Jaquandor put up an interesting meme the other day, based around the idea of traveling back in time and encountering an earlier version of yourself. Since I loves me a good Grandfather Paradox, and I’ve now reached a sufficiently curmudgeonish age to dish out unsolicited advice to younger selves, let’s gather up some banana peels and stale beer for the Mr. Fusion and get this DeLorean rolling! Er, hovering. Whatever.
I spotted this video in a couple places yesterday and thought it was worth passing along. The performer is supposedly a homeless, unemployed man, but some people are voicing suspicion; they’re saying the camerawork is a little too professional and the whole thing a bit too polished. One commenter on YouTube suggested that maybe this is a viral created by some ad agency somewhere to bring attention to the cause. That seems reasonable to me, but I really have no idea. Whether this dude is an actor or not, he is an impressive puppeteer, and I found the clip surprisingly poignant. I suspect Jim Henson would be pleased, at least.
Without further ado, I give you “Under Pressure,” the great classic-rock song by Queen and David Bowie, lip-synched by Kermit the Frog and his identical twin:
I learned something yesterday afternoon that’s been eating at me a little, and I want to talk about it here. However, I am reluctant to name names, because I’m not sure there’s anything to be gained from making too big a fuss about this matter, which means this entry is going to be a little… vague. Sorry about that. I hope you’ll bear with me.
There’s this place I know that’s very unique and very scenic, and it makes a nice destination for a Sunday afternoon drive. The place has an interesting history as well; it was quite an endeavor to bring it here to Utah and get it into its current condition. The Girlfriend and I first visited this place a couple years ago, when it was novel and exciting. I took a lot of photos that day, and seeing as how it’s the 21st century and all, I posted several of them to my Flickr photostream. And then I pretty well forgot about them.
Yesterday, Anne and I returned to this place with her parents, and we saw that the owners are now offering a commemorative book for sale. I flipped through the sample copy, thinking it was nicely done, if a bit expensive for what you’re getting. Then, toward the back, I ran across something that looked very familiar. I asked Anne if she saw what I thought I saw, and she agreed with my suspicion. I should’ve asked to speak with a manager right then and there, but her parents were already out the door, and I tend to be pretty non-confrontational in person. So I waited until we got home and then I fired up Flickr and confirmed what Anne and I both already knew.
I’d seen one of my own photos in that book. There was no doubt. It was my photo… The owners of this place that I’ve supported and enjoyed and enthused about right here on this blog ganked my bloody photo without my permission and stuck it in their $55 coffee-table book and are making money from it. And the more I think about the situation, the more it bugs me. I even had a Creative Commons copyright on the picture, all rights reserved; fat lot of good that did me, eh?
The irony here is that if the people behind this had bothered to contact me, I would’ve given them the picture for free. I don’t have any aspirations to make money with my photography. It’s strictly a hobby for me. But it’s the principle of the thing, you know? My photos, like the words I string together here on this blog, are my work, representing my creativity and my skills (such as they are), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want some credit for them. I didn’t have the chance to pore over every page of the book, but I’m willing to bet my name isn’t anywhere in it. I know photos get passed around the Internet without attribution all the time. Hell, I’m guilty myself of stealing things and reposting them here on Simple Tricks. But I’m not profiting from those little acts of piracy, am I? I think publishing somebody’s work in a book that you’re selling at a considerable mark-up is kind of a different animal.
The question is, what am I going to do about it? I don’t have the money or the stomach for a lawsuit. As I said, I don’t want to make that big a fuss out of this. But I also don’t want it to pass without any mention either. It’s bullshit, and somebody owes me an apology at the least, if not my bloody contributor’s credit. All I know is, my affection for this particular place has taken a major hit, thanks to the dishonesty of the sneaky bastards who own it. The gall, the sheer gall of what they did…
Arg. Reason # 34,567 why life in the 21st Century sucks…
A coworker of mine is currently in Germany, regaling we earthbound drones back home with tales of her adventures via Facebook. She commented this morning on seeing a woman in a full-length burqa emerging from a sex shop and how that seemed “like progress.” And that in turn reminded me of something I saw on Boing Boing a while back.
This is a little on the racy side, but it’s nicely done and very, very interesting… and not just in the immediately obvious way!
Nothing like messing with your cultural stereotypes, eh? As I replied to my traveling friend, you never know what’s going on under those things…
The InterWebs have been buzzing this week with the confirmation of those year-old rumors that Uncle George is planning theatrical re-releases of all six Star Wars films, newly converted into trendy 3D, beginning with The Phantom Menace in 2012 and proceeding with one episode per year through Return of the Jedi in 2018. Assuming, that is, that the earlier releases do well enough at the box office to warrant going through the entire series. Personally, I think it may be a mistake to start with the prequels rather than the Original Trilogy. I know George views them all as one big happy saga and would like for them to be seen in sequence, but the sad truth that he seems unable to accept is that the prequels just aren’t as well-liked as the OT. They have their supporters, true, and I myself am not as hard on them as many of my friends, but I have a bad feeling that the OT is going to get shafted when the prequels fail to perform to whatever expectations the Great Flanneled One has for this event.
So, I’m standing on a street corner in downtown Salt Lake yesterday waiting for the light to change, when this grubby, hipster-y looking guy carrying a suspiciously bulging gym bag steps up to me and says, “Hey, man, would you have any interest in buying — ”
I took a quick step to the left and braced myself for something uncomfortable.
” — a fax machine?”
Out of the dozens of possibilities that had zipped through my mind after the words “interest in buying,” I must confess that a fax machine was not one of them. Sad times are these, when young ruffians feel free to peddle such wares on our formerly respectable city streets…
A while back, I received an email from a guy who said he was compiling information on Rick Springfield’s past concert performances for a couple of fan sites he was working on. He’d found my blog while Googling the 1981 Working Class Dog tour — Loyal Readers will recall that Rick’s stop here in Salt Lake City during that tour was my first concert — and he wanted to ask me for some details about the experience. We ended up having quite a nice conversation, and, being a helpful little pack rat who’s held on to the ticket stubs from every concert I’ve ever been to, I was able to put together a list for this guy of all the Rick shows I’ve attended. In case anyone out there is curious, I’ve seen him a grand total of eight times, seven of which occurred in the last decade, counting EFX Alive, the Las Vegas stage show he did for a while. The Girlfriend and I saw him twice last year alone. Which I suppose makes up somewhat for not getting to see him this year. He was scheduled for a November appearance in West Wendover, the Nevada border town where Salt Lakers go to gamble and buy cheap hooch in convenient gallon-sized jugs, but that performance was canceled a couple months ago, and he hasn’t come near enough to Utah on any other of his other stops to tempt me. I’m fanboy enough to cross a state border for Rick, but I draw the line at entire states.
I believe a new Wendover date has been scheduled for next spring, but in the meantime, the Internet has provided an alternative fix: you can go here and listen to his entire set from the recent Sweden Rock Festival, nearly a full hour of music that includes many of the old favorites, as well as a couple tracks from his latest album, an abbreviated but kick-ass take on Eric Clapton’s “Crossroads,” and even a little bit of The Beatles’ “She’s So Heavy.” The show ends with one of my personal favorites, a flat-out, pedal-to-the-metal, head-banging rocker called “Kristina.” I’ve seen Rick on both good nights and not-so-good nights, so trust me when I say this performance is well worth your time. Especially if all you know of him is “Jessie’s Girl,” as this is a good overview of where he’s been musically over the past 30 years. Don’t dawdle, though — I don’t know how long this is going to be available. You’ll have to sit through about a minute of Swedish DJ patter right at the beginning, but I thought that was kind of interesting, myself. If you don’t know the song titles by heart the way I do, you can find a set list under the little hyperlink near the top of the page that reads Musiken i programmet. To listen to the concert, look for the music player at the bottom of the page…
A few days ago, I was half-listening to NPR’s Morning Edition as I drove to the train station to go to work… well, actually, I guess I was only one-third listening to it, as I was aware that they were interviewing some author but I couldn’t tell you his name or the title of his book, or really anything at all about the interview itself. Except for one idea that for some reason jumped up and grabbed me by the arm.
This mysterious, anonymous author said something about his belief that everyone has an internal age, a time in their life when they are their “most authentic self.” I remember him saying his own clock was set somewhere between 47 and 53 years old. Now, I don’t know what he was actually getting at because of that “only one-third listening” thing. And it’s kind of a confusing concept anyway. Does he mean that we have an actual chronological age at which our inherent personality traits and maturity levels “catch up” with the calendar and with society’s expectations of how a person that age is supposed to feel and act? Or does he mean we’re mentally stuck at a certain age regardless of our calendar age? Are those definitions really just the same thing and I’m parsing this too much? Probably.
In any event, I was thinking about this internal clock/authentic self thing over the weekend, wondering what it means and, of course, what my own internal clock might be set for. I know of at least one reader of this blog who would say that I’ve been going on 50-something for decades now (he’s told me so a number of times), and my mother has long maintained I was a 35 years old by the time I was seven. I understand why people say things like that. It’s because I tend to be overly serious, and I often express a fairly sour view of the world for a (relatively) young man. But honestly, I don’t see myself as psychologically middle-aged, in spite of what my hair- and waistlines are telling me. I don’t think my “authentic self” is 50 years old, or even 35. I’d say the real me is somewhere between 15 and 25.
I’m not speaking from nostalgia for bygone innocence or looking at my youth through rose-tinted glasses and thinking I was happier then than now, because I haven’t forgotten that I went through some rough times during that decade. But that was the period when my tastes and interests pretty well solidified (they’ve not changed a whole lot since then), and it was when I had the clearest idea of what I wanted to do with my life and who I wanted to be. My ambitions were the most coherent they’ve ever been (which probably isn’t saying much, but hey, everything’s relative), and I hadn’t yet begun to feel diminished through age and compromise and obligation. If that’s not the definition of authentic self, then I really don’t know what it is.
The sad thing is that my authentic 15-to-25-year-old self didn’t realize that he was living through the peak of so many aspects of his character. He always assumed that he — I — would become more confident as I got older, that things would become, if not easier then at least more clearly defined. It hasn’t quite worked that way, though. I won’t bore you all with some whiny confessional, but I will say that most of the time I feel like I’ve become less certain and more fragile with age, rather than stronger. Maybe that’s why I have so much sympathy for child actors, because I, too, feel like I peaked at the very beginning of my adult life and have been struggling ever since to figure out what to do with myself…
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not much for anime, those Japanese-made animated films that typically feature characters with enormous eyes (or hardly any eyes at all), bizarrely stylized facial expressions, and utterly insane hair-dos. I’ve sampled several of the acknowledged classics of the form over the years, but despite my genuine interest in Japan and its culture, I’ve just never been able to warm up to this stuff. In general, anyhow. There are two notable exceptions, a pair of anime for which I do have genuine affection, both of them television series that showed up in America right around the time I was absolutely crazy for anything that included spaceships and rayguns (i.e., the fifth grade).
The first was a show I think most people in my general age demo will remember, Battle of the Planets, which followed a team of five teenage superheroes known as G-Force.
The other was Star Blazers.
Jaquandor wrote something insightful over at Byzantium’s Shores this morning:
…a blogger I read recently wrote that President Obama has brought all of his woes upon himself, and that the Tea Party only exists because of his excesses. “The Tea Party wouldn’t exist without him,” this fellow wrote.
But…of course the Tea Party would exist without him. The Tea Party would have happened to any Democrat elected President in 2008, because for all the grass-roots mythology the Tea Parties like to indulge, the fact is very simple: the Tea Party is nothing more than the same pissed-off Republicans who crawl out of the woodwork en masse every time a Democrat is in office. President Hillary Clinton would have faced a Tea Party. So would President Joseph Biden, President John Kerry, President…anyone at all from the Democratic Party.
This mirrors something I’ve thought off and on ever since Barack Obama’s election. It’s really not his policies or his personality that have got people on the right foaming at the mouth. I don’t even think it’s his Muslim-sounding name or his race (although I certainly don’t discount any of these things as contributing factors). When you get right down to brass tacks, the biggest problem is simply that a very sizable segment of the population cannot abide the thought of anyone other than a Republican sitting in the Oval Office. Conservatives like to gripe about the culture of entitlement that they think liberals promote, but what else could you call the obstinate conviction that the presidency belongs to their side alone except an overblown sense of entitlement?
We’ve seen this before, of course, during the Clinton years. The Big Dog may have eventually revealed some major (and exploitable) character flaws, but he had enemies searching for those weaknesses before he even took his oath of office, for no good reason that I’ve ever been able to determine other than his party affiliation. A lot of people, especially here in Utah, just couldn’t wrap their minds around the fact that 12 years of Republican presidency were over. And I think the exact same reflexive denial took root the moment Barack Obama took the reins from G.W. Bush.
A lot of things from the Clinton era seem to be repeating themselves, actually. The Republicans are once again threatening to shut down the government if they don’t get their way. They’ve come up with a new Contract on, er, Pledge to America. Even Newt Gingrich has raised his beady-eyed, porcine head once again. And on the other side of the aisle, we’ve got a Democratic majority that is disorganized, disheartened, ineffectual, needlessly and inexplicably cowardly, utterly incapable of standing up for itself in the face of all the crazy bullshit, and very likely going to lose big in a few weeks.
The stench of deja vu is nauseating.