You’re completely naked save for a fine sheen of sweat and a  battered pair of Tony Lama roper’s boots.  You’re in a shaky, arthritic sort of three-point stance over a miniature traffic cone, fingers two knuckles deep in avocado-green shag carpet.  From somewhere in the nebulous distance, Mark Lanegan sings The Girl From Ipanema as a tail-coated Charles Manson paddles your ass with the backside of a ukulele.

You haven’t?

Neither have I.

There I stand, watching a pale, green-tinged sun come up over the water. I’m lost in thought. (But not too deep. Coffee won’t be ready for another five minutes.) The mouldering, ramshackle dock groans like a hungover barmaid with the wake of each passing bass boat, loose, rusty nail-heads digging into the soles of my grubby dime-store flip-flops. A breeze comes to me from the next valley, bringing with it the flat, metallic bite of gasoline-tainted lakewater and the drone of onrushing urban sprawl. The collar of my shirt flutters. Just a little. It almost seems more at home here than I am.

Not surprising, really. This is a shirt made to take everything in stride: bar fights, out-of-control bonfires, chainsaw accidents, two-day hangovers, entire weeks bunking on a sprung pull-out sofa.

The man who wears this shirt can meet the worst life dishes out and sleep right through it. They could have used a few up in Washington after the Bay of Pigs.

This faux-broadcloth button-down marvel gives the unmistakable impression that it’s never seen the inside of a drawing room or a symphony hall. Or a washing machine. It’s cut nice and full through the chest, and just a little long; I imagine it would stay tucked in just fine, if you ever bothered. But of course you won’t. Not this shirt.

The rich, yarn-dyed colors hint that, just maybe, you know a thing or two about fashion. The dull, unimaginative micro-plaid says, “Don’t bet on it.” And buttons? This, clearly, is not a shirt that gets too hung up about such things. Oh, there are a few, most of which even match. But they tend to slip open once or twice a day, and it’s missing one or two at the very top, so the shirt is always open just a bit further than most. Gives a man room to think.

Or not. No pressure.
The Apathetic Shirt (No. 1367).

Available in XL-XXL only.

Colors: Shades of faded blue. Imminently forgettable.

Price: $37.95

Already own one? Or three? Then I’ve got just the pants for you…

Thomas Jefferson never wore pants like these. Neither did Andrew Carnegie. MacArthur might have looked once, but not twice. I shudder to think what Oscar Wilde would’ve had to say about them..

These are not pants that negotiate treaties. They do not control fortunes or found nations. They don’t drive company cars.

These are the pants that drive across three states, at ninety miles an hour, to get to a sold-out concert, and just as fast back, so as to be on time for work. These are pants that climb chain-link fences to steal ‘high-voltage’ signs. These pants have been inside a strip club at ten in the morning, and have slept in the bottom of a homemade canoe on the Green River.

These are the pants that bailed you out of jail at three in the morning. There was probably another pair sitting on the bunk right above you.

These pants have been on fire. They’ve been stabbed, spat on, shot at, bled in, ripped apart, sewn up, thrown away, bought secondhand, and set on fire again. These pants smell like bong water. And do you know what?

They’re still pretty good pants.

I think it’s the pockets. There are eight altogether; between them, you can carry just about everything you own. Maybe more. Pockets like this make a man feel… What? Competent, maybe.

If Hemingway had had a pair of these pants, he might have dragged those sharks out of Bimini Bay with his teeth. He’d have looked like shit doing it, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to tell him.

No-Bullshit Pants (No. 1273). Made of a miraculous twill; heavy enough to last forever, but light enough to be perpetually wrinkled. Pockets range in size from coins to six-packs. Fit is roomy, but the fall is always about an inch short.

Men’s even sizes: 32-52.

Colors: Our choice of 12, all guaranteed to match nothing you own.

Price: $55.95

You know, there’s not even a compelling reason to analyze this all that deeply. Nominally, P.A.A. 2007 gives the President and the Attorney General (meaning, ultimately, the NSA) increased authority in authorizing  surveillance and data acquisition as concerns

persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,

insofar as

the acquisition does not constitute electronic surveillance,

and

a significant purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign intelligence information.

There are some finer points–among them, the ‘sunset clause’, which means that the Act can be “reconsidered” in six months, but in practice likely means that the sun will set over the cold and congealing rivers of Hell before this power is handed back willingly–but that’s it in a nutshell. In plain English, the Executive Branch now possesses an even greater capacity to be violently xenophobic. How remarkable is this? After unabashedly trampling on the civil liberties of United States citizens for years now, seeking legislative authority to harass foreign nationals is, frankly, anticlimactic.

No, what bothers me about this Act is not the legislation itself, but the semantics and the delivery. They called the bloody thing The Protect America Act, but for all the subtlety involved, they might as well have called it the Don’t Smash Baby Kittens With a Hammer Act. I mean, it’s got the words ‘Protect America’ built right in; what kind of freedom-hating, peace-fearing, war-mongering, baby-decapitating Communist terrorist scumbag would vote against that?

The point is this: Yes, it’s a terrifying annexation of power. Yes, it’s a vague, intentionally poorly-worded affair through which all manner of lunatic abuses and infractions might potentially be driven. Yes, it will almost certainly be integrated, at some point, into a form wherein it directly threatens the rights and freedoms of people just like you and me. But what scares me even more is that when something like this comes along, the American public–with a few notable and appreciated exceptions–doesn’t protest. No, we reach for the Astroglide and bend over a little further.

Why?

Because it’s all for the Greater Good. Because it’s all about safety and security and keeping out the goddamned Terrorists, whoever the hell they are. Because we’ve been taught to fear, and taught that the only answer to that fear is an unblinking eye.  Because deep down we really believe that the U.S. government, given enough power and popular support, can really rid the world of everyone who doesn’t think and feel and believe and look–yes, that too–just like we do, and never-you-mind that we ourselves have no idea what we think and believe from one day to the next.

Because we actually believe that, when that fateful day comes, when everyone who’s left thinks alike and acts alike and nobody ever has to be afraid anymore, that the government will smile, thank us for our sacrifice, and hand back all those liberties, all those rights and freedoms.  All that power.

And that’s the kind of self-rationalizing, doublethink bullshit we’re getting better and better at buying into these days in America.

That is what frightens me.

A quick recap for those, like myself, who’ve been asleep for three weeks:

SoundExchange (Corporate motto: “[This motto is protected by federal copyright usage restrictions, and may not be viewed except by licensees of SoundExchange, Inc. and their assigns.]“), in an unprecedented show of good sportsmanship not unlike that with which a bored housecat allows a chipmunk to limp around in dazed, broken-legged circles before eating it, agreed to temporarily stay collection of fees due under the newly-minted royalty scheme. (That is, of course, with the understanding that back dues and interest will be payable immediately upon a compromise settlement). To their–very small–credit, the position they are currently championing would at least forego decapitating the smallest of net broadcasters (non-commercial operations and/or those worth less than $1.2 million per annum) . There position is summed up nicely in this quote from spokesman Richard Addes (via CNNmoney.com):

We are talking to small webcasters and representatives of public radio to see if we can reach some kind of acceptable compromise, but everybody else is going to be bound [by the new regulations].

In other words, they aren’t even bothering to pretend that this is anything other than carefully-litigated extortion. By only hammer-locking the largest of the broadcasters, they effectively admit that they’re only interested in growing high-yield crops on their money farm.

That brings us to the issue of fee caps. Commercial webcasters–Pandora, Live365, et al–understandably turned a little green at the CRB-stipulated $500 per stream policy. How many audio streams does Pandora.com establish in a given year? Hell, in a day? It doesn’t take an economics major to see that even a multi-million-dollar entity will bleed white at that rate. So, in their continuing generosity, the nice boys and girls over at SoundExchange agreed to cap annual fees for such large concerns at a paltry $50,000 annually. Says Executive Director John Simon:

We believe that this minimum fee proposal addresses webcasters’ concerns about the minimum fee affecting webcasters with hundreds or even thousands of stations.

This to me is reminiscent of automotive dealerships in the past raising their sticker prices astronomically and then offering seemingly unbelievable discounts. Effectively, what they’re saying is “Sure, it’s more than you wanted to pay, but it’s fifty percent off. Fifty percent! With that kind of savings, how can you afford not to buy?”

Of course we need not forget this is a good-faith compromise offer in the same sense that the guy who puts a knife to your throat in an alley and demands your wallet is offering you a perfectly reasonable choice when he says, “Your money or your life.”

But wait, it gets better.

In order for this compromise to even be considered on the part of Sound Exchange and the rest of Big Music, webcasters must commit, again in the words of Simon, to “become much more compliant in their reporting” and “work on a technologically-feasible solution [to stream-ripping].” These two points were mysteriously under-hyped in the initial “shucks, aren’t we generous” fanfare the industry raised over it’s talks with net radio outlets. The first seems quite straightforward in that it indicates a mandate for stringent, IRS-grade record-keeping and documentation. A pain in the ass, at best. At worst, a clerical nightmare. The second, however, is the blue-ribbon winner. “A solution for the prevention of stream-ripping” means one thing and one thing only: DRM. And we all know what a wonderfully painless operation that’s always been, don’t we?

The bottom line is that the recording industry has grown so complacent, so bound up in its sense of fiduciary entitlement, that they can no longer be reasoned with. To paraphrase Leo Laporte, the inimitable Tech Guy, the music industry went to their legislative and judiciary pet, the Copyright Royalty Board, and asked for the moon. And lo and behold, they got it. The CRB handed them a blank check, a permit to extort. They’ve been trying and failing to squeeze performance royalties out of over-the-air broadcasters for 80 years (not that they aren’t still trying, mind you), and they’re damned and determined to get it right the first time with internet broadcasting.

Of course, there’s still hope, some of it issuing from and unlikely quarter: Congress. The Internet Radio Equality Act is by no means out of steam. Here’s an excerpt from a statement from Sens. Wyden and Brownback, two of its champions:

While we strongly support a negotiated solution, we will not allow the minimum fee issue to be used to force an agreement that mandates DRM technology and fails to respect the established principles of fair use and consumer rights.
…
If great progress toward a fair solution for webcasters is not made by Congress’s return to Washington after Labor Day, then we plan to take expeditious steps toward passage of the Internet Radio Equality Act.

Please take a minute to read the rest of the statement courtesy of Eliot von Buskirk of Wired.com. In fact take five minutes and send your own congressional representatives a letter letting them know how you feel about this issue, whatever those feelings may be. If you don’t know who your representatives are, or how to get in touch with them, head on over to SaveNetRadio.org and input your ZIP code. Their database will provide you with all relevant contact information, including telephone numbers and outlines of talking points if you’re not sure how you want to approach the issue.

Of course, our best line of defense, as entertainment consumers, is to remember, as I’ve said before, that the entertainment industries–the record industry included–exists on the whim and good grace of the audience. Record sales are a privilege, not a right. Period. Therefore, I say this: Whether you be a listener or a broadcaster in any medium, on any scale, I urge you to remember that there are vast oceans of musical talent out there who haven’t yet been assimilated into the corporate entertainment complex. And for you musicians and performers in the audience, remember that the more people who can hear you, the more records you sell, regardless of what bullshit they concoct to the contrary. You’d do well to remind your labels and production houses that killing off an outlet as vast, accessible, and inexhaustible as net radio is not in your best interest, and that what’s not in your best interest is not in their best interest.

Don’t let them forget we’re listening, friends.

Yep, that’s right. Coming soon to a posh research clinic near you, and brought to you thanks in part to decades of hard work on the part of the Human Genome Project: a sleek, trendy, imminently framable-for-display map of your very own personal genome. Impress your kids! Be the envy of all your friends! Be the very first on your block to own a really long and inscrutable document which details, among other things, how likely you are to suffer early-onset male pattern baldness!

But wait! There’s more!

Act now and you’ll also receive full Web 2.0 integration! You heard right! Your genome can be the next big meme! But hurry! You don’t want to be the last kid on Facebook Myspace Twitter Pownce to make your genetic mapping part of the digital metaconscious, do you?

In all seriousness, though, I’m not sure quite what to make of this.

Is this just a post modern take on colonics and full-body imaging? In other words, is it just a snake-oil-and-mummy-dust exercise in superstitious gimmickry and pop-culture status symbology? Jason Bobe says no. Conan O’Brien et al disagree. Of course, let’s not forget that ours, collectively, is a culture that grew bored with space travel after one successful moon landing, but clings with meth-addled raptness to every new development in the on-going saga of Paris Hilton. I’m almost afraid that even asking whether this is legitimate science or flavor-of-the-month pigswill is perhaps giving us too much credit.

Then there are a couple of little details to be ironed out. (You know, once we’ve managed to scrounge a quick $20,000 from the sofa cushions to pay for the sequencing.)

First, do I own it? I mean, it is my genome, after all. But then, the vast majority of my genetic data is shared with every other human being–not to mention every other form of life–on the planet. Therefore, could or should I be able to patent my genome or otherwise legally secure exclusive rights to the data that fundamentally represents me? Or should it be part of the public domain, another entry in a Wikipedia of genetic information? Should I even care, since I’m not really profiting from it anyway?

Next, there’s commercial involvement to consider. How much of this data are we prepared to have filter into the hands of corporate entities? If the answer is anything other than, “All of it”, then we need to scrap the whole idea and start over with something more innocuous, like stamp-collecting. The Web has taught us a lot of things (many of which don’t bear repeating in polite society). But most resounding of all is this lesson: Nothing is private. And if you think AdSense is pervasive and laser-targeted now, wait till Google has your genetic code on file.

And then there’s the $64,000 question: What the hell do we do with a map of our personal genome? Its value as a diagnostic tool is directly proportional to the capacity of the medical community to act on the information stored therein. That is, what use is it to know that I have an inherent genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s if there’s nothing I can do about it. The situation is roughly analogous to the early days of in-car radar detectors; for the first time, consumers were able to buy a $300 device that could be hidden in a car which would emit a loud beep whenever they got a speeding ticket. The phrase ‘useless as rubber lips on a woodpecker’ springs inexorably to mind…

Anyone up for a game of political football?

**Edit**

Seems to be fixed.

We’re all good little netizens here, so I assume everyone knows what that means, right? Show of hands?

Yes, you there, in the back; the large, unkempt-looking fellow. Yes, why don’t you step to the front and tell everyone who hasn’t been paying attention what’s going on?

The LOC’s Copyright Royalty Board issued notice on March 2 of this year that, effective May 15, royalty fees levied against internet-based broadcasters for the usage of commercially-recorded music would increase by anywhere from 300% to as much as 1200% (dependent on a broadcaster’s existing royalty fee cost structure). In addition, this measure will be considered effective retroactively from January 1, 2006. Popular activist site Savenetradio.org sums up the situation nicely:

At the request of the Recording Industry Association of America, the CRB ignored the fact that Internet radio royalties were already double what satellite radio pays, and multiplied the royalties even further. The 2005 royalty rate was 7/100 of a penny per song streamed; the 2010 rate will be 19/100 of a penny per song streamed. And for small webcasters that were able to calculate royalties as a percentage of revenue in 2005 – that option was quashed by the CRB, so small webcasters’ royalties will grow exponentially!

Now pardon me for donning my stylish tinfoil chapeau here, but I think this more or less removes any and all doubt as to whether or not the CRB is, at least in its current iteration, anything more or less than one more pretty potted ficus decorating the lobby of the Ministry of Entertainment. Now, I’m not even going to bother posting links to examples of the myriad legally-and-philosophically questionable activities engaged in by Big Entertainment in the last few years (but always in the name of What’s Best for Music/Movies/[Insert Medium Here], of course). By now, you already have your opinions on the subject, so I’m not even going to waste the bandwidth. No, what I’d like to do instead is to congratulate the RIAA. Yep, you heard right. If I could arrange a face-to-face with Mitch Bainwol, I’d shake his hand. I really would. Why? Because, with the onslaught of the First Holy Crusade Against Darkest Internet, and for the first time since the filing of the initial wave of anti-P2P lawsuits, the RIAA have actually scored a clean hit. Think about it: No more mucking around with dubious interpretations of copyright law. No more quasi-admissible ‘driftnet’ litigation. In fact (they seem to say), fuck the law. Who needs the law when you have economics on your side?

Which brings me kicking and screaming up to the brink of the sprawling tarpit of perversity that is entertainment economics. For simplicity’s sake, let’s only consider only the musical branch of the entertainment industrial complex. Now, at the risk of rubber-stamping my age across my forehead, let me say that I do, in fact, remember days when music came into our homes and cars via radio. You remember radio, right? Like that big ol’ Silver Marshall hi-fi in Jerry Pridmore’s basement? The Top 40 scene was for your parents, but there was this bitchin’ FM station out of somewhere or other (Denver, maybe?) that played Zeppelin and Velvet Underground all night, and it sounded absolutely fucking amazing, especially after a couple of dips into the little plastic baggie Jerry kept hidden behind a loose brick by the freezer. Then you got older, and the little plastic baggie went away (probably because your mom found it after you went away to college), and the radio?

Well, the radio’s still there. Sort of. Except that now, instead of three or four stations across the dial, there’s ten, maybe more, depending on where you live. And guess what? They’re all playing the same dozen songs by the same half-dozen pop-royalty assclowns. And when the loud, grating, interminable commercials come on the air (which they do practically between songs now), you can forget switching to another station, because odds are good that there’s an ad running on the next one, too. Why? Because the ClearChannel Continuum sees all, that’s why. (By way of example: I live in the middle of nowhere. Without an external antenna, I can only reliably receive six or seven off-air broadcasts at my house. Of these, three were owned by ClearChannel last I checked. And that was a year ago.) Basically, the idea is that nothing is more unfair than for an advertising company to have to pay media outlets to distribute their ads, particularly when the distributer, not the advertiser, was going to have ultimate control over the audience. So ClearChannel, in what may well go down in history as one of the most brilliant strokes of marketing since the late-night infomercial, started buying out starving broadcast outfits. Enter present day, and, with nearly 1,200 outlets in the U.S. alone, an army of marketing weasels are not just guarding the henhouse, they’re living in the damned thing.

Ok, so radio’s become a ceaseless torrent of consumerist effluvia. Most people aren’t listening, anyway. They’ve got their iPods and their XMs (Oh, wait, ClearChannel owns that, too. Tee hee hee). But what is an enterprising wannabe-broadcaster to do? Enter the internet. Having taken a couple of economics classes in college, I like it already: Low-to-non-existent cost of entry, fucking enormous audience that spans all demographics, and little if any regulation. As a budding audio entrepreneur, I’m practically creaming my shorts. But as good as this sounds for me, imagine what it means for my friend–let’s call him Frank; his real name is Leo, but that’s not important–who’s just started a band. Frank’s playing the clubs and bars for now, mostly crappy covers, with the occasional original piece sneaked in once the clientele are to wasted to notice. But Frank has ambition. He wants fame. He wants global notoriety. He wants a wallet so overloaded with cash that its weight causes him severe chiropractic distress. Mostly, he wants a chance to play for an audience that isn’t on the other side of a floor-to-ceiling chain-link fence. What Frank needs, clearly, is some serious airtime. At my urging, then, let us assume that Frank bops on down the the local FM joint. The receptionist puts down her copy of Vogue long enough to hand Frank a questionnaire entitled: So You Want to be on the Radio?, which consists of two questions:

• Is your target audience between the ages of 15 and 25, of homogenized American lineage,socially and politically inert, and possessed of a short attention span and vast swathes of disposable income?
  

• Are you Mick Jagger?

(Note: If you answered ‘No’ to more than one of these questions, unfortunately commercial radio will be unable to accommodate you at this time.)

So when Frank comes home dispirited and all set to give up the band and fall back on his formal education as an electrical engineer to make a living, I’m able to brighten his day. “The internet,” I exclaim, “is the answer to all your problems.” I go on to explain that there are streaming-media services all over the place who’ll host his music for a very small fee, and that, thanks to a magical system of tubes, people all over the world will be able to get drunk and be bored by his music. Then Frank calls me an enormous tool and storms off, but we’ve always had a complex sort of relationship.

The point is that, as of May 15, it’s likely that none of that will be true anymore. Net radio is, or at least appears to be, eating its last meal. But why!? Wherein this bustling intellectual utopia of porn, pirated software, and terrifying, inscrutable social commentary lies the threat to Big Music? Some pundits cite an economic rationale. Essentially, the idea is that the fat profits lie with the handful of mass-marketable plastic faces churning out seemingly identical multi-platinums year after year, and not, as one might suspect, a heaving throng of up-and-coming ham-and-egg types peddling a few albums each. The internet, this rationale goes on to suggest, is a medium–the only medium, in fact–in which these nickel and dimers can shine through the halogen glare of pop stardom. In further point of fact, due to the alarming breadth of the audience reachable via the internet, the True Stars of the music world, deprived of their captive-market stranglehold, are at a significant disadvantage. Therefore, QED, the internet, at least insofar as it pertains to the distribution of music, must go.

Of course, for this rationale to be true, one must accept the existence of rationality, and I for one don’t see much. What I do see is the outlining of another theater in the ever-widening War on Media Terrorism. I’m not sure when this war started. I can’t pinpoint the day when it became an insurgent act to seek out end enjoy music (and movies, and…) on the terms we choose; when we would be harassed, persecuted, prosecuted for the deplorable crime of shirking our responsibility to provide the media industry with exponential profits irrespective of the quality of their product; when, in short, we, both individually as consumers and collectively as a consuming culture, would be punished for having the audacity not to conform to a fucking business plan.

Now, I mean all that in the absolute nicest possible way, I really do. And, certainly, I’m exaggerating for humorous effect. But there is a problem here. We’re being subjected to fiduciary whims borne of an insufferable air of corporate entitlement. Ordinary corporate entities leap through flaming hoops while playing the banjo to get profit margins where they want them. The RIAA wish to simply re-adjudicate, re-legislate, and re-engineer our society until we have no choice but to give them one. And if we let them do it, we deserve it. It’s long past time we took a step back and remembered one essential truth: the entertainment industry is a service industry. They exist solely to provide us, the consumer, with pleasing diversions. Period. End. Fin.

Let’s not let them forget that. Take a minute to look over the SaveNetRadio petition. Or, better yet, write your own letters. Or boycott. Or march in the streets. Or something. Just raise some hell, huh?

That used to be one of the things we did best.

In keeping with the concept of providing insightful, everyman translations of corporate verbal diarrhea, here’s my take on Microsoft’s response to the Dell situation.

(Note: Quote is second-hand, and pre-mangled, presumably, by someone at the BBC. If I find the full text, I’ll update.)

In response Microsoft said that Dell was responding to a “small minority” of customers[...]

…’small minority’ here meaning nearly 11,00 customers of the second-largest PC retailer in the nation…

who had a very “specific” request.

…that request being, specifically, “Please don’t force us to use an operating system that makes us want to hollow out our PCs and use them as creative garden planters.”…

Honestly, the cheek of us consumers. If this keeps up, sooner or later we’re going to start believing that we should get to choose which products and services we pay for and use.