Shit Like This Is Why I Don't Have The Patience To Be A Real Writer

So, this one time I submitted an idea for a piece on the new writer's section of the Cracked.com message boards. It was basically me bitching about zombie fanboys again, with the idea that I would do a list of apocalypse scenarios made famous by movies that would be scientifically way more likely to happen than a stupid zombie outbreak, backed up by whatever facts I could find with a ten minute Google search. One of the editors responded, and told me that my idea just looked like a list of apocalypse movies, and that here at Cracked.com they don't do articles that read like "here's 10 great cowboy movies, etc, etc".

 So today's top articles on cracked are:

• 6 Deleted Backstories That Totally Change Classic Movies
• 10 Brilliant Comedy Gems Hiding on YouTube
• 3 Past Box Office Hits That Prove January Movies Suck
• An Urgent Message to Guys Who Comment on Internet Videos
• If 'Django' Was 10 Times Shorter and 100 Times More Honest, and
• The 5 Most Badass Things Ever Done in the Name of Research

Now, I'm no mathematician, but out of today's top articles, 50% are just lists of movies/internet videos that fulfill certain criteria and 33% are commentaries on said movies/internet videos (one of which is a tounge-in-cheek synopsis of an already tounge-in-cheek Tarantino script), leaving only 17% (1) of today's top articles to tackle any subject that isn't about movies or internet videos.

So maybe I was aiming too high. Maybe instead of doing a list of apocalypse movies, I should have proposed a list of apocalypse movie YouTube mashups that would sync well with the Nyan Cat song. Because, you know, the only thing more interesting than watching YouTube mashups is reading serious critical commentary on YouTube mashups.

More Than Just Lists Of Movies... Sometimes.

 

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Movie Review

Its gotten too serious up in here lately, so please enjoy this lighthearted movie review.

I saw The Hobbit. Before I give my opinion, let me put my level of Tolkien fandom in perspective for the casual reader. I loved the Lord of the Rings movies, and I have only recently begun reading the actual books. I've finished Fellowship and Two Towers. So just so we're all on the same page, I don't have maps of Middle Earth on my wall and I don't speak Elvish. I also haven't actually read The Hobbit, Return of the King, or The Simillarion yet.

That said, I thought the movie was great! It was a little long in getting started, and there were some obligatory franchise shout-outs (for example, the scene where Elijah Wood suits back up as Frodo just to get the mail and eat an apple), but overall, I thought it was fantastic.

However, liking stuff is boring, so there are two small things about The Hobbit that I hated and am fully prepared to go on a rant about. These in no way impact my overall liking of the movie, but they are very stupid and must be addressed.

First Stupid Thing:

So in one part of the movie, Bilbo and the dwarves are crossing this rainy mountain pass (in a scene that looks identical to one in Fellowship except that the rain was snow). Some rocks start falling down on them, and one of them shouts "The legends are true! Rock Giants!"

And then, holy fucking shit, 75 foot tall monsters made of solid rock are beating the tar out of each other. And I don't mean just crashing into each other like you might expect senseless stone people to do. These guys are throwing jabs and hooks and executing sick bare-knuckle boxing combinations like they just graduated a 12 week fight camp with Manny Paquiano. So needless to say the Dwarves are scared shitless, but manage to barely escape this brutal fracas and get inside the mountain. 

And nobody ever mentions it again.  

In fact, they all just fucking go to sleep. Now, since I haven't read the original book, I don't know if this is explained somewhere, so maybe somebody can help me out. As far as movie making goes, its pretty random. There's no set up whatsoever. One minute, Dwarves are walking across a mountain, and the next minute, what could not possibly be any less than the most fucking powerful creatures in Tolkien's universe are having a title bout across an entire mountain range. Then, thanks to the comfort of a cave within a dwarf's walk of this catastrophic scenario, the danger is suddenly over without so much as anyone saying "Wow. So, how about that rock monster battle? Crazy, am I right?"  

Let's think about this. These things are as tall as mountains, throw boulders the size of Isengard, have the combat dexterity of a young Joe Frasier, and Gandalf and co. are worried about a dragon? Are you kidding me? Forget about this dragon nonsense! We need to deal with these living mountains who are God-like in power and clearly aggressive. Radagast saw a "necromancer" in the old tower? Fuck that shit! What if the rock-man royal rumble spills over into the streets of Minas Tirith? Smashed. In fact, what the hell couldn't three rock monsters who had a bad morning utterly destroy? White city of Gondor? Smash. Rivendell? Smash. Eye of Sauron? Throw a mesa at it. Fangorn forest? Lay down and roll. Sure, the Ents seemed pretty powerful before we learned they are completely outclassed on the next range over. 

Call me crazy, but I feel this situation needs to either be dealt with, or at the very least, explained. Like maybe two fuckin seconds of screen time when Gandalf comes back to save them from the goblins. 

"Yo Gandalf, that goblin shit was scary, but you should have seen this other shit we saw right before that. You would not believe it."



"Oh, you must be referring to the rock monster mash. They always do that, but for a million centuries of man they always stop by six o'clock and never leave the mountain range."

"Oh, ok. Good."

See? Problem solved. But failing that, I feel that it should make parties of both good and evil in Middle Earth somewhat uncomfortable that this kind of thing is going on. Yes, the one ring can corrupt the minds of men, but, you know... smashed. 

Second Stupid Thing:

All subterranean creatures are racially incapable of building railings.   

I would seriously like for someone to do a body count of how many deaths there are in these movies due to lack of railings. I don't remember anything in the books about the dwarves specifically leaving railings off of clearly precipitous bridges and walkways despite the fact that a strong sneeze could send someone tumbling down 4,000 feet into a river of magma, so I'm forced to assume this was an executive decision on the part of Peter Jackson. 

There's a scene in The Hobbit where they're fighting off a million goblins in Goblin Town, and the lack of railings, handholds, and crossbars is so apparent that they simply use the strategy of "just knock them off", to which the goblins were clearly unprepared despite the fact that they fucking live like this. The dwarves are no better. The glory of Erebor? No Railings. The Mines of Moria? Built with no railings. Conquered by orcs, who continue this tradition to their own peril, as we see in Fellowship. Its safe to assume that Orcs, Goblins, and Dwarves never achieved dominance on Middle Earth not because of lack of fighting capability, but because their populations were surely decimated by the gruesome results of dizzy spells, banana peel accidents, and drunken stumbling off of precarious walkways with no railings! 

And you know what? That's why the king is a human. Helm's deep? You have to fucking try to fall out of that thing. There's like a parapet every two feet. The elves are a little better than the dwarves as well, but there still some places where one wrong step means your ass is down a waterfall, like in front of Elrond's magical moon-rune E-reader. Overall, given the glory and/or complexity of these underground dwellings, it would seem like a wise investment in public works to even string some rope handholds across the most dangerous parts of your lair. The Goblin King clearly had time and resources to build a wacky cage trap and some kind of torture machine, so it follows that it wouldn't be too much to ask for a safety net here or there. Just sayin. 

Anyway, the movie was good.    
 

Guns and Ammo

Is anyone else nostalgic for the days when Columbine was a freak occurrence? These days, not a month can go by without some psychotic asshole going on a killing spree, trying to one-up last month's psychotic asshole with the horror and body count of his rampage. Its getting absolutely ridiculous (not that there's anything rational about mass killing to begin with). However, the fact that these scenes are becoming more prevalent offers a definite boon to some. Let's take a look at who the winners are every time something like this happens:

The Media

The media may be the biggest winner of all when somebody goes bat-shit. After all, its a guaranteed ratings boost. The scene is familiar to all of us: a break in regular programming, aerial views of crime scenes with dozens of police cars, tearful eyewitness testimony, etc, etc. Every news network has a vested interest in horrible, horrible things happening, and yet they have so painstakingly and meticulously crafted which terrible crimes deserve our attention. Drug related shooting? Local news. Gang war? Probably not even reported. Mexican drug cartels leave 33 headless bodies on a road to mark their territory? Time Magazine page 52. White man goes crazy and shoots a bunch of people? Cue the fucking President.

Of course the media stations, like any profitable business, are just going with what works. Maybe inner-city poverty/drug-related shootings are just out of vogue right now, I don't know, but its pretty plain to see the hypocrisy, and perhaps even racism inherent in this kind of reporting. If the media was really interested in treating all gun violence equally, they would have absolutely no problem filling their 24 hour news cycle every single day by simply re-broadcasting the police blotters in the capital cities of every state in the nation. But in our society, its expected that inner-city poor people are going to shoot each other to death, while the mass-murderer stands out as the inexplicable exception; worthy of endless debate, discussion, and air time. For this, and many more reasons, urban crime just isn't profitable to the news corporations, and so they've spared no expense to create a very lucrative niche for themselves. We'll watch the events unfolding, then we'll watch the eyewitness interviews. Then (provided the psycho hasn't killed himself), we'll watch the trial, and see the endless stream of googly-eyed mugshots. Then, because trials take a while, we'll forget about it until the sentencing, and then we'll tune back in to see how that plays out. Its a cycle destined to repeat itself until it is no longer economically viable, and there's not much anyone can do about it.

Its would violate the freedom of the press to say, pass a law telling them to limit coverage of mass killings. However, would such a law cut down on copycat killings? Of course it would. You can't copy something you don't know about. Would it cut down on the paranoia in this country? Of course it would. Even though we still lead the civilized world in gun homicides, its thousands of times more likely that if you are going to die soon, it will be because you ate too many hamburgers and got heart disease, smoked yourself to death, or were texting while driving. But no, we can't tell the media to stop doing this and still consider ourselves a free country. We just have to a) hope that someone at each of the major news networks grows a soul, realizes the damage they're doing by creating icons out of these people and fights to bring it to an end, or b) (much more likely) people eventually get psycho-killer overload and stop tuning in for hours every time this happens.

Make no mistake, the media makes celebrities out of these pieces of shit on purpose, which brings us to our next winners:

Fucking Psychopaths and Their Stupid Fucking Wanna-Be Psychopath Fanboys


There is now a clear path to victory for psycho assholes. Its not reaching out to family or society for psychiatric help, because lets face it, self-reflection and improvement takes effort, and who wants to do all that? Its much easier to buy an automatic weapon, walk into a public place and try to kill as many people as you can before offing yourself. You're guaranteed to be a superstar, and even though you won't be around to enjoy it, you won't have to face any of the consequences either, because you're dead.

But just like there are legions of fans out there for serial killers (you know, the fucking losers who write to them in prison about how they "love their work"), you can be damn sure that the next dick to shoot up a college or a mall was at home, glued to the TV set when the last one happened. Its a win-win situation for these idiots; they have nothing left to live for, psychiatrists are practically unaffordable, and there's really no more spectacular way to go out. Or at least that's what we as a society have shown them.

And finally, our third winner:

Weapons Manufacturers...?

FREE PUBLICITY

Any press is good press, right? 

Actually, while was in the middle of writing this, I saw that the company that manufactures the above weapon, which was used in last week's shooting, is going under or being absorbed or something. I was set to go on about how the widespread coverage of the weapons used acts as free press for arms manufacturers, but apparently I stand corrected in this regard. I suppose in some extreme cases, like a school massacre, or an oil spill that ruins half an ocean, there can be serious consequences that actually affect a corporation's bottom line. So if your company's weapons are used to kill children in some other country, you're in the clear. Just make sure you're not on American soil.

Well, I guess that weapons manufacturers aren't always winners in these cases. But one thing that is certain is the media/social civil war of words that erupts over gun control every single fucking time this happens. And just like everything else in our culture of rapidly diminishing literacy, the same stupid circular arguments keep happening. So now I'm going to lay out my position.

Prone Position

I believe that Americans have the right to own guns. However, I also believe that this right is entirely symbolic in nature as opposed to functional. Yes, guns can be used for sporting, like target shooting or putting holes in the windshield of your uncle's old car. These things are fun, and we should have a right to do them. Guns can be used for hunting. Personally, I think hunting is bullshit, but if it makes you feel like a big man to kill something from 100 feet away with vastly superior technology for lulz, then I guess I begrudgingly accept your right to do that too.

The only other use that a gun has (besides maybe sitting on a mantlepiece to look impressive), is to kill or maim human beings. Whether it be in self defense or plotting a massacre, the fact remains that this is one of the 3 (3.5 if you count the mantlepiece) uses of a firearm. Scout leaders tell their troops that a gun is a tool, not a weapon, and yet it has no constructive purpose. Animal, man, or paper target, its purpose is to destroy. However, I maintain that we have a right as Americans to own them.

This does not mean we get a blank check. I also believe that every person who wants to own one should have to be initially certified and periodically re-certified in the safety, usage, and maintenance of firearms. After all, don't I have the right not to be accidentally shot in the face because Tommy Triggerjamm never bothered to learn where the safety was? Or because Supermale Familyprotectorman  left his .9mm in a Boscov's box at the bottom of the closet for his five year old kid to take to kindergarden? We're not a nation of plantation farmers anymore where you'd have to walk five miles to get to your third accidental shooting victim. Your actions/negligence have real world consequences for the people around you. This concept seems pretty basic to me. I've never heard anybody bitch that their God-given rights were being infringed on because they were required to pass a driving test to get a license. Its the same concept. You have control of a potentially deadly machine, you should legally need some fucking clue how to use it.

I hope to have established here that I definitely believe there is room for intelligent discourse about the gun control issue. However, the following arguments, which I see posted over and over and over and over and over again make me actually want to shoot myself:


"Banning guns won't do anything. The bad guys will get them anyway because they don't care about laws."

Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of stupid, bullshit argument is this? If making laws to keep certain weapons out of the hands of civilians "didn't do anything", how come there haven't been any attacks with RPG's? When was the last domestic massacre that was carried out with an Apache helicopter, or an unmanned fighter drone? Why aren't these psycho killers using briefcase nukes, or neutron bombs? Because they can't fucking get them. Banning weapons from civilian use makes them much more difficult to obtain, and cost prohibitive. See, that's the real key. If something is banned, the cost increases exponentially. Would people still be able to get assault weapons if they were banned? Yes. Some would. But it would be much more difficult.

I understand that crimes would still happen, I'm not a fucking idiot. But doesn't it just make some semblance of logical sense that we, as a society, should make it just a tiny bit more difficult for a guy to go to his mom's and borrow a weapon that shoots 30 rounds a second when he feels like going crazy on a whim like the Sandy Hook shooter did? Then people say "you're only punishing the law abiding citizens!" Oh really? Well keep this in mind: This fuckin guy was a "law abiding citizen" until the second he pulled the trigger. You can be a law abiding citizen and purchase an automatic, military grade rifle. You can be a law-abiding citizen as you drive into a school zone with that weapon in the trunk of your law-abiding car. In some states, you can freely brandish that weapon near said school and still be a law abiding citizen. Then, once you pull the trigger, and only then, you cease to be a law abiding citizen, but guess what... its already too late to punish you because you've already killed a dozen people, and you're just going to kill yourself anyway.

And furthermore, if you're going to use the argument that bad people will just do bad things anyway, why would we have any laws at all? You can't stop people from getting raped, so why is rape illegal? Rapists are just going to rape anyway, so why make it illegal? You can't stop kidnappers from kidnapping people or robbers from robbing, so lets just abolish all laws and the bad people will do bad things and the good people will just have to live with it. I'm sure all you "libertarians (read: anarchists) out there are cheering at this point, but for everyone else, this is where that train of logic leads. News flash: There's not many "good" people out there. That's why we built "society". It sets up consequences for people who decide they should be able to do whatever they want at the expense of others.

"Look at prohibition. That worked really well."

Shut the fuck up. I'm sure there are myriad causes why prohibition was revoked, but one big factor was the fact that you can make hooch in your fucking bathtub. If you know anybody who can build a .223 Bushmaster rifle in their garage, they're probably already employed in something much more lucrative, so good luck with that.



"We need weapons to protect us from the Government."

 Look, I'm no fan of tyranny. I know that around the world, people are terribly oppressed by cruel dictatorships. Fortunately for us, that's not here, not yet. Plenty of people love to dispute this, but let's look at the reality of the world. We have freedom of speech and the press, unlike China. Our president isn't shelling cities of civilians like in Syria.

But that doesn't mean it could never happen, and I wish that having access to high powered rifles could actually give us the security that we were forever safe from tyranny. But it doesn't, because for all your wishes, you still can't shoot down F-14 Tomcats with an M-16. You can't penetrate the armor of a tank. The fact is that our military has helicopters, airplanes, warships, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, the CIA, the FBI, JSOC, the NSA, and the dreaded Osprey.

Behold its wackiness, and tremble!

It spends more on defense each year than the next 26 countries combined. I'm sorry, but a loose affiliation of ex-moonshiners with automatic rifles isn't going to stop the US Military. The only way to defeat it would be if a large portion of the armed forces were to defect to a resistance movement, or if any such resistance were to be supplied by another superpower like China or Russia. The Mujahadeen were only able to kick out the Soviets out of Afghanistan because we provided them with $1,000,000,000 in advanced weaponry. They weren't taking out fighter jets from the back of trucks with AK-47s.


So in closing, there has to be a middle ground. We have the right to own weapons, but we should also have the ability to determine what is essential to our freedom, and what is fucking dangerous to the populace. There is always a fine line between freedom and safety, but when we can see the havoc that gun violence wreaks on this country on a monthly basis, something needs to be done.

Guns don't kill people, people do.
People with guns kill more people than people with no guns.
People with automatic rifles kill more people per minute than people with handguns, shotguns, or hunting rifles.

Its a simple question of numbers.

The Problem With Everything (Election Eve Edition)

Well here we are, on the eve of Election Day. For all the ubiquitous noise we've been bombarded with for what seems like fucking forever, less people will probably vote in this election than did for the last American Idol winner. But no matter who wins, nothing is going to change that drastically. I honestly don't know who falls for campaign speeches that are so obviously full of distortions, lies and vagaries on both sides.

Romney, if he wins, isn't going to fix the economy any faster than Obama has tried to. The office of the President of the United States of America isn't some kind of kingship where our leader issues commands and suddenly there's a million more jobs and gas is 88 cents a gallon. Don't these idiots who clap and cheer whenever some politician promises them everything they want realize that if it were possible, every President since the dawn of the republic would have done it, if for no other reason than to get re-elected? No one person is to blame for the Great Recession, no one person is able to fix it. If you think the problem lies solely in the fact that there's not enough regulation in place on Wall Street, keep in mind that half of the corporations responsible for the collapse were breaking the regulations that there were anyway, and have yet to be held accountable in any meaningful way.

Romney also isn't going abolish Roe Vs. Wade as people are screaming about either. This is an hysterical impossibility fanned by the flames of the media. Even if he had any principles (at all) and wanted to make abortion illegal more than anything in the world, remember that congress is still deadlocked, and will probably remain in roughly the same condition after the election.

In short, no matter who wins, neither candidate will do half of the things they've promised while campaigning, and they'll do four times too much we won't know about til the files become declassified in seventy-some years.

But for those fearing the apocalypse if their guy doesn't win, keep in mind, no matter who wins, the following things will still happen:

- We will continue to spend more on our military budget than the next 26 countries combined. Spending will increase each year regardless of wartime or peacetime. An enormous portion of our tax dollars will go to for-profit military contractors to build weapons that will likely sit in silos and bunkers for the rest of time.

- We will continue, overtly or covertly, the War on Terror. We will continue accepting the death of innocents as collateral damage in a war that has no ending and no borders. We will continue sending machines to assassinate people with no trial or due process.

- We will continue to condemn (mostly black) people to a life in and out of our prison system for crimes no greater than local marijuana distribution, while in the meantime allowing alcohol and cigarette companies to target teenagers with sexy advertisements.

- We will continue to allow lobbyists and corporations to control our lawmaking and leadership selection process. After all, money is speech now, and the richest people are the loudest.

And since that's what will happen, let's also not forget what has happened.

- 6 billion dollars has been spent on the 2012 presidential campaigns, shattering by a landslide all previous records. That's 6 billion dollars that has been spent so that not a day would go by without you hearing someone telling you for whom to vote, whether it be via radio, TV, billboard, or asshole with a clipboard. That may not be that large a figure in context with our entire economy, but how many cops, firefighters, and teachers would 6 billion dollars have hired? How much more of a difference could we have made in this country if we'd bought schools instead of ad space?

- Barack Obama, our sitting President, Commander-In-Chief, and "most powerful man in the world", has just spent the last 6 months doing nothing but trying to keep his job. For half a year, the President's job has been to keep his position by going around in a tour bus to give empty promises to suckers in middle America. Fuck, we might as well elect Motley Crue. And we wonder why nothing gets done in this country. Is that really the best use of anyone's time?

So, enjoy casting your entirely symbolic expression of freedom and democracy tomorrow. Let's just get it over with so we can all go back to caring about reality TV shows while business returns to usual.

Amanda Palmer - Everyone's Mad At Some Chick I Never Heard Of

This One.

Before looking at Facebook today I'd never heard of Amanda Palmer before, but this current pop culture spat highlights some of the points I brought up in yesterday's post.  Apparently she is a musician who raised a whopping $1.2 million on Kickstarter to record a new album. She used that money up, and now is asking if fans want to play with her (unpaid) during shows at various tour stops because she can't afford to hire any more professional musicians. I mean, it seems a little ghetto, but apparently the audacity of this has been getting her crucified by fans, musician's unions, and industry veterans like Nirvana collaborator-in-some-capacity Steve "Made His Career When Music Stores Still Existed" Albini.

The full article is here: New York Times , and Steve Albini's response is outlined here: Albini!

First thing's first: the unions. I suppose I can understand their outrage at something like this. Neither I, nor any of my friends I have or ever have had in bands have ever been members of a musician's union of which I'm aware. I can only assume therefore, doing no research on the matter, that these unions do not consist of a tight-knit affiliation of garage bands writing rock music, but more likely studio musicians, orchestra members, and freelance day jobbers. I get it. They're coming from a world where they're always compensated for playing because they're always playing with/for people who have money. Because they're used to this kind of treatment, they get pissed at people who play for free because they feel it devalues (both monetarily and otherwise) musicians in general. Like I said, I understand the sentiment. However, these people need to understand that they do not live in the same universe as the people Palmer is most likely reaching out to. They're probably not fans of the music, so they obviously would have no incentive to accept the job in the first place. Why then would they get incensed by an offer than in no way applies to them? The article states that Palmer can't afford the $35,000 it would take to hire the three more musicians for the tour, so they're basically complaining that nobody is being paid for a position that wouldn't even exist if nobody volunteered for it.

Think about it in other entertainment related terms: if a magician asks a member of the audience to come up and help him with a card trick, does anyone complain that the volunteer isn't being fairly compensated? After all, they're technically performing a portion of the labor that is necessary for the show to continue. However, that would be a pretty stupid thing to complain about because the volunteer is fully aware that they're not getting any money out of the deal, they're just doing it for the spirit of the event and to be a part of the show. The case is very similar here.

Moving on, its Albini's stance on this matter that really gets to me:

If your position is that you aren’t able to figure out how to do that, that you are forced by your ignorance into pleading for donations and charity work, you are then publicly admitting you are an idiot, and demonstrably not as good at your profession as Jandek, Moondog, GG Allin, every band ever to go on tour without a slush fund or the kids who play on buckets downtown.

This gets us to one of the potentially unforeseen effects of using Kickstarter I was talking about yesterday: apparently to some people, there's a huge fucking stigma attached to it. If you use Kickstarter, you're a pathetic, stupid, deadbeat musician pandering for change, and you need to get out there and be poor like all those obscure people he mentions at the end so that your band can be name-dropped by some asshole for street cred after you die in poverty. In fairness, Albini's Wiki page shows him to be a decidedly non-greedy studio engineer, but come on, would he be where he is today if he hadn't been getting paid with sweet sweet major label dollars while he was working with Nirvana, The Breeders, Helmet, Chevelle, Robert Plant, Fred Schneider, The Stooges, Mogwai, The Jesus Lizard, the Pixies, and PJ Harvey? It must have been nice to come up in the heyday of Tower Records when the Buzz Bin was overflowing and that rock star money was raining in, but things are different now. For a lot of musicians, the money isn't coming from the top down, it's coming from the ground up. Who the fuck is he to call somebody an idiot for cutting major label money out of the equation? God damn it, is this still rock and roll we're talking about?

This is another point I touched on in the other post. The Kickstarter money is raised and the album is recorded, but what about when it runs out before the tour? There's no company to borrow more money from, that's all there is. Don't get me wrong, $1.2 mil is a shitload of money, but its not like she put it in her pocket, she recorded a fucking album. First off, Kickstarter and Amazon take 10%, leaving about $900 grand. Out of that money you can be God damn well sure that plenty of studio musicians got their union-approved rates for the duration of recording. I haven't heard the album, or any of Palmer's music for that matter, but I'm pretty sure she didn't pull a bunch of jug-blowing hobos out of the rail yard and have them play backing tracks for nothing more than a hot meal, so let's get real. People got theirs.

So I can understand why spoiled musician's union members would get all self-righteous about this because they've never had to play for only beer before (as so very many of us have, so very often), and I can see why a guy who's spent his career on the receiving end of a ceaseless tide of big label cash would disapprove of someone getting money directly from the fans (you know, the ones who would have just had to spend money to buy the album anyway), but what I don't get is the reaction from the fans.

Why the FUCK would fans be pissed? Speaking as a fan myself, if Iron Maiden came up to me tomorrow and said, "Oy, mate! We've run outta pounds for our US tour. We need YOU to come up to a show and sit in on the drums for a few numbers. We can't pay you, but you'll get free merchandise, and you can get bloody well pissed with us all night! I mean really knickered!", I would rob a gas station and throw my great grandmother down an open sewer grate to get to that show. Are you fucking kidding me? How could a true fan be anything but honored to share the stage with their idols? Sure, its not as an equal, but let's face it, you're not an equal. You just volunteered, so what can you expect?

And really, that's my point. Amanda Palmer isn't riding into town with a paramilitary junta and taking slaves to play sax for her. She's not (to my knowledge) fucking over the contracts for musicians that are already in place. She simply ran out of money after meeting expenses, and tried to come up with a solution so that the show could go on. She's asking people to play. It's voluntary. If you're too good for that shit, go back to your first chair in the Sioux City Philharmonic or whatever and shut the fuck up. Nobody has a gun to your head. None of you rock pundits out there seem to remember the fact that there are millions of musicians out there at all levels who will never make money or be famous, and many of them may not even want to. But maybe they do want the thrill of playing to a large crowd for once in their lives and sharing the stage with touring musicians, so who the fuck are you to tell them they should be insulted for being asked?

And another thing: Weezer did this exact same thing a few years ago! They had a contest and put a bus full of kids onstage to play Beverly Hills or whatever that stupid song was. I don't remember any media storm about how Weezer was exploiting child labor on their tour. They even have a tour video in Japan where they do the same thing. Why was everyone cool with it then, but now its an outrage? I really don't understand.



Play it right, slaves, or you'll be sorry!



 

So all in all, even though I've never heard a single note of music from Amanda Palmer, I find the level of criticism going on here absurd. How these critics can sit in their ivory towers and pass judgement like this is ridiculous. If you're a union musician, you don't fucking know what it means to take on risk and self-produce a project. You probably just show up at the venue that pays you, play your parts, go home, and cash your paycheck (because you get a paycheck instead of wrinkled $5's based on the number of friends you brought to the show). So shut the fuck up. If you're an iconic big wig like Albini, granted, you may be a patron fixture of the rock scene, but you also are who you are because bands paid you with corporate money. Money that came from companies that have ruined brilliant musicians financially, and that to this day fight with armies of lawyers to keep song rights away from the very people who created them. How does that give you any moral leverage to call someone an idiot for cutting a few corners while you reference these obscure underground bands who "made it the hard way" from the comfort of your top end studio? So shut the fuck up.

And the fans... how dare you? Who the fuck do you people think you are? This band is on the road to entertain you! They're doing whatever they can to make sure they can play the songs accurately at the show, cause you can be damn sure your ass would be booing if they sounded like shit. They try to make ends meet in a way that's already been done before (Weezer!) but this time its a scandal. How dare they run out of money and ask for help! It makes you wonder why people would bother to dedicate their lives to entertain a bunch of ungrateful pieces of shit who bash you at the first sign that you're not some uber-rich rock star, but just a person making some tough choices to try to keep doing what you love. I'd like to see your asses out there on a 36-date national tour.

News flash: unless your favorite music is auto-tuned pop-country performed by minors, your favorite musicians are getting poorer and poorer. The time of the rock star is over. The time of super groups selling out stadiums is going to be finished within 10 years. You better get used to bands "pleading for donations and charity work" on Kickstarter. Get used to fans on stage, because without them there might not be anyone on stage at all. Trust me, when the "artists" from the Billboard Top 20 are the only ones left with the resources to make music that you'll actually hear about, you might be yearning for the days when Bill the fuckin salesman was up there jamming with Amanda Palmer.

So please, shut the fuck up.

Kickstarter - Maybe Not As Good As We Think?

I've been thinking about Kickstarter for a while now. More specifically, what it means for artists, for fans, and what its impact will be on society as a whole. Make no mistake, the advent of Kickstarter and similar model websites is huge, but time will tell who benefits the most. I'm banking on big corporations, but hey, you know me.

I first heard about Kickstarter about a year ago. Somebody was telling me about this website that allows artists to raise money for their projects. Of course, I was skeptical at first. "Oh, right,"  I thought,  "A website where everyone just gives you free money to achieve your dreams. Sounds legit." However, I researched it a bit more and found that as long as people kept their fundraising goals reasonable, many projects were actually being fully backed. So then, when it came time for my band to record a new CD (having no money as we'd been minus a guitarist for a while and unable to play shows), I thought, what the hell? Let's give it a shot.

So, we got a few friends together, spent about $60, and made an hilariously awesome video: High Council Kickstarter Video . A good time was had by all, but also, it worked! Family, friends, acquaintances, and some guy from France all pledged to the project, and we were able to raise enough money to get it off the ground. I even went on to donate to a friend's band's recording. I thought that this was really going to revolutionize the way that musicians make money, and that it was a very positive thing. I've even heard that Kickstarter projects raised more money last year than the National Endowment for the Arts (but I haven't researched the validity of this).

However, by virtue of the fact that I work at a comic store, I started hearing about companies that already exist running Kickstarter projects, like this one: Reaper Miniatures . The first thing to note about this project is that out of a $30,000 goal, the project raised $3,400,000. This company already has brand name recognition, and by offering an insane rewards package (if you're into the model thing), they secured what I'm willing to bet is the biggest one-time influx of cash that they've ever received in the history of their company. Sounds pretty good, right? I'm not so sure. For the moment, lets overlook the fact that this shit is for nerds. What this company has done in order to fund a new product line is to effectively pre-sell their merchandise directly to customers at pennies on the dollar. Furthermore, because of the sheer quantity of rewards they gave out at such low prices, its highly unlikely that these customers will a) need/want more of it any time soon, or b) ever be willing to pay full retail price at any point in the future when such a glut has been produced (hello Ebay!).

Now, whether intentional or not, this project has most likely cut retail stores like mine out of the equation for the foreseeable future. Why would anyone want to carry this product line when anyone who could possibly have wanted to buy it will already have more than they could ever use upon the moment of its release? Perhaps now this company has unwittingly transformed into an online, direct-to-customers outlet. Or, perhaps they've priced themselves out of their own market, and what really seems like a 3.4 million dollar blessing has burned all of their bridges in the retail world and led the company to die a slow death. Its hard to say, and time will tell.

What this project and others like it further tell us is that Kickstarter seems to have no qualms about letting pre-existing companies create projects. Is developing a new miniature model line an artistic project? Uuuhhh... I guess. I mean, you do need an artist to make that kind of thing. But where is the line drawn? How long will it be before Pepsi runs a Kickstarter to fund a new logo for their 20 oz bottles? That's technically artwork, and it will make Kickstarter an enormous dump-ton of money, so I can see no reason why they wouldn't allow it. Pepsi could then just reward donors with unending gallons of slightly discounted Pepsi, effectively just giving a new venue to just sell the same old stuff. On that line of reasoning, what's stopping political candidates from starting a project to design a new campaign banner, or record a self-congratulatory campaign song? Surely we'll all be rewarded with plenty of bumper stickers, pamphlets, buttons, lawn signs, and all manner of propaganda decorated with the new logo we donated to create. How long will it be before the front page of Kickstarter.com is simply loaded with pet projects from the advertising branch of every major corporation in the world?

New mascot for McDonalds? Funded! Thanks for the Big Mac coupons. New logo for Shell Oil? Funded! Thanks for the mesh-backed baseball cap. Mitt Romney's Autobiography? Funded! Thanks for the autographed copy that someone else signed. New fuckin raincoat for the Long John Silver's guy? Funded! Thanks for the six piece fish n' chips meal. Isn't art wonderful?

Let's get back to music for a minute before I bring this home, as this is the aspect I care about most. It may seem like I'm kicking a gift horse in face by examining all the negative potentialities of the website that's been very good to me, but its important to understand here that I don't matter. As a musician, I never have and probably never will make any money. I'm looking at the big picture here, the real American dollars. Back in the day, it worked like this:

1. Record label signs you.
2. Record label lends you enough money to record an album.
3. Record gets released and they promote it. You hope it sells enough copies to pay them back with some money left over for yourself.
4. You go tour to promote the album to help it sell enough copies to pay back the record label, and hopefully make some money for yourself.

That was how rock stars were made. The ones that made the company money were the ones who lived the life. These days, with the advent of Kickstarter, it might look something like this:

1. You make a Kickstarter to fund your album.
2. You hit your goal and get the money. Hooray!
3. You use all the money to record the album and create/ship all your rewards to the donors.
4. There's no record company to pay back. From here on out, it's all profit, baby!

Or is it? Even if you are a recognized musician or band, chances are that your Kickstarter goal didn't include funding for a national scale promotion campaign. Are you ever really going to be able to reach as many people as you could have with the record labels? In addition, what's the post-Kickstarter incentive for people to buy your album? If you're a real fan, you probably already donated and received the album plus some kind of bonus track, live recording, T-Shirt, etc, etc that the band offered as a reward. At this point, the only people left are probably the ones who are just going to pirate the album anyway. Its true that you're not in debt to anyone, and don't get me wrong, that's great, but the opportunities for you to actually make a living off of that album might be greatly reduced. Musicians might have to start adding personal compensation to the total dollar amount of the goals they set on Kickstarter, and that could make some of the goals unreachable.

In any case, Kickstarter is still very young, and its too early to gauge the long term effects it will have on music and the economy in general. However, once it gets big enough to show up on Corporate America's radar, you can be sure that things will change. I believe this site was started with good intentions, and in practice it has raised a lot of money for legitimate artistic projects. It has also produced a lot of shocking, million-dollar grand slams that can't help but raise the eyebrows of those who are keenly aware of how to profitably exploit such things. Yes, Kickstarter may have hatched as an indie, artist friendly hub to fuel our imaginations, but by the time its fully grown we could be looking at a website full of commercials that's just another place to do our online shopping.

So... Should I Just Not Vote?

Yea, so that's the question. If being semi-addicted to political news has taught me anything, its that by the time the election for the president of the United States of America comes around this November, I will have grown so fucking sick of the circus that is our commercially sponsored facade of democracy that I probably won't give enough of a shit to vote. Now, everyone knows, or should at least realize, most people in this country don't vote at all. I get the feeling that the minority that actually does feels that what it is doing is really important. I used to feel that way too, but now I don't think I do anymore. I told myself that voting was one of the few methods in which we citizens are allowed to exercise our freedoms. This is true: we do have the freedom to vote. However, that doesn't mean it makes any difference whatsoever. And I'm not speaking from the "I'm just one person. What difference can I make?" perspective. I'm saying that literally, in practice and function, our presidential votes do not matter. I don't mean to sound pedantic, and I'm sure most of you already know this, but just to clarify:

United States Electoral College

Read up on that, if you're so inclined. If not, I'll skip to the important part.

Irrelevancy of national popular vote

The elections of 1876,^[77] 1888,^[77] and 2000^[77] produced an Electoral College winner who did not receive the plurality of the nationwide popular vote. In 1824, there were six states in which electors were legislatively appointed, rather than popularly elected, so the true national popular vote is uncertain. When no candidate received a majority of electoral votes in 1824, the election was decided by the House of Representatives and so could be considered distinct from the latter three elections in which all of the states had popular selection of electors.^[78]

Opponents of the Electoral College claim that such outcomes do not logically follow the normative concept of how a democratic system should function. One view is that the Electoral College violates the principle of political equality, since presidential elections are not decided by the one-person one-vote principle.^[77]

A result of the present functionality of the Electoral College is that the national popular vote bears no legal or factual significance on determining the outcome of the election. Since the national popular vote is irrelevant, both voters and candidates are assumed to base their campaign strategies around the existence of the Electoral College; any close race has candidates campaigning to maximize electoral votes by capturing coveted swing states, not to maximize national popular vote totals.

Of course, however, we do directly elect our congresspeople, but even fewer people actually vote for them. Those that do are just taking it on good faith that their representative will see how their district voted in the Presidential race and put in a good word for them. That might be an oversimplification, but its probably not. If they don't vote likewise (the congresspeople that is), they might not get reelected for their next term.

Oh no! Poor congresspeople! They'll somehow have to scrape by on their $300k+/yr "consulting job" that they got after voting whichever way their lobbyist wanted all those times.

So, after taking a step back from all the manufactured excitement and outrage about what Obama said or what Romney said or Biden or Ryan or whoever-the-fuck, and reminding myself that I already know that voting doesn't actually matter, I just have to question why I should even participate. Besides some nagging sense of white guilt that I'm not taking advantage of a freedom that I know full well that people in other countries are dying for, is there any legitimate, concrete rationale for doing this?  Am I supposed to take this symbolic bone that our country is throwing us and be happy with it? I don't know, but I am sincerely doubting that I could even symbolically throw my support behind either one of the candidates currently running for president.

I mean, Romney is just out of the question. There is no man alive who more perfectly embodies a spirit of having no fucking clue not only of the struggles of poor Americans, but of people who just aren't sickeningly rich. Now I don't like to choose a candidate based solely on personality, but comments he's made like how he's not worried about the poor because "there's a safety net in place for them" show so clearly that not only is he completely devoid of any compassion, but he's unaware that there is even a need for such an emotion to begin with. Whenever any reporter dares to call him out on some pesky facts or tries to circumvent his talking points, he becomes frustrated at their insolence and makes an exasperated face like he just watched them jerk off in his throne room. There is no more adequate analogous figure for this man than Thurston Howell III of Giligan's Island. He's trapped in a land he doesn't understand with people who aren't all infatuated with how much money he has, and he has no useful skills except for throwing his wealth around in order to get what he wants, which is more money. I have no idea why this person is even in politics, except maybe to make his rich friends even richer, but let's face it, you don't have to be president to do that. And besides, at least Thurston Howell sometimes had a sense of humor.

Then there's Obama. Despite the fact that he has thrown the middle class a couple of corporate, watered-down life rafts like healthcare and signed on to gay civil rights issues that everyone besides old people, zealots, and racists have been on board with for years, his administration is still responsible for continued and repeated actions that are morally reprehensible. Sure, he's ended combat operations in Iraq (leaving behind thousands of other troops and military contractors), but the fact is that he authorizes drone strikes in sovereign nations on innocent people every day. He is responsible for targeted assassinations without trial or due process, claiming the executive branch saying so is all the authorization one needs. Is this as bad as the illegal wars and wholesale slaughter of civilians under Bush? No, its not. And obviously, he gets a pass for Bin Laden, but still, how can I bring myself to vote for someone whom I know is guilty of continuing the worst of this country's imperialist policies? In addition, he continually supports nightmare legislation like the NDAA and has yet to actually close Guantanamo like he promised. If Romney is Thurston Howell, Obama is Tony Soprano. You really want to like the guy because he legitimately cares about those close to him and tries to make sure they're taken care of, but when he leaves his home to go to work he does terrible things.

It's like, "Hey, you kids OK with your healthcare? Good. Now daddy's gotta go order some assassinations without congressional oversight." So forget about that.

I knew it was dark times indeed when I had to seriously consider if I would vote for Ron Paul were he to get the nomination. I agree with about half of his ideas, such as "stop spending all our money on wars" and "protect our civil liberties", but the other half of his agenda is to systematically dismantle everything the working class has fought to earn for the last 100 years. Obviously I don't think that Medicare and Social Security are flawless programs that don't need any fixing, but Ron Paul wants to revert the country to an entitlement-free time when "folks just helped each other out" from the good of their hearts, I guess. That's mostly the system that the entirety of human civilization had been operating under for all of history, and yet strangely there was no such thing as a middle class until America in the 1950's. So let's just ask all of human history for the last 10,000 years how well voluntary systems of public welfare work out.

Spoiler alert: it doesn't. Without minimum wage, worker protections, and regulations on the power of business, there is no middle class. This isn't conjecture, its history. Quote Ayn Rand all you want, but a society with no funds for the public good doesn't equal some kind of heroic capitalist utopia, it equals feudalism. Sorry, but I've got the history of every nation on earth to back me up on this. Anyway, this is besides the point since Ron Paul isn't in the running anyway.

So what am I supposed to do? Choose between the self serving capitalist tyrant or the promise-breaking centrist war hawk? Is there even a lesser of two evils to choose from? Maybe the entire system is evil. In that case, wouldn't I be evil for participating? Maybe I should just sit this one out.