trouble at school, he might be willing to do it."

I'm not making this shit up. We have parents who have, apparently, castrated themselves without even knowing it. Parenta castrata.

How sad must it be, as a child, to grow up in a house where parents are so weak and pointless as to be incapable of serving as authority figures? How can kids learn about adult responsibilities, about the dangers and rewards of power, if they can't even witness the adults in their own homes wrestle with that responsibility. But today's parents aren't wrestling with the challenge. They're fish, flopping around on the mat, just waiting to be pinned so they can go sit back on the bench and keep drinking and playing golf.

As parents wimpily scurry farther away from being... well, parents, teachers and school administrators find themselves having to play detective, mediator and lawyer, all for bargain-basement pay.

Oh, and add one more role: armchair psychologist.

Not only are they under the gun to investigate thorny legal and disciplinary issues they can't even be sure they're allowed to investigate, they now find themselves deciding whether kids should have best friends.

Yes, there is now a debate amongst psychologists and educators whether it's healthy for kids to have best friends.

Far better, it seems, to have numerous shallow and marginally-meaningful relationships. You know, because the history of literature is rampant with kids who had best friends and were absolutely miserable.

Meanwhile, as schools get bogged down with having to play all these different roles, they are, far too often, failing to serve in their primary and original role: F#*KING TEACHING KIDS, LIKE, SCHOOL S*#T. It's not remotely fair for us to ask that of them, is it? When they're so busy doing so many other things that weren't ever supposed to be in the job description in the first place?

Teachers. Parents. Neither seem capable of focusing on the most important part of the jobs their titles imply.

The biggest difference: Teachers don't have much choice.

Why the Music Industry Sucks (Part XLVII)

Fairweather Friends - The Wooden Sky (mp3)
Damage is Done - Me My Head (mp3)
Empty Hearts, Empty Eyes - Sam Billen (mp3)

This is why... this is why... this is why you suck.

Those of you who read BOTG with any regularity know that, once in a while, I've made an effort to promote some of the better musical acts that get sent our way.

For example, just since September 1, Bottom of the Glass has received promotions and free music files (or links to them) from more than 20 bands and artists. Almost all of these are being sent out to a huge number of music blogs by promotion companies hired to spread the virus of a new band, but some are sent by friends of an artist or even by the artists themselves.

Because I can imagine few things more challenging than trying to spread the gospel of one's own musical vision, in the hopes of maybe being able to eke out a living and maybe a few free beers now and then, I feel compelled to do "a li'l sum'pin sum'pin" here and there to help out. We only get 200 or so visitors every day, but hey, if only one of you morons actually likes and/or buys their stuff, then I've paid it forward like Haley Joel Osment, right? (And if not... well, at least I tried, which does wonders for a conscience.)

So here's the 47th reason The Music Industry Sucks.

To my best recollection, my posts -- that is, those written by "Billy" -- have been "flagged" for potential copyright violation nine times since we started doing this in April 2008. Of those nine, four of them happened because I had linked to songs sent to me by music promoters.

Do you see what I'm saying?

I got busted for posting a Keane song because Keane doesn't need my help and didn't ask for it. That has happened to me five times. And although it puts a dent in my opinion of a band like Keane that they'd jump on my ass for saying something nice about their music and using their song as an example... well, the law's the law, and I'm mostly just grateful that the only consequence is that they pull down my post and remove the file.

But... almost half of the time I've been notified of doing something wrong, I was doing exactly what "the industry" had asked me to do!! They hand me the gun, they hand me the bullets, they beg me pretty please to fire the weapon toward that target over there, and then they call the fucking police and have me arrested for illegally discharging a firearm.

All four times this has happened, I've expressed my disappointment and frustration with the music promoters who gave me a poisoned pill, and each time they apologize and explain that the people who ratted on me aren't in the same company as the people who begged me to promote the artist.

BOTG is Archie, and I've apparently got Veronica standing behind me with a baseball bat waiting for me should I lean over to try and kiss Betty, who's sitting next to me rubbing my inner thigh and whispering sweet nothings in my ear. And I'm supposed to believe they don't work together, even though they always seem to be in the same places at the same time.

Truth is, I'm sure one arm doesn't have one clue what the other is doing. But that hardly does anything to improve my opinion of the industry. In fact, it's just a reminder that their system has become so convoluted and confused that they can't even keep track of themselves. They work against their own interests. And even though the music promoters have responded that they're aware of this odd little problem, they also seem to shrug and say, "Yeah, that kinda sucks, but there's not much we can do about it."

The Music Industry is on the verge of dying. It's a wonder they're not yet in Hospice care. But I fear they're gonna prove themselves like Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il, capable of hacking and wheezing and moaning for several decades longer than their bodies or souls deserve. Because, as Clint's William Munny says so well, "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

One bright piece of news, though. Blogger has started to revert posts to "Draft" status rather than deleting them altogether, which allows us to "fix" the copyright problem and then re-post it rather than lose everything altogether.

So while the Music Industry continues to ride its dinosaurs and lament the death of the 8-track, other industries continue to prove themselves capable of adaptation. "Adapt. Improvise. Overcome." That's another Clint Eastwood-ism from the guiltier pleasure known as Heartbreak Ridge, a.k.a. When did the music industry become more like Grenada and less like the butt-kickin' good ol' US of A?

As a test, I've posted three songs from a sampling of bands whose albums or singles have been sent to me free of charge in the last month. There's roughly a 50% chance that this post will be yanked due to my having violated the DRSM act, despite the fact that the music promoters sent these two me and asked me to use them. Enjoy 'em while they last, and if you like 'em, try and find some way to reward the bands without stealing!

No Good Deed

Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta - Geto Boys (mp3)
Don't Save Me (It's Alright) - Todd Thibaud (mp3)

In Texas, a guy working produce at a store heard a woman screaming that her purse had been stolen. He reacted instinctively, chased down the 15-year-old suspect, and held him for the cops. And he was fired for it.

Why? Because Randalls has a clause in its employee contract abjectly forbidding its employees to intervene in such criminal acts. Said their spokesperson, "We recognize Mr. Schafer’s good intentions, but our overriding focus must be the safety of all concerned."

Translation: You're a swell guy, but we'd rather hire that perp, 'cuz we can trust he won't screw with our liability concerns by rescuing old ladies' purses.

On nights (or OK, occasionally at work), I'll hop over to this site called Plastic.com. It's basically a news aggregator that tries sparking discussion and commentary from its members, focusing mainly on stories or subjects that have a controversial bent. This topic got plenty of commentary, and a lot of it really bothered me. Plastic's readership leans fairly liberal and atheistic, and like any site that welcomes pseudo-debates, people tend to flow towards more extreme views. When it comes to extreme liberal views about crime and punishment, the reaction generally involves not trusting the police and not condoning people defending their measly and meaningless property with excess (read: any) force. So, a good bit of the responses on this story were of the "Sucks that the dude got fired, but there's a reason those clauses are in employment contracts, and if you let employees wail on someone everytime they steal some crackers, you'd have a screwed-up society" variety.

Maybe it's my Scottish heritage. Maybe it's my Southern heritage. Maybe I've watched too many Clint Eastwood movies. I dunno. But I struggle to pity someone who acts in a predatory manner on a weaker or more vulnerable human being. Be it a rapist, or a mugger, or a carjacker, or a burglar, or a child molester. Anyone who uses their position or size or knowledge to take gross and immoral advantage over a fellow human being who is weaker or smaller or dumber should not have the right to expect completely balanced justice.

When you're on the wrong side of right, under predatory circumstances, you've lost your right to believe you deserve complete fairness. You gave it up when you stepped into someone else's weakness and preyed upon it. I'm not saying muggers deserve to get shot to death by the Po-Po or have their firstborns burned on an altar or something. But they put themselves into a river that's out of their control. If the current drags them out, or if there's some vicious undertow, well they didn't have to put themselves in that river. They might not deserve to drown, but they damn well shoulda known it was possible the minute they stuck their toe into those chilly rapids.

Do we want a society where we are forced to choose between an instinctive desire to protect and defend a weaker person and the need to hold onto our livelihood? I guess there's people who say "It's just a purse" and people who say "It's just a predator," and rarely shall the twain meet.

All I know is it aggravates the hell outta me.

What Would Wyatt Do?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following entry was removed because of a music file complaint, even after I removed said music file. So I've re-inserted the text but won't waste time with the pictures or the music, and I apologize to all those whose comments were sadly deleted by music bastards.]

Westerns rock.


I watched the movie Appaloosa the other day, and it's not bad. It's not sublime, but it's not bad. In fact, very few recent Westerns have blown my doors off, but I dutifully watch them all anyway, because I just love the genre. 3:10 to Yuma, The Assassination of Jesse James..., The Proposition, Open Range. Watched 'em all, and I'm pretty sure if I didn't love Westerns in general, I wouldn't have found them nearly as enjoyable.

All my friends and even some people who can't stand me know I worship Deadwood, the 3-season HBO series. By "worship," I mean it's my favorite television show ever in a looooong line of TV shows I really really love.

The '80s and '90s produced a number of Westerns that continue to earn love. Tombstone and Unforgiven are two of the best from that span, but several others are great as well, and I can't help but type the words Young Guns just so I can include it. Ang Lee's Ride Like the Devil, which is only barely a Western, is almost certainly one of the better movies you've never heard of. And Three Amigos, while not a perfect comedy, holds up surprisingly well 20-plus years later.

The West, as depicted in almost all of these films, was raw and struggled between forces of lawlessness and order.

George W. Bush loves Westerns. He especially loved High Noon, the story of a lone town marshal forced to stand off against a vicious gang. Not surprisingly, this is a genre of film held sacrosanct in the romantic hearts of gun-totin' NRA types all over our great land.

But here's a strange twist. In almost all of the movies I have listed, and in dozens of others, one key rule of law always seemed to stay constant in these otherwise lawless lands: No Guns Allowed In City Limits.

These mining towns didn't have many laws. They had to pick their battles very carefully. No stop lights. No speed limits. No laws against pissing in public. No open container laws. None of that crap. But here's one they thought was pretty important when it came to protecting the citizens of a township: No Fucking Guns!

So it's powerfully ironic that Tennessee now finds itself on the verge of allowing our citizens to do the one damn thing that even the wildest of the Wild Western towns on the edge of civilization knew not to allow. We're more backwards than Deadwood! Our legislators and the NRA thinks Wyatt Earp was a moron who stole freedom from its citizens. Yes, that's right, the NRA and Tennessee legislators are watching Tombstone and cheering for "Curly Bill" Brocious (played superbly by smarmy fucknut Powers Boothe, who's also in Deadwood), because that man and his red-sashed Cowboys must have had the right idea on how to keep order in a town.

I can think of maybe four times in the last 15 years when Tennessee as a comprehensive whole shamed me. But nothing, nothing at all, compares remotely to the embarrassment I've felt from the latest attempts to pass a law permitting citizens to carry a firearm into businesses that serve alcohol.

If "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions," then I'm not sure what the hell is paving this particular legislative road of Guns In Bars, but "asphalt" sounds like a good starter ingredient, because no matter how much I rack my brains for "good intentions" with this particular law, I can't think of any. I just know there's a lot of asses at fault.

Or, as my wife so beautifully put it the other day, "Only a bunch of legislators hiding behind metal detectors and armed security guards could pass a law with the excuse that armed citizens make society safer. I wonder when they're gonna get rid of those metal detectors and security guards and allow citizens to carry firearms into sessions of Congress?"

I read a Chattanooga Times Free Press article on this and found the reader comments very interesting. Some gun owner types are very well-written and have some compelling arguments. However, at the end of the day, I'll side with statistics, and here's mine: as someone who does not carry or even own a gun, I am roughly a bajillion times less likely to die via "GSW." Meanwhile, my uncle and other gun permit people, by cherishing that right to protect themselves and their property with deadly force if necessary, are also exponentially more likely to find themselves in the hospital or morgue because a bullet found its way into their flesh.

I might not ever be a big fan of Bristol Palin and the "abstinence only" movement, because I'm pretty convinced that, ultimately, fu -- er, makin' whoopee -- is a pretty cool thing, and it's pretty darn essential to the human race. But when it comes to guns and firearms, which by the way are neither natural nor necessary for the propogation of the human race, their idea has merit: you stick a gun in your house, and those bullets might go somewhere. You never stick a gun in your house, and bullets ain't likely to find their way in, either. Unless they're magic bullets...

But back to my point: If Wyatt Earp had a big damn problem with ordinary joes carrying their weapons into tow, and Wyatt was a bad-ass mofo, then why the hell should I have to apologize to Wayne LaPierre or whatever repressed soul is in charge of the NRA nowadays for standing in favor of the same laws as Wyatt and all those other bad-ass Wastern sheriff mofos??

You wanna spit on me, spit on them first. But they seemed to have a pretty good idea of how to keep order in a town. Maybe you might wanna go back and watch some Westerns and learn something.

High Dives and Monkey Bars

Trapeze - Patty Griffin (mp3)
The Wrong Child - R.E.M. (mp3)
In My Tree - Matthew Sweet (mp3)

Had a melancholy moment with my daughters last night. We were driving back from Ringgold, emerging from the Fourth Circle of Hell otherwise known as "a swim meet," and they asked me if I'd ever been on a high dive. The only high dives they've ever seen were on the Olympic Trials we watched last night. They've never actually seen one in person.

"Was it fun?" my older daughter asked me.

As usual, I probably overthought my answer before just being honest, worrying that my honest "Yes, it was very fun" answer was salt in the wound, reminding them of joys they'd never have.

"What was it like? Was it scary?"

It was scary. It was exhilarating. Most of the fun was trying to decide what kind of flying leap you had the nerve to take while you were climbing up that steep ladder, then standing on the edge of that board for a gut-check. To dive, or do a flip, or just take the coward's way out and do a "pencil" or run flailing off the edge, hoping the silliness would disguise your hesitance to do something more skillful.

The high dive was an awesome rite of passage. That water seemed a looooong way down as a kid. It seemed even higher up when you'd see some adult -- usually a mother -- get up there and have trouble working up the gumption to jump.

What I didn't tell my girls -- not yet -- was that I fell off the back of a high dive when I was eight years old. After a year of swim lessons and regular visits to the neighborhood pool, I had finally worked up the nerve to dive off the high dive. It took a few minutes, but I finally managed, and even received a 3.4 from the East German judge.

Having successfully done it, I was in such a rush to repeat the miracle that I raced up the ladder a little too quickly, and as I reached for the rail at the top, my hand slipped, and I fell backward.

It's amazing how quickly your brain can shut down. That one split second in time, of my hand slipping away from that rail, feels like several minutes in my memory. I couldn't have been in the air for more than a second or two, but I don't remember any of the actual fall. I never even felt myself crunch against the concrete.

The only things I remember before starting to wake up is the nervous reaction of my mother, who was so frightened she couldn't even scream. She whimpered. And I could hear it as she leaped from her lawn chair. My biological father died when I was a couple of days old, and Mom never hid the fact that her single greatest fear in the world was losing me. The sound I recall coming from her is a lot more chilling now than it was back then.

Turns out blacking out saved me a few broken bones at the very least. I landed so completely flat against the concrete that I got up with only a few minor scratches and nothing else. We didn't sue. We didn't even cancel our membership. We were back at the pool the next week. No measures were put in place to make the high dive safer. No warnings were posted that one should grab the hand rail carefully, that no one should go too quickly up the ladder. The judgment was made, fairly quickly, that user error was the root of my accident.

By the time I was 10, I was joining my friend Andy and other pals at his pool, doing really stupid things. He had a curved slide that went eight or so feet down into the water, but mostly what they did was climb to the top and jump in. The really daring moments required you to stand on top of the handrail before jumping.

Someone really could've hurt themselves. Especially a massive klutz like myself. But we never did, other than a few bruises or scrapes from hitting the pool bottom too hard on occasion.

When I start thinking back to my childhood, there wasn't much of any of it that hasn't been deemed, by one group or another, as Too Dangerous. Riding dirt bikes 10 miles, across several four-lane high-speed roads, to the local movie theater. Fighting in bottle rocket wars. Playing "joust" on our bikes with baseball bats. Watching HBO when my parents weren't around. Hell, even playing Dungeons & Dragons.

And those adventures that weren't deemed dangerous were flat-out demolished. Like high dives. Monkey bars. Sitting in the floorboard of the back seat of your parents' car on the trip to the grandparents or the beach, playing with your Star Wars figures.

Where do kids today find healthy ways to explore that gray area of Acceptable Risk? The very nature of growing up, of maturing, requires that kids and teenagers test boundaries, take flying leaps, push red buttons. Part of growing up is learning that sometimes parents and other adults were right on about warnings, and sometimes maybe they weren't.

Lately it seems like adults, with heavy assistance from hungry attorneys, are working to sanitize the entire fucking planet. Gone is the notion of acceptable risk, replaced by "if it hurts even one child, it's too dangerous." I'm honestly surprised swimming pools are still permitted at all, with the crippling power of the anecdote and its value in the news media over actual statistics.

My daughters are oddly fortunate, however. The school campus on which I live includes something affectionately known as "The Tower," a huge concrete platform that soars some 20+ feet above the surface of the water. If it was a rare treasure 20 years ago, now it's a rat that has somehow survived in a cage full of velociraptors. I'd like to say The Tower will survive another 20 years, but the cynical side of me doesn't even give it another five. A boy had to be taken to the hospital a couple of weeks ago after slipping and falling off the concrete structure.

The lifeguards responded quickly. All of the precautionary measures in place worked. But he was hospitalized. The first injury we've had on The Tower in at least four or five summers and four or five school years, with thousands of boys, thousands of kids running and leaping from it every day from late April until September.

But one injury might be all it takes in today's world. The notion that kids will be kids and that sometimes being a kid can hurt... well, that's not acceptable.