Rudy-Come-Lately
This just in: Rudy Giuliani is rooting for the Red Sox. That’s right. The former mayor of New York City, who keeps four Yankees World Series rings on his dresser, has pulled a reverse Johnny Damon and started cheering for a team whose World Series appearance should cause bile to rise to the back of his throat. This didn’t play so well when Bill Richardson tried it either.
I assume that Yankees fandom is sort of like a parallel universe version of the Red Sox Nation (which I guess makes us the evil version of Yankees fans, because George Steinbrenner won’t let his players grow goatees; but I digress). And I cannot under any circumstances imagine ever cheering for the Yankees to succeed at anything. They could be trying to keep a school bus full of children from falling over the edge of a bridge, and I’d be rooting for gravity.
So here’s a tip, Rudy: I cheer for two teams, the Boston Red Sox, and whoever’s playing the Yankees. You might want to try applying the bizarro version of that same logic if you want to convince voters that you actually stand for anything.
Convergence
When things come at me in threes, I pay attention. I know that it’s nothing more than a trick of patterning, seeing a gestalt image where there really isn’t any deeper meaning, but it happens rarely enough that it’s usually worth mentioning.
The latest one started with the news that Radiohead is allowing fans to pay what they want to download and own their latest album (which comes out tomorrow, or very, very late today if they’re releasing it at midnight GMT). I sort of lost interest in Radiohead a few albums ago, but this is an incredible thing. Considering that the vast majority of artists make only a dollar or two from each CD sale, the five dollars that I plan to spend on my download of In Rainbows represents at least a 150% increase in profit for them. I like the idea of bands making a name for themselves and ditching their record companies–who are, to a one, lying, thieving, parasitic whores. Cutting out the middleman appeals to the Lutheran in me. The Sex Pistols need to record an album called “The 99 Feces” and nail it to the front door of EMI’s office building.
Related to this was today’s announcement that, for the first time in 18 years, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails are not contractually bound or beholden to any record company and are officially free agents at this point. NIN fans know that, over the course of his career, Trent has signed some of the worst possible recording contracts in history, and the business side of his career has never done him a single favor. Interscope never knew how to promote The Fragile, they pushed With Teeth to be poppier than it probably would have been otherwise (not that I think that’s necessarily a bad thing), and they were so out of touch with Year Zero that Trent footed the bill for the viral marketing campaign himself. And not only that, he had to personally intercede to keep Interscope’s lawyers from going after the fans who uploaded “leaked” songs to file sharing services…when that was the whole point of leaking them in the first place!
The third item in this trifecta of “fuck the record companies” came in the form of today’s Diesel Sweeties, which you should all read on a regular basis. I think that the idea of a “certified indie” label is a great idea whose time has come. The big four record companies and their pitbulls, the RIAA, have done a great job of separating consumers from their money and keeping it from flowing into the hands of their artists. CDs don’t cost $18.99, not when the artists are seeing less than 10% of that. I can’t wait to see them die a slow death in a ditch, trading in their brand new Beemers for 12-year old Civics and realizing that they have no place in the new order of things.
Well, a man can dream, anyway. Here’s that Diesel Sweeties comic:
Attention Comics Readers
If you order your books through Previews and have the October 07 catalog handy, turn to page 512 to see my brother’s Legend of Zelda guide listed! For the record, this means that both Stratton brothers have now appeared in the pages of Previews, a small but significant honor to comics nerds like me.
Something I Posted On SuicideGirls.com
I warmed up my writing synapses this morning by wading into a discussion about Joe Francis, the Girls Gone Wild douchebag, on SuicideGirls.com (not at all safe for work). I’m reposting what I wrote here, because if the past is any indication, I’ll probably have my SG account canceled by the end of the week.
- – - – -
Not that I’m trying to say that this is an apples-to-apples situation, but…
I have several friends who shot sets for this site and other reputable “female empowering” alt-porn sites when they were in their late teens or very early 20′s. They were paid a pittance and signed away all rights to the photos, because it was a scene that they wanted to be a part of, and because when you’re 19, $100 can make the difference between coming up with your part of the rent or not. (Or it can buy you a fairly substantial bag of weed or a tiny amount of coke. I’m not saying all these girls leapt off of the pages of Les Miserables. Although I do have a great story about a dancer I knew who stripped to save her farm…)
After these friends of mine did a little growing up and wanted to pursue more mainstream careers, they tried to get the sites to remove their photos. Despite the fact that the sites had gotten much, much more than their money’s worth from the sets, the sites refused to comply. One even sold their archives in bulk to other, less reputable sites, with the only condition being that they had to change the screen names of the girls. The sites did nothing illegal, and they were well within their contractual rights to do these things, but it definitely ran contrary to their mission statements.
Now, $100 isn’t a t-shirt and a trucker cap. And creating a scene that people want to be a part of isn’t plying them with liquor and coercing them into taking their clothes off. And even if you’re only 19, you should be smart enough to realize that maybe in 10 years, you might want to run for the local school board and not want pictures of your boobies floating around on the internets.
But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that SG and similar sites exist solely to empower women and create great erotic art any more than Joe Francis produces Girls Gone Wild to promote women’s freedom of expression. At the end of the day, despite the gulf of differences that separates them, both rely on horny guys paying to see young women’s naked bits to pay the bills.
And if this is the last post anyone sees from me, it’s because my account got suspended right after I posted this.
For Mom
What do you do when you’re asked to review a game that you have no interest in? Turn the review into a story about your mom instead.
leave a comment