The sound of money

There’s a fable that is told in many different versions around the world. In some European versions the hero is a wandering clown, but in the version I first read as a boy it was Ōoka Tadasuke, the 18th century Japanese magistrate who has many folktales attached to him. The story goes: an innkeeper overhears a poor student tell a friend that he always eats his rice as the innkeeper is preparing his fish, and thus the smell improves his meal. The angry innkeeper brings the student before Ōoka, demanding payment for the stolen smell. Ōoka responds by having the student spill his pocketful of coins from one hand to another, and tells the innkeeper that the smell of fish has been repaid by the sound of money.

rice

The popularity of this story speaks to a deep, common-sense understanding that there are some things of value that are beyond commerce. The value of these things lies in part to their having no ownership, to the way they float in the air, literally or figuratively. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that indignant, entitled, or greedy individuals won’t try to assert their claim.

Making the Internet rounds today is this disturbing piece on Waxy.org. Andy Baio, a tech enthusiast, made a series of chiptune versions of Miles Davis’s tunes on Kind of Blue; when he distributed the files, he included a version of the Kind of Blue cover that had been highly pixelated. The original photographer of the Davis portrait, Jay Maisel, sued Baio for copyright infringement. The case settled out of court for $32K.

I’m not going to go into the legal issue here—I have strong feelings about the stupidity of the current state of intellectual property law and I’ll bore you all some other time—but I do think that the story poses the question, what motivates an artist to take such disproportionate and vindictive action against a fan? It’s not money—Mr. Maisel is one of the most successful commercial photographers in the world. In Baio’s account, he quotes Maisel’s lawyer:

“He is a purist when it comes to his photography,” his lawyer wrote. “With this in mind, I am certain you can understand that he felt violated to find his image of Miles Davis, one of his most well-known and highly-regarded images, had been pixellated, without his permission […]”

With all due respect, I’m certain I can’t understand how Maisel’s hurt feelings are worth $32K. What’s being referenced here is the noxious concept of Moral Rights, the idea that an artist’s right to preserve the integrity of a piece of work can and should prevent anyone else from editing them in any way—including, apparently, using the original work as a springboard for something new. The American system of copyright does not, in fact, recognize Moral Rights (it’s mostly concerned with people getting paid), but the romantic ideal that somehow the artist’s intent should trump future artists’ intent forever and ever is anti-Art. Everything is derivative. That’s the way culture happens. 

I make a part of my living as a designer and illustrator. I have used existing works of art as inspiration, as reference material, as grist for the mill. Maybe some other artists have taken bits and pieces from what I’ve done and made something new. I don’t know of transformative works, but I have found places where my art was used unaltered without attribution or payment. If someone were to use one of my illustrations commercially, I would ask for payment; if they were to use it in a way I found offensive, I would ask them to stop.

But really? Most of the time, it just makes me smile—because I know my work is floating out there along with all the other smells.

Fight for your right

I’m not really the type to have role models; people are too complicated, too full of good and bad to be credible heroes to me. But if pressed for an example of someone who showed great courage in speaking truth to power I would have to go with William Gaines.

William Gaines

Gaines is best known today as the longtime publisher of MAD Magazine, and while financing a rag whose purpose was to pervert middle-American values and raise several generations of smart-ass punks would be enough to commend him, I think his finest moment came in 1954, when he was the publisher of the EC Comics line of horror comics: Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, Shock SuspenStories, etc. Red panic was in the air in those days, and a crackpot psychiatrist by the name of Frederick Wertham had just published a book entitled Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed that violent comic books were perverting American youth, turning them into either Communists or homosexuals or both. The upshot of all of this was that Gaines was called before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency to give an accounting for why his comics were so gory and disgusting and devoid of redeeming qualities and really wasn’t he ashamed of himself.

You can read his testimony in its entirety online, but the long story short is he refused to play the game. When asked to justify himself—to explain what possible good could come of comics featuring beheadings and eviscerations played for laughs—he shrugged: “It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.” 

He stood condemned before he spoke a word, of course, and within a year EC Comics was forced to stop publishing its horror line because of the new guidelines set forth by the Comics Code Authority. But I’ve always loved the image of this bespectacled, schlubby man effectively thumbing his nose at the idea that entertainment had to serve some noble purpose. Here was a guy who refused to justify something that had, and needed, no justification. There are many people who pay lip service to the idea of free speech when that speech is in service of a cause. It takes courage to defend free speech in the service of nothing other than simple self-gratification.

I often think of Gaines whenever someone ties themselves in rhetorical knots trying to answer scolds and censors who aren’t happy with the kind of fun others are having. Video games promote hand-eye coordination; I’m not wasting time on the Internet, I’m building my social network; I’m only reading it for the articles. Look at the convoluted points activists make when trying to legalize marijuana: they talk about pot’s medicinal uses, the ways the fibers can be used to make rope and the ways seeds can be used to make oil and the ways the roots can be used to make kitchenette sets. What they don’t say is: “I want to get high, and I think it’s fair that I be free to do that in a safe and legal way.” 

There are some things we do for shits and giggles. Most of the best things: roller coasters, horror movies, bourbon, sex. You have your own list, and it’s probably different, but you don’t have to justify it to me.

I get knocked down

Parenthood is a project made of anxiety, delight, but most especially drudgery: and of the tedious bits some of the worst are the endless hours spent playing first board games. The absolute nadir of these is of course Candyland, whose cruel and capricious nature has driven most parents to stack the deck in their child’s favor (or in their own favor, who cares, so long as the damn game ends already for God’s sake).  But a close second is the game Chutes and Ladders.

Chutes and Ladders

Chutes and Ladders is the kinder, gentler cousin of Snakes and Ladders; of the two, the latter name more accurately describes the feeling of playing the game, which not unlike a case of the DT’s. In the event you never were a child, here’s a description: the game consists of a race to the final square interrupted by a string of random reversals of fate in which your piece ascends ladders or descends chutes. These titular features are arranged in such a way that victory is eternally snatched from young innocent hands and the average game length is six hours (including two nap times).

The picture above is the version of the game I played with my daughter Kate when she was three; the board, apparently from the 1970’s, includes scenes that attempt to provide karmic justification for the players’ rises and falls. In one square, a girl mixes batter and so is rewarded by a ladder leading to a cake; in another, a boy reaches for cookies on a high shelf and falls down a chute that ends with a concussion and a possible lifetime of epilepsy. In one confusing pair, a child either hands his mother her purse or absconds with it and is rewarded via a ladder with ice cream; in yet another, a boy skates on thin ice, only to chute to what we must presume is an icy death.

I don’t think that Kate was impressed by the lessons of these scenes, but being a rational child she liked the depictions of cause and effect. She was especially pleased by a sequence where a pulling a cat’s tail results in a scratched face for the abuser. Kate herself has to this day a scar from the family cat that she received in exactly the same way; perhaps she found some sort of atonement via proxy. But for me there was no comfort in these tiny morality plays, because in spite of the veneer of a just universe the game is still entirely one of chance. In fact, the rewards and punishments only made the underlying randomness of it all that more depressing. What did it matter if sweeping the floor earned the little girl a trip to the movie when her stab at the housework was just one of six random options in the first place?

Fortunately, the days of playing this game are long behind me; I think we got rid of our copy at a garage sale, or maybe it’s squashed flat beneath the weight of better games on our basement shelves. But at night sometimes the game still haunts me. I wake from a dream of sudden falling and I wonder whether my life is really a series of actions and consequences or just one die roll after another.