Reason Magazine - Topics > Culture

Some Squirrelly Guy Who Claims that He Just Don't Believe in Fightin'

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:16:00 EDT

In this week's Village Voice, Chuck Eddy offers a spirited revisionist defense of the much-maligned (by liberals, anyway) country star Toby Keith. As you might recall, Keith topped the charts in 2002 with "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue," a patriotic ditty that promised terrorists and other malfeasants, "we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." While I can't say that I've ever cared for Keith's music, his feud with the self-important Dixie Chicks was fun to watch. And as reason contributing editor Charles Oliver noticed back in 2003, the famously pugnacious Keith was an Iraq War skeptic from the start.

Here's Eddy on why Keith is more than just a right-wing shock jock:

That handful of songs (a couple of which appeared on a surprisingly funky 2003 album entitled Shock'n Y'All, har har) is pretty much where Toby's editorializing ends, at least on record. His output is no more limited by his war-machine anthem than Merle Haggard's was by the comparably opportunistic "Okie From Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side of Me" when Nixon was president. And not many country artists since Merle have managed a creative streak like Toby's these past few years-in fact, to my ears, his '00s output (six albums plus change, including half of 2006's Broken Bridges soundtrack and a few spare tracks collected on his new 35 Biggest Hits) just might stand up to anybody else's this decade, in any musical genre.

That's a bold statement. But the comparison to Hag makes sense. Read the rest of Eddy's article here. For the definitive take on the tangled politics of country music, however, look no further than reason's own Jesse Walker.

The Old, Weird Niagara

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:35:00 EDT

From last Thursday's Wall Street Journal, here's the great reactionary radical (and reason contributor) Bill Kauffman on Ginger Strand's intriguing new book Inventing Niagara:

Ms. Strand's populist defense of the glorious disorder of the private Niagara Falls Museum is of a piece with her appreciation of the falls as God and nature intended them to be. But just as the five-story museum was leveled by the New York State parks authority and replaced by a parking lot, so have the falls, in Ms. Strand's words, been "manicured, repaired, landscaped and artificially lit, dangerous overhangs dynamited off and water flow managed to suit the tourist schedule." One can't help noticing that the "improvements" Ms. Strand deplores were almost entirely the work of government. Those overhangs were blown off by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has trimmed, blasted, dammed and fortified this natural wonder and its river. State, not commerce, was unable to leave well enough alone.

As an American patriot, I've long been ashamed of the fact that Niagara's greatest attraction, the uncanny Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum, rests on the Canadian side of the falls. And as Kauffman notes, we can thank the bulldozers of the vile Robert Moses, among other government villains, for the destruction of "the carnival-barker spirit that once gave the city brass, if not class."

Whole thing here.

On the Media's Take on Ayn Rand (featuring Reason's Nick Gillespie)

Mon, 12 May 2008 17:02:00 EDT

NPR's On the Media did a long segment over the weekend about Ayn Rand's continuing popularity and influence. Among the folks they interviewed was reason's Nick Gillespie. Snippets here:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's Gary Cooper playing Howard Roark, the tall, angular architect of tall, angular buildings in The Fountainhead. That book has sold something like six million copies since it was published in 1943. Ron Paul should be so lucky.
Rand died in 1982 - but Rand lives!
NICK GILLESPIE: Let's put it this way: Ayn Rand's work, I think, is popular for the same reason Prometheus has always been popular with humans. It's about somebody who dares to struggle against great odds and, you know, steals fire.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick Gillespie is the editor of Reason.com and Reason TV and former editor of Reason Magazine, a Libertarian journal whose name is a nod to Rand's favorite wordreason, above all - reason above conventional pieties, reason above religion, above especially collectivist societies and command economies, the horrors of which she witnessed as a child in St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution - reason that finds its purest expression in capitalism.
NICK GILLESPIE: Virtually every CEO of every major company will list Ayn Rand as a major influence. A bevy of Hollywood stars, ranging from Brad Pitt to Angelina Jolie to Vince Vaughn - a director like Oliver Stone, who is fond of Castro, says that Ayn Rand is one of the most important figures in his intellectual life. Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Hugh Hefner - I mean, the reach of this author is pretty astonishing....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I don't think that influence derives from her persuasive argument against command economies.
NICK GILLESPIE: She gives egoists a positive case for why the world should revolve around them and around their efforts. If you are the person who is creating value, if you are the star, the sun really does revolve around you. And not only should it be that way, but that's the moral order of the universe....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nick Gillespie, of Reason, says he was never wowed by Rand's novels but that the attacks on them are often swipes by people who would rather not seriously engage her ideas.
NICK GILLESPIE: How many characters from Saul Bellow novels, how many characters from Don DeLillo novels, inarguably great writers, how many of them have penetrated the American cultural consciousness in the way that a Howard Roark or a John Gault [sic] has, to a degree where these are shorthands for an entire system of ideas?
I think that that speaks pretty highly of her power as a writer. She is a great author because she has a phenomenal audience, including a lot of people who go through a worshipful phase with her. And, you know, here we could be talking about Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve, as well as any number of pimply-faced adolescents who decide to grow beyond her.

Whole transcript here.

The piece, which runs about 15 minutes, is rich with bits of audio. Listen to it:

reason on Rand here.

"As a subculture, we are not the spawn of Satan"

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:08:00 EDT

The New York Times profiles the weird world of steampunk,

a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines.

Whole thing here.

Though the article does refer to the great William Gibson, whose short story "The Gernsback Continuum" is a bona fide steampunk classic, it somehow fails to mention Bruce Sterling, whose own contributions to the genre are far from negligible. Contributing Editor Mike Godwin sat down with Sterling back in 2004 for a freewheeling interview that touched on everything from "Google blindness" to Islamic terrorism. Read it all here.

Virtually Free

info@reason.com (Wagner James Au) — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

If You Don't Like Hank Williams

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:17:00 EDT

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a long, favorable review of the new Hank Williams (and family) exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. From Barry Mazor's article:

The lives of Hank and Audrey Williams; of their children, Hank Jr. and Lycretia; and of Hank's daughter Jett are all traced, as well as the growing careers of Hank Jr.'s performing progeny Hank III, the punk rocking honky-tonker, and Holly, the singer-songwriter. The exhibit features some 200 family artifacts, most never seen before in public, from Hank Sr.'s prized, inlaid Martin guitar and his violin, and the suitcase he had with him the night he died, to the family's early television set and bric-a-brac from their den. There are the spangled new Nudie suits provided Hank Jr. and then Hank III, in turn, when they were small boys, the white guitar Ms. Jett took to the stage as she began her own late-blooming career, and intimate family photos and home movies.

For my two cents, any celebration of America's honky tonk king is worth the trouble. And I can't help wondering what the folks at the Grand Ole Opry make of it. The Opry, of course, gave Hank the boot back in 1952, rescinding his membership as punishment for all the booze and pills he was downing. As Nick Tosches writes in Country: The Music and the Musicians, less than a month after scoring a crossover pop hit in the fall of 1952 with "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)," Hank was "in the worst shape of his life," shacking up at the boardinghouse run by his mother in Montgomery, Alabama. "He pined for his faithless wife, Miss Audrey, drank, took chloral hydrate, drank, fell down and cracked his skull, drank some more, and wrote ‘I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive.'" A few months later he was gone, found dead in the backseat of a chauffeured Cadillac.

Today, Opry visitors are greeted at the door by a Hank impersonator. And why not? He's arguably the greatest singer and songwriter in all of country music. But then why hasn't the Opry reinstated his membership after all these years? Here's what Reinstate Hank has to say about it:

Despite being one of the most powerfully iconic figures in American music, Hank Williams has yet to be reinstated to the Opry. Now, your help is needed to honor and preserve his legacy. Join the campaign and add your signature to the petition to Reinstate Hank Williams to the Grand Ole Opry.

Petition here. Hillbilly hellraiser Hank III carrying on his granddad's legacy here. My look at country's tangled roots in blackface minstrelsy (including Hank's "Lovesick Blues") here.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: The New York Sun's Alternative Take on the Big Apple

Wed, 07 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

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They Try to Make Me Go to Rehab

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:53:00 EDT

Will the troubles of poor Amy Winehouse never cease? First, a leading UK daily releases a video that allegedly shows her smoking crack. Then another calls for the British government to forcibly commit her to drug treatment ("The State's actions could save a great talent"). Now Variety brings word that she won't be recording the theme song for the latest James Bond flick:

Mark Ronson, who produced much of Winehouse's Grammy-winning "Back to Black," said the soul diva is "not ready to record any music."

Ronson said the two started work on the track for the upcoming Bond movie "Quantum of Solace" but it would take "some miracle of science" to finish it, he said in an interview with Sky News.

reason, of course, has long championed the right to use those "miracles of science" that keep landing Winehouse in such trouble. Read all about it here, here, and here.

New at Reason

Tue, 06 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Contributing Editor Greg Beato makes the case for drafting Barbie and waging culture war on Iran.

Read all about it here.

Drop Barbies, Not Bombs, on Iran

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Despite Hillary Clinton's penchant for magnificently monochromatic pantsuits that are just a couple epaulets short of colonel status in Michael Jackson's toddler army, the bellicose Democratic senator from New York is apparently incapable of intimidating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a recent appearance on Good Morning America, Clinton told ABC News' Chris Cuomo that she will definitely attack Iran if it launches a nuclear strike against Israel, and even added a dash of swaggering trash-talk to her promise. "Whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel," she exclaimed, "we would be able to totally obliterate them."

But while Clinton's saber-rattling may have unnerved lesser Iranian officials such as Amb. Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi, who lodged a formal complaint to the United Nations, Ahmadinejad appeared unmoved by Clinton's morning-chat bravado. "Presidency of a woman in a country that boasts its gunmanship is unlikely," he quipped.

Meanwhile, Iran is terrified of Barbie, the tiny polyvinyl sex bomb who loves shopping, pizza, and brushing her hair, but has few satellite-guided missiles at her disposal. According to Iran's Prosecutor General, Ghorban Ali Dori Najfabadi, a loosely organized coalition, led by the world's most impeccably accessorized mercenary but also including additional combatants like Harry Potter and Spider-man, is doing "irreparable damage" to Iranian children. "The irregular importation of such toys, which unfortunately arrive through unofficial sources and smuggling, is destructive culturally and a social danger," Najafabadi cautioned (doubtless worried about the effect on sales of Iran's "official doll," Sara).

In the long run, of course, a Barbie revolution would be more devastating—and humiliating—to Iran's theocracy than a nuclear strike. Fundamentalists of all stripes inevitably fear homegrown dissidents more than foreign aggression: The prospect of annihilation is more palatable than the specter of choice. In Iran, the prosecutor general is battling plastic dolls. In the U.S., the American Family Association (AFA), armed to the teeth with adjectives, is decrying the "explicit, open-mouth homosexual kissing" that recently occurred on As the World Turns, the long-running soap opera underwritten by consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble.

In August 2007, As the World Turns made history when it showed a kiss between two gay male characters, Noah and Luke, or as their fans refer to them, "Nuke." In the months that followed, their romance continued, albeit with only one additional instance of same-sex first base action. Suddenly, in fact, even modest, closed-mouth homosexual air-kissing seemed off-limits—whenever the characters seemed on the verge of smooching, the camera panned away. Viewers took note of this uncharacteristic discretion and began campaigning for another kiss; a couple weeks ago, the show delivered. (And now the American Family Association would like you to see it too.)

According to the AFA, Procter & Gamble wants to "desensitize viewers to the homosexual lifestyle and help make the unhealthy and immoral lifestyle more acceptable to society, especially to children and youth." No doubt this is because Procter & Gamble's main business is selling Tide, Crest, and Pampers, and the unhealthy and immoral gay lifestyle inevitably leads to a pathological obsession with clean laundry, cavity prevention, and baby care.

In the case of Barbie, there in no multinational conglomerate driving the agenda. Mattel doesn't officially deploy its unlikely freedom fighter to Iran; the Barbies who show up in Tehran shop windows are smuggled into the country, the victims of international doll trafficking. Once there, however, they make the best of it, embodying the traditional American values of self-determination and haircare—and potentially exposing impressionable Iranian minds to phenomena as diverse as Frank Sinatra, the occult, investment opportunities involving miniature dog poop, and who knows what else.

Contemplating such matters, an obvious question arises: If Barbie's marginal and haphazard presence in Iran is so disruptive, what kind of impact might she have there if a more orchestrated effort to put additional sexy white boots on the ground was implemented? Luckily, the relative economy of a Barbie surge—an army of 200,000 cheerleaders for Western decadence can be mustered for the price of a dozen Tomahawk missiles—means our government isn't likely to get involved any time soon. If anything could dampen Barbie's revolutionary power, official U.S. sanction just might; the people of Iran already have one government too many trying to manage their doll-play.

Best just keep filling up your SUV, gas prices be damned. According to the Associated Press, the increasing presence of smuggled Barbies in Iran is "partly due to a dramatic rise in purchasing power as a result of increased oil revenues." As long as America's expressways remain bumper-to-bumper every weekday afternoon, hope for democracy in Iran exists.

And if we could aim a few gay soap opera Nukes their way, so much the better. After all, hardcore mullahs and old-school feminists aren't the only ones who despise Barbie's vacant but empowering gaze. In 2002, an AFA spokesman decried a pregnant version of Barbie's married sidekick Midge that featured a trap-door stomach with an adorable unborn baby inside it, exclaiming that "Mattel should stay out of the 'birds and bees' business and leave adult themes alone." (Yes, you read that right; the American Family Association is officially against childbirth.)

In 2006, Robert Knight, the confusingly virile president of Concerned Women of America, accused Barbie.com of trying to promote "bisexuality gender confusion" among visitors to its site, based on a poorly worded question in a survey that the site quickly amended. These days, however, such groups apparently don't have the troop strength to maintain a presence in every zone of the Culture Wars—they're too busy waging war on imaginary homosexuals to do battle with Barbie too.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco. Read his reason archive here.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: The Age of American Unreason; Q&A with Susan Jacoby

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:35:00 EDT

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MADD as Hell at GTA IV

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:24:00 EDT

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) pans the just-released latest iteration of the massively popular vid game Grand Theft Auto:

Noting that drunk driving claims nearly 13,500 lives each year, MADD said that it is "extremely disappointed" that the game lets users get virtually drunk and then get behind the wheel of an equally virtual automobile.
"Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke," MADD said. "Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime, and it is also 100 percent preventable."
MADD is asking the Entertainment Software Rating Board to bump Grand Theft Auto IV's rating up to AO for Adults Only from M for Mature. The ESRB's content descriptors for the game currently include "use of drugs and alcohol." The parental group also said that it is asking the game's "manufacturer" (presumably Take-Two Interactive) to consider stopping distribution out of a sense of social responsibility, or out of respect for those who've been hurt or killed by drunk drivers.

More here.

MADD has to get in line to pan GTAIV, which is pulling weak reviews such as this one: "GTA IV on Sony PS3: Resolution, Online Issues Hamper Experience."

reason's November 2007 cover story, "Prohibition Returns!," discussed MADD's mission creep from an anti-drunk driving org to an anti-alcohol group. Read all about it here.

Steal a Little and They Call You a Thief; Steal a Lot and They Call You King; and Then There's Jim Twitchell

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:48:00 EDT

University of Florida professor of English and advertising Jim Twitchell—an occasional reason contributor over the years—has been unmasked as a serial plagiarist by The Gainesville, Florida Sun:

James Twitchell, a widely published UF professor who writes about consumerism and pop culture, has lifted words verbatim from multiple authors in at least three books published between 2002 and 2007, a Sun investigation found.
Twitchell initially denied a pattern of plagiarism, but the 64-year-old professor was contrite and ashamed when recently confronted with a larger body of evidence.
"It's my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited. In many cases, I have not done this," Twitchell wrote in an e-mail Wednesday. "I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others."

More here.

From a reason perspective, what's particularly disappointing is that Twitchell, who contributed four memorable pieces that together made a fun and erudite case for consumer capitalism, ripped off at least two other reason figures: former Editor Virginia Postrel and anthropologist Grant McCracken.

Here's Postrel's reaction:

I was surprised at the extent of Twitchell's word-for-word copying, but I don't consider that his most egregious breach of ethics. Giving your readers inaccurate information because you've changed store names--to hide the source? to make a better story? just for fun?--is worse.

And here's McCracken:

This was witting behavior. Twitchell sent Postrel the manuscript of Living It Up to ask for a blurp. She noticed Twitchell's use of the Diderot Effect and asked him to acknowledge me. Twitchell did not. According to Stripling, Twitchell claims that Diderot Effect "has become such common parlance in his area of study that he wasn't even sure who coined it." Really? But his use of my exact words tells us he was acquainted with its origin.

We've done a quick scan of Twitchell's work for reason and have no obvious cases of rip-offery and plagiarism from other sources. If we dig that up, we'll make corrections. Twitchell's behavior is not simply indefensible but really fucking stupid: We live in an age where it's tough not to get caught for plagiarizing. And where there's no cost to acknowledging sources—if anything, it's a sign of erudition and plugs an author into a broader network of thinkers.

Grand Theft Smasheroo

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:16:00 EDT

The latest installment of the controversial video game Grand Theft Auto will bust up sales records like Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) driving home from Capitol Hill, say industry analysts:

The launch of "Grand Theft Auto 4" is expected to be the biggest entertainment event of the year, with first-week sales forecast to be up to $400 million, beating those of last year's "Halo 3" from Microsoft Corp.

More here.

As sales mount for the game, now set in New York-like "Liberty City" and (hopefully featuring a whore-banging, money-laundering, hypocritical pol a la Eliot* Spitzer), expect the protests to mount against the game, which has somehow helped add to generally lower crime rates in the United States.

[*]: Spelling corrected due to input from reader Adam Scavone.

Hillary and the Holy Ghost

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:39:00 EDT

"I have had the experiences on many, many occasions where I felt like the Holy Spirit was there with me as I made a journey...You know, it could be walking in the woods. It could be watching a sunset."—Sen. Hillary Clinton.

More here, in a Wall Street Journal col by Daniel Henninger which is mostly about "culture war" stuff. (The only truly indispensable resource on culture war stuff, by the way, is Morris P. Fiorina's Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America.)

Hat tip: To a reader whose email pointing to this picture I inadvertently deleted.

"Who Doesn't Want to Wear the Ribbon?!?!"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:36:00 EDT

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this interesting Spiked review of the book Ribbon Culture, by Sarah Moore, which looks at the "the relentless rise of awareness-raising ribbons—kitsch fashion items that express the wearer's fear of disease or empathy with victims."

In seeking to understand why the individuals she interviewed wear the ribbons or wristbands that they do, Moore's account stands out through her refusal to pander to the rhetoric of ribbon culture, which emphasises ‘awareness', ‘caring' and engagement with a cause. In reality, these positive rhetorical sentiments mask an anxious, self-obsessed, depoliticised culture....
The increasing orientation towards the self has been theorised by several influential thinkers, including Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Anthony Giddens in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), Ulrich Beck in Risk Society (1992) and Frank Furedi in Therapy Culture (2004). It is understood to be a product of the breakdown of traditional institutions and relations of solidarity, which lead to a more fragmented, risk-conscious society, in which the quest for meaning takes on a more individualised, uncertain form. Critics such as Lasch and Furedi view this process as a predominantly negative one, leading to a fearful, isolated outlook that rests on a diminished sense of the individual and society, while the Giddens school of thought presents it in a rather more positive, liberatory light.

Put me in the Giddens school to the extent that I think the breakdown of traditional institutions is both overstated and generally liberatory and the turn toward the individual to be a good thing. I find Lasch generally unpersuasive as a social critic and am a disagreeing admirer of Furedi's work. But the review (and I presume the book it's based on) is certainly worth checking out.

More here.

Pirate Capitalism

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, by Matt Mason, New York: Free Press, 279 pages, $25

In a well-publicized speech two years ago, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney said, “We understand now that piracy is a business model.… Pirates compete the same way we do —through quality, price, and availability.”

Sweeney wasn’t thinking about Jack Sparrow, the fictional hero of Disney’s cash cow Pirates of the Caribbean. She meant the consumers and capitalists who pull music, words, and video out of the culture and remix, recast, and resell them.

It used to be easy to tell the pirates from the creators. Record labels sold CDs; Napster distributed music for free. Studios made movies; bootleggers taped opening nights in theaters and sold DVDs on the street the next morning. But postmodern piracy is more than mere bootlegging. In its best manifestation, it is the creation of brand new products cobbled together from the sights and sounds of contemporary life—including those sights and sounds disseminated by billion-dollar entertainment corporations.

In order to keep up with the pirates, more and more media companies have started to copy and co-opt their tactics. They’ve done this so well and so thoroughly that it’s getting hard to tell where piracy ends and good marketing begins. These increasingly blurry lines are making the entertainment industry nervous and conflicted. In The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, Matt Mason of Vice magazine tells the stories of early mix-tape mavens, turf-protecting graffiti artists, and retro sneaker designers while analyzing the ways that big companies compete with, fight off, and (increasingly) embrace culture pirates.

Mason concentrates on edgier industries, but we need look no further than Disney’s multi-billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise for a prime example of a decades-long saga of a major corporation first plagiarizing itself and then encouraging others to do the same.

It began in the late 1950s, when someone at Disneyland dreamed up a wax museum of history’s great pirates, sort of a seafaring Madame Tussaud’s. After the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the herky-jerky robot motions and pre-recorded audio of “animatronics” became all the rage. Disneyland’s wax-pirate exhibit slowly evolved into a creepy, scary, kitschy wonder: a shadowy boat ride through larger-than-life animated pirates going about their dirty business.

After a few decades of mooring itself into the subconscious minds of American children—who among us didn’t duck when the fake cannonballs whistled by?—the Pirates of the Caribbean resurfaced in the early 1990s as a screenplay pitch from Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, whose previous projects included Aladdin and Shrek, paradigmatic specimens of the self-aware, self-referential, pop-literate era of animated features.

In 2003, Disney finally turned the adaptation of the theme-park ride into celluloid. The rest is history: Swaggery drunk Johnny Depp (in a character openly lifted from Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards) spawned a trilogy of films, the second of which made an astonishing $1,066,179,725 in worldwide box office. Halloween costumes abounded, some Disney-issued and some not. Some were simply labeled “pirate” but looked a lot like Sparrow/Richards.

At least eight video games inspired by the film have appeared, with varying degrees of official sanction. A mobile phone game released by Disney’s Internet unit received lackluster reviews while a popular, unauthorized Xbox game borrowed the title, The Black Pearl, and little else. But instead of suing the peglegs off their unauthorized competitors, Disney simply pulled alongside and joined the melee with its own (free) Pirates of the Caribbean online role-playing game, fighting it out on the pirates’ own terms. Disney has stopped seeing at least some of the world’s pirates and remixers as thieves, and started seeing them as opportunities for a vast, multi-faceted marketing campaign.

Using the customizable characters from the role-playing game, fans were soon creating original YouTube videos—digital clips of pirates skewering British officers on their cutlasses, for example—from within the world of Pirates of the Caribbean Online. Some of the best were made by the 10,000 fans given passwords for the beta test of the online game at a pre-screening of the third movie, making them officially sanctioned pirate remixers (many of whom take their role literally, showing up to the screening in eye patches and tricorns).

Lots of these fan-fiction films have developed narratives of their own. They are part of a growing movement of machinima, where fans use video game environments to create their own animated movies, many of them borrowing characters or settings from Hollywood blockbusters. Meanwhile, the unauthorized Xbox game has in turn become the basis for 14 (and counting) user-modified versions at the PiratesAhoy.com online community.

In 2006, completing the great circle of recycling, Disneyland altered the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride to include an animatronic Johnny Depp.

In an effort to explain this mash-up landscape, Mason turns, with mixed success, to the last days of disco, to the early days of tagging New York subway cars, and to economic game theory. The most apt parallel, though, is to an industry known for its fickleness. Video and music companies are slowly realizing something that the world of fashion—with its markedly more relaxed attitude toward intellectual property—has always known. In the words of Coco Chanel, who long ruled the fashion world with an iron fist and a quilted handbag, “a fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion.”

In a 2006 Virginia Law Review article, “The Piracy Paradox,” Kal Raustiala and Chris Springman made the case that “induced obsolescence” is the fashion industry’s healthy way of shrugging off the impact of copying while still remaining relevant. Logos can be protected —via trademark law, not copyright—but there’s nothing illegal about selling a purple head-scarf that looks a lot like the purple headscarf in Ralph Lauren’s last collection. Ralph simply announces that eyepatches are all the rage now and purple headscarves are so last season. This keeps fashion fresh and the industry strong, all with very weak intellectual property protection. As Coco said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”

This isn’t to say that all designers sit idly by while $30 versions of $5,000 purses show up on the street. The Paris-based Hermès in particular has been aggressive about protecting its logos and certain additional trademarkable design elements. Still, the relationship between Chinese knock-offs and couture may be mutually beneficial in the end.

“We don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward,” Disney’s Sweeney said in her speech. Mason puts it another way, using awfully similar language: “Pirates have taken over the good ship capitalism, but they’re not here to sink it. Instead, they will plug the holes, keep it afloat, and propel it forward.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of Reason.

Mothers Doin' It for Themselves!

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Behind placid suburban facades, in seemingly normal neighborhoods, restless housewives are dismembering and enucleating babies, baking them in ovens in pursuit of that gently throttled look, then selling them to strangers. And, no, it's not Satan who's making them do it—it's eBay.

Thanks to a recent British documentary, My Fake Baby, the world at large now knows about the "reborning" community, a mostly female subculture of artisans and collectors organized around vinyl infants who begin life as inexpensive, plain-looking dolls and, through the meticulous craft of maternal Dr. Frankensteins, metamorphize into super-realistic creatures that look and feel just like genuine lifeless babies. The rarest specimens fuel high-stakes eBay bidding wars that can reach upwards of $5000.

Naturally, the reporters behind My Fake Baby present the phenomenon as a disturbing trend. Grown women fussing and fawning over trompe-l'œil zombie tots who stay cute, silent, and unsoiled forever, an infinite repository for uncomplicated maternal cuddling? Cue the sad keyboards and all the dsytopian foreboding they can conjure! Punch up the narrator's voice-over with a touch of sterile sci-fi detachment!

But why the need for judicious alarm every time some new species of low-tech android manifests itself? Have the men who love women crafted exclusively from stain-resistant silicone taught us nothing about the future of interpersonal relationships? Ten years into the RealDoll phenomenon, you'd think we'd be comfortable with the fact that Canis lupus familiaris's days as man's best friend are numbered: Clearly, the future belongs to more convenient, customizable, obligation-free companions.

As with sex doll sculptors, the goal of reborn artisans is verisimilitude, the production of artifacts that "feel incredibly real and will flop in your arms just like a real newborn baby." The hair that decorates a reborn's skull and brows often comes from genuine humans, or at the very least, well-bred goats. After multiple layers of paint, a reborn's tiny face and hands bear all the subtleties and imperfections of authentically blotchy and translucent baby flesh. Glass beads, polyfill, silicone, and on occasion, kitty litter, give them the heft and consistency of real babies. Some of the most ambitious iterations have begun to wiggle and cry; you can even obtain a "beating heart" for your parthenogenic bundle of joy.

For many women, reborns are just dolls, a new collectible to peddle or pursue, this decade's Beanie Babies. For others, the attachments go deeper, a fact that's reflected in the craft's unique lexicon. Reborns aren't created in workshops and sold via online storefronts, for example; the women who make reborns refer to their businesses as "nurseries." One practitioner doesn't just merely sell her products to customers; in her description, she "adopt[s] out babies all over the world."

But is any of this blurring of reality and fantasy reall so strange or threatening? Granted, it is a bit macabre that so many reborn producers give their businesses names like "Babies From Heaven's Garden"—there's certainly great potential for a pro-life horror flick wherein the souls of aborted fetuses inhabit the bodies of reborn dolls and wreak havoc upon the activist judges who've made Roe v. Wade the law of the land. Ultimately, however, it seems no less natural to invest great emotion in a relationship with an inanimate but extremely realistic baby than it is to do the same with, say, an iguana or a hamster, and when was the last time you saw a hand-wringing documentary over the alarming trend of pet ownership?

Because reborns don't perfectly simulate living babies yet, an aura of delusion attaches itself to the subculture: Conventional wisdom suggests that if you interact with non-human entities as if they are in fact human, you must be a little bit crazy. But, really, if what you're mainly looking for in a baby is a fleshy no-hassle security blanket, then it certainly seems saner—not to mention more humane—to choose a plastic infant over a real one, doesn't it?

Traditionally, only the very rich have been able to fine-tune relationships to the exact degree of obligation and reciprocity they prefer; fake babies, like fake adults, democratize that ability. If you want to adopt a dozen babies but you're not Angelina Jolie, all those diapers and nannies are going to add up. If you want to assemble a harem of servile blonde hotties, you'd better have a house with at least as many bedrooms and bathrooms as Hef's Playboy Mansion. Or you could buy yourself a half-dozen reborns or high-end sex dolls.

At the moment, human surrogates appeal only to those whose imaginations are vivid enough to see past their technological limitations. Eventually that will change and they'll be harder to resist. It's not as if we have very far to go either. Sci-fi movies tend to present androids and replicants as near-facsimiles of actual humans, but of course the real appeal of artifical babes and babies is their lack of human complexity, not their uncanny simulation of it. Equip a reborn with a few convincing facial expressions and a limited vocabulary of charming goo-goos and Ma-Ma's, and that will be enough: The rueful documentaries will be quickly replaced by fervent infomercials.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato writes from San Francisco.

Keep Your Mouth Shut and Your Eyes Open

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:06:00 EDT

With the caveat that I am not the world's biggest fan of political Road to Damascus confessionals (on the theory that anyone younger than 95 years old who was ever a Trotskyist, let alone a Maoist, just should not be preaching to me about political judgment), this David Mamet mea culpa is pretty entertaining, and not only because he's going libertarian on us. A selection:

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. [...]
[My play is] about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

Whole thing here. Maybe it was all that time in Santa Monica.

The Latest Fake Memoir Continues to Undermine Authorial Authority in an Age When America Has Already Lost What Little Was Left of Its Innocence after That Game Show Scandal in the 1750s...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:19:00 EST

The author of the best-selling auto-bio Love and Consequences goes to the back of the long line of literary fakers:

Margaret (Peggy) Seltzer of Eugene, Ore., who wrote under the name Margaret B. Jones, acknowledges that her critically acclaimed account of being raised in a black foster home in South-Central Los Angeles and following her black foster brothers into the gang life was a fabrication.

More here.

It's not immediately clear if this helps or hurts the manuscript I'm shopping around about having been raised in a Skinner Box by two ping-pong playing pigeons while becoming the first valedictorian at Hamburger University and then playing table tennis in death matches for money in Micronesia until a guy named Morrie started bullshitting me on Tuesdays. I hope not, for my reader's sakes.

Whatever the case, I salute the author for entertaining thousands of readers and look forward eagerly to her next book.

reason on literature's paper lions here.

Every Man a Warden

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:26:00 EST

As Dave Weigel blogged below, Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax has died. It was Gygax, more than anyone else, who turned Tolkien fandom from a premodern pose into a postmodern, participatory phenomenon: Rather than merely reading about hobbits and elves, fantasy fans could enter Middle Earth themselves and create their own adventures. Granted, most of those adventures tended to sound the same. (If you've ever endured a D&Der's detailed account of how he spent his weekend, you'll understand what I mean.) But we knew that from the title, right? On one level it's a liberatory vision, one where anyone can create a world for everyone else to play in. But Gygax gave it a Foucauldian twist: In the end, each of those worlds is still a dungeon.

Huzza for Commerce!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:10:00 EST

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, They Stink: WFB on the Beatles

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:54:00 EST

The always-innerestin' site 10 Zen Monkeys has posted a fun tribute of William F. Buckley, Jr., titled "The Collected Controversies." There's a lot of good stuff there, including the National Review founder's dumping on the Fab Four:

In a 1964 essay titled "Yeah Yeah Yeah, They Stink," Buckley had written that the Beatles were not merely awful: "I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful." His diatribe acknowledged the National Review critic who argued that after Sinatra's twitches and Elvis's thrusts, future entertainers would have to wrestle live octopuses. "The Beatles didn't in fact do this," Buckley wrote, "but how one wishes they did!"

"And how one wishes the octopus would win."

10ZM also includes his rarely citied final rejoinder to Gore Vidal in their famous TV bitchfest ("Go back to [your] pornography"), a mention of a dreadful novel about Elvis Presley, and this quote that all conservatives should read closely:

"Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great."

(One controversy that's missing: Buckley's and National Review's odious defense of state-enforced segregation.)

Whole 10 Zen Monkeys, well worth reading, thing here.

I've been trying to track down video of Buckley's great Firing Line interview with Jack Keroauc, the king of the Beats last TV spot (I believe) and a real melding of two very different conservative minds, but can't find it online anywhere, alas.

The editor of The New York Times Book Review and author of a fantastic bio on Whittaker Chambers, Sam Tanenhaus, has a Q&A about WFB here. (Tanenhaus is writing a bio of Buckley too).

Update: Commenter Xmas below points to the Kerouac Firing Line interview here.

Ex Marks a Spot

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Featuring essays and fiction from contributors as varied as talk show satirist Stephen Colbert, former US senator and consort to Linda Ronstadt and Debra Winger Bob Kerrey, and "black humor" author Bruce Jay Friedman, Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me seeks to find ponies in mountains of emotional manure. Edited by Ben Karlin, a former editor of The Onion who also worked on The Daily Show and co-created The Colbert Report, the anthology is "about that salient something men take away from failed relationships."

Unfortunately, based on the preponderance of the evidence presented here, that salient something amounts to little more than frat-boy-level chuckles about unrequited middle-school crushes, frustrating games of telephone tag in the pre-cell days, how "dirty girls make bad friends" (to quote the title of one contribution), and the realization that even boys who grew up wearing "husky" jeans can at least occasionally get the girl.

Of course, you don't go into a book with a foreword by the editor's mother ("My son is a real catch and shame on any girl who's ever thought otherwise") expecting Saul Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak (which hypothesized that love gone wrong killed more people than all the wars and famines in human history). But the collection's persistent glibness - don't inadvertently involve your pets in autoerotic activity, counsels one section - doesn't just undercut the occasionally funny lines, it helps explain why these guys might have dumped in the first place.

That most of them, including the popular novelist Nick Hornby, who contributes an introduction, seem to be ensconced in happy relationships trowels on an extra layer of smugness that is every bit as off-putting as passing gas during intercourse.

There are memorable pieces, to be sure. Kerrey's account of a secret crush he never met and who died in a plane crash is haunting and artfully intertwined with the tale of an octogenarian friend who reconnected with an early love late in life. Marcellus Hall's comic strip, "The Sorrows of Young Walter: Or the Lessons of a Cyclical Heart," is wry in its transparently phony insistence that "every heartache was unsolicited." Advice columnist Dan Savage's memory of the older woman who initiated him into sex—and unintentionally convinced him he was gay—is funny, raunchy, embarrassing, honest and moving in the way the best relationships are.

Alas, those pieces—and a couple more—are few and far between. Which means this collection, like the amorous relationships it describes, fails far more often than it succeeds. It's not clear there's much of a lesson in getting dumped, though one of editor Karlin's insights is well worth remembering: "Everybody gets crushed. For the lucky ones it only happens once."

Nick Gillespie is editor of Reason.tv This story originally appeared in The New York Post.

Lost in Political Philosophy

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:20:00 EST

ABC's TV series Lost, whose fourth season premieres tonight, has multileveled mysteries and a cruelly withholding storytelling style that inspires passionate love and passionate frustration.

The love comes from the show's fascinating and compelling adventure-intrigue-SF storytelling. The scenario: plane crashes on an uncharted island. Some passengers, most with a fair amount of dark intrigue in their past, survive and try to forge a workable civilization—and to escape. Previous inhabitants of the Island bedevil them. Everything ensues.

The frustration comes from the fact that halfway through the show's entire six-season arc, the viewer can be certain of very little—neither what lies ahead nor precisely what's already happened -- and certainly not the meaning of what's happened.

The search for meaning bedevils characters and viewers. No element of the show is as suggestive and aggravating as its heavy reliance on political philosopher references.

The show stars a John Locke, which initially just seemed a curiosity. But as the show progressed, we were introduced to a Danielle Rousseau, a Desmond David Hume, a Mikhail Bakunin, a Richard Alpert, and even an Edmund Burke.

But what does any of this mean?

IN THE CASE of Locke, obvious references and ironies abound. Like the philosopher, he stands for political and personal liberty within a civic context.

Locke "leads" generally through service to the commonwealth—yet sometimes acts imperiously and dangerously, pursuing a personal vision of what is best for them all, in a disturbingly Filmerian manner.

He claims to be an empiricist—a real "meat and potatoes" guy—but comes to a seemingly mystical belief in the island's power. Complicating his role as the "man of faith" in the island is that his mysticism is based in his experience of healing from the island, and his personal encounter with the smoke monster—so character and philosopher might be able to get along as fellow empiricists.

Most significantly Lockean is island John Locke's mantra: "Don't tell me what I can't do," the cry of the man who despises paternalism and unjust government. (In what is probably more an in-joke, Locke's evil father is "Anthony Cooper," after philosopher Locke's mentor, the first Earl of Shaftesbury.)

Lost fans love clues, and if Locke's name is one, it likely suggests that what Locke thinks he has empirical evidence for, he probably does.

DANIELLE ROUSSEAU'S link with her philosopher is obvious: she is the lone savage on the island, separated—by choice—from the human societies available to her. Her primary skills are sheer survival and the trapping and killing of animals and other humans.

Her personality is more stunted and weird than the apotheosis of human capabilities and sensibilities her namesake seems to promise from the "noble savage." Her being "Rousseau" is both obvious and ironic. If it's a clue, the viewer can wonder whether Danielle had her child taken from her, as she claims, or abandoned it, as the philosopher did with his five children.

The philosopher Mikhail Bakunin believed in a socialist anarchism, freely-organized worker federations controlling the social order. Lost's Mikhail Bakunin has an uncanny ability to survive fatal injuries, and is a brutal enforcer for his boss Ben (the sinister leader of the "Others").

If the name is anything more than the creators having fun, the clue may be that, as with Bakunin's rivalry with Karl Marx over taking over the existing state, the show's Bakunin might have a serious difference of opinion as to how their community should run with his "master" Ben.

The real Richard Alpert, former Harvard partner to Timothy Leary, represents using modern science to achieve religious transcendence, and later, renaming himself Baba Ram Dass, going straight for the religious transcendence.

The character Alpert is seemingly ageless. If his name is meaningful, it could relate to the apparently religious mission of his group—the "Others"—compared to the almost parodically scientistic pre-crash Dharma Initiative that they seem to have superseded.

ALL SUCH SPECULATION is hazardous, however, since Lost almost asks not to be trusted. It loves season openings and closers deliberately designed to confuse the viewer as to what he's seeing, where and when.

Lost's constant use of the number "23" indicates a love for the fiction of Robert Anton Wilson. The philosophical science fiction novelist celebrated "guerrilla ontology"—wild techniques to make people question the nature of the reality they are perceiving.

Despite all the political philosopher namedrops, Lost doesn't show much of a functioning society, and definitive answers, both narrative and philosophical, continue to slip away. Ultimately, the show sells classic sociopolitical anxiety: the world is mysterious and strange, with inexplicable forces that might save your soul or might kill you, and you'll never know why; scientific planners and religious fanatics alike have complicated plans in which they use humans as pawns; the wealthy and powerful pursue secret agendas that may either save or destroy us.

By naming characters after philosophers, Lost reminds us that the conflicts of ideology, power, and social relationship are timeless, perhaps "eternally recurring"—like character Desmond Hume's re-cycling through his own life, like the seeming series of "powers" rising and falling on the island (from the creators of the 4-toed statue to the Black Rock crew to the "Hostiles" to Dharma to the "Others" to...?).

With its echoes of everything from Homer's The Odyssey to O'Brien's Third Policeman, Lost's intricate webs of meaning and suggestion make it not only an exciting example of post-modern referential bricolage, but also the most significant pop adventure tale of our time.

Even in a "state of nature" on the island, its flashback-strewn storytelling reminds us that none of us have a Lockean "blank slate." Our past choices, failures, sins and obsessions will always shadow and influence our present. Built the heart of the viewer's relation to the show's mysteries is a faith that its writers, our "leaders"—the gods of the fictional universe we are watching—are careful, caring, omniscient and omnipotent, that not a plot thread or mysterious reference is dangled that they won't ravel together with care.

We may be saps to believe it—but Lost fans know that attitude makes experiencing the show more delicious.

Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine and author of the books This is Burning Man and Radicals for Capitalism. This article originally appeared in The American Spectator.