Really, I think that state of mind is all the copy protection any creator needs these days.
Awhile ago I was listening to a podcast interview with Patton Oswalt, and the discussion turned to other comedians who had stolen his jokes. He basically said he didn't care. Which is the same reaction that Louis CK had when people were stealing his jokes. Remember, Louis CK regularly nukes his entire repertoire and starts again from nothing.
Neither guy really cared, because the next morning they were gonna get up, put on the coffee pot, and sit down and write twenty more jokes, and maybe five of them would be any good, and maybe one would be gold but still not make the cut. But they'd likely be twenty jokes ahead of the Mr. Steals-His-Jokes of the world.
And just like you don't become a Patton Oswalt by sweating stolen jokes, you don't become a Richard Stevens by freaking out over who might be grubbing your online comic for free.
Back in January, Kirby Krackle got to check another item off our collective to-do list: our first "performance video" that didn't portray us as animated cartoon characters! We crammed our gear into the Comic Stop in Redmond and played through "I Wanna Live In A World Full Of Heroes" while filmmakers Garret and Jill orbited the room with fancy camera gear.
HEY I'M NOT DEAD YOU GUYS I just took a blogging break for most of the last month. Last week Megan and I went to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree for a much, much, much-needed break from the Pacific Northwest winter gloom. It turned out to be an ideal place for someone like me who likes to evenly divide vacation time between wilderness adventure and lazing in a hammock by a pool with a book and beverage. I took the above photo while hiking a short loop trail only a mile or two from our hotel.
So much has happened since my last post: Kin to Stars played our third show and kind of struggled through it; Kirby Krackle shot a video (more on that later) and kicked off a West Coast tour with nerdcore rapper Adam Warrock (we, the live band, only played the Seattle and Portland shows before Kyle struck off solo); Explone snagged an opening slot for The Jealous Sound here in Seattle, and were confirmed to open for one of my favorite heavy bands, King's X, until their drummer was suddenly hospitalized and their tour canceled, yikes! So that's off for now.
This weekend Explone headlines Friday night at the King Cat Theater (which I'm pretty sure will be torn down afterward to make more buildings for Amazon.com) and Kin to Stars plays a THREE HOUR show at The HUB in Tacoma on Saturday.
In addition, we had electricians come out and drill holes into our house. Would you like to see my house in cross-section? Well here it is anyway:
Matt Haughey recounts how he almost lost the business he'd been running for over a decade due to a bogus copyright claim:
"The formal retraction took nearly two weeks to secure and convince lawyers for my host that it was adequate for removing the DMCA claim. That's two weeks into a 30 day window before I lost my rack of servers and hosting account completely. I'll never forget last year when I went through this because it was two of the stupidest weeks of my life, all because of some problematic laws granted new powers to copyright holders and I had to engage in a prolonged legal fight thanks to a mistake made by a bot."
This is my personal nightmare scenario: I get slapped with a DMCA takedown because one of my song titles resembles another song title, or one of my legally licensed cover songs attracts the attention of some label's lawyers (or worse, a web-crawling robot script they employ), and I'd have to make a difficult and/or expensive choice.
It seems that these US copyright bills always start with "protecting our intellectual property" and end with "keeping you from knowing, doing or saying things we don't want you to know, do or say."
I'd like to believe that the Stop Online Piracy (STOP) and Protect IP (PIPA) bills would only be used to target "rogue" "foreign" infringing websites, as the authors and supporters contend. But that's naïve, because the copyright laws we have now are already being abused.
Seattle is currently under a sheet of snowy ice! The back door to my house is literally frozen shut and I've been housebound for three days. Luckily I have soup, grilled cheese, a couch-cushion fort to keep away the ice weasels, and the new Kin to Stars single cookin' up. We're performing our third-show ever at the newly-relocated Wayward Coffee in Seattle on January 28th. Details are here on the Facebooks. Hopefully we'll all be thawed out by then.
In other news, I'm promoting snowgnarok as an alternative to snowpocalypse and snowmaggedon, which are both totally played. Please help draw attention to this campaign by changing your Twitter avatar to a light shade of completely white.
I've decided that I don't hate the new Van Halen song and video. The song is 100% not-great VH but all the familiar elements are there, except for maybe Wolfgang.
Beyond the fact that I couldn't stop singing "sexy dragon magiiic!" under my breath for a few hours, this song and video had very little impact on me, other than what I expect from any other viral media thing. I consumed it as I do all media these days: in front of a computer screen, with headphones on. I watched, I was amused, I moved on.
I was not sitting at a computer screen with headphones on when I first heard Van Halen's "Summer Nights." Instead, I was in a car with my high school buddies, on one of the last days of the school year. It was almost summer, finally warm enough to go without a jacket, and we were cruising around the sticks listening to FM radio. Van Halen had just released 5150, Sammy Hagar had replaced Diamond Dave and we were all LOSING OUR MINDS over it.
And when my buddy Jeff jammed the cassette of 5150 into the car's stereo and the opening chords of "Summer Nights" started playing, we pulled up alongside another car at a red light and Pat began rolling the windows down so the occupants could see us stick our heads out just in time to shout out in goofy fist-pumping unison with Sammy:
UHN!
And then peel away, rolling the windows up like nothing happened.
I'm holding out hope that as digital music moves to mobile, away from screens and headphones, there'll be more chances for things that are momentarily interesting to become really awesome moments for someone.
"During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as 'undeliverable,' and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost."
As the story of Lakhdar Boumediene's experience at Guantanamo winds its way across the internet, all I can think of is everyone who told me that if people were being held in that place, there were probably good reasons for it, because if there weren't they wouldn't be in Guantanamo. How ridiculous to think so.
A long time ago I got called for jury duty and spent two days hanging around a city courthouse. To my surprise, I got selected for a trial. During the voir dire phase of juror selection, the defense and prosecuting attorneys took turns asking us questions intended to determine if any of us were unfairly prejudiced, crazy or just extra unhappy to be there.
The defense attorney singled me out. He gestured at the defendant. "Obviously he's done something wrong, or he wouldn't be here, right?"
Of course, the answer to this is no -- in fact it is his right to be here, to have a trial at which to plead his case. Because, allegedly, that's how we roll in the US of A, no matter how sensationalized your story has become. The defendant had probably spent a single evening in the county lockup that previous night, and I could see it in his expression: thank God I am here.
It's pretty easy to get a gig. If you live here, there are hundreds of coffeeshops, open mics, art galleries, restaurants and other venues that will let you work your craft in front of an audience, without expecting you to pack the place. You might be competing with an espresso machine and people might have their noses in their MacBooks and regular books, but if you're content to be background music while you work up your chops, you won't be lacking opportunities to play.
The locals are still proud of the grunge thing. When I moved here I was hesitant to even mention "grunge" to anyone, figuring most locals would be sooo over it. I'm happy to say that's not the case at all. Those who grew up here in the 90s remember how exciting those days were, when the city was the heart of a new musical groundswell. I haven't met any locals embarrassed to still be Pearl Jam or Soundgarden fans.
It's more tribes-y than clique-y. Every scene has its inner circle, but I don't think you can buy your way in with expensive equipment and stage clothes. Despite Seattle's reputation for being chilly, its musicians are some of the warmest, friendliest people I've met (that goes double for the native sons and daughters), and they tend to form tribes and small communities which are not impenetrable to anyone who puts in a good faith effort to know them. (Best way to do that? Join a band.)
It's isolated. It's three hours to Portland OR, four hours to Spokane and forever to anywhere beyond that. Unlike anywhere east of the Ohio River, where an hour or two in any direction gets to you to a considerably populated metropolis. This leads to a kind of self-containment, where a band from Portland might have a hard time finding a gig in Seattle because there's no shortage of local acts to choose from. This also works in reverse for Seattle acts trying to land gigs outside of Seattle. A challenge all around.
It's not all indie folk. There are thriving hip-hop and metal scenes, a resurgence of indie funk and soul, and we even have an upstart rock orchestra. KEXP might be our most famous FM station, but we've also got major triple-A in KMTT, hard rock and metal in KISW, and more than a few country, pop and dance stations. We're home several independent electronica festivals, and the annual Folklife festival draws thousands of spectators every year. (And yes, we do have quite a bit of folky stuff at the moment, thank you. Guilty as charged.) Whatever you're into, there's a niche for you here somewhere.
Despite entering my eighth dark, miserably rain-soaked Seattle winter, this place still tops my list of favorite places I've lived.
Last weekend I experimented with GarageBand's built-in guitar amp modeling. My god. I could not believe the sounds I was getting, and just from default settings! I don't know if Apple's amp modeling is done in-house or not, but it certainly rivals anything I've heard from Line 6. I did some rock demos that to my ear sound like they were cut in Butch Vig's garage, and I didn't use a single microphone.
Apple software is amazing. At some point in the past few years, Apple figured out how get the software out of the user's way and just let you make stuff. It goes beyond the user interface stuff and deep into the product itself.
For example, iMovie comes with a limited set of filters and transitions, so you can add special effects to a clip or make fancy jump cuts. But here's the genius: you only get a handful of filters, but those filters are nearly perfect with default settings. If you're a knob-twiddler you won't appreciate this, but iMovie is not about knob-twiddling, it's about letting you make a damn movie on your laptop.
This tendency toward ease, toward letting you make something, is even more evident in GarageBand. There's no "mixer view" like you'd get with Logic or ProTools, but who cares. The stock instruments actually sound good, and while you can tweak the settings of plug-in effects as much as you like, the default settings of the various reverbs, compressors, EQs are so good, you can almost sense the hand of some anonymous Apple engineer who had the good sense to say "hey, how awesome would it be if whoever uses this thing doesn't have to mess with it?"
And then there are those guitar amp modelers. It's almost comical.
I'm a late, reluctant Apple convert. I had one of the first iBooks and grew to hate early OSX, nothing seemed ready for any serious work. I tend to view computers as I do automobiles. For some people, a car is a lifestyle expression. For me, a car is a chair on four wheels that takes me where I want to go. I've only owned one new car in my lifetime, and I chose the basest base model I could find because I truly do not give a damn. Likewise, I never cared that my main machine was a beige box so long as it let me do the stuff I wanted.
For me, the switch to a MacBook was not for fashion-forward reasons but because I just wanted stuff to work, good lord why can't this stuff just work instead of requiring me to don scuba gear and go cave-diving into the Settings menu, scanning ad-laden messageboard posts for out-of-date clues as to what this ASIO error means and why that driver doesn't work because it's not ported to 64-bit yet and suddenly it's two or three hours down the drain and I really wanted to record vocals tonight but now I'm tired and I have to be at work early tomorrow and screw this, I just want to make this one thing, why is all this stuff in my way?
This is how the world ends, not in fire or ice, nor with a bang or whimper, but when everything can be done satisfactorily on a MacBook Pro.
