Making fun of Courtney Love is fun, but i'm not here to do that. She managed to say something sensible though perhaps idealistic. She wrote an article in which she describes how ridiculous the record industry is, how bands are totally abused by labels, and how MP3s can benefit bands and fans more than the traditional system of music distribution. I will, for once in my life, give props to Courtney Love.

In defense of the MP3, she says:

Story after story gets told about artists -- some of them in their 60s and 70s, some of them authors of huge successful songs that we all enjoy, use and sing -- living in total poverty, never having been paid anything. Not even having access to a union or to basic health care. Artists who have generated billions of dollars for an industry die broke and un-cared for.

They're the rightful owners, originators and performers of original compositions.

This is piracy.

She contrats this with the alleged piracy going on in peer to peer networks where kids trade songs. She argues artists are getting ripped off not by the indie kid in South Dakota, but by the record label in LA. Agreed. It's a power struggle between those with power and those needing to sign a recording contract to pay the bills.

Courtney touches on an issue I have always felt strongly about: even as a musician, I have no issue with downloading MP3’s. They’re in everyone’s interest. If a band really strikes me, I will see their shows and buy their albums. Before the advent of the MP3, I would rarely buy a cd unless I heard most of it by borrowing a friend’s copy. Now, I can download an entire album and have the option to buy a copy if I want the improved sound quality and liner notes.

She goes on:

Let's not call the major labels "labels." Let's call them by their real names: They are the distributors. They're the only distributors and they exist because of scarcity.

Agreed. Labels don’t produce anything but marketing. They may pay radio stations to play a single and they might spot the cash for a tour, but the band normally has to pay all that money back. And since they only made a penny or two on each album sold, paying back hundreds of thousands won’t be easy unless their debut album sold millions of copies. (Not likely).

As for copyrights and contracts, she says:

When you look at the legal line on a CD, it says Copyright 1976 Atlantic Records or copyright 1996 RCA Records. When you look at a book, though, it'll say something like copyright 1999 Susan Faludi, or David Foster Wallace. Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers get their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever.

Well, not forever, but for a long time. Here’s an extreme example of one record label and how it handled contracts. Factory Records (Joy Division, New order, etc.), a Manchester, England label founded by Tony Wilson, did not hold the rights to the bands’ music. Instead, it simply acted as a promoter and distributor.

More specifically, the contact went something along the lines of, "Everyone is free to go when they choose and no one is contractually obliged to stay." Wilson signed his name in blood. He was quoted as describing his philosophy as: ‘the band owns everything, the label owns nothing, and everybody can fuck off.’

I’m not suggesting all record companies function like Factory- that would be ridiculous. But they could easily adopt some of the basic philosophies: the band owns the copyrights to the music, the label functions solely as distribution vehicle, and the label gives the band a fair cut of the profits.

Labels could then build a name for themselves as signing certain kinds of bands that project a desired image/message. The label would then market itself as purveyor of that image. Apparel, events, cd packages, member programs, and so on. There is no need to gouge into the band's revenue to turn a profit.

Once upon a time (before I went corporate), I used to go mountain biking three times a week. When I was a college senior it dwindled to once a week. Now, at 23, I have ceased being a mountain biker and have become a great appreciater of bike wall-art. My bikes hang on the living room wall as artifacts of my more cardiovascular days.

Working life combined with San Antonio's heat have not helped. Instead, I work out at the gym in the basement of my office building. There are a couple excercise bikes- they make me cringe. They also make me promise myself to hit the trails once the highs peak at 85 instead of 105.

I saw The Reverend Horton Heat at the Sunset Saloon last night, a nifty old-west style venue in downtown San Antonio. The opening band, The White Heat, was kind of lame.

But when the Reverend came on, the crowd went ballistic as the band launched into one of their surf-y numbers. Now, I don't own any Reverend cd's nor do I have any Reverend MP3s (which does not impact my argument in the below journal entry). I just go see the shows, so I have no idea what any of the songs are called. All I can say is that they played a good amount of straight up rockabilly, surf, swing, some latin-esque compositions, and gave a blues encore consisting of an extended Red House. They had an old guy with them and he sang some raunchy blues vocals. He had long hair, a ZZ Top beard, and Harley attire.

The show was exactly 90 minutes from first to last note. Then came the encore blues-revival, and I left halfway through. On the whole, I had a kick-ass time. I contributed to the mosh-pit action as best I could and did some skankin' and whatever else that came to mind. The mosh-pit wasn't of your average variety. The vibe was positive and good. Everyone just wanted to bounce around and have a good time.

Before the show, I met a couple army chics about my age and we talked extensively about their assignments in Korea and Germany. The things they told warrant a journal entry on their own, so I'll leave that for another day...

So if the Reverend comes to your town, make sure to get a ticket and bring your friends. He puts on a good show.

Check out this nifty image of the Helix Nebula. "At 650 light-years away, the Helix is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth. A planetary nebula is the glowing gas around a dying, Sun-like star." So when our sun dies, it might look as cool as that-->

I read the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (which was awesome) last year and I realized that part of why I enjoyed it so much was because the story dealt with fringe society. By fringe society, I am referring to subculture-like things that form in reponse to a fringe hobby/activity. For example, I am (or was) a member of at least one fringe society: mountain bikers. Mountain bikers have their own set of slang terms, behavioral patterns, and spending/eating habits. How many people would call a $2,000 bike 'mid-level'? Mountain bikers, that's who.

The fringe society in Kavalier in Clay was the comic book society. All my life I have been exposed to comic books in no special way. I was born too long after comic books showed up to witness their rise, but I have seen them leak into cartoons and movies. Little did I know how much happened beneath the surface to fuel the comic book revolution. And little did I know it was such an art.

For some reason I really enjoy reading about sub-cultures and fringe societies. I guess it could be that I feel better knowing that there are people who did useful things with their fringe hobbies, while I haven't done jack with mine.

In an effort to continue on my fringe-society-binge, I took a trip to a local bookchainstore to find a new fringe socity to learn about. I wanted a book like Kavalier and Clay, a book set in a different era that involved a fringe society, with a group of characters navigating through the twists and turns of the times. Whether or not the story was fictional was not an issue, but I did want historical accuracy.

I got lucky and stumbled upon a book with a cover more cartoony and outrageous than Kavalier and clay's, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark. The cover depicted a female tiger tamer in a cage, with lions prancing and flying from left to right, while she stands calmly in the middle with two whips. I was reminded of the people on airport runways that wave their arms around to direct the lumbering lumbering steel birds to their proper place.

I went home and performed some impromptu research: the book is about the most famous female tiger trainer in history (American, at least). The setting is the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus during the 1910s and '20s. The back of the book says "Mabel Stark was five feet tall, brazen, suicidally courageous, obsessed with tigers, and sexually eccentric."

Looks like 'fringe society' might be too tame a term in this case.

Every Monday night, a nearby pub called the Flying Saucer has this great thing called Pint Night. Almost every beer on draft is $2.50. While that may not seem great at first, it gets better when you realize that imports from Holland, Belgium, and Germany can be had at half price. However, this does not result in lower tabs. It results in more beers.

Today's diet consisted of two Young Double Chocolate Stouts (substitute for dinner), a Dekoninck Ale, a Real Ale Fullmoon Rye, and a plate of cheese fries split umpteen ways. My multicultural beer-a-thon thus included the British, Belgians, and Americans. Next week, I plan on visiting the Czechs, Germans, and Brits (once again). I have a penchant for the British stouts.

In fact, I was rightfully upset when I asked for a Young's Oatmeal Stout two weeks ago and was turned down. Boddington's had replaced it on the tap. "What a crime", I thought. A mediocre, tasteless light ale gets trumped by a less popular, yet thoroughly superior stout. So be it. I'll boycott Boddington's. I talked to the manager and he said the replacement was due to Boddington's popularity and sales rate. Fuck sales, give me the real beer.

To make a musical comparison, we can say this: Boddington's is Blink 182 and Young's Oatmeal Stout is Fugazi.