UNDERAGE HOOKERS AT THE SUPER BOWL

So let me get this straight. The RIAA sues a 14 year old girl for downloading a few Jay-Z tunes, and then in order to pay her legal fees, she does an ad (which will air during the Super Bowl) for Pepsi, a company that happens to be sponsoring iTunes, which (not to mince words or anything, but) is a pay-to-download service which only serves to perpetuate the current openly corrupt major label model in which the artist gets about ten cents of any dollar you spend on their music?

And they only get that much if they're not currently in debt to their record labels in the first place. Which weeds out even most major label artists. So maybe Jay-Z, to use this girl's favorite example, is getting that ten cents on the dollar. Great. His fridge'll stay full of Heinekens and jello-pops or whatever he does ads for. Bully for him.

But this goes beyond fucked up and into something like legalized extortion. This girl got squeezed for three grand, and now she's out there selling herself to pay off her "debt."

"This ad shows how everything has changed," says Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman. "Legal downloading is great because fans are supporting the future of creative work in America."

What rot. The only creative work I see being done here is in the marketing departments and law firms, who have left the real world, where many music fans might not want to give all their personal information to some online retail service to listen to just one song, and traveled into some kind of bizarroland where one corporation's lawyers taking a few thousand dollars from a teenager and then making her sell her dignity to another corporation to pay that money back is (and I'm quoting here) "sassy" and "a wink at the download hot button."

My gripe is not necessarily with iTunes. Hey, it might work out for everyone involved. It's the fact that the RIAA and their corporate partners think this is so damned funny that they're making a snarky ad using the victims of their own litigation.

I'd rather give my music away than let these bastards take a penny from its proceeds. Which means I'm in the wrong fucking business.

(Sorry. This just chaps my haunches.)

[via downhillbattle]

A WICCAN'S BAD-TOUCH ZONE, AND OTHER COLD THINGS

Here I thought my Canadian (and Canadian-positive American) sistren and brethren were a hardy bunch.

I dragged my sorry ass (not to mention the ass of a very special ringer to whom I was hoping to feed a little local raw meat of the hockey-playing variety) out to the rink in Chinatown early Saturday morning, and despite the fact that compared to last week, when the temperature was measured in Kelvin and your breath molecules would visibly slow down as they reached the outside air, it was bikini weather on Saturday, with temperatures almost up to freezing and a thin layer of snow on the rink looking almost like virgin sand, nobody else showed up.

We sat there, having cleared off the bench area with my goalie stick, letting our coffees grow cold, thinking about what kind of shopping we might want to do, until we were positive that no one was coming, and then we went to this bakery on Baxter Street for the Chinese version of cup-of-coffee-piece-of-pastry, and got on with the business of a typical Saturday, which really means a lot of laughing at tourists.

The rest of the weekend had slightly less drinking than one might guess, but it was quite nice. And now that I'm alone in my apartment again, the walls closing in like a Star Wars Trash Room, I can get back to the business of cranking out songs.

Oh, by the way, new in Area 52 this week: the Earthquake Blues. I sure hate songs which use elemental forces as metaphor, and this sure ain't a blues song, but I don't much mind this one. It won't sound like anything else I do this year, I can promise you that. I couldn't make another song that could hide behind a beat like that if I tried.

One other thing - I love Dawn's quote about the songs so far:

The music I've heard of his isn't quite catchy enough for me, which, as I've tried to explain to him, very likely means it is perfect for many other intelligent and discerning music fans. Put another way, we can't all aspire to the greatness of Herman's Hermits, but some of us can approach that of Tom Waits.

I am happy to take that as a compliment I'm not sure she meant to give...

...and note that if by some coincidence I'm approaching the genius of Tom Waits, then I wouldn't know which peak to climb next. Peter Noone's genius would be as good as any. Although I don't think I can write a song like "Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter," until I get me a ukulele. Add that to my shopping list.

THE LEFT BANK(E)

And speaking of Left Banks, Dawn tells a story of the Left Banke, the great garage-pop band that did "Walk Away Renee," and Alan Merrill, who decided against joining that band and instead going to Japan and, ultimately, writing "I Love Rock 'N' Roll."

[For Jon, who did see me follow him back home, though I left soon after]

THE LEFT BANK (I)

After a week, I'm ecstatic at the feedback from The Area 52 Project. The first song I posted wasn't all that interesting, and though that wasn't a deliberate choice (nobody chooses to suck, and I thought the thing was appropriately angry, and at certain people, even), the feedback was excellent. More people downloaded it than I thought would have, especially considering how in the last six months or so I've been treating Midtown Manhattan like it's Walden Pond, and on top of that I'm still getting back on top of the whole "making music and telling people about it" thing, which seems straightforward until you realize that I'm only now getting the feeling back in my arms, and often while I'm writing something clever or callling a friend they just spasm and start beating me up.

I'm in great pain as I type this.

I gleefully thank Suzette, Valerie, and Vidiot for talking the thing up. It's going to only improve, swear to Zevon.

This week's song, Paris, is about the city, not the hotel heiress. It's vastly more sophisticated than last week's ranty piece, which is admittedly like comparing, oh, a well-adjusted normal person with a really angry tree slug.

Still. It's perfect snow-shoveling music. I'm just saying that.

OLAY!

Now this has been a shitkickingly eventful week.

My birthday came and went (I remain 63 for another year -- thank you, Oil of Olay!) my friends and I partied like David Blaine all weekend long (meaning, we scuttled around Manhattan like we were trapped in a big block of ice, not like we were continuously scraping a wasted Fiona Apple off the floor and shoveling her into a cab to go from one coke bash to another and have streams of sycophants tell us how we're so much better than that fraud Copperfield and anyone who says so is a fool. Just to, y'know, clarify), and except for the fact that I missed the Zambonis on Friday night and stood up my friend Heather (it was so cold here, but I mentioned that already, and if you really cared about me, or if you live near here, whichever, you'd know all about it, and this is not a weather-themed blog, like, oh, Caren's is), I had close to a perfect weekend.

I am, however, looking for work. Anyone wanna hire a mouthy know-it-all who showers once, maybe twice a week, and looks like Joe Pantoliano's ugly short cousin? I can type and I eat most household pests, so lunch hours are negotiable.

AREA 52

It's the first Monday of 2004, and as promised, and as per the terms of both my parole agreement and my new year's resolution, I am proud to officially announce the kickoff of my latest albatross:

The Area 52 Project.

My goal is to show the world a few dozen songs in some kind of demo form and see if I can polish some of them to completion. I'll be putting up one song for download every Monday for as long as I can keep it up through the rest of the year. I'm pretty confident I can do this, actually.

Many of these songs are going to be sloppy in the recording. Many of them will suck. Many of them will be unfinished. But all of them will bring the world a little closer together, even if it's only at the opposite end of the pool from where I'm currently bobbing with my water wings.

I set up a message board thing there, because I'm really looking for input on the damned things, because lord knows I don't have enough people in my life telling me I suck, but if you have any really involved input on them, I'm always at the end of my email.

Like Al Bundy says, let's rock.

NOT A BAD PLACE TO DRINK YOURSELF TO DEATH, IF YOU'RE INTO THAT SORT OF THING

Hey, Happy New Year, you sexy freaks. Every last blessed semiliterate gas-huffing compulsively masturbating one of you. My people!

You know, it's so sad. New Orleans was so underwhelming. Every day, the same thing: eggs and coffee, start drinking at noonish, bar to bar around the town till about 3 or 4, switch back to coffee just for pacing and wander around the French Quarter or the garden district or some bayou tour or whatever till sundown, then meet up with everyone at dinner somewhere impossibly classy where two hours later we all stumble out, stuffed to the gunwhales with etoufée or jambalaya or osso bucco or something lamb based, and spend the next 6-8 hours starting ever-less-coherent conversations with strangers, listening to zydeco or dixieland of varying degrees of quality, and dodging flying breasts. (It's a real problem, you know. All those people with concussions from the wanton nekkidness. I'm glad I wore my hockey helmet.)

It is so good to be back home in Manhattan, where most ugly people keep their clothes on, I have my books and my poetry to protect me, and my alcohol tolerance is now at an all time high. Tha-anks for that, New Orleans. Thanks for a lovely time, you beer-goggles-hot bookwormy drag queen of a city. Now let yourself out, daddy's gotta work.