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Intellectual property law might have gone in a very different direction if not for Judge Sol Kramer and his "Lighten the Fuck Up" rule. One shudders to think what the world would be like for creative people if this crusty New York jurist hadn't been sitting in the Southern District federal court, where a succession of copyright cases inevitably wound up in the '80s and early '90s. That rare lawyer who actually understood art and music, Judge Kramer created an intimidating series of precedents that shaped the course of U.S. artistic history. It's amusing to think back now at the judge's use of salty language in the courtroom as plaintiff after plaintiff made its case and came away disappointed. Of course, the written opinions that followed were exquisitely reasoned and delved deeply into the minutiae of the respective artworks, guided by the judge's strong and principled belief that, while these matters had to be taken on a case by case basis, creativity ultimately had to be protected from the drag of frivolous lawsuits. The following are some his jabs from the bench:
"Your honor, my clients Messrs. Kaylan and Volman, aka the Turtles, have been severely damaged by the indiscriminate sampling of their world famous string intro to the 60s hit 'You Showed Me,' in De La Soul's 'Live Transmission from Mars.'"
"Oh, lighten the fuck up. 'Live Transmission' is a one-off novelty song, hell, it's not even a song, it's a little ambient piece. Get out of my courtroom."
"Representing myself, your honor, I am appalled that Jeff Koons took my image 'String of Puppies' and made a sculpture out of it and I seek a milllion dollars in damages."
"Oh, lighten the fuck up. His work is in the museum and yours is in the museum shop. Not the same market at all. He did you a favor publicizing that sentimental fluff, you should thank him."
"'My Sweet Lord' uses the exact same melody as 'He's So Fine.'"
"Yeah, but everything else about it is different. Lighten the fuck up."
[More "lighten the fuck up" rulings will be added as I think of them. In reality, every one of these trivial nuisance suits was treated as a matter of grave importance by the courts and contributed to the awful muck that is copyright law today. The judge's description of the "String of Puppies" photo was softened even though I think the photographer was an ass for suing. I mean, he made an ordinarily uplifting photo and Koons ridiculed it all the way to the bank--just deal, sometimes things happen when you put sickly sweet crap out there in the world. --tm]
"One to Thirty" [mp3 removed]
This is drum and bass. This is that note.
From indymedia: William Kristol Gets Pied
William Kristol, founder of the Project for a New American Century (a leading neo-con think tank) and a key figure in American foreign policy for over 20 years, was hit by what appeared to be a cream pie tonight in Richmond, Indiana. Throughout his speech, given at Earlham College, he defended the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war and state terror and was in the process of comparing current policy challenges to those of the early Cold War when a young man calmly lifted himself onto the stage and quickly walked to the podium, splattering a delicious dish all over the speaker as well as the college's president (collateral damage, perhaps?).It's not quite the Cronenbergian exploding head I thought it was when I first saw the photo, but I'll settle for a pie for this war-mongering moFo. I realize "Americans don't care about the war," which is why Bush squeaked in again (with a little cheating), but many of us here in the New York metro area are tired of having this violent, inept cadre in office. They're admitting they failed in Iraq, otherwise Wolfowitz and Feith would be moving up in the Defense Department, instead of being shunted aside.
Unfortunately, after a period of shock, many people in the audience stood and clapped to show support for Kristol (for a total of three standing ovations), including many self-professed peace activists and liberals who were afraid that this succulently sweet action would discredit Earlham College. They apparently forgot, perhaps due to his liability as a speaker, of Kristol's central role in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, his long efforts as a Harvard-trained political scientist to provide the intellectual justification for the Bush agenda of foreign intervention, and his current place as an architect of a war in Iraq which has claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives.
This month's Bookforum has two--count'em, two--Serious Novelists sneering at the French for liking "bad" American writers. John Banville looks down at "enfant terrible" Michel Houllebecq's infatuation with H. P. Lovecraft and Gary Indiana can't believe a writer as great as Emmanuele Carrere (accent grave over the first e rejected by my browser) likes Philip K. Dick. This is in two different articles, mind you. Well, get over it, you losers. Much as it disgusts you, those unsavory recluses had what the first George Bush called the "vision thing," which (respectively posthumously and belatedly) caught the popular imagination (especially filmmakers'), while few outside of the editorial offices of Bookforum, where the flame of genteel writing is perpetually kept burning, know who John Banville and Gary Indiana are. I swear, sometimes I think the literary clique exists only to bash H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. They've clearly run out of other things to write about.
(Lovecraft is on the cover, by the way--he sucks but sells magazines. "Enfant terrible" is the headline writer's phrase; I don't think Banville actually uses it.)
"Procession (Cooked)" [mp3 removed]
This is the tune I posted previously with more fleshed out (slap) bass and some atmospheric sweeps. The mood is a bit eerier and the bass drum quite insistent as befits a marching band of otter-like creatures in LED-mesh raiments moving slowly through the streets after ketamine has been dumped in the village water supply.
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Update: The DVD scan collection is still going strong but the ministeck patterns have been removed. What happened? No lawyer threats, I hope. The page now identifies its creator as Stacia Yeapanis, artist and curator of the DVD museum.
"Procession (Raw)" [mp3 removed]
This is a bare bones version of a tune I'm working on. I've since moved it along several stages, adding more instruments and a bit more elaborate drumming than this lone, slightly hamhanded tom, but this draft has its charms. A sort of folk processional (why does everything I write end up sounding Irish? some deep genetic roots I didn't know I had?) is played on a very flatulent sounding Sidstation, then repeats with some bright house-y chords with a sampled Absynth.
I'm teaching myself to write in Cubase and it's painfully slow because it's not as intuitive as Harmony Assistant, the other program I've been using, or my old Mac. The scheme relies more on key commands and shortcuts that you only learn by accident, or belatedly discover buried in the fine print of the manual. Ultimately the advantage will be more control over more instruments, being able to mix midi and sound files, and having access to some of the juicy plugins that are out there. (Again--I would never talk this way about Photoshop filters: I think music engineers "get it" better than art engineers.)
This week, dear diary, I've learned: (1) how to reset Kontakt to reduce latency (note lag); it's still not 100% but is vastly improved; (2) how to trigger a 120 bpm sampled beat so it plays in sync with a midi part (after some experimentation, I reset the tempo track to 122 bpm and added a triggering note every four beats, which is the length of the sample); (3) how to sync the Sid with an external midi clock; (4) how to turn off program changes in the Korg I'm using as a midi controller, so the Sid's presets don't keep switching as I dial around the Korg. I'm also getting a better handle on bending notes with the Korg's filter knobs.
Bonus: "Procession (Panning Wah-Wah Organ Version)" [mp3 removed]
Images from Frankie Martin's installation "One Minute Rave," at Canada. Press a button outside a cloth-draped doorway, enter the room with the black light, strobe, and cardboard cutout DJ, and you have exactly one minute to freak out. Actually you can do it multiple times, but you have to keep sticking your hand outside the doorjamb to hit the switch that activates the music and lights. Some very nice handcrafted work, geometric patterns, psychedelic drawing, and pure kitsch from the era of smart drinks, glow in the dark whistles, and floor shattering bass lines. Which is still going on in many parts of the country, and/or in a state of being perpetually revived, as the '60s psychedelic thing continues to morph with new technology and new crops of initiates. The vibe might also be "the early years of rave" before the DIY spirit gave over to corporate interests, if that era ever in fact existed. Maybe it's just an ideal rave of the mind. To put it in some historical context, this was to the early '90s what Kenny Scharf's black light rooms were to the late '60s, but less sardonic and more girly--and I mean the latter in a good way. It's truer to the spirit of the show than saying "post-feminist" and it's certainly not grrr-ly.