So I decided to write that book, and fill it with as many lies and as much misinformation as I could muster.

Today I took all the scanned images and stuck them together in Word and made a PDF file out of them, the better to print out or browse through on a computer.

http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/AmericanStates.pdf

Lucy's Favorite Page

It’s still available as individual images on Flickr.com.

The structuralist critics liked to talk about there only being two (or 36, or ???) different stories that are retold over and over. These two women’s shows are exactly the same story: Actor, past the prime earning years, trades on what’s left of their fame to draw a live audience to hear them sing. This shop-worn trope only occurs in New York City in the US — I’ve never lived or visited anywhere else where people pay good money to see B-list celebrity Cabaret. Who hires the musicians, commissions the arrangements, secures the venue? Do these women do it as a vanity project, does someone put up the money to indulge them, or is there still someone left in New York City that thinks this sort of thing is a good idea in which to invest thousands of dollars?

The reviews linked above seem to damn both with faint praise, exhibiting an unusual (for the Times) amount of charity, but giving readers very little to actually recommend the shows. Daly’s voice is described as ‘delicately brassy,’ which sounds like the worst of both worlds. Plimpton is described as having a ‘serviceable, medium-sized voice,’ which is NYTimes Arts-speak for ‘don’t quit your day job.’

Perhaps I’m not being fair to either Plimpton or Daly — I have admired both actors on occasion, and who knows, maybe they can keep an audience enthralled with a few songs and some amusing anecdotes. But in the extremely unlikely event some successful actor is reading this post, let me warn you: Plenty of singers have turned to acting, and done OK for themselves, but I can’t think of one actor that has done the reverse and had things end well.

If someone tells you you’re multi-talented, the only sane response should be intense skepticism. Amongst the various human talents for performance, being able to act barely qualifies you for acting jobs. All effective singers are already actors, but in addition they have good voices and the can sing in tune. The converse doesn’t obtain — remembering lines, modulating your facial expression and hitting your mark has nothing to do with singing.

So don’t quit your day job.

But they also say “the Service and the Tracks are solely for personal non-commercial use.” Which means you can’t use them on mixtapes, mix cds, or DJ mixes for which you charge money. On the other hand, it also appears to prohibit playing the tracks as part of a DJ Set, which is rather the point of buying dance music in any format, unless I’m reading that sentence wrongly?

Beatport, oddly, doesn’t have an license statement anywhere. In their FAQ they state “In the United States and UK buying a track from the site is just like buying a record from the record store. The same legal implications are in effect.” But I’m not sure that’s actually an accurate statement to make globally. It also doesn’t address the fundamental difference between physical media and digital media: owning a record or CD is a zero-sum game — if it’s loaned, or sold, or stolen, someone else has it and you don’t. I’d really prefer that they have some actual legal statement about what it is they’re selling.

Amazon terms of services (as listed on TOSback.com) are as restrictive as Boomkat with respect to public performance: “…you agree that you will not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, license or otherwise transfer or use the Digital Content. You are not granted any synchronization, public performance, promotional use, commercial sale, resale, reproduction or distribution rights for the Digital Content.”

That seems to preclude me playing any MP3′s I’ve bought from Amazon when I DJ, or do a radio show, or put up a DJ mix for download. Which I don’t think really makes any sense; if I play something on the radio, the station has arrangements with licensing organizations to compensate the license holders, and any bar or performance space that operates as a business pays for a similar license to present music. Not only that, the Amazon Terms Of Service are more restrictive than Boomkats, even though they apply to exactly the same product.

Can Amazon actually add restrictions on the use of items they sell? They are, in fact, the middleman in a transaction between me, the buyer, and the holder of license, the record label. Do they have any say at all in how I use digital downloads? And what about artists whose music isn’t covered by a standard copyright – e.g. Throbbing Gristle who, from what I’ve read, don’t copyright their music? I’m sure there are artists whose MP3s are sold by Amazon.com that use a Creative Commons license, which can conflict in several ways with the Amazon TOS.

I’m not an Intellectual Property lawyer by any means, so I don’t know what to think. But all musicians are faced with a disruptive change that’s happening with respect to how music is distributed, and none of us know where we stand, really. I’m all for musicians to get paid for their work. Hell, I’d like to get paid for my work. But going forward we’re going to have to come up with some sort of fair, sustainable business model in a world where digital copies zero out the cost of reproduction and distribution.

I think in the near term, if you want to support musicians, you should buy their music rather than download it illegally. More than that, you should try and buy it directly from the musician if at all possible, because that way, they get more money than if you buy from a record store or on-line site. I just bought a series of EPs from Cooly G, by sending money to her directly via Paypal. She also has a couple of records out on Hyperdub, but I bet she’s made more money selling directly to her fans than she has from stuff released via Hyperdub.

Sidewalks of New York was Ed Burns’ auteur turn as the post-milleneal answer to Woody Allen. Watchable but not fantastic. Murphy is decent and better than just watchable. She has a face that’s like a CNN crawl of her thoughts, and she’s a good enough actress that her thoughts when in front of the camera are what her character would be thinking.

In Ramen Girl, she plays an American girl stranded in Japan, who, for reasons not readily apparent to me, decides she must learn to become a Ramen Master. This was, I think, a movie originally for Japanese audiences (with Brittany’s English in subtitles) that got language-inverted and sent straight to DVD. She seems a little too gobsmacked and weepy in this movie, but she did her best to make an actual character out of a dishrag of a caricature. This reminded me of Tampopo, which had its basis in the same Japanese in-joke: Americans take at face value the reverence for ramen in the movie, but to a Japanese audience this is ridiculous — Ramen is fast food, and becoming a Ramen master is a little like becoming a French Fry master at Burger King.

The Dead Girl in which she plays the title role, is a movie that tells the story of a murder as the story of the people around the event. Murphy is only in the last segment, detailing her last day as a prostitute trying to deliver her child a birthday present, and of these three movies, this one is the best performance.

I’m sure in coming days we’ll find out all sorts of tawdry details of how she died, her less salubrious proclivities, her schlubby husband, etc. But for now I think it’s worth reflecting on her work, which on the whole was really good. A lot of mention has also been made of her voice work; her Luanne on “King of the Hill” was peerless. And if you peruse her filmography there is ample evidence (she worked A LOT) that she was without fear when choosing roles — she’d try anything once.

And “Sinbad The Sailor” holds a special place in my heart, because it was a family favorite when my son Sean was very young. And it has everything: Ub’s ‘turntable’ innovation, combining filmed 3D backgrounds with cell animation, plenty of Popeye’s surreal muttered asides, the “Twister Punch,” and Blimpie’s legendary appetite. And it’s a mini-operetta — the Sinbad song sung by Bluto became a car ride favorite. It’s a mark of it’s excellence that it was later quoted in abridged form in a 1952 Paramount Popeye cartoon, with different music. Curiously the “Twister Punch” becomes “The Onesie-Twosie.”

This was recorded at the Volksbühne in Berline on November 15, 2007, and I went to that show. I don’t know how a recording could really do justice to that show — I was in the first row, and the bass was rearranging my innards and pushing and pulling the air out of my lungs. But if you’re into uncomprimising industrial-strength noise music, you’d love it.

I liked the setting in Kwazulu Natal, and hearing Zulu spoken. It was beautifully filmed. Those two things kept me from getting up 20 minutes in and turning it off. After 40 minutes, I wanted to see if it ever found a way to redeem itself. In the end, though, it is an example of how fundamentally some people misunderstand how to make religious art.

Case in point — the protagonist is driving a tractor, carrying his brother’s son. They hit a bump, and the child gets run over by the tractor. He dies, and both the protagonist and his brother go into deep, demonstrative mourning. The protagonist weeps and wails about how he feels responsible. Maybe a bit over the top but not inconsistent with the reality of the situation.

Then one night, the brother has a dream, where he sees his son again, and the son tells him he’s OK, he’s waiting for him in heaven. The brother calls the protagonist to tell him, they both cry tears of joy, and the movie moves on; the kid isn’t mentioned again until the credits, where they dedicate the film to the real-life kid who died.

The problem here, and the problem in a lot of religious ‘art’ is that it is arguing from its own conclusions. The idea that a) the dream is accepted as a literal supernatural contact with the dead kid and b) that since the kid is in heaven, everything’s hunky dory just doesn’t ring true. It’s what the film-makers, and presumably some Christians wish was true, but it is completely at odds with actual human experience.

A very similar event — the accidental death of a child — occurred in my family. My mom’s family are deeply religious Mormons, who believe in eternal life as sincerely as is possible. Yet the entire family — not just my uncle’s family, but all the cousins, my grandmother, everyone — were and are affected deeply by the wound this accident left. It is one of the seminal hurts around which the whole family curls. My Grandmother died unable to mention the child’s name without tears brimming in her eyes.

There is great religious art. That’s why people go to Europe and haunt old churches. There’s Marian Anderson singing spirituals. There’s Bach’s B Minor Mass. There’s Aretha Franklin testifying in the pulpit of her father’s church. There’s religious art that makes a stubborn, confirmed agnostic like me wish I could share that faith in God. There’s Chaucer’s “Canturbury Tales” — humorous, scatalogical, irreverant; but he states in the preface “all that is writen is writen for oure doctrine.”

Unfortunately there’s the ‘art’ religious people create that seeks to cleave to doctrine in ways that turns it polemic or Pollyanna. The real impulse to religious art is unruly and heterodox and disturbing, but stuff like “Faith Like Potatoes” has more in common with Socialist Realism than it does real art. The love of God can be one of the most beautiful impulses in art, but it gets turned into bathos and kitsch by artistic cowardice. Which is a shame.