infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Josh Marshall notes that anti-tax samurai Grover Norquist has applied to trademark the phrase “K Street Project.” The K Street Project began in the mid-nineties by Tom DeLay and Norquist as an effort to ensure that the major lobbying firms hired only Republican insiders and channel corporate money into Republican campaign coffers. The project was successful, considering the Republican control of the house and the corporate-friendly agenda pushed through government.

With the emerging publicity around Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay’s misdeeds, the K Street Project is bound to gain media attention. Norquist’s attempt to trademark the phrase is a way to lock down the way it is used and close down the discourse surrounding right-wing lobbying. Clearly this is an abuse of the current intellectual property regime and a startling example of why we need to reform intellectual property laws in order to maintain free discourse about politics, society, and culture.

Update: Josh Marshall now says Norquist was just trademarking the K Street Project logo. In retrospect, it seems unlikely that Norquist could use the trademark as much of cudgel in media discourse, but now it’s clear that he isn’t trying to shut down coverage of his work.

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Oh sweet, the Fantagraphics blog says the new Penguin Classics Deluxe line of paperbacks features covers by famous cartoonists. I’m pretty excited about the version of Candide with Chris Ware’s artwork. I realize that it’s not really illustrated by Ware - he just did the cover art. (My mom has a sweet illustrated edition of Candide that she read while pregnant with me.) I’m a little intrigued by the edition of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy with a cover by Art Spiegelman and Luc Sante. It seems a little redundant since David Mazzuchelli did a wonderful comic verion of City of Glass. But I suppose that was in a series that Spiegelman edited.

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In the past year or so, I’ve all but quit reading newspapers on- and off-line. Nearly all of my online reading comes from blogs or relates to my research. While I watch Keith Olbermann for a little variety in my media diet, I’ll clearly see articles on a relatively bounded range of topics. Because of this, my drawers were really showing in a meeting with my chair this morning. We were talking about copyright and digital music, and I wondered out loud what had happened with Apple Computer’s agreement with Apple Records that it would not go into the music business. She told me, “That trial is starting right now. It’s been in the news.” Wow, I’m surprised I missed it, considering all of the technology blogs I read.

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AJ of PaperCuts fame has a new blog, and his first post is on a subject I felt inclined to write about a few days ago. He calls for a moratorium on what he calls “wistful, mournful cover versions” of songs. His examples of the trend include Frente’s cover of “Bizare Love Triangle” and Tori Amos’ version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I’m not sure this really constitutes a trend, since many of his examples come from the 1990’s.

I can sympathize, however. Over the weekend I watched Thumbsucker on DVD, and at one putatively tender moment the soundtrack swelled with a jarringly bad cover of Big Star’s “Thirteen.” The performance was too close to the original to make it new, so I wondered if the producers couldn’t afford the rights to the Big Star recording. Perhaps it was intended to have a distanciation effect in a moment of teen eros, but I had to stop the movie, pull out my copy of #1 Record and listen to the original a few times before starting the movie again. I first thought, “This is one of those songs that should never be covered” but then realized that a band like Galaxie 500 could have brought something new to the song.

Similarly, I recently watched a “Veronica Mars” episode from the first season where Veronica works to solve a mystery at a utopian hippie community. In one scene, a character sings “Oh Sweet Nuthin’” by the campfire. I was a little confused. It seemed like the producers were trying to evoke some notion of sixities-ness, but The Velvet Underground were about as un-hippie as it gets. They were all about black leather and IV drugs, not peace and love. It’s clear that the creators of the show like to mess around with intertextuality, so perhaps that accounts for the disparity between music and plot. Still, TV and movie producers need to be cagey about using covers for emotional effect - it seems as likely to alienate the audience than to draw them in.

AJ’s post informed me that Cat Power performed the cover of “Hangin’ on the Telephone” used in those Cingular commercials. The music certainly got my attention - Marshall’s voice is familiar enough that I wondered who was singing. I think I object more to a prominent indie rock figure appearing in a mobile phone commercial than the cover. She’s made a career out of “wistful, mournful cover versions,” so his moratorium would eliminate some of her best recordings. It’s probably better to admit that songs are often covered by lesser talents than the original artists, and leave it at that.

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In an earlier post, I joked that the sites Kevin Kelly calls “consensus Web filters” won’t catch on until they get a cool name like “blog” or “wiki.” I just ran into a practical reason “consensus Web filter” is a lousy name for this kind of site. I just tagged the “digg vs dot” site that compares stories on digg.com and slashdot.org, and I didn’t have a nice tag to describe it. I, of course, tagged it “Web2.0,” but that doesn’t quite describe what the site is up to. “consensuswebfilter” is too long and uwieldy for a tag, while “CWF” won’t make sense to anyone but me.

Although I have zero influence over computer industry buzzwords, I propose to call these sites “bubblers,” because they enable the most popular links to “bubble” to the top, and, as far as I can tell, the only other colloquial use of “bubbler” is for drinking fountains. So tell your friends: “consensus Web filters” are now “bubblers.”

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Tonight we watched the third episode¹ of “Twin Peaks” in the “TV Theory and Criticism” seminar I’m taking this semester. This is probably the most memorable episode since it includes the harrowing scene of Leland Palmer dancing with a photograph of his dead daughter Laura and a dream sequence where Dale Cooper meets a dancing midget. At the end of the screening, I told a fellow grad student, “It never occurred to me that Kyle MacLachlan sort of looks like David Lynch until I watched this again tonight.”

Andy said, “I’ve never seen a picture of Lynch, but he’s such an egomaniac that doesn’t surprise me.”

I told Andy, “He sort of looks like Kyle MacLachlan.”

1. Including the pilot…

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It looks like a Creative Commons case has gone into litigation &em in the Netherlands. A Dutch tabloid published some photos Adam Curry posted online under the attribution-non-commercial license, and, since the tabloid is a commercial entity, Curry took them to court. Here’s an update with a translation of the judge’s ruling.

I’ve long wondered how Creative Commons licenses would play out in court, and it appears that they’re enforceable. However, you do need the resources to engage in litigation. If a business was using my content, I doubt I’d be able to take them to court, unless someone wanted to do some pro-bono work.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about memes lately, probably because I have to give a class presentation about Mark Poster’s “Perfect Transmissions: Evil Bert Bin Laden” in a few weeks. Poster’s essay examines how the “Sesame Street” character Bert made a cameo appearance in a pro-Bin Laden poster that was widely reported by the Western media. Poster’s argument is primarily about how images and information are disseminated globally in often context-less ways that often create strange juxtapositions and produce new meanings.

My problem with the essay is two-fold. First, it treats the Bert is Evil image as a special case, rather than a fairly common online phenomenon - isn’t the Bert Bin Laden poster another case of the same phenomenon that gave rise to this Oolong the pancake bunny image or this Domo-kun image? Secondly, he doesn’t really provide an explananation for the overall phenomenon of replicating and recontextualizing images. Like the Bert Bin Laden poster, these images rely on cultural symbols that are placed into a new context, but in these cases it’s Japanese culture transmogrified into American (or at least Anglophone) Internet culture. Isn’t there a more universal process going on?

Which brings me to memes. There are even more things I don’t like about “memetics.” The theory wants to assign agency to information that I don’t think is warranted. People disseminate these ideas and images - I find it hard to believe they propagate themselves. Secondly, the theory was proposed by Richard Dawkins, a non-media specialist, and when people outside communications and media studies start theorizing about the media, reductionist folk theories start to propagate. (Noam Chomsky and, to a lesser extent, George Lakoff are examples of non-specialists making reductionist claims.) I know little about the psychological research that has followed Dawkins’ proposal of memetics, but I’d never be able to get away with claiming that “information is like a virus,” and I don’t think I would beleive it myself. I’m more interested in the social contexts of these “mash-ups” and how the symbolic power of the images persists.

I suppose the short-term solution is to use “meme” in a folky sense. Since that’s the term used online to describe artifacts like Oolong and Domo-kun, it make sense to use it. In terms of a larger research project, I imagine it’s possible to study the meme phenomenon online, while refusing to subscribe to any notion of memetics.

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OK, this might be the story I’d give a media studies person if they asked about this whole Web 2.0 nonsense. Tim O’Reilly’s canonical piece is great, but it’s a little too utopian and a little too geeky for the folks in my department. This piece is good at de-mystifying the buzzword, neatly summarizing the concept by saying “the open standards of the web are being repackaged as Web 2.0 for a Wall Street audience.” It’s great that the article points out that Web 2.0 is seen primarily from a business perspective, but I do think that “the read-write Web” has a lot of potential for producing participatory media.

I suppose Indymedia was an effort to bring this concept to activists, but it seems to be a bit of a failure. It’s non-activist audience seems to consist of right-wingers interested in taking quotes out of context to make disingenuous generalizations about liberals and leftists - six years later, Indymedia no longer seems to have the potential to reach new audiences. It’s become more of an Internet version of Deep Dish TV, a distribution system for documentaries for sympathetic audiences. I wonder what an Indymedia 2.0 would look like.

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As an aspiring typography geek, I was intrigued by a series of blog posts titled “Five Simple Steps to Typesetting on the Web.” My first paid job in publishing involved proofing the typesetting of math books, so some of the posts are so hardcore I flinch in revulsion. The suggestions in the post on glyphs seem valid, yet too cumbersome for quickly tossing off a blog post. Who wants to mark up ligatures when you shouldn’t be blogging at all? Still, the posts are intersting. I read his post on dashes with great interest, since I apparently have an unhealthy obsession with em-dashes.

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