The Brunch Table

I received unsolicited mail today from “Napoleon Franks” and “Youngblood Benzedrine.” I don’t know about everybody else, but my spam names definitely tend toward the macho…With these two latest additions, I now have enough characters saved up to make a TV show. I call it “SpamCops.”

INT. POLICE STATION, DAY

     CERVANTES      But take a look at this.

He holds out a grainy black-and-white photo of a grinning fat man seated behind a desk. Youngblood and Napoleon stare at it intently. The face is hard to make out, but…

     YOUNGBLOOD      It’s Paperboys J. Mercantile! I knew it.

Napoleon shakes his head slowly.

     NAPOLEON (in fake British accent)      Don’t you worry, Chief, we’ll take care of that jolly old fellow all right.

     CERVANTES      Now, no rough stuff….

AIVF has got an extensive listing of independent video distributors, with a profile on each:

This sobering observation pops up in an interview with Video Data Bank:

…the loss of federal and foundation dollars has had a devastating effect. It’s a very holistic field, and we are all suffering now. Only eight percent of our business is domestic exhibition. Lots of business has shifted to Europe, where video is still very popular.

A little bit of my musical childhood, preserved in amber. Dig the pipe organ joining in the final chorus (if you choose to stick with it that long).

I guess the song always had a special significance for me, ’cause while I was growing up we kept having to replace the family dog, thanks to a nearby intersection with a blind right turn….

Take a look at this… hactivist.com/flashpoint

It’s a diagram for turning a disposable camera into a portable slide projector–apparently, a little soldering will make the flash fire continuously, and it’ll keep going for several days. Would anybody like to take a crack at building one of these? The website says you can even pick up large quantities of the cameras for free at photo labs…saves them the hassle of recycling them….

Why is it that you can easily download the entire series of Deep Space Nine if you have the disk space and know where to look, but you can’t grab a BitTorrent of the Clarke testimony? (There is, however, a transcript.)

*****SPAM***** Massive amounts of Women

That subject line was part of my morning email-checking experience, and I felt like sharing it with everyone. Doesn’t it have a cozy, “All Your Base” sort of vibe?

It made me think a bit about TV standards (shows you where my head is at). Some countries use the older American NTSC standard, and some use Germany’s improved PAL standard. Nowadays, most video gear sold around the world will play either NTSC or PAL, no problem…

…except in the United States. Our government actively discourages the sale of dual-system gear. Effectively, that keeps us NTSC-only. And, not content with that barrier, we also require the DVD players sold here to use “region coding”–meaning that they refuse to play DVDs from outside the U.S. and Canada. How did this happen?

Well, I think it’s useful to look at the experiment France tried in the the 1960s. To reduce commercial competition from foreign TV, their government added a proprietary tweak to the PAL standard and renamed it SECAM, effectively granting monopoly control to French broadcasters. (The scheme was thwarted by video gear manufacturers, who didn’t want to have to make whole separate product lines for the Francophone world. Eventually, they figured out the SECAM tweak and made sure their regular PAL products could undo it. Poof–the monopoly was gone.)

Now, our own video isolation wasn’t deliberately planned from the start, but our government’s decision to maintain it accomplishes the same purpose. It costs money for media companies to convert from one format to another, cutting into the profit they could make from selling a video in another country. If we had video players that could handle stuff from anywhere in the world, Chinese- and Spanish-language movies would quickly pop up on Blockbuster shelves in big cities across the U.S.–the customer base there would be too large to ignore.

As it is, small media companies in other countries find the expense of conversion daunting. Format conversion becomes a kind of “media tariff,” a barrier that keeps out foreign competitors. And that’s exactly how Jack Valenti (R.I.P.) and co. like it.

For a bit of proof, just look at the foreign videos that do make it into our Blockbusters. The enormous popularity of Japanese film and TV over here just wouldn’t be possible without a shared format–Japan and the U.S. are both on NTSC. Any little media company there can release its video in the U.S., on the cheap. And it’s that saturation that really causes a cultural exchange to get going in earnest.

So…this is just a really roundabout way of saying, the phrase “Massive amounts of women” sounds very, very anime. And a common television standard is the reason why I can think that thought today.

Rest easy–now there’s a test you can take for your “Autism Quotient.”

16 is normal, 32 or higher is, er, not normal.

I scored 24….

The story of that famous Che photo, and of Alberto Korda, the photographer who took it.

Ironically, Korda’s desire to protect Che’s image by not claiming ownership of it led to its wide availability. Since Korda’s death in 2001, the image has continued to be used for varying purposes - and how he would have felt about a Che bikini, for instance, will never be known.

So I went to a big Shabbat dinner last night, hosted by one of the music school professors…it was the first big, proper Shabbat I’d been to since my grandmother died, and our relatives in Philly kind of lost their center and drifted out to other parts of the world.

Whoops, I’m not counting the strange evening I spent with the Lubavitch in Pittsburgh, in 2001 I think…everyone seemed to be having a good time there, but the maternal-line exclusiveness of that crowd turns me off. (If I’d been born with a Jewish father and a Christian mother instead of the other way round, I wouldn’t be able to hang out with them.) A cousin of mine got dumped by his girl, who belonged to a similar fundamentalist branch, when she found out his Jewish mother was really his Jewish stepmother. As if anybody now living really has an unbroken maternal bloodline that goes back 2,000 years to ancient Judea!

I just finished reading Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, where he argues that minority groups raised in majority populations tend to share the sexual preferences of the majority, and intermarry wherever society allows. If this is outlawed, well, people the world over tend to commit adultery at a steady, fixed rate…so one way or another, the boundaries of pure ethnic categories get nibbled away. In fact, because of this effect, you tend to share more genes with your geographic neighbors than you do with strangers who look like you–a black fourth-generation New Yorker and a white fourth-generation New Yorker are statistically likely to share more genes with each other than with their distant ancestors back in, say, Ethiopia and Germany. In other words, the maternal-line folks are just kidding themselves.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the dinner was great. And I got to hear a song in Ladino (the Latin spoken by Mediterranean Jews), too. I think this was my first taste of a real religious experience–not in any spiritual sense; it was more the experience of sitting down to dinner with a dozen strangers (about half of whom weren’t Jewish) and feeling a sort of unconditional acceptance.

In the middle of a somewhat-unfocused Alternet article on the post-Reagan deterioration of California, I found this amazing fact:

In California’s glory days, in the 1960s, government spent as much as 25 cents out of every dollar on infrastructure: schools, roads and other stuff that Tom Higgins, a venture capitalist and Democratic activists in San Francisco, calls “engines of wealth creation.” Today those engines are cold. The state spends barely two cents per dollar on infrastructure.

“…right here. Right where we’re standing now.”

The Cat with Hands is a beautiful animated short, by Robert Morgan. I don’t want to say another word, or I’ll ruin the surprise….

This database lets you pick as many states as you like, and measure their public-school educational stats side-by-side. I decided to work from my own personal experience, and use West Virginia as my baseline…and I was really surprised. New York and California aren’t a hell of a lot better off, by these numbers.

What’s especially interesting is that you can check up on standardized test scores, by grade, for the categories “white,” “black,” and “hispanic.” Reliably, “white” scores hover at 30-40% passing grades, “black” scores at 10-15%, and “hispanic” scores at 15-20%.

So I started thinking, this doesn’t just rank the three biggest ethnic divisions in the United States–they’re giving us a snapshot of our remaining middle class (assuming that the upper class isn’t really involved in the public school system). That’s not very many people, if you apply those figures to the whole population.

Here’s another rundown on the Grey Album and its adventures in copyright law. Two things make it especially useful, though. First off, at the end of the article, they recap the four criteria that support a claim of fair use:

1. The new work is for a non-commercial purpose.
2. The new work doesn’t substitute for a purchase of the original work.
3. The new work tranforms the material that it borrows in some way.
4. The new work has a critical perspective on the old work.

(I recently read Clearance and Copyright, by Michael Donaldson; his opinion is that if a work meets enough of those criteria, the claim of fair use will–theoretically–hold up in court. He uses the metaphor of a “shield.” The more criteria that apply to you, the stronger your shield is. It’s especially important which state hears the case, he says–New York state has the country’s best track record of upholding valid fair use claims.)

But the real surprise in the article is this–due to a quirk in federal law, there is no federal copyright protection for sound recordings published prior to 1972! Only state laws protect their use, and the state laws at present are more lenient than the draconian 1976 federal revisions, the first of the Mickey Mouse laws.

So I guess the moral of the story is, if you must sample, use old stuff and do it in New York.