Well I didn't have any plans anyway...

So this 26-year-old girl went to see Phish in Portsmouth, Virginia on Tuesday, but after the show, her friends couldn't find her. So they went home. Her parents, being the protective types, freaked out and filed a missing persons report.

Drag Me To Hartford

Laura Pepe and, likely, one of her newfound
traveling companions. I don't get it either.

As it turned out, she just decided that the show was awesome and, not having any other particular plans, decided to catch a few more shows. Apparently she had made some new friends and tagged along with them. Once the acid wore off, she thought it might be prudent to let people know she was alive. She called her parents from somewhere in the DC area yesterday to let them know she was on her way to Hartford.

Hilarious... and proof of why Phish is better than Metallica. The woman who disappeared from a Metallica concert, sadly, was never seen again.

Drag Me To Hell

While Laura was tooling around the U.S. with her new friends, I was, sadly, on haitus from my own Phish tour. But I had an opportunity to see Sam Raimi's first directorial gig since the last "Spider Man" last night, "Drag Me To Hell."

She was probably also at the phish concert.

I've long adored his campy, cheesy, and brilliant horror spoofs, "Evil Dead," "Evil Dead II" and "Army of Darkness." So I was looking forward to seeing his first return to the genre where he cut his teeth since making the giant-budget "Spider Man" trio.

I have to say I was a little disappointed. Perhaps it is a matter of setting one's expectations too high, or perhaps it is that the genre is best suited to a low budget. Or, perhaps, it is that Bruce Cambpell did not even have a cameo. I am not going to describe the plot too much - because there really isn't one. That is never the point of these movies.

Raimi's original low-budget, over-the-top films owed much of their charm to their absurdity and self-deprecation, yet still were groundbreaking technically. The famous scene from Evil Dead II where Cambell is fighting against his own hand is frightening, hilarious, and somehow believable. Drag Me To Hell featured modern production and much better special effects, but the result was often flat.

The best scene in the movie came early on, in which our hero, Christine, is attacked in her car and consequently cursed by the gypsy pictured above. A young woman fighting off a crippled old lady with a stapler? Brilliant. But things kind of deflated after that. The frights were simplistic, and the enemy was intangible and impotent. Most of the demon's chills came in the form of rattling kitchenware, billowing curtains, and an occasional nightmare. So while the sets were lush and lavish, they were a backdrop to relatively uninteresting proceeedings.

There were some positives, most notably the fortune-teller character who Christine consults throughout the movie in her efforts to free herself from the gypsy's curse. He got all the good lines, while most of the other characters were pretty flat. Another scene where Christine meets her boyfriend's parents also has some priceless moments. But unfortunately these bright spots were overwhelmed by a rather plodding pace and pretty uninspired action.

At the end of the day, it was an okay movie. At $30 million, it wasn't exactly a big-budget film either. But Evil Dead II, which was made for $3.5 million more than twenty years ago, did far more with far less.

A Light In The Attic

I am not referring to the Shel Silverstein collection of the same name. But it is a wonderful book nonetheless. Rather, I am referring to the latest bit of incremental progress on the long road to transforming my "fixer-upper" into a mansion of exquisite charm and taste.

I am now officially in Year 4 of living in (or, perhaps, living with) my Columbia Heights home/project/nemesis, and I have shared that space with my lovely fiancee for close to a year as well. There is a theorem that says that you will gradually accumulate stuff to fill the space in which you live. This has always proved true in my own life, as I am a hoarder.

The Project

Just over two years ago I first addressed this problem in the only rational way: by expanding the space available to store things. This involved putting in a staircase so I could access my attic more easily than by hoisting myself up through a crumbling hole in the ceiling of one of the closets. Since I only have three closets in the entire house, one of which is too small for any useful purpose, this inefficient attic access method also served to reduce my available storage space, since I couldn't really use the closet as long as I had to go through it to get to the attic.

Two years later, over the weekend, I got around to putting some lights up there. Now I can see without a flashlight or an extension cord from the 2nd floor of the house! Since it was about 130 degrees up there while I was working on Saturday (when the mercury outside reached 95) I had the roof hatch open too. This reminded me that the roof hatch thingy had seen better days. Probably about 50 years ago. It was crumbling to dust, so I also rebuilt that thing to ensure that water and rooftop prowlers stay out. All in all it was a fine day in the attic and I now have improved my ability to store things that I have a 10 percent chance of needing in the next 10 years.

The Reward

That was Saturday. Sunday I headed off to see my favorite band Phish in Hershey, PA with a friend. In order to justify this, I need to explain to you that I have been a fan for 20 years as of this September. That means that I am not:

• A stoned college student and/or drifter
• Asking people on the way if I they can "kick me down" some change for gas and/or tickets
• Going to be checking out from society until Phish finishes their tour

On the other hand I am, probably, still:

• Clinging desperately to some vestige of carefree, bygone days
• Willing to drive long distances and deal with much inconvenience to see three hours of music from a bunch of guys who are still wearing the same tee-shirts they were in 1986. The setlists haven't changed much since then either.
• Convinced that it is worth every bit of the money & effort.

It was a fun time. Hershey, by the way, is decidedly not intended for pedestrians. The hotel I stayed in was, as the crow flies, about one mile from the stadium, pictured above. Seemed like a no-brainer to walk in instead of dealing with a massive parking lot situation. That walk involved walking on the edge of a quasi-highway for a mile. Then, the actual road into the park has no sidewalk or shoulder for a stretch, even though it's right in the center of town! Luckily there wasn't much traffic at that point so it wasn't especially scary but really quite baffling how difficult it was to do what seemed entirely reasonable and sensible.

The stadium, by the way, was half-empty - certainly a change from bygone days when you had to work every angle you had just to get a ticket. I thought, perhaps, this meant that Phish has finally been around so long that some of their fans are dying off due to old age. You know, the ones who were already old when they were deadheads back in the 80's -- those guys could easily be in their 60s by now, and anyone born after 1980 probably thinks of Phish as some kind of curiousity from a bygone era.

But the crowd was a lot of young people, and everyone seemed to be pretty into it. That is, it wasn't like a bunch of college kids just came to the show because there was nothing else to do that night. I talked to a few people who were old timers, sure, but they were not the rule.

Anyway, the light crowd made for a great experience. You could easily move anywhere in the venue, and even though it was a pretty big place, it felt much more intimate. The sound was great (as expected), and people were up to their usual standards of friendliness with complete strangers. Like someone just handed me a bottle of water at some point - which was much appreciated, as it was damn hot out there.

The put on a fantastic show. Interestingly, they didn't play a single song written in the last decade -- actually nothing that came after the album "Billy Breathes" which was released in 1996. The fact that I really liked this conclusively identifies my as a curmudgeonly old-school fan who still thinks of songs from "Billy Breathes" as "new songs." That made the show very much a time warp. I doubt it was intentional - I don't think Phish analyzes their own sets that much - but it was a rare treat.

Radiohead @ Nissan: You Both Suck

The weather on Sunday was anything but good. Actually, that's being generous. It was a monsoon. But that didn't stop scads of adoring Radiohead fans from making the trek to the Nissan Pavilion in Bristow, Virginia on Sunday.

I swore years ago that I would never return to Nissan Pavilion. I can say, without hyperbole, that it's the worst venue in the entire country. I have never been anywhere that created an overall less pleasant experience. Just about everything is wrong:

• It's at least 40 miles from downtown DC.
  
• There is absolutely no chance of getting there by public transportation.
  
• It involves driving on I-66, usually during rush hour, which ranks slightly above being waterboarded, and slightly below watching C-SPAN, in my list of least favorite forms of torture
  
• The last several miles into the venue are on tiny, local roads which inevitably are a mess.
  
• It has never taken me less than 2 hours to get out of the parking lot after a show, because of the previous point and awful traffic management.
  
• The sound sucks
  
• Security are assholes
  

Basically, there's nothing good about it. I would rather see a show at the Tweeter Center in Camden, New Jersey. Actually, overall driving time is probably less, and it's a much nicer venue, with a great view of Philadelphia. Once you get over the fact that the only businesses in Camden are bail-bonds shops and you will be parked outside a maximum security prison, it's a far better experience than Nissan.

So, Radiohead has in recent times begun using their awesome uber-star power to do whatever the fuck they want. The first we saw of this was giving away their last album, Rainbows, for free or whatever you felt like paying for it. I thought this was pretty cool, actually, because I despise the old guard music industry and their desperate tactics to extort money from the very people who are their best customers. So when Radiohead made a gazillion dollars without even printing a single CD, I was impressed.

This time, they claim to be touring in some kind of eco-friendly fashion. On their web site Radiohead attempts to martyr themselves before their fans by claiming to have selected the venues based on a list of practical criteria that would result in the least carbon impact from their tour.


Richard, the Tour Production Manager says on May 1: The main issue is how the audience moves to and from the show. With the location and public transport links now a more significant factor when choosing venues, fans are being encouraged to think about alternative ways of travelling.

Take a look at the map to your left. This shows the relative locations of Washington DC, Baltimore, and the Nissan Pavilion. In Washington, DC are two perfectly acceptable venues for concerts - RFK Stadium and the MCI Center. MCI center has a capacity similar to Nissan Pavilion, and RFK Stadium can hold much more. Given Radiohead's ridiculous popularity, you'd think RFK would have been a perfect choice. Please note also the relative proximity of Baltimore, which you actually CAN get to by train.

Oh wait - but Live Nation is promoting the Radiohead tour, and of the three, Nissan Pavilion happens to be the only venue that is run by Live Nation!! Oh, crap. It looks like they left one thing off their list of "selection criteria" for identifying the venue that would result in the least environmental impact: Must be run by Live Nation.

But back to the actual disaster, er, show on Sunday. As it happened, it rained. A lot. Now that's hardly their fault, but it underscores just how crappy Nissan Pavilion is. From all over the blogosphere we see reports of wretched experiences:

mistiwalters (dcist): After thousands of cars waited in traffic for four hours, they were turned away because the concert was over by the time they got there. How's that for a carbon footprint?

IMGoph (dcist): 6-hour burger king run. that's what the trip to nissan turned into for me, my roommate, and his girlfriend.

pellucidity (dcist): We spent 3 hours in traffic... Arrived in Bristow at 7:30 and were turned away by the police at about 10:30... I'm not going back to Bristow.

headhot (consumerist): Because of the absolute clusterfuck that is Nissan Pavilion, we almost never go. If it were not Radiohead, and the fact that there were no other shows scheduled in 300 miles, we would have never considered going. After this mess, I don't think there is any band that could get us out there under any condition. Fuck the Pavilion.

Bottom line: Nissan Pavilion, you suck. Radiohead, you suck. And you're full of shit. If you gave even one tiny llama turd about environmental impact, you would never have scheduled a show at a venue 40 miles away from downtown DC, nowhere near public transportation of any kind, and also well known to take hours to exit the parking lot post-show (think: thousands of idling cars). See: here (dcist, pre-show), here (wapo - 4/15/05), here (random forum post from 2007). Finding gripes about Nissan Pavilion is about as hard as finding a lobbyist on Capitol Hill.

And, the ultimate insult, as Radiohead whines, "please carpool!!": There's a $6.00 parking fee charged on every ticket! Thanks a lot, assholes. We carpool, but we pay to park anyway.

I didn't go. I never even gave it a thought, even though I really like Radiohead's music and have wanted to see them for years. I feel bad for those who wasted their entire crappy Sunday in a car in the sticks in Virginia, but you should have known better. And Radiohead, you should have too.

Jazz Fest 2008 Part 2

Some more pictures from the weekend. The highlight of the fairgrounds music was Leo Nocentelli's Rare Funk Gathering, with Doug Wimbish and Will Calhoun of Living Color. Doug Wimbish apparently replaced Victor Wooten Muzz Skillings as their bass player. Will Calhoun was the drummer from day 1. I haven't seen Living Colour in years but they were always a great band back in the day... should probably check them out again. Doug certainly proved himself on the stage with Leo.

Anticipate home improvement posts soon. I've finally gotten my new windows and after putting them in I can finally proceed with the finish work in the kitchen. Once that's done I'll be moving outdoors and hopefully get my backyard fenced in this summer. Anyone want to come help me dig holes...




Doug Wimbish. Nice shout out to DC with the 9:30 club tee shirt





Leo Nocentelli






Will Calhoun

Jazz Fest '08 Part 1

It's been a long time since I posted. Don't worry - I survived New Orleans. Why is it so hard to go away, even for a few days, without creating a backlog of work and life? On the plus side, it seems to still be winter here in DC so at least I haven't been missing much while working late this week.

The weekend was a lot of fun, as always. Those moments where you find yourself hanging out at a bar with a pirate at 3 AM who's telling you about his failed marriage and how much his therapist has helped him are really what make New Orleans so special. Did I mention he was a pirate?

Anyway. I still have a lot of pictures to go through but I put some up on flickr today. Here are a few that I like, in no particular order. I'll tell stories here when I have a bit more time, so for now, enjoy these images from the swamp. You can see all my pics (so far) in my Jazz Fest '08 set.

Small Time Celebrity... Two Weeks In A Row

Today's post will be entirely self congratulatory. I made the WaPo Express blog log last Friday, and my pictures from the Mt. Pleasant fire got published in the April Intowner! There is no question that before long, my name will be as much a household word in DC as Vermin Supreme.

First, my little writeup of the Widespread Panic show at the Warner got quoted in Express. You can download the whole issue here.


Next, my pictures from the fire at The Deauville in Mt. Pleasant were printed in the April Intowner. It's online here.


Update 2:29 PM I have been recognized by DCist for the comment of the week. I expanded on that in my last post here. This, combined with my having twice transcended the virtual/physical barrier by having both my words and pictures appear in print, I feel that I deserve the title of "king of geeky bloggers and amateur photographers" for this week. Next week: I shall be attempting to obtain the elusive DCist "avatar of the week" award. If successful, that would be essentially the equivalent of a PGA grand slam and my blogging career would be complete. I shall then slip into obscurity and blog anonymously about pet peeves mostly involving Apple products.

Wax Fang @ DC9

I was staring at a boring Monday evening, so I thought I would see what the music scene had to offer last night. While Monday isn't exactly a prime candidate for finding a hot show, it's also pretty hard to be disappointed when your alternative is doing laundry or catching up on a week's worth of The Daily Show on the Tivo.

The Louisville trio Wax Fang was making their first DC appearance last night at DC9. This place is probably my favorite small DC venue, so after reading some good stuff about them online I decided to check them out.

The band did not disappoint. They went through their catalog in about an hour and a half, including three encores, all for the roughly 12 people in the appreciative audience. The set of all original material ended with a Sonic Youth cover -- though I couldn't say what song it was since I've never gotten into that band before. The music is immediately accessible - tight, quick guitar riffs and driving drumlines draw you in quickly, but it's woven with musical virtuosity that gives depth to the tunes. It's the perfect combination of pop hooks and Zappa-esque complexity that makes the songs both catchy and geeky - and I mean that in the best possible musical sense.

I knew almost nothing about them before walking in last night, but I'm converted. Watch these guys.

More pictures from the show.

Nathan Maxwell - Happiness in Time

Okay - this is far from timely, since the record in question came out in 2006, but I found this CD in my car a few months ago. I have no idea how it got there. If it's yours, feel free to reclaim it. But this is a fantastic album. It's soulful, uplifting, intimate, and reminiscent of old Rolling Stones all at once. The kind of CD you can just put the stereo and leave there and let it go 'round over and over again. Just check it out.

There's not a lot out there about this guy or his band. Neither his myspace page nor the band website say anything about live performances, but you can listen to the music there. He's from New York.

Apparently, I get into new music by finding random CDs when I clean out my car. But I'm glad I stumbled across this one.

Suing your customers

In this story we read about 19-year old Jhannet Sejas who recorded about 20 seconds of the Transformers movie with the video mode of a pocket camera, and was promptly arrested for video piracy.

In the comments (from another site) someone writes:

"i took out a cell phone in a theatre recently, to check the time, and put it on vibrate. a guy can down from the projection box apparently, asked to see my phone. i ask why, he says to check if it had a camera.

So. It seems that the MPAA is tearing a page from the RIAA's handbook, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater: they are pissing off the very people they depend on for survival, their customers.

The absurdity of hassling people for recording (or, in the case of our commenter, simply opening his cell phone) a movie with a pocket camera, or cell phone, cannot be overstated. Within hours of a movie being released (or in some cases, before it's even been released), a high-quality bootleg is typically available on the Internet. These are sourced from prerelease DVDs that get leaked, or are telesync recordings that are made by the video camera operator himself. What possible threat, then, is a barely-watchable, and necessarily incomplete recording made by a patron for fun?

RIAA and MPAA have apparently decided that the best way to deal with sagging record sales and movie viewership is to have their customers arrested. Yet these are the people who are actually still going to movies, and still buying music! These are fans of Hollywood, the very consumers of their product! This kind of legal action has no effect on piracy as everyone knows. Movies and CDs continue to proliferate freely around the internet.

I believe in paying for a product, even if I can get it for free, if it's a good product. I buy CDs and DVDs all the time. But when I read stuff like this, it doesn't exactly make me feel good about supporting them.

This continued hostility towards their own customers shows how shortsighted the entertainment industry is. More than eight years after Napster forever changed the way people consume music, they still aren't getting it. Where once there was an opportunity for these organizations to embrace the technology to the benefit of everyone, instead they continue to dig their own grave as the world marches on around them.

Shut the Internet down!!

This is absolutely priceless. Clearly fame has it's privileges. No matter how much of a crackpot you are, you can still get your looney tunes opinion in print.

"I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span."

Ummmm... we'll get right on that!!

"In the early seventies there were at least ten albums released every week that were fantastic."


I am guessing he's referring to this sort of thing.

Police @ Hershey Park

I finished the floor on Saturday. But my camera battery was also finished so still no pics.

I wanted to post a quick concert review in the meantime. I saw The Police at Hershey Park Stadium last Friday, July 21st, with my brother David. Thank god for technology. Traffic was backed up for nine miles coming into Hershey. If it weren't for my GPS and his Google Maps (it is possible that we are way too wired) we probably would have missed part of the show. Luckily we managed to dodge about four miles of standstill traffic using backroads, as guided by divine navigational satellites and internet access.

Anyway, my capsule review.

Pros:

• Great show. Band was tight, energetic, and had a lot of interesting new arrangements of old favorites. As far as these reunion shows go, it was about as good as I could have hoped for. Didn't feel phoned in and the guys even high-fived a couple times.
  
• Really nice outdoor venue, and the weather was perfect.
  
• No security to speak of. If only I had know that before, so I could have brought my own refreshments. (See "Cons," below).
  
• Impeccable sound - sounded great from up front where our seats were, and just as good when walking around other parts of the venue.
  

Cons:

• Traffic sucked. Think Nissan Pavilion, but worse. Took almost 90 minutes to get there from where traffic backed up about 9 miles out - and that, with our GPS backroad dodge.
  
• Traffic really sucked. Another 90 minutes on the way out just to get to a road that wasn't a cluster f*ck.
  
• Pennsylvania blue laws. Beer lines were horrible, by the time we got into the place and waited in line a half-hour for a beer, it was 8:30. At which point I noticed the sign saying beer sales would end at 8:45. Jesus, the band hadn't even started yet! And limit two per customer of course. The only thing to do was buy two, and pound one immediately while the guy was taking our money - which entitled me to buy another one. Unfortunately, my beer-chugging skills have grown weak. I didn't have the stones to take the 2nd one down before we had to move on. But we were able to jump back on line before the cutoff, finish the beers in line, and get two more before it was all over for the night. So I managed five (large) beers out of that situation, which was OK. But next time there is no question I'm bringing my own. Props go to David for successfully occupying the beer vendor during the purchase process long enough for me to kill one and buy another. What was merely unfortunate, could have been tragedy.
  

Unfortunately, I didn't think to bring a camera. So the phonecam will have to suffice. View from our seats of the stage.

Music to my ears

I've seen a lot of music lately. Not a surprise, really, since I spent last weekend in New Orleans for weekend one of Jazz Fest. But I've also been listening to some other new (or new to me) music that's worth mentioning.

First - the bad. Last night, I saw Meshell Ndegeocello at the 9:30 club. I've always loved her unique and ever-morphing style, and was looking forward to the show. Unfortunately, Meshell phoned it in. The show was, from start to finish, a disjointed series of what amounted to radio-edits from her catalog. Nothing ever clicked, no effort was made to engage the audience or move outside the most basic interpretation of each number. On top of that, the sound was bad - the bass was smeared, overmixed and washed out the whole sound. You could barely hear the guitar and vocals. The entire uninspired show clocked in at barely over 45 minutes.

Well, that's out of the way, and I don't begrudge her despite my disappointment - everyone's got bad days. A commenter on her myspace page mentions allergies or something, so maybe she just wasn't feeling well. Following the show (which was over by 11:30) I walked back to Utopia to catch up with a friend there. En route from 9:30, I passed no fewer than 8 cafes and clubs with live music plainly audible from the street. It's funny how these things creep up on you. U street is by all rights the new center of the DC music scene, reclaiming some measure of it's cool from the 50's and 60's. I never really gave it a second thought until last night, when you could hardly walk out of earshot of one band before you heard the next one a few doors down.

We ended up at Cafe Nema where The Young Lions were playing their regular Thursday gig. Over the course of the set, they were joined by a few other musicians who seemed to just keep walking in off the street, instruments in hand. The band was rocking - and there was no shortage of surprises as the lineup kept morphing with each cat who walked in the door. Highly recommended. They also play every Friday night at Bohemian Caverns.

Speaking of Bohemian Caverns, I've caught the Thad Wilson Jazz Orchestra twice at Bohemian on Monday nights, which appears to be the TWJO's new home. It's an intimate and unusual space, which has been graced by many legendary jazz performers in decades past (see the History page on their web site). The two nights I saw TWJO play, they put on completely different shows, with selections ranging from standards to eclectic original compositions. The performances were consistently excellent.

Back to New Orleans... Thursday night I caught Rotary Downs at d.b.a. on Frenchman. They put on a great show - largely consisting of eclectic tunes somewhere between alt-country and indie-rock. At the same time they aren't ashamed to throw in a few hooks which kept at least one song stuck in my head for a day afterwards. Good stuff - definitely worth the price of a CD after the show.

Kirk Joseph

On stage Friday I was largely camped out at the Congo Stage, which began with Kirk Joseph's Backyard Groove. Kirk Joseph, formerly of Dirty Dozen, heads this outstanding funk/rock/jazz group.

When The Saints Go Rhyming In

Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue took the stage next, producing a variety of funk-rock, hip-hop, not to mention a good dose of rock-n-roll as they exploited AC/DC's "Back in Black" - an interesting juxtaposition to the rapped-out "When The Saints Go Marching In."

The final act of the day was Soulive, by now an old-school jazz/jam band. However, both their lineup and style have evolved since I've last seen them, most notably with the addition of reggae singler Toussaint as a full-time vocalist. I wasn't familiar with most of the songs they played, presumably many of which will appear on their upcoming album, No Place Like Soul., but the new sound and style that Toussaint brings is fresh, funky and welcome.

File sharing doesn't hurt music sales

A new study demonstrates statistically that the effect of file sharing on music sales is negligible, despite the recording industry's claims of staggering losses as a result of digital music swapping. This is the first hard evidence of my own long-held belief that attempting to restrict free exchange of copyrighted digital property (be it music or software) is not only ineffective, but in probably even counterproductive.

There has been a real drop in music sales in the last few years, a fact which the music industry has often pointed towards as proof of the impact of P2P file sharing. The author suggests several possible explanations of this trend, which are reasonable, although it does not attempt to analyze this side of the equation in detail.

There are other costs that are not even accounted for in this study. The entertainment industry has undoubtedly spent staggering sums of money on developing and implementing copy-protection schemes for music and video. This real cost is of course built into the price of every CD, DVD and DVD player you buy. Windows Vista includes DRM code at every layer of its functionality, at the behest of the entertainment industry. Every modern TV and DVD player must include circuitry whose only purpose is to manage encrypted digital information. All these technologies, which add no value to the consumer, impact the bottom line when you buy something -- and in some cases, the complexity of the technology causes things to just not work even when used in a perfectly legal manner.

Another consideration is that DRM reduces the value of music purchased online, by restricting its utility, which certainly has an effect on sales as well. Finally, the RIAA continues to file thousands of lawsuits on the basis of their so-called losses, again at great expense not just to the recording industry, but to society as these essentially frivolous suits must be brought to trial. This also comes back as a real cost; and since suing your own customers is akin to biting the hand that feeds you, there is certainly an impact from the ill will generated by these actions.

These other factors are probably difficult to quantify, but taken with the hard data presented in this study, it is clear that the ongoing fight against "piracy" of this kind is not just ineffective, but probably actually harmful to the industry. It will be a great day when the entertainment industry starts focusing it's resources on actually entertaining again.

Free as a bird

Somewhere between Portland, Maine and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Monday, "Freebird", that altogether too familiar Lynyrd Skynyrd song came on the Sirius Super Shuffle. I love Sirius, by the way. Even the age of the portable music player has not entirely solved the problem of boredom on long drives. Traditional radio is almost useless, since you need to change stations every half hour or so, assuming you can even find something other than a right-wing religious talk show in much of the country. Satellite radio, while not entirely perfect (e.g. some channels suffer from heavy rotation on occasion), is a nice companion on long drives.

But back to Freebird. Perhaps it was the fact that this was about my 16th hour of driving in three days. But I started analyzing the (few) verses to this song. Such activities are usually a mistake. On the surface, there's not much to the story here. It's not like I was trying to make sense of Terrapin Station in an acid-induced haze, wherein the mysteries of the universe are revealed. No, this is just Freebird.

Anyway, I suddenly had this realization that the song has another layer. Perhaps this is supposed to be obvious, perhaps I just never bothered to think too much about the song. But on this day, it spoke to me in the way that only a cheesy, overplayed, excessively dramatic, multiple-false-ending rock-and-roll anthem could.

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be travelling on, now,
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see.
But, if I stayed here with you, girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.

So the story seems simple enough. He's leaving his girl, trying to make excuses (it's not you it's me), blah blah. You've seen this all before. But really, there is much more. Our hero here is speaking from a place deep in his soul, a place where a raging conflict lives on. A conflict that can never be resolved, and is in fact the foundation of his sorry existence.

I'm as free as a bird, and this bird you cannot change

The protagonist proclaims his freedom, as the factor driving his departure. He must be free, and she will never change that. Lord knows I can't change.

Herein lies the unfathomable conflict that, really, prevents the narrator from ever truly being free. Freedom is necessarily at odds with the inability to change. How can one be free if one can never change? In fact, the hapless wanderer is trapped by his conflict, his past, his fear. He almost convinces himself that he is free, but there is a great irony underlying the claim. He speaks initially as one living for the moment, yet he belies his freedom with this painful admission of failure - he cannot change.

Bye, bye, its been a sweet love.
Though this feeling I can't change.
But please don't take it badly,
'Cause Lord knows I'm to blame.
But, if I stayed here with you girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you'll never change.
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.
Lord help me, I can't change.

Looking at the words in print, it becomes so clear. The final cry for help, the hand reaching from the raging sea as he slowly sinks below the surface. He is destined to live this cyclical life, like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill every day. But unlike Sisyphus, he finds no solace in this pattern. He longs for true freedom even as he acknowledges that he has none.

...

Okay. Maybe that was altogether too much mental energy spent on Freebird... but strange things happen during the heart of a long drive...

DRM 2.0

Digital Rights Management (DRM) gets a lot of press these days. DRM is what prevents you from being able to make copies of songs you buy from iTunes. I won't go into the whole history and complexity, since it's easy enough to find plenty to read. But the short version is, DRM is designed to prevent you from copying media. This could be physical media such as a DVD, or something you downloaded, like from Apple iTunes store.

The practical implication of this for most people is it's a pain in the neck to use music or video, for which you paid, in flexible ways. For example, you can't use something from iTunes on a zune (or any non-iPod device, for that matter). You can't "loan" a downloaded song to your friend. If there were a single DRM scheme that was standardized, it would still be inconvenient, but at least then you'd be able to use your music on different machines. However, there exist many, non-interoperable schemes.

The music industry has always defended these schemes as necessary to protect themselves against rampant piracy. Yet, rampant piracy exists, and continues unfettered. Movies show up on the internet sometimes even before they've been released in the movie theater, not to mention before any official DVD release! CDs have no inherent copy protection, and anyone can easily make freely distributable MP3 files from a CD. These facts don't sit very well with the music industry's rationale for DRM, which effectively encumbers the end-users ability to use music and video which they paid for, in a legal manner.

The truth is far more sinister. At last the music industry has admitted that DRM isn't really about piracy, it's about making money. They want to make people pay for the same thing many times over. What used to be considered fair use, the music industry aims to make technologically impossible, essentially making you pay for the same thing more than once.

The irony, of course, is that the pirates continue on their merry way, as they always have, whereas the actual paying customers get less and less value -- and logically, as one gets less value, one probably tends to buy such a product less. And as the DRM schemes become more complicated, very real problems are starting to crop up for people who are simply trying to use hardware and media they legally own in normal ways, as PlayStation3 owners are discovering.

Personally, I'm a music lover. I buy a lot of music, I see a lot of live music. I'm also a technology freak. I just bought my first iPod against my better judgment - an 8 gig nano - because it's such a cool little whisker. But I also own a 4-year old 60 gig Creative Zen xTra, which while not nearly as slick, is perfectly functional and is my car jukebox. I have no intention of getting rid of it until it dies. And finally I have a Slim Devices Squeezebox, which is by far greatest piece of music technology invented since the LP and anyone who loves music owes it to themselves to get one. So, you'll never see me shopping at iTunes for my music, since I won't be able to use it on any of those devices except the iPod.

Think about this. The way iTunes works is the equivalent of Sony trying to sell you CDs that would only work in a Sony CD player. Remember the Betamax? And iTunes goes one step further - it only works on your "CD player", not your friend's. Most people would laugh out loud at this idea as it applies to physical media. Yet Apple has only managed to get away with it so far because for a lot of people, the iPod is the "industry standard" MP3 player and they don't realize or care about this fact. And this has a wonderfully insidious marketing strategy for Apple, since they have made it very difficult for people to buy anything other than an iPod.

Well, there's evidence that this philosophy may change in the near future. Many independent record companies already sell their music DRM-free. (Ironically, if you buy the same music from iTunes, it comes with DRM anyway). But there are whispers of majors beginning to expirement with this idea. And despite the claims that piracy is the whole point of DRM, the impetus for this change is, yet again, money. Finally, a beleaguered industry is thinking about doing what any good business person knows without having to wage a multi-year, billion-dollar battle: provide you customers a good product at a reasonable price, and they'll keep coming back.

I suspect that Apple is starting to, well, crap in their pants at this idea, since the end of DRM for music means the end of the iTunes/iPod stranglehold on the digital music market. But this is nothing but good for us, the consumers.