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Frozen.

If luck smiles on my sched­ule today, I hope to make it over to the Detroit Ice House. The man­agers of the project haven’t announced its loca­tion yet, so I won’t, either. But I know. It’s dif­fi­cult to keep an aban­doned house that has been care­fully cov­ered with ice much of a secret. They’ve sur­rounded the place with police tape, so the snow doesn’t get dis­turbed before the offi­cial project pho­tographs are taken. Or so I’m told. It’s close enough for a quick lunchtime hop, and by then the tem­per­a­ture should be high enough that things should be a lit­tle drippy. High pres­sure promises preser­v­a­tive tem­per­a­tures until the big reveal.

There are enough of these guer­rilla art projects going on around here — a pre­vi­ous cadre of hip­sters painted aban­doned houses, from roof to foun­da­tion, includ­ing win­dows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I won­der if we’re on the tip­ping point of becom­ing a play­ground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bar­tender become a real-estate devel­oper, but now it’s even eas­ier. In “The Farmer and the Philoso­pher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Bar­low remarks that Detroit is a pretty big can­vas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated con­cern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attach­ing a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while cer­tainly wor­thy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judg­ment until I see it. One of the very few con­ser­v­a­tive cri­tiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big expla­na­tion text, that when an artist has to post a sign­board telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint sig­ni­fies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “ref­er­ence the con­tem­po­rary urban con­di­tions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look for­ward to see­ing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of say­ing, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Sat­ur­day, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban con­di­tions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, any­way. I’ve reached the stage of win­ter where feel­ing bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get out­doors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hiber­nate the sea­son away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stew­art on? And Stew­art said Fox has “taken rea­son­able con­cerns about this pres­i­dent …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next com­ing of Chair­man Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If every­one is hip to this, why do these things keep get­ting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to sud­denly read a mil­lion words to get up to speed, and sev­eral hun­dred of the words involve morons whin­ing that they should have to pay for some­thing and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last week­end seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announce­ment. Ama­zon is using cheap e-books to sell Kin­dles, and MacMil­lan is try­ing to hold the line on sell­ing its inven­tory at a loss, for obvi­ous rea­sons. Here’s Vir­ginia Postrel at the Atlantic with some­thing of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stu­pid things peo­ple are say­ing in the wake of last week’s events, includ­ing (in so many words), “it’s not like writ­ing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for any­thing I can steal with impunity.” (I’m think­ing this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those peo­ple say­ing, “E-books are great, because then the last bar­rier stand­ing between the ded­i­cated ama­teur and his vast read­er­ship will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile read­ers any any pub­lisher within dri­ving dis­tance. And please, in keep­ing with your views about the real work of pub­lish­ing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental pro­posal to help little-seen inde­pen­dent films get a lit­tle more-seen, offer­ing feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the com­ments have already started:

“The begin­ning of the end,” wrote one user in com­ments; “i thought the pur­pose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seri­ously [sic] sell­ing out,” appar­ently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where peo­ple think noth­ing of pay­ing $4 for a cup of cof­fee could they balk at the idea of pay­ing a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy break­fast, step one to improv­ing one’s per­spec­tive on win­ter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

Posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 9:59 am
in Detroit life, Movies, Popculch.

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45 responses to
“Frozen.”

  1. alex said on February 4th, 2010 at 11:02 am

    Speak­ing of con­demned house art projects…

    The mother of one of my best friends was an art teacher at Chicago’s Net­tle­horst Ele­men­tary School back in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. She lived near the school, right on the lake­front north of Bel­mont Har­bor, in a rented grey­stone that was being razed to put up one of those ticky-tacky apart­ment build­ings known as a “four plus one.”

    She made her con­demned house into a school­wide art project and it was fea­tured in the news. Grade­school­ers came in and painted it up all psy­che­delic. Imag­ine any­one try­ing some­thing like this in these liti­gious times.

  2. beb said on February 4th, 2010 at 12:47 pm

    Adopt­ing my cranky old man per­sona once again, I con­fess when I toured the Hei­dle­burg Project some years ago all I could see was a bunch of junk that needed throw­ing away. I must be a Philis­tine because I didn’t see the art there.

    I haven’t read heav­ily about the Ama­zon MacMil­lan dust-up, either. I was sur­prised to hear that Ama­zon wanted $10 as the min­i­mum price of a etext for their Kin­dle. I’ll wait for the paper­back before I pay $10 for a license to read a book on an elec­tronic device. As Ama­zon has already shown with “1984” you’re not buy­ing a book, but merely the license to read one. As for the specifics of the con­flict I sus­pect it was just like the dust-up between Apple’s iPod store and the record com­pa­nies who wanted a big­ger slice of the prof­its. It has noth­ing to do with authors or artists. They will not see any more from the e-file pie, just their pub­lisher, who no longer has to make a phys­i­cal prod­uct to sell in order to make money.

  3. crinoidgirl said on February 4th, 2010 at 1:03 pm

    In the lat­est of my con­tin­u­ing series of non sequiturs, a truly bizarre cam­paign com­mer­cial from Carly Fiorino’s camp:

    http://​www​.salon​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​p​o​l​i​t​i​c​s​/​w​a​r​_​r​o​o​m​/​2​0​1​0​/​0​2​/​0​4​/​d​e​m​o​n​_sheep

    And I thought I was the only per­son that thought the Hei­del­berg project was crap. Thank you, Beb.

  4. Julie Robinson said on February 4th, 2010 at 1:15 pm

    I’m with Beb. Fru­gal liv­ing is a lifestyle here, so we use the library. And $104 mil­lion for Walk­ing Man 1? http://​seat​tle​times​.nwsource​.com/​h​t​m​l​/​n​a​t​i​o​n​w​o​r​l​d​/​2​0​1​0​9​7​5​4​1​5​_​a​r​t​r​e​c​o​r​d​0​4.html

  5. Peter said on February 4th, 2010 at 1:39 pm

    Crinoid­girl — Holy @#%#!!!! I peed in my pants when I saw the rear shot of the fake sheep! This CAN’T be real!

  6. coozledad said on February 4th, 2010 at 2:04 pm

    What gets me about that ad is its blend of Monty Python visual cues mar­ried to the the irony-free Repub­li­can world­view. That open­ing speech is pure mock heroic, absent the mock. We’re sup­posed to come away from those lines think­ing the Civ­i­tan Club built Amer­ica and now one of them’s deserted and print­ing money for Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger.
    In his spare time, he’s dress­ing up like a guy rush­ing the TKEs with a lam­b­chop mask and laser point­ers taped to his eyes. The impli­ca­tion here, if we can assume there is sub­text, is that this guy doesn’t see it so much as rit­ual haz­ing, but a unique oppor­tu­nity to exer­cise his real sex­ual pro­cliv­i­ties; maybe it’s more of a Repub­li­can “At Swim Two Birds” than Finnegans Wake.

  7. crinoidgirl said on February 4th, 2010 at 2:13 pm

    Yeah, c’dad. I par­tic­u­larly like the sheep top­pling off its pedestal. Very Monty Pythonish.

  8. Dexter said on February 4th, 2010 at 2:17 pm

    The EYES !! S C A R Y , OOOOOOH ! The bit was at least watch­able until the wolf appeared. I knew it was com­ing but I hee-hawed right here any­way. The worst end­ing to a com­mer­cial ever!

  9. Rana said on February 4th, 2010 at 2:21 pm

    That com­mer­cial is a hoot — it’s hard pic­tur­ing the mind­set that would gen­er­ate such a thing.

    Is any­one else reminded of that news­cast in which a bear sit­ing was re-created with a ply­wood cutout of a bear shape?

  10. beb said on February 4th, 2010 at 2:23 pm

    Nancy wrote: “Only in a world where peo­ple think noth­ing of pay­ing $4 for a cup of cof­fee could they balk at the idea of pay­ing a penny less to watch a movie”

    The thing is that peo­ple grew up watch­ing free TV. Sure there were ads which tech­ni­cally paid for the pro­gram­ing but we were never required as part of any terms of ser­vice agree­ment required to watch com­mer­cials. So we expect TV to be free. The same is true for music. We grew up lis­ten to music for free on the radio so we expect music com­ing from the mag­i­cal box on our desk to be free as well.

    Peo­ple don’t go to the­aters expect­ing to see a free movie. That’s because there have never been free movies in the­aters. We expect to pay for stuff there. But when the prod­uct comes to us from some­thing that resem­bles a tele­vi­sion the con­di­tioned response is that thi hsould be for free.

    Oh, adding to what I see above. $10 for a e-book. That’s out­ra­geous because there’s essen­tially no cost to cre­at­ing or dis­trib­ut­ing the kin­dle file. I could see $2 — one for the author and one for the dis­trib­u­tor, but $10, no.

    Appar­ently YouTube and Flickr have been banned by my employer and at home we have only dial-up. I’ll have to take people’s word that this is tru­ely weird. “Purity” as men­tioned on Salon is new Repub­li­can code word for anti-tax, anti-regulation, birther/tea-bagger non-sense. Since sheeps, lambs actu­ally, are asso­ci­ated with purity I sup­pose the mes­sage her is that Fiori is the pure can­di­date and her oppo­nent is a wolf in sheeps clothing.

    Just remem­ber who took an icon name­brand (HP) and drove it into the ground (CF).

  11. nancy said on February 4th, 2010 at 2:37 pm

    Man, beb, you’re a hard case. Two bucks? One for the author and one for the dis­trib­u­tor? Do you have any idea what sort of num­bers a typ­i­cal non-bestselling book in hard­cover puts up? Not a fail­ure, just one that doesn’t make the lists, some­where south of Stephen King and Tom Clancy? Well under 10,000 copies is typ­i­cal, and that’s for some­thing that was well-promoted, well-written and well-reviewed. You’re say­ing an author should devote any­where from at least half a year to maybe sev­eral for five grand?

    If you can’t find any­thing decent to read in a few more years, don’t blame the writ­ers. They’ll be too busy wait­ing tables.

    I’m also told the pub­lish­ing busi­ness model is a lot like col­lege ath­let­ics, in that one or two block­buster books can carry the rest of the house. Just as Big 10 foot­ball makes Big 10 field hockey pos­si­ble, James Pat­ter­son makes lit­er­ary fic­tion pos­si­ble. I read lit­er­ary fic­tion for the most part, so I guess I owe him respect. But I hon­estly shud­der at an upended pub­lish­ing indus­try being crowed over by peo­ple who don’t even read.

  12. MichaelG said on February 4th, 2010 at 2:44 pm

    We have two big time cor­po­rate women run­ning for Statewide office here in Cal­i­for­nia. Carly Fio­r­ina, for­mer HP hon­cho is run­ning for Bar­bara Boxer’s sen­ate seat and Meg Whit­man, erst­while E-Bay Boss, is run­ning for gov­er­nor. Both are con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans, both offer fur­ther proof that prowess in the cor­po­rate board­room is not an indi­ca­tor of polit­i­cal poten­tial. Whit­man, in par­tic­u­lar, is run­ning an odd cam­paign. Her plan to solve California’s fis­cal cri­sis has three points: Fire 30% of State employ­ees, cre­ate new jobs and lower taxes. No mat­ter that the points are total fan­tasy, they res­onate with pissed off vot­ers. She appears only on radio and occa­sional TV com­mer­cials, won’t do inter­views or talk shows and refuses to debate her pri­mary oppo­nent. In short, she does noth­ing but repeat her mantra over and over in paid ads while hop­ing to be anointed gov­er­nor from above. The other day she was busted try­ing to bribe her pri­mary oppo­nent into quit­ting the race thereby giv­ing her a free pass to the gen­eral elec­tion. The fur still hasn’t set­tled from that one. It is being bruited about that she has spent $30 mil of her own money on the cam­paign so far. It’s inter­est­ing times when Jerry Brown is the san­est look­ing can­di­date on the block.

  13. Connie said on February 4th, 2010 at 2:49 pm

    While in Lon­don two years ago my daugh­ter vis­ited the Absolute Vodka Ice Bar. Build­ing and fur­ni­ture and even the glasses in which drinks are served are made of ice. A fur is draped across the ice seat before you are seated, and fur coats, hats, gloves, are pro­vided to cus­tomers. She said it was the most expen­sive sin­gle drink ever, but fun for the expe­ri­ence. http://​www​.belowze​rolon​don​.com/​a​b​s​o​l​u​t​-​i​c​e​b​a​r​-​l​ondon/

  14. MichaelG said on February 4th, 2010 at 2:53 pm

    Don’t for­get that when “buy­ing” a Kin­dle E-Book from Ama­zon that you are only buy­ing the oppor­tu­nity to look at the book on your reader for a lim­ited period of time. The period runs from when you make your pur­chase to when Ama­zon decides it will cut you off. They can erase it from your Kin­dle at will. They can see how often you access it and when. You can’t copy it, print it or loan it or sell it to another party. There are other strings attached as well. It will be a long time before I pay good money for some­thing like that. I’m stick­ing with the library and used book stores.

  15. Sue said on February 4th, 2010 at 3:07 pm

    MichaelG (and every­one else, I guess): have you noticed that the bar for what cit­i­zens are will­ing to tol­er­ate in exchange for their taxes has plunged? Last year in WI many munic­i­pal­i­ties and the State stopped or really reduced the num­ber of cut­tings along the edge of roads and the mid­dle areas. No more plant­i­ngs, noth­ing but over­growth in a lot of spots. Even five years ago that would have brought howls about low­ered prop­erty val­ues and qual­ity of liv­ing. Now, it seems like a race to the bot­tom, so a 30% cut in state employ­ees would make sense to some­one who’s decided that there is no cor­re­la­tion between taxes, ser­vices and impact on a community’s value in the form of schools and upkeep. I guess if you can’t sell your house any­way why be con­cerned about what your com­mu­nity can offer to a poten­tial buyer?

  16. coozledad said on February 4th, 2010 at 3:11 pm

    Michael G: This is what fright­ens me about Whit­man, and the whole aris­toc­racy of ass­holes and perps the GOP fields for office: They sim­ply don’t know how to behave in pub­lic. I’ve been look­ing at the pho­tographs of Meg’s smirk­ing racist prog­eny and won­der­ing how long it’ll be before the party show­ers them up and laun­ders their records so we can have us another coun­try club sociopath wip­ing his shoes on the White House fur­ni­ture.
    http://​gawker​.com/​5​4​2​8​4​9​3​/​w​h​y​-​d​i​d​-​m​e​g​-​w​h​i​t​m​a​n​s​-​s​o​n​-​g​e​t​-​s​u​s​p​e​n​d​e​d​-​f​r​o​m​-​p​r​i​nceton
    and
    http://​gawker​.com/​5​4​2​9​4​6​5​/​i​t​-​g​e​t​s​-​w​o​r​s​e​-​m​e​g​-​w​h​i​t​m​a​n​s​-​s​o​n​s​-​r​a​c​i​s​m​-​a​n​d​-​e​n​t​i​t​l​e​m​e​n​t​-​w​e​r​e​-​s​t​u​f​f​-​o​f​-​legend

  17. Dexter said on February 4th, 2010 at 3:14 pm

    Con­nie, I have heard of vodka bot­tles encased in a block of ice at Sammy’s Rou­man­ian in NYC,
    http://​sta​t​ic4​.px​.yelp​.com/​b​p​h​o​t​o​/​e​h​X​l​0​U​_​l​z​G​a​K​T​e​I​_​S​D​wQ2w/m
    but an entire bar scene made out of ice? whoa!

  18. jcburns said on February 4th, 2010 at 3:21 pm

    My open browser tabs this after­noon include Cindy McCain cam­paigns for gay rights, Waf­fle House goes Roman­tic for Valen­tines Day, A cogent expla­na­tion of why the iPad is a game changer, and these retweets: news­pa­per head­line: “Man arrested for flee­ing and allud­ing, retail fraud” and British Woman Mar­ries Mac­Book Pro. Phew. And because I’m spe­cial, I got to talk to Nancy today on the phone! Good day so far.

  19. MichaelG said on February 4th, 2010 at 3:36 pm

    Whit­man is try­ing to avoid the pub­lic and the media and their nasty propen­sity to ask ques­tions. She wants to run for gov and then run the State from her aerie. She wants to be queen. Her talk­ing points, if that’s what we can call them, show her to be indis­putably either totally unin­formed about how things work or a lying sack of shit.

  20. beb said on February 4th, 2010 at 3:40 pm

    Nancy: “You’re say­ing an author should devote any­where from at least half a year to maybe sev­eral for five grand”

    My under­stand­ing is that most do. Maybe $2 is low, but what part of the $10 for a kin­dle edi­tion does the author get? Cer­tainly not $5. Typ­i­cal roy­al­ties for paper­backs (the last I heard) was 8% of cover, cover being $8, or 64 cents. For Hard­cov­ers roy­al­ties are higher (12%?) for a $25 book that’s $3 bit hard cover books don’t sell in num­ber as well as paper­backs. Most author’s don’t earn out their advance, which range from $5 – 10,000 for a non-“Name” new author. I’m not opposed to authors mak­ing money from their books, I’m just say­ing most of them won’t.

    But also my point is that $10 for a Kin­dle book, which is a license to read a book, not to own a copy of the book. Is high and will keep peo­ple from buy­ing eBooks when a cheaper paper­back is avail­able. The price of an eBook should reflect the costs of pro­duc­ing it. Since it costs noth­ing to pro­duce, the price should be pure roy­alty to the author.

  21. nancy said on February 4th, 2010 at 3:56 pm

    Actu­ally, most don’t. At least not the good ones. If your pro­posal is promis­ing, you’ll get an advance, based on the idea that a good book requires work, and the advance is (in part) to help sup­port you until you’re fin­ished. Lots and lots and lots of books don’t earn back their advance, and — this is the part that slays me — the model is set up to account for this. One of the things I admire about pub­lish­ers is the will­ing of at least some of them to launch promis­ing money-losers into the world, on the chance the writer will develop and find an audi­ence. As long as they keep a few “Eat, Pray, Love“s in their sta­ble, they can carry the wor­thy but under­ap­pre­ci­ated artists.

    Books aren’t cans of soup. They’re part of the cul­ture and also part of our accu­mu­lated knowl­edge. That’s a hard thing to put a price tag on. Used book­stores, paper­backs, libraries are all fine things for the budget-minded shop­per, but I don’t want to see a world where any­one who wants to be a seri­ous writer has to have a day job in a university.

  22. nancy said on February 4th, 2010 at 4:01 pm

    It’s true that we have a wran­gle before we know what e-books are worth to the mar­ket. But pub­lish­ers aren’t just money-grubbing mid­dle­men — they find the writ­ers, nur­ture the writ­ers, edit the writ­ers and mar­ket their books. While e-editions don’t carry paper and ink costs, there are band­width and server-farm costs, and while it would be nice if you could own your copy out­right, expe­ri­ence has taught us what hap­pens to dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion left unpro­tected. I don’t blame pub­lish­ers for try­ing to pro­tect their copyright.

    I really really really wish the inter­net hadn’t grown up around the value of Free, Always Free. I’d pay for a great deal of what I now get free. And at least we’d know what most of it is worth.

  23. Calliope said on February 4th, 2010 at 4:46 pm

    Beb, ebooks cost nearly as much to pro­duce as a paper book. The phys­i­cal costs of a paper book, print­ing, paper, bind­ing etc, are actu­ally a very small part of the cost of the book. As low as 10 – 15%.

    Edi­tors, copy­ed­i­tors, proof­read­ers, design­ers, type­set­ters, and mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing all cost money.

    I sug­gest Tobias Bucknell’s excel­lent arti­cle for more infor­ma­tion on the real costs of a book, ebook or physical.

    http://​www​.sfwa​.org/​2​0​1​0​/​0​1​/​w​h​y​-​m​y​-​b​o​o​k​s​-​a​r​e​-​n​o​-​l​o​n​g​e​r​-​a​v​a​i​l​a​b​l​e​-​o​n​-​a​m​a​z​o​n-com/

  24. MichaelG said on February 4th, 2010 at 5:26 pm

    In my post at #14 I brought up the ques­tion of just what you actu­ally get when you “buy” an E-book. Before I think about how much I want to pay for some­thing like that, I want to see some seri­ous thought on the part of all par­ties about just exactly what an E-book is. I wouldn’t give you a plugged nickel for the Ama­zon model. There are lots of small pub­lish­ers and pur­vey­ors all over the net offer­ing E-books in Adobe and in many other for­mats with many dif­fer­ent strings attached from $3.95 up. I don’t know if these would be read­able on Kin­dle, I sus­pect not, but I’ll bet you will be able to read them on your IPad. Like VHS and BETA, there will even­tu­ally be a sin­gle basic for­mat. I’d like to see some­thing anal­o­gous to today’s actual book book. I can loan it, resell it, burn it because it was writ­ten by a com­mie or what­ever else I want to do. I hate the Kin­dle model. Talk about cor­po­rate total­i­tar­i­an­ism. Ama­zon makes Bill Gates look like Mother Teresa.

  25. Dexter said on February 4th, 2010 at 5:31 pm

    I thought I’d go off topic…I was shocked to read there are 87,000 glass­ing attacks in Eng­land each year…that’s a beer glass upside-the-head…also, a puzzler…these new shat­ter­proofs “keep beer colder longer”. Huh? I always heard Brits pre­fer beer at room tem­per­a­ture.
    http://​hosted​.ap​.org/​d​y​n​a​m​i​c​/​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​/​E​/​E​U​_​B​R​I​T​A​I​N​_​P​I​N​T​_​G​L​A​S​S​?​S​I​T​E​=​I​N​K​E​N​&​a​m​p​;​S​E​C​T​I​O​N​=​H​O​M​E​&​a​m​p​;​T​E​M​P​L​A​T​E​=​D​EFAULT

  26. Hexdecimal said on February 4th, 2010 at 5:54 pm

    NANCE WROTE:“I really really really wish the inter­net hadn’t grown up around the value of Free, Always Free. I’d pay for a great deal of what I now get free. And at least we’d know what most of it is worth.”

    /start soapbox/
    It might be time to remem­ber that the Inter­net (Internet’s?) very being was pred­i­cated on the “Free exchange of infor­ma­tion and ideas”.

    I’m of the camp that believe that infor­ma­tion, regard­less of it’s form, wants to be free. And once it hits the net it some­how, almost always, finds that it is free.
    \end soapbox\

  27. coozledad said on February 4th, 2010 at 7:09 pm

    Nancy: I won­der if you couldn’t use some­thing like JSTOR as a tem­po­rary fire­wall for pub­lished cre­ative work? I guess there are prob­a­bly ways to hack that, too.

  28. brian stouder said on February 4th, 2010 at 7:36 pm

    It might be time to remem­ber that the Inter­net (Internet’s?) very being was pred­i­cated on the “Free exchange of infor­ma­tion and ideas”.

    I believe the Defense Depart­ment was a key part of the birth of the ‘net; or in any case, researchers and so on. So that it was more like “the free exchange of ideas amongst a select group”

    I’m of the camp that believe that infor­ma­tion, regard­less of it’s form, wants to be free. And once it hits the net it some­how, almost always, finds that it is free.

    Indis­crim­i­nate ‘Infor­ma­tion’ has always — I sup­pose — been free for the learn­ing, and shar­ing. In the days of cave-people, the best place to reli­ably find water or whether this or that plant or ani­mal was edi­ble could freely be learned, or not (and woe unto the unlucky adven­tur­ers who guessed wrong); and in any case, would only mat­ter to peo­ple in a par­tic­u­lar locality.

    But very specif­i­cally, if one indi­vid­ual or group learns (or invents) some­thing, they are not now (nor were they ever) required to ‘set that infor­ma­tion free’, regard­less what the infor­ma­tion wanted(!).

    And indeed — if “infor­ma­tion wants to be free”, MISinfor­ma­tion always wants to taint all that free infor­ma­tion even MORESO! — so that it becomes worth­while to reward some tribe that is will­ing to actively labor to pro­vide relably TRUE information!

    And by the by — I’m old enough to remem­ber when the ques­tion (regard­ing cable tv) was — why should I pay a monthly bill, and still see commericals?

    And now, we see that NBC may sim­ply go off the ‘free’ air­waves, and become a fee-based cable ‘con­tent provider’.…so ‘free infor­ma­tion’ ain’t free after­all (at least on TV), eh?

  29. Hexdecimal said on February 4th, 2010 at 7:52 pm

    cdad — It would not mat­ter even if the the fire­wall wasn’t hacked. Once a book, a song, or a movie is made elec­tronic and put any­where near the inter­net it is almost free (and free as in beer). All it takes is one per­son who buys it and then puts it on a server and it now totally free — in the wild for all to share. The Geni can’t be put back into the bot­tle. You can sue, but look at the music indus­try. The RIAA is mak­ing money suing but the indus­try itself is los­ing millions.

    I ques­tion why any­one thinks the Inter­net is a good place to sell their dig­i­tal goods. It works well for the sell­ing of shoes and t-shirts and such, even hard bound and paper­back books. Those are tan­gi­ble hold in your hand prod­ucts. They are hard to dupli­cate with out machin­ery and hard to move to mar­ket with out an infra­struc­ture. But dig­i­tized infor­ma­tion begs to be free and will almost always archive that freedom.

  30. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on February 4th, 2010 at 7:54 pm

    ARPAnet. Bil­lions of “how to fight and sur­vive a nuclear exchange” dol­lars went into it, even though it wouldn’t sur­vive the first EMP pop (but would let you trans­fer data that would help you recon­fig­ure your fis­sile mate­r­ial shap­ing for max­i­mum yield). And other than exchang­ing long uncom­piled code files between our DEC PDP’s, we used it to play “Empire” and “Telen­gard” in MMUDs, but with a lim­ited account of mem­ory — 50kb in my first account at Pur­due, I believe.

    The “free free free” exchange of insight, wis­dom, and cre­ative con­tent on the inter­webs was one brief shin­ing moment that ran from about 1989 to the begin­ning of Times Select and the WSJ pay­wall, say 12 – 15 years. It was an incred­i­ble flo­res­cence of cool­ness, but an unsus­tain­able burst of pub­lic domain stuff like Guten­berg that will always be out there, and blogs that, like the poor, will always be with us, and of other con­tent that’s going to have to have a mar­ket econ­omy wrapped around it to keep it from all just drip­ping onto the floor.

  31. Hexdecimal said on February 4th, 2010 at 8:03 pm

    Brian — You’re right in all you wrote, although using the cable TV com­par­i­son is a bit skewed when com­par­ing it to the inter­net. We don’t have access to pro­duc­ing con­tent and shar­ing it via the TV like we do on the internet.

    Bet­ter minds than mine have been dis­cussing this issue for over 10 years that I’m aware of, and their con­clu­sion is basi­cally what I wrote above– don’t expect to make more than 1 sale of elec­tronic data because after that it will dis­trib­uted to oth­ers for free. Go over to Slash​dot​.org — their dis­cus­sion board is full of this type of conversation.

    JTMMO — I played those MUD’s too at IPFW and got lost in them more than once — it took 2 hours to get out of a room once. Fus­trat­ing but fun

  32. coozledad said on February 4th, 2010 at 8:33 pm

    Hex­idec­i­mal: Thanks for explain­ing it to me. I always fall into the trap of think­ing there’s a tech­ni­cal solution.

  33. moe99 said on February 4th, 2010 at 8:39 pm

    Here’s the Carly Fio­r­ina ad with a bet­ter sound­track:
    http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​s​2​w​g​H​w​Y​C​-​Z​E​&​a​m​p​;​f​e​a​t​u​r​e​=​r​elated

  34. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on February 4th, 2010 at 8:48 pm

    Amaz­ing how many hours we could spend on prose that was merely prepar­ing us to find Tom Clancy nov­els riv­et­ing lit­er­ary extrav­a­gan­zas — “Take two steps west. Take another two steps north. Take the key from the table. Go two steps south. Go two steps east. Drink from the bot­tle on the bench, then put the key in the door. Fight the kobold in the next room.”

    Ah, good times, good times. Then we went to the stu­dent union with our box of per­centile & eight-sided dice, and played pen­cil and paper D&D until our accounts reset and we had a new 50kb of mem­ory to use.

    I didn’t date much in college.

  35. coozledad said on February 4th, 2010 at 9:00 pm

    Moe: Just think of all the pro­mo­tional dol­lars Pink Floyd could have saved if they’d just waited for other folks to sync their stuff up.

  36. beb said on February 4th, 2010 at 9:09 pm

    Nancy wrote: “I don’t want to see a world where any­one who wants to be a seri­ous writer has to have a day job in a university.”

    For poets that’s pretty much the sit­u­a­tion as it stands. But that’s because most peo­ple don’t read poems any­more. I’m not sure but that won’t become the norm for seri­ous writ­ers in the future. There are a shock­ing num­ber of peo­ple, my sis­ter, alas, is one, who appears to have never read a book she wasn’t required to. The issue isn’t, really, whether peo­ple are steal­ing book off the inter­net for free, but that peo­ple aren’t read­ing like they used to. We may be the last lit­er­ate generation.

    Nancy wrote: “If you can’t find any­thing decent to read in a few more years, don’t blame the writ­ers. They’ll be too busy wait­ing tables.”

    A cou­ple years back I had an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with a woman about romance fic­tion. Appar­ently there is a large on-line mar­ket in ama­teur romance fic­tion. Some authors I was told actu­ally had large fol­low­ing so much so that tra­di­tion paper book pub­lish­ers had made it a rule that they would not at any man­u­scripts from some­one who had pub­lished on-line. Since I don’t read romance fic­tion or explore on-line fic­tion I don’t know how much of this is true. But it has the scent of cred­i­bil­ity because I’d seen stuff like this in SF fan­dom 15 – 20 years ago. There are a lot of peo­ple who want to be writ­ers. So they start by writ­ing fan fic­tion. Some many, in time, actu­ally go on to be a book pub­lished author. As long as they are peo­ple who enjoy read­ing sto­ries there will be peo­ple writ­ing stories.

    But I’ve rid­ing my hobby horse long enough. Hey, every­body, Boingboing,com is all upset because Miley Cyrus’s younger sis­ter is appear­ing in some scan­dalous children’s lin­gerie pho­tos. Child Porn! Child Porn! OMGTHECHILDREN!

  37. Deborah said on February 4th, 2010 at 10:05 pm

    A lot of archi­tects teach at uni­ver­si­ties to help round things out. It’s partly eco­nomic and partly for net­work­ing pur­poses. A lot of the design­ers I work with teach on the side. I lec­ture from time to time and have taught a semes­ter or two but I am not a born teacher on a large scale, I’m much bet­ter one on one. It’s a sad state of affairs but it is real­ity. The value of writ­ing and cre­ative arts has been on the decline. Sigh.

  38. brian stouder said on February 4th, 2010 at 10:07 pm

    Well, tonight ol’ Rachel made me laugh and guf­faw not once, but twice — with lit­tle asides about the polit­i­cal sheep ad.

    And aside from that, we learned on her show that the woman who runs the New Orleans restau­rant Dooky Chase was helped (in part) to re-open her famous estab­lish­ment after hur­ri­cane Kat­rina by ‘folks from Fort Wayne, Indiana’.

    Who dat, indeed!

    edit: well — a quiet real­iza­tion (not to say epiphany) for me, regard­ing aging, is that a sort of pride­ful intran­si­gence begins to take hold. If the whole damned world insists on trans­form­ing printed pages into elec­tronic Kin­dling, STILL I’ll never, ever own or use one.

    I insist that my books have pages and dust and maybe the odd note or author’s inscrip­tion or long-lost coupon or event pro­gram (used as a book­mark) within them. And I want foot notes and end notes and mar­gin­a­lia; and even if I hate the font or the pag­i­na­tion, it must be THE font or pag­i­na­tion that the pub­lisher com­mit­ted to.

    And no damned book of mine will ever depend on a battery

  39. nancy said on February 4th, 2010 at 10:08 pm

    Who dat would prob­a­bly be Lisa Williams and her friend…name escapes me. Lisa catered our wed­ding and is the exec chef at Joseph Decuis. As well as good friends with Dooky.

  40. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on February 4th, 2010 at 10:49 pm

    Brian — unless you’re read­ing it under the blan­kets by flash­light. I really, really had to know what hap­pened to Aramis on the road back from Calais. When my mom real­ized I was read­ing “The Three Mus­ke­teers,” she was ridicu­lously pleased … it was years before it occurred to me what she had assumed she’d find me read­ing by the light of my Scout D-cell at 11:30 pm. It wasn’t that she was such a Dumas fan, apparently.

  41. Rana said on February 4th, 2010 at 11:43 pm

    I’m of mixed minds about the whole “free infor­ma­tion on the inter­net” issue. On the one hand, as a writer (or “pro­ducer of con­tent” as they seem to like to call us cre­ative folks these days) it would be nice to get paid for my work — though as some­one who tends to write cre­ative non­fic­tion, which is a rare and unprof­itable beast, it’s not like I could ever make a liv­ing at it. On the other, com­ing out of a back­ground of acad­e­mia, it’s not impos­si­ble that there are other ben­e­fits to be accrued from freely shar­ing one’s work. I’m think­ing of schol­arly pub­lish­ing in par­tic­u­lar, a nifty set-up in which intel­li­gent, trained pro­fes­sion­als engage in hours of research and analy­sis to pro­duce works that are offered to jour­nals for free and for which they get noth­ing except credit for hav­ing achieved the mile­stone of pub­li­ca­tion.… except that, in the old sys­tem, such efforts did earn those pro­fes­sion­als nice things like tenure and life­time employ­ment, and the respect of one’s peers.

    I find myself won­der­ing if there are analo­gies in those blog­gers who find ways of turn­ing their blogs into books, or even movies — there is clearly a mar­ket for those things, despite the con­tent being avail­able for free on the inter­net (heck, hit rates are what the author can use to demon­strate that there’s a mar­ket for the book!). So I don’t know if it’s books vs. inter­net copies, free con­tent vs. paid con­tent, so much as some peo­ple can make a liv­ing writ­ing free stuff, and some (most) peo­ple can’t. Given that a gen­er­a­tion or two before, that equa­tion was some peo­ple can make a liv­ing with pub­lished books, and most peo­ple don’t man­age that, I’m not sure that anything’s really changed, except audi­ences’ greater access to the mediocre and unin­spired stuff that in pre­vi­ous decades would have man­i­fested in hand-bound, hand-typed junk tak­ing up space in ran­dom people’s attics.

  42. Dexter said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:15 am

    Con­gres­sional Quar­terly on Coats “test­ing the waters” before for­mally declar­ing a run at Evan Bayh.
    http://​www​.cqpol​i​tics​.com/​w​m​s​p​a​g​e​.​c​f​m​?​d​o​c​I​D​=​n​e​w​s​-​0​0​0​0​0​3​289470

  43. Denice B. said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:22 am

    Saw a clip of Jon Stew­art on ‘The O’Reilly Fac­tor’. He told Bill that he is “The voice of rea­son on Fox. Which is kind of like being the skin­ni­est kid at ‘Fat Camp’.” Up yours, Fox!

  44. beb said on February 5th, 2010 at 8:10 am

    There is an arti­cle some­where out on the Inter­net which describes how a band could sell a mil­lion albums and still end up broke. A lot of what I’ve been argu­ing here has been influ­enced by that arti­cle. There are two key points in the arti­cle. One is that the Record Com­pany charges back all sorts of expen­sives to the band — the advance, the producer’s fees, cost of mak­ing the video, adver­tis­ing, etc. The other point is that the band’s por­tion of the $16 or so you pay for that album is a buck, or so. The way it’s set up the Record Com­pany makes a lot of money sell­ing records, the band not so much.

    When I heard that Ama­zon was try­ing to keep a $10 floor on ebooks the first thought that popped into my head was “how much of that goes to the author?” If hard cover roy­al­ties run 12 – 14% and paper­back roy­al­ties run 6 – 8%, then ebook sales prob­a­bly run 4 – 6%. Which means that for ebook sale the author is get­ting less than a dol­lar in roy­al­ties. When I sug­gested that ebooks should be priced at $2, with a dol­lar going straight to the author, I was actu­ally propos­ing a RAISE for the author. I do want to see authors make a decent liv­ing from their work. Some of my best friends are authors. I wasn’t try­ing to make athors live in poverty, I was try­ing to say that most of them already do.

  45. Becks Davis said on February 5th, 2010 at 2:19 pm

    I’m jeal­ous that you’ve found the loca­tion of the Ice House, I’ve been try­ing for weeks to find out that secret. I’m not sure how I feel about the project, though.

    Thanks for the link to my post on the Belle Isle Ice Tree and enjoy your visit on Sat­ur­day. I posted some new pic­tures of the tree from this week on Detroit Moxie: http://​www​.detroit​moxie​.com/​h​o​m​e​/​2​0​1​0​/​2​/​5​/​t​h​e​-​b​e​l​l​e​-​i​s​l​e​-​i​c​e​-​t​r​e​e​-​i​s​-​b​l​u​e.html

    He’s look­ing quite pretty in blue.

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