Rhino sent out a press release last night saying the soundtrack, largely featuring the work of Kimya Dawson (along with one old Moldy Peaches song) and other ultratwee artistes, is number one this week. The Billboard chart online doesn’t yet reflect it.

Not everyone will be happy. Jim DeRogatis’ original screed against the film, the music and a lot of other things in the Chicago Sun-Times is here. Roger Ebert weighs in here. Sun-Times readers chime in here, with DeRo’s responses.

The film, incidentally, hit $100M in North American grosses over the weekend.

The Chicago Reader recently opened up its archives. I went hunting for one of my favorite Reader stories, written by Josh Goldfein a few years after I stopped working there, which I don’t think got enough attention when it came out. Perhaps not all that relevant today, it nonetheless functions as a sobering coda to the indie-rock era, whose idealism and discontents colored the debate of the time.

While the story is very nuanced, it basically details what happens when, after a label-band handshake relationship of many years standing, one of the parties figures out it can make a lot more money by abrogating the deal—which, as it turns out, wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

A shorter follow-up article is here.

…. is being re-architected, and so will be patchier than normal around the edges for the next few days. Please bear with us.

A scene in the most recent episode of “The Wire,” in which Mr. Fancypants Managing Editor tells intrepid city editor Gus Haynes not to swear in the newsroom, has struck a chord, particularly at Slate’s ongoing discussions of the fifth season, which has now moved to Romenesko as well. I would like to take the bait and make the argument for not swearing in the newsroom.

My first reason is aesthetic, mostly. As the episode plainly showed, the people who do swear in the newsroom are the buffoonish fat guys who stand around, talk loud and swear a lot. It makes for a newsroom culture that’s unpleasant and off-putting if you’re not one of the loud fat guys. Imagine trying to work in that scene in “The Wire,” while three of the office fuckheads stand around, with one offering up his oh-so-clever annotations of the mayor’s press conference, as the other two, who just happen to be his employees, laugh appreciatively.

Secondly, it’s a way to intimidate younger and quieter people. We’ve already seen Haynes berate a younger female employee for using a word wrong—he hollers at her across the newsroom and then announces her mistake to the whole office. I keep coming back to this because it strikes me as an extremely thuggish move on Haynes’ part, but it’s clear that in David Simon’s mind this is the essence of old-time newspaperin’. For me it is just icing on the cake that Haynes (and Simon) were wrong about the word in question, but then that’s a slice of real life as well. (The loud fat guys are often wrong.) But for the record, Haynes would have been being a jerk even if he had been right. (He was being a drama queen, too. That’s what editors are supposed to do: fix potential mistakes. What kind of editor announces it to the newsroom? Right: A dickwad editor.)

Those are the two professional arguments against it. The third is more existential, and it is this: If you think the problem with newspapers these days is petty little stuff like this, you’re as crazy as David Simon. While the Simon and the fat guys were standing around swearing in the newsroom, newspaper profits began to drop, younger folks started to grow up not reading the morning paper… and then the internet happened and the world changed. We may see a major daily newspaper go bankrupt in the next year or two. Are there actually journalists out there who think this is something to waste any time thinking about?

Which brings me to point four. What’s really wrong with journalism is that daily newspapers in the US for the most part did not take ownership of a changing delivery system for news. Period. Lest you think that this has something to do with their obsession with the bottom line, they didn’t take ownership of a changing delivery system for advertising, either. There are many other smaller issues involved, but those two simple sentences describe 90 percent of the problem. The questions daily newspaper employees should ask (and be asked) is, what did they do to help? Did they think about the future, embrace the internet, sound the alarm, advocate for change? Or did they sit on their fat asses, let the unions spar with management, and then sit around and whine about the good old days when the roof caved in?

___

All posts on “The Wire.”

Back to Hitsville’s home page.

“The Wire” in its fifth season has settled down into an unsettling dichotomous duality, as A.J. Liebling might have said. I can’t think of any television show ever that was so perfectly half-extraordinary and so perfectly half-preposterous.

In the former half, we have the Marlo-Omar-Prop Joe thread, finely wound and elaborately pulled tight. Tonight’s denouement had an emotional punch I don’t think I will forget soon, based as it was first on events in episodes one, two, and three seasons past and thus almost dreamily ungraspable, and second on a grace note or two early on in tonight’s episode (in a lawyer’s office, and then at one of those unfailingly hilarious drug overlord meetings in that sterile hotel conference room) and because of that sharply and wholly poignant.

It may be one of the more memorable episode endings in TV history. Most particularly, we can see in Marlo a figure who can transcend the show’s bleak streets and bleaker bureaucracies: a perfect and efficient god-dispensing beast, a Superman in the most alarming Nietzschean sense. David Simon, the brilliant, flawed creator of “The Wire,” has a crank’s view of what’s wrong with the world; in Marlo, a creation of his most malevolent impulses, he makes, paradoxically, his most elegant argument. Like a strain of bacteria that staves off each flawed insufficient vaccine—growing wiser and stronger in the process—Marlo prevails. If we don’t get it together, Simon seems to be saying, this is who we’re all going to be working for.

And then there is, sigh, the other half of “The Wire,” the one with McNulty (and now, even more preposterously, Freamon) embarked on a gambit that is, in both its conception and execution, something out of another, much dumber, show. (“The Wire: SUV,” with the Who singing “Down in the Hole” over the opening credits.) Paired with the Sun stuff, on which more in a minute, it’s enough to make you scream.

From here on in, I’m going with Bubbles’ pronunciation of his name: McNutty is on the trail of a guy, Marlo, who dumped 22 bodies in boarded-up housing. For reasons that have not yet been made clear, he thinks he can get some more attention for the department if there’s an imaginary serial killer around who kills homeless guys, as opposed to a real one who kills people who aren’t homeless and presumably have family.

As is stultifying clear, McNutty is going to hook up with the two young semantically and ethically challenged young’uns from the Sun, who are going to buy his outlandish story because they want to get ahead, and the Sun, led as it is by strutting brace of credulous popinjay editors, is just the place to do it. Bunk is very displeased with McNutty; I’m displeased with his creator, David Simon. It reminds me of something Bertie Wooster once said in an old Wodehouse book, which I just found on Wikisource:

”To be quite candid, Jeeves, I have frequently noticed before now a tendency or disposition on your part to become—what’s the word?”

“I could not say, sir.”

“Eloquent? No, it’s not eloquent. Elusive? No, it’s not elusive. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Begins with an ‘e’ and means being a jolly sight too clever.”

“Elaborate, sir?”

“That is the exact word I was after. Too elaborate, Jeeves—that is what you are frequently prone to become. Your methods are not simple, not straightforward. You cloud the issue with a lot of fancy stuff that is not of the essence.”

Exactly. Couldn’t McNutty could get the same effect by calling up the Sun and telling someone that the police department was disbanding the group that was solving 22 murders?

But no. Meanwhile over at the Sun, our hero, manly and intrepid city editor Gus Haynes, was being the life of the party, delivering some knee-slapping comments while watching a mayoral press conference at the news desk. But then Mr. Fancypants Managing Editor comes over to tell him that swearing is a no-no in the newsroom. In the David Simon universe, manly men should be able to swear at a newspaper. (They should also be able to publicly correct the word usage of young female Hispanic reporters, even when they don’t know what they are talking about, and possibly have a nip now and then and pinch a few bottoms as well, but Mr. Fancypants would probably rain on those parades, too.)

Also meanwhile, angry young reporter Scott Templeton, whom we know is a Jayson Blair-style maker-upper, husbands his resentments, piece by piece, like Smeagol. His precious is a job at the Washington Post, but the Posties, when he goes to visit, aren’t buying what he’s selling.

(When I saw Templeton approach the Post building, I was waiting for Simon, as a Sun loyalist, to throw a few barbs the Post’s way, but if they were there I didn’t catch them. I think he, too, is in awe of the paper.)

Finally, Simon continues to bang on the tedious drum that buyouts at a paper like the Sun would target a hardworking veteran police reporter like Twig, who has the department wired. As I wrote last week, I’m sure that some valuable reporters have been let go in the downsizing that has wrenched the newspaper industry over the last four or five years; but in the vast majority or cases, the whole point of the buyouts is to target the unproductive folks as a workaround of last-hired first-hired union rules.

Simon’s drumbeat on this issue doesn’t even make internal sense; the editors keep saying (with heavy-handed irony), “We’ll just have to do more with less.” Why would they let go the guys who are actually doing more? What’s that word for someone who’s being a jolly sight too clever….?

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.

Patrick Goldstein offered some opinions on the writer’s strike in the LAT last week. They were grounded in fact, carefully placed in context, and explicitly presented as strategic recommendations to the writers, whose side he supports.

Nikki Finke, calm, cool and collected, burst out with a classic Nikkifit™ soon after, accusing him of carrying water for the studios. The third sentence of her response, below, is best savored if it’s read aloud Meg Ryan fashion, with increasing speed and voice pitch until the parenthetical coda, which should be delivered triumphantly, with a cute little smirk:

Usually, we [Finke is referring to she and Goldstein] coexist peacefully. But not this week. Not after that venomous screed you wrote in the Los Angeles Times yesterday berating Patric Verrone as if he’s to blame for all the ups and downs of the pre-strike and post-strike negotiations when certain moguls showed themselves to be lying scum only pretending to bargain in order to embarrass the WGA leadership in the eyes of members (a ploy which didn’t work).

“Stop shilling,’ Finke hissed in conclusion. Goldstein somehow managed to carry on. His newest column explores a pet subject of Hitsville’s, namely how, while no one was paying attention, the Oscars have strangely racheted over to, as often as not, focus on the best films of the year. These films unsurprisingly are less commercially minded than the blockbusters and often emanate from the studios’ specialty divisions or from independently financed productions.

In fact, of the five nominated directors — the Coens, Paul Thomas Anderson, Tony Gilroy, Jason Reitman and Julian Schnabel — only “Michael Clayton’s” Gilroy has a long history of work within the studio system, having written a variety of commercial thrillers, notably the “Bourne” series. The Coens have occasionally tried their hand at studio productions, but with little success. They remain fiercely independent outsiders. The same goes for Anderson, who retains total control over his films, as does Schnabel, director of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

Somehow, over the past ten years, the members of the film industry has diverged sharply in their outlook on movies from the rest of America. And the Oscars definitely understate the schism: For better or worse, they are rigorously designed and carried out to represent, in fairly credible fashion, the opinions of working members of the industry; if anything, the requirements for membership and the zealous way it is guarded suggest that this is a conservative part of the industry, too.

This trend is soon going to raise real questions in the academy. Viewership of the ceremony tracks closely with the box-office grosses of the best-picture films each year. Right now, “Juno” has been 2007’s surprise hit, earning $100 million while no one was looking, and will be making money for the foreseeable future. But the next ones down are “Michael Clayton” (which has $41M and is being re-released) and then “Atonement,” at $38M and counting.

While up from the low of recent years (33 million in 2003, in the weeks after the Iraq war started), Oscar viewership has been lackluster most of this decade, hovering in the 40 million area, far below the 55 million who tuned in the year “Titanic” won. While “Juno” will have its partisans, the American heartland will not be pulling up chairs to root for a movie about an acidic pregnant teen who likes the Stooges. (They won’t be rooting, either, for the depressing time-fractured period romance, nor the one about the guy who goes around killing people with a pneumatic hammer, nor the one about the oilman who [spoiler deleted], nor the one about the lawyer.)

That all goes double for the overseas audience the academy whimsically describes as “one billion viewers around the globe.” This has big implications for the Academy’s prestige and influence in general and the money it makes off the broadcast in particular. For the next few years, the behind-the-scenes discussions in the academy are going to be about how to continue to make a lot of money off the TV broadcast of a ceremony designed to showcase the decisions of a membership that, peskily, can’t be counted on to make the right decisions for the ratings.

A few days ago, Wired News posted a breathless item saying the Scrabulous-Scrabble imbroglio might be being resolved—why, perhaps that very day!

11th Hour Buyout to Save Scrabulous Tonight?

By Terrence Russell

Unless a Hail Mary deal is reached, Facebook’s Scrabulous application may finally get the axe tonight. The causal gaming app has come under fire from toy makers Hasbro and Mattel, who claim that the game infringes on Scrabble’s copyright. But after a week of legal sparring, Hasbro’s cease and desist demands are slated to reach their zero hour this evening.

Or perhaps not! Scrabulous is still working and there’s been no agreement. For the last few weeks, a legend on the main Scrabulous Facebook page has heralded some wonderful new upcoming features of the game. This I found a little cheesy, in that, far from fab new features, the most likely Scrabulous accouterment might have been jail time for its developers, in that it was a precise online ripoff of a game (Scrabble) that belonged to someone else (Hasbro). That hasn’t stopped its online partisans from mounting a crusade on behalf of Scrabulous’s creators, Rajat and Jayant Rajat Agarwalla.

Today, the Scrabulous page contains this note:

Scrabulous Update!

Hi folks
We are really grateful to the entire Scrabulous community for the exceptional support that has been provided. It is amazing to see that a small application has touched so many people across the world! There has been a lot of speculation about the future of Scrabulous and it is currently impossible for us to comment on this matter. However, like always, we will keep you updated as soon as we can.

It isn’t always the case, of course, but it certainly is true some of the time that the nuttier the writing on one side of a cause, the least likely it is that the cause has the facts on its side. Over at the AP and the Motley Fool, folks are writing Scrabulous paeans of dubious logic. Here’s Alyce Lomax on the Motley Fool site. Don’t be fooled by her first sentence. Her argument grows more sophisticated after that:

Hey, wow! An online version of Scrabble, called Scrabulous, has Facebook users in an uproar of excitement. You’d think the big names behind Scrabble would be thrilled to see people enjoying a little online wordplay related to their classic board game.

But you’d be wrong. Hasbro (NYSE: HAS) and Mattel (NYSE: MAT), which between them own trademarks and copyrights to the game either here or abroad, are crying foul. They say that Scrabulous is an infringement, and they’re trying to shut the game down.

Hey, wow! Shouldn’t the Motley Fool be more careful with facts? Scrabulous isn’t “an online version of Scrabble.” And here’s Martha Irvine, writing a personal essay for the Associated Press:

[E]arlier this month, attorneys for Hasbro and Mattel, makers and owners of the rights of Scrabble, issued the brothers an order to cease and desist.

Cease and desist? Are they kidding?

[…]

It’s been said many times, on petitions, on blogs and on message boards, that Hasbro and Mattel would be making a huge public relations blunder if they shut down Scrabulous. Several of my friends claim that, because of Scrabulous, they’ve purchased Scrabble boards for themselves or friends.

People who’ve never played the game before are suddenly into it.

So in the end, is it really worth making hundreds of thousands of people mad?

Hitsville likes Scrabulous—even more than real Scrabble, actually. In board Scrabble, the use of rarely used words (particularly two- and three-letter rarely used words) is the key to winning, so players are divided into two clear categories—those that have them memorized and those that don’t, which makes an informal game of Scrabble less competitive than it should be. But Scrabulous levels the playing field efficiently, with the word-list and word-lookup buttons.

All that said, it’s a complete rip-off of Scrabble. It’s dumb, but within Hasbro’s rights, not to have a free online Facebook version of its game. Many of Scrabulous’ vocals fans are probably employed in the word professions. Would any of them like a stranger taking their work and posting it online and trying to make money off it just because they hadn’t got around to it yet?

Obvious the Agarwalla Brothers are giving Hasbro an object lesson in this subject. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t a little … grimy. Why don’t they come up with their own game to sell online? Because it’s easier to steal someone else’s.

Jim Dwyer in the NYT has a thought-provoking piece on the down side of privilege:

This week, when the actor Heath Ledger could not be awakened in his apartment, a masseuse made calls to an actress friend of Mr. Ledger’s in California before calling for emergency help. The actress dispatched several private security guards, who happened to be in the neighborhood. They arrived at the same moment as emergency medical workers.

Dwyer is too polite to say it, but the actress friend, according to other reports, was Mary-Kate Olsen; those same reports say the two were an item, but then, they also say Ledger and model Sophie Ward were involved. (I don’t like to spread rumors or anything, but they also hint Ledger and model Helena Christensen hadn’t ever pulled the plug on their relationship.)

In any case, from the perspective of some Ledger had a lot to live for. Dwyer’s article is about how folks like him—and he cites Nelson Rockefeller as another example—live inside a floating bubble that, while it makes day-to-day life more bearable, carries with it a mindset that can seem a bit … insular when trouble strikes. In Rockefeller’s case, the 25-year-old woman he was with called an ambulance only after an hour of activity that might have been highly amusing in a ’40s screwball comedy. In Ledger’s, the masseuse who came by for a scheduled appointment touched his cold body and called … one of the Olsen Twins.

Dwyer:

“You have children 6 years old who know to call 911 when someone is sick,” said Lou Palumbo, who owns an agency that provides private security to celebrities and heads of state. “What you find is that people in entertainment, sports, politics, people with a lot of money who might not be famous, they’re operating with their own set of rules. They’re under the impression that concessions are made for them every day. They want us to do damage control.”

…the Associated Press reports that the name of the next James Bond film will be “Quantum of Solace.” “Silent Lucidity” had already been snatched up by Queensryche.

Spinning off an Associated Press report saying now Yahoo is preparing a non-DRM music store a la Amazon’s, Jacqui Cheng in Ars Technica ruminates on the meaning of DRM-free music:

If 2007 marked the death of music DRM, such a venture through Yahoo could make 2008 the year that DRM-free music actually becomes widely available. Not only that, but all music stores offering DRM-free music will be forced to come up with new ways to appeal to customers. Exclusive content and bundles are something that iTunes already offers, but the competition will surely need to step up.

For example, Yahoo (and others) could offer songs at higher bit-rates than Amazon and the rest of the competition (Amazon currently offers songs at 256kbps), or an entirely lossless format. It could offer ogg support in order to really set the music free. Or, better yet, offer downloads in a variety of formats so that the user can choose whatever he or she wants. AllOfMP3 (technical legalities aside) lets users choose both bitrates and codecs on the fly—how cool would that be in a legit music store?

However, in the AP story, Yahoo says it’s not the case:

Carrie Davis, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, said the company has often said it wants to offer music without copy protections and the subject has been part of its ongoing talks with record labels.

But Davis denied that discussions with record labels on the matter have stepped up in recent weeks or that anything is imminent.

Via Slashdot, a story from the Hollywood Reporter about the Blu-ray/HD_DVD shakeout:

In the week since the studio’s surprise early-January announcement that after May it will support only the rival Blu-ray Disc format, sales of HD DVD players ground to a virtual halt, giving Blu-ray hardware a whopping 93% sales advantage, according to data from the NPD Group.

According to raw retail data collected by NPD, consumers bought just 1,758 HD DVD players the week of January 12, down from 14,558 players the week before. In contrast, consumers bought 21,770 Blu-ray Disc machines, up from 15,257 the previous week.

Over on one of the MTV blogs a very earnest poster defends the film’s internal music logic, an issue that had been attacked vehemently, by Jim DeRogatis in Chicago and others. I’m not convinced either way, but I did like this cold introductory graf, with all spellings intact:

You know who doesn’t like “Juno”? Guys over 30 who fancy themselves any sort of music afficianado and music critics. We’ve heard all kinds of reasons why they might object, but we propose that it’s an unconsious visceral reaction to the double hit of the Jason Bateman/Sonic Youth rejection scene.

The poster, incidentally, says that the Moldy Peaches appeared on Oprah, but this is apparently a reference to the “View” appearance. For more on the film, click on the “Juno” tag below.

Sad about Heath Ledger, an unflashily brave actor, and not much else to say about the passing of a star young enough to have shown only a penchant for eclectic movies and a quiet ambition, manifested of course most notably and again bravely in “Brokeback Mountain.” His death promises to be a new “Don Quixote”-like nightmare for Terry Gilliam, still amid the filming of the atrociously tiled “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” with Ledger as star. Variety has some details on the production and a nice roundup of other films whose production has been disrupted by tragedy here.

Update: The Times’ David Halbfinger makes a few calls to say that no one knows what will happen on the “Parnassus” shoot:

Mr. Ledger’s death leaves the producers with few desirable options: recast and reshoot, rewrite and adjust, or abandon the project altogether.

[…]

Brian Kingman, managing director of Aon/Albert G. Ruben Insurance Services, a leading entertainment insurance underwriter, said that only 18 days of filming had been completed on the film, suggesting that about $14 million had been spent, and that Mr. Ledger had been named an “essential element” under the film’s cast-insurance policy.

That means the producers would have the right to abandon the film and recoup their spending on the project before his death.

In the meantime we can savor those commenting on his death, like Bonnie Fuller, at the Huffington Post, in an essay entitled “Heath Ledger: Why, Why, Why?”, which begins this way:

It was just this past weekend that I rented the film, A Knight’s Tale, starring Heath Ledger, to watch with my youngest son who is six. I wanted to enjoy it with him because I figured that he was at an age where he would love its action and its fantastical play on the world of medieval jousting.

Never having met one, I’ve often wondered what the editors of magazines like “Star” and “Us Weekly” are like. Those dulcet sentences give me a pretty good idea. I would like to spend some quiet time with Bonnie Fuller and tell her about how the comma is used.

To watch “A Knight’s Tale,” Fuller had taken a deserved evening off after her last HuffPost epistle, titled and I’m not making this up, “Bye Bye Skinnies! Why Bumpalicious and Not Naked Stars Are Taking Over Monthly Mag Covers.”

There are many things that contributed to the DVD boom of the last six or eight years. The movie industry deserved its free digital money, just as the music industry did in the 1980s. The movie industry was even smarter, keeping the price point low and adding even more potent special features.

One appeal of the DVD that is sometimes overlooked is the way it resolved a huge problem in home movie-watching in the 1980s and 1990s, namely the violence that was done to most movies in the process. Since movies didn’t fit on TV screens well, folks originally got a cropped picture (or, worse, a panned-and-scanned one). It doesn’t get talked about much, but this was an aesthetic outrage almost without historical parallel. Since photo composition is so central to the filmmaking art, a similar example in any other medium is difficult to formulate—can you imagine a huge percentage of novels consumed minus their adjectives?

Anyway, I think it’s possible that the DVD’s fast rise is at least partially due to an underappreciated feeling on the part of home viewers that they weren’t getting the whole picture, so to speak. (I’m not saying a widescreen is intrinsically better; just that if a movie was filmed that way it should be seen that way. “The Sopranos” isn’t any better once it started being shown in a widescreen format. You can compose perfectly well for a nearly square screen.)

Still, while we are now seeing that whole picture, we are not seeing it with the force of a large screen in a theater, which is another perhaps unarticulated desire on the part of even casual movie watchers. But as very large flat screens become a routine home product, this may change as well. A recent WSJ ($) story detailed that, with LCD set sales increasing by 75 percent a year it’s suddenly become difficult for makers to distinguish their screens by quality or price. (The digital conversion in 2009 is going to accelerate this changeover.) As prices drop, 50-inch TVs, which in an average living room pack a substantive cinematic punch, are quite affordable, making it now not just the place where you can see a movie in its appropriate aspect ratio, but also in a setting that will, in an almost subconscious way, fulfill an unspoken need on the part of consumers that previously could be obtained only in a theater.

And these days, of course, the movie theater has become a zoo. (Before a film I saw recently at a megaplex, we were shown a commercial that featured a cartoon piece of snot in an old west setting being run out of town by a sheriff named “Mucinex” or somesuch. The theater showed it twice before the film—and then had it blaring again on an oversized screen in the lobby.) Given a scenario in which a couple or a family can a) stay in and watch a movie in superb and powerful reproduction at home in peace and quiet with popcorn at hand or b) pay $20 and $40+, respectively, before snacks to schlep to a cacophonous environment, be bombarded with commercials, experience poor projection, and have someone texting in the seat next to them, the choice isn’t even close.

This ineluctable process will have three plain effects: a) increase the pressure for day and date release of film and DVDs; b) accelerate the industry’s moves toward 3D and IMAX and the like, just to maintain reasons for actually traveling to a theater; and c) continue the bifurcation of the movie experience, into an adult one with quality movies seen at home and a younger, more action-oriented one that is experienced in ever-more advanced public spheres.

A funny Onion piece. How often do you hear that these days?

Cortney Harding in Billboard ($) details a weird little scam some rock mags play: Making money by selling ads that feature the photos of various artists—without getting permission or compensating them. Chief culprits: XLR8R and Rolling Stone:

Baltimore electronic musician Dan Deacon opened his December issue of XLR8R magazine to find he’d been named one of the worst artists of the year in the reader’s poll.

But that wasn’t what prodded him into making an obscene blog post. Rather, it was Deacon discovering his picture on the front of a postcard ad; on the back was a plug for Greyhound buses, promising to take riders to America’s best underground venues to see artists like himself.

As it turned out, no one had ever contacted Deacon or any of the other bands in the ad to seek permission to use their image, let alone compensate them.

XLR8R wouldn’t comment. Rolling Stone and RJ Reynolds are facing a class action lawsuit from bands included in a big cartoon, “The Indie Rock Universe,” that was backed by a Camel ad. Rolling Stone and RJ Reynolds contend that the ad and the carton were unrelated.

Harding spoke to an entertainment lawyer named Quinn Heraty, who isn’t working on the case:

Heraty says that the reason most indie acts don’t pursue cases against those who use their images without compensating them is a simple question of resources. “A band will see their image and call the company, only to be pawned off on the ad agency,” she says. “It’s a shell game, and it gets discouraging. And let’s face it, lawyers are expensive. Because of this, some brands think they can just railroad indies; they assume they’re broke and dying for exposure.”

p.s.: Am I the only person who finds Billboard’s crazy web site a mess? There’s obviously a lot of information available, but the architecture of the site seems to divide pieces into mystifying categories. I’m a subscriber and have a web account as well; but to find the article I mentioned above, even as I had a hard copy of it in my hand with hed, byline and date of publication, it still took me a half dozen tries in as many search boxes to pull it up.

From the It Couldn’t Have Happened to a Nicer Group of People Desk:

Simon Napier-Bell, onetime manager of the Yardbirds, offers a very long memoir in the Guardian. It has fun passages like this:

I insisted the Yardbirds should produce their own records. I demanded the biggest advance they’d ever paid and the highest royalty - £25,000 and 12 per cent of retail - and they gave it to me. If this was my entrance exam into management, I thought I’d passed with flying colours. I soon learned I’d failed.

EMI had simply advanced the Yardbirds their own royalties and included a host of tricky accounting clauses - for instance the artist was only paid on 90 per cent of records sold, and was not paid on ‘over-pressings’, although these were usually sold anyway. I asked the group’s lawyer why he’d let these things pass. ‘If I told my clients not to sign unfair contracts they’d never get a deal.’

And this, written, conveniently, after Ahmet Ertegun had passed away:

With a view to discovering more about the explosion of music coming out of London, Ahmet invited me for afternoon tea and muffins. I’d only been there five minutes when the door opened and Joe Tex, one of the biggest black recording artists in America, stuck his head in. ‘Ahmet, man, I was just wondering if you could loan me 10 bucks.’

‘You want 10 bucks,’ Ahmet told him. ‘Go downstairs to the studio, find a backing track you like and put your voice on it.’

An hour later Joe came back. Ahmet buzzed the studio and asked the engineer if Joe had done a good vocal. Then he doled him out $10 and offered him a cup of tea. When Ahmet left the room for a minute I asked Joe how much royalties he got. He wasn’t sure he got royalties at all. ‘I don’t know exactly how it works,’ he confessed, ‘but Ahmet and Nesuhi are like brothers. Whenever I’m in New York I gotta place I can hang out. And I always come away with a few bucks.’

And this, from the stories-too-good-to-check file:

Bob [Dylan] was arguing the point but [CBS exec] Dick [Katz] was having none of it. ‘Look, I’m telling you. There’ll be no fucking religion—not Christian, not Jewish, not Muslim. Nothing. For God’s sake, man—you were born Jewish, which makes your religion money, doesn’t it? So stick with it, for Christ’s sake. I’m giving you 20 million bucks—it’s like baptising you, like sending you to heaven. So what are you fucking moaning about? You want 20 million bucks from us? Well, you gotta do what we tell you. And what we’re telling you is … No Torah! No Bible! No Koran! No Jesus! No God! No Allah! No fucking religion. It’s going in the contract.’

The Moldy Peaches reune for an appearance on … “The View.” Kimya loves Whoopie, it turns out. (No, really. She actually says, “I love you.”) For her part, Whoopi has hosting duties on “The View” that are so strenuous that … she has to use crib cards to ask her battery of questions. Well, two. (Link via Consequence of Sound.)

The performance is also up on YouTube here, in much lower quality but with the rest of the short interview intact at the end.

Variety says perhaps not, in light of several new developments:

• The guild said it would not picket the Grammys, set for Feb 10.

• The guild has dropped its demands for representation of reality-show writers.

• With the DGA settlement at least in the same universe as the writers’ new media demands, the guild and the studios began talks today to begin talking about maybe starting talking again.

At the same time, however, pickets were out in force again in LA, and in New York a west coast guild official played bad cop, saying at a rally in Manhattan that the guild was still planning on picketing the Oscars if an agreement wasn’t reached.

The story also contains a lot of information on how the Oscars may be affected if the strike goes on, and crunches some of the DGA numbers.

Details from Jeff Leeds in the Times here.

Via iPod Daily News, an enjoyably psychotic commercial for the Microsoft Zune.

Too few commercials, one thinks, contain both the Counting Crows and giant jellyfish. What has the Mac folks exercised—not unjustifiably so—is the commercial’s not-so-subtle implication that the Zune has a touch screen. Like the one that other mp3 player has. Which the Zune does not.