To me, the movie theater has always been a temple.

But they have brought prostitutes to the temple. Barn animals, too. Even clowns.

Perhaps even barn clown prostitutes.

The temple has been desecrated.

I Am Now Unable To Get A Mortgage

Our bank called in the middle of the movie last night. The mortgage broker said, “We see a transaction here that you’re at a… *rustling of papers* movie theater?” I told him yes. “Then I’m afraid you can no longer afford your mortgage payment. This is also a sign of deep, deep fiscal irresponsibility.” Then he told me to enjoy the film, and the mortgage broker hung up.

I bought the tickets. For two people it was $22.00. Better that it wasn’t a 3D movie, or the price would’ve been $32, instead.

You know how much my Netflix subscription costs?

A mere $16.99. For the whole month.

When I was in LA, we went to the Arclight, and it cost an arm and a leg and a sliver of my actual brain, but you know what they have there? Ninja ushers protecting your theater-going experience with a shuriken in the eye for any who would dare talk during the film or answer a phone. And they have eunuch projectionists, trained for years in the art of showing movies (and ever-untainted by petty, rotten sexual urges). And best of all, the Arclight provides only assigned seating. First come, first serve, pick your seats, enjoy the meticulously prepared theater experience.

In Los Angeles, it seems that the temple is still intact.

In the Lehigh Valley, in Pennsyltucky, not so much.

It Looks Like Tron Had The Trots In Here

This theater, the Rave Promenade, is in general a very nice theater. Or it was, once. The bathrooms were always an assault on the eyes — walls and fixtures of the brightest neon, as if the bricks were lit by LEDs and burning souls from within — but they were always clean, too. Not so much last night.

It looked and smelled like a pack of giraffes had come through there and peed on everything. It smelled musky, like the urinary waste of an ermine. And it was humid. Like a jungle cloaked in a yellow fog.

The urinals were taken, so I hit the toilet.

Someone there had done a hover-job: hovered above the seat while manufacturing explosive diarrhea all over the aforementioned seat.

Note To Hover Diarrhea Man: see a doctor. Your waste looked like gritty coffee water. You probably have some kind of intestinal bleeding. Possibly a tropical parasite. Your kidneys need replacing. Stat.

This Zagnut Bar Better Double Up As A Flotation Device

Your movie theater concession prices can go eat a dick and die. I will not pay one billion dollars for a bottle of water. I will not buy a popcorn tub as big as a tugboat, and I will not tithe my blood to taste the chemical butter and styrofoam crunch. I will instead go to the Fresh Market before hand and I will buy chocolate-covered pretzels and sneak them in. Along with the filled-up reusable water bottle I bought from home.

So fuck off.

Fuckers.

Meet Mister Greasy Elbows

Whilst I was in the giraffe paddock known as “the bathroom,” some yuppie leather-fleshed father brought his clan of eight or nine people (including teen children and their significant others) and wanted to sit exactly where my wife and I were sitting. We tend to choose the precise middle of theater. The man asked my wife, “Hey, can you move over one?” Because, you know, he and his cult have to all sit in a goddamn row. Like fishy brislings. Which is conducive for nothing — his daughter can still give her boyfriend that handjob inside that tub of popcorn. My wife, always a nice person, tells him “Sure.”

This man is now my enemy.

He remained my enemy for the duration of the film.

I had my arm on the armrest, and he’d occasionally eat candy (obnoxiously licking his fingers like some kind of drunken squirrel), and his elbow — sweaty, greasy — would rub up against my own. His attempted domination of the armrest was never assertive; his message never clear. He’d leave off for a time, and then when I reclaimed space, would eventually elbow me again — gently, a meager swipe lubricated by his foul arm grease — or he’d rub his forearm against my own.

I was tempted to say to him loudly so that his yuppie-spawn family could hear:

“Sir, this is not a men’s airport bathroom. This will not initiate sexual conduct, and I am now certain that you are a socially conservative Republican looking for cheap man-on-man thrills.”

Except then he finally stopped and went to sleep. Every fifteen minutes. Not so much snoring as mouth-breathing like some greasy-elbowed muffinhead. His wife, the judicious one, would wake him by reaching across his chest and taking the soda from the armrest on his far side.

Mister Greasy Elbows, you are an entire jar of used douche.

We will meet again.

My Ears Are Wet And I Wonder Why… Oh! Oh. It’s Just Blood.

The sound, especially during promos, is skull-shatteringly loud. It’s like a chorus of crickets have formed a metal band and crawled deep into my ear, using my eardrum as a goddamn subwoofer.

I have explained this to the people at the theater, including the manager, and their excuse is, “This is the sound level requested by the studio for optimal experience.”

Optimal experience is apparently code for “ear death.”

Can they change it? Technically, yes, but somehow it’s bad form. The theater cares more about what the distributors and studios want more than they care about the needs of the ear-squirting human blood-sprinklers populating their audience.

I’m forced then to wonder: what about the damaged hearing of children? (Many of whom are probably in the R-Rated movies, because any time we go see an R-Rated film it is overwhelmed by children — or, rather, lazy shitbasket parents who don’t want to pay a babysitter and who figure District 9 won’t scar their five-year-old son, Booboo. Hey! Father-of-the-year! You should be shot in the balls.) Nah, hell with those kids. If Toy Story 3 ruins their hearing, it’s not because it’s too loud, it’s because it’s so awesome. Their deafness is a prize. A trophy, even! Cherish your ruined eardrums, kids.

The wife and I, we’re like old people. We bring earplugs.

Thing is, nobody else seems to care.

Nobody else appears to believe the sound is too loud. Just me and the wife. We old fogeys.

I’m half-deaf in my left ear already, and still the sound bores to the center of my brain like an earwig with a battering ram. And yet, curiously, while the explosions are super-crazy brain-melting loud, all the dialogue is muddy and mumbled, as if spoken through a bucket of quivering tofu.

The Muddiness Continues

The projection is dim, gray, occasionally unclear. It is as if someone borrowed the coffee-speckled diarrhea from the bathroom and dripped it over the film projector. The commercials for the film show that it is gray, but bright, and certainly clear. This is not. This is damaged kidney water. This is a rainy day. This is not the ideal projection, digital as it may be. The temple is sullied.

Someone pooped on the altar, called it “a sacrifice.”

Inception

…Is thankfully an awesome movie. There. That’s my Inception review, right there: “Inception is awesome.” You want more? Fine, fine. Pshh. Here goes.

Inception is brainy and brawny. It is the jeweled crown atop the pile of festering effluence that has so far been the Summer Movie Crapstravaganza.

It doesn’t even deserve to be with those other movies. It is densely layered, like the finest baklava.

It is Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” video, except on lots of acid.

You will have to pay attention.

The plot is precise.

The characters, not so much. The ensemble cast is given little motivation or meaning, and they are there more as tools: necessary drivers of plot, but not much more. Cobb (DiCaprio) and his wife are given full-bore character treatment, though, as are a few others (the mark, and the mighty Ken Watanabe). The first thing you always want to make clear with characters is, what do they want?

That is not established so cleanly here. And it is not a factor of the ensemble: Dark Knight was capable of making all its characters ring crisp and clear like the pealing of a bell.

Further, the very end, which I shall not spoil, is equal parts “clever” and “a cheat.”

Despite these misgivings, it is a most excellent movie. It will hopefully do well, as this film is — as I understand it — something of a referendum for the summer. If an original film that is not a remake, interpretation, or sequel (and likely will never have a sequel) can make boatloads of money, then it is perhaps time for Hollywood to stand up at the hole like an aroused marmot and say “Enough!” to all the derivative fol-de-rol.

Of course, this is likely bullshit, given that one of the biggest successes last year was District 9, another original — and one made fairly cheaply. And still nobody pays attention.

Yet. If Inception tanks (doesn’t look to be the case; the word-of-mouth is strong with this one), we’ll be seeing a remake of the remake of the remake of A-Team in no time.

Conclusion

I spend too much money to go to the theater for what is ultimately a mediocre experience. My home viewing experience is infinitely better (and I can bring my dogs).

Also: people suck, and the movie theater is filled with them. They’re like roaches. They’re everywhere. My home viewing experience is refreshingly absent of sucky human beings.

Also: Inception is good, go see it.

The end.

And now, let’s talk about the –

*drum roll, crash of thunder, thunderous hoofbeats*

FUTURE OF PUBLISHING.

I write this post because I just came from reading a thoughtful, incisive post over at John Horner’s Hornor’s Bastardized Version about publishing and e-books (“I Sing The Book Electric“), and there I posted a comment and it feels like, instead of dumping a fat back of blubbering word count in his comment box, I’d be better coming over here and jabbering into the void. So, prepare to get a little bit on you.

To give the gist of John’s post (though please, go read it, he says things far more intelligently than I can paraphrase), it’s this: right now, we as authors are facing a potential transitional period whose value is not known. Yes, blah blah blah, e-books are ascendant, except we don’t really know how true that is. It’s the Wild West in terms of both electronic and traditional publishing, as old laws are slow to catch up into new territory. What is likely (and this is John’s main point) is that the ease of publishing will lead to a wider diversity of published material, but this diversity has the potential to be paralyzing rather than empowering (at least, from the audience’s perspective).

As authors, this is both totally exciting and deeply fucking terrifying, because we don’t know if this trip is going to lead to a mighty gold rush, or to us breaking down in the middle of nowhere, forced to cannibalize one another. Mmm. Sweet meats. Long pork. Pass me the fork?

I am equal part e-book Luddite and wild, frothing futurist in my thought response to not just John’s post, but to any future scenario regarding the “publishing revolution.” At the outset, I’m pretty much in John’s camp in this one: traditional publishing has handed to me a wealth of wonderful books. The gatekeeper model has worked — at least, it’s worked to put good books into my hands.

What it hasn’t done yet is worked to put my books into the hands of others (nor has it necessarily worked to put my friends books — like John’s — out there). Maybe my books suck, and that’s a good thing. I dunno.

The reality, I’m afraid to say, is this: the world is home to a lot of bad fucking writers. Wretched wordsmiths, clumsy and fumbling. The fear is, the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING will kick down the doors and allow all these awful writers to come flooding onto our shelves and into our e-readers, a tumbling horde of zombie book-monkeys whose vast hunger for brains is present simply because they themselves possess none to begin with.

The signal-to-noise ratio will wobble wildly, and next thing you know, it’s going to be all noise and no signal. That’s the fear. It’s a fear I myself possess. It’s good for bad writers, and bad for a good audience.

Except, like with all things, the truth isn’t really at the margins. The truth can’t be that simple. It never is. The truth seems to forever lurk in the mushy middle, in the mire of moderate thinking.

(Mmm. Alliteration.)

In no particular order, here’s some added thoughts.

That Awful Buzzing Vuvuzela Noise Has Always Been Here

It’s easy to submit to the fear that the sudden e-book revolution will produce greater difficulty in separating wheat from chaff once we strung up our gatekeepers from the streetlights. But the truth is, the noise has been present since Caveman Thag learned to scratch pictures of Two Stags Fucking on the cave wall. The ability to write — and, later, the ability to print — has essentially granted the ability to make books and tell stories since the dawn of time. This is wildly simplified, since different barriers — like, say, the inability to read or the Black Goddamn Plague — prevented this, but my point is that in general this publishing industry model isn’t that old, and in its most currently refined form is only a couple decades into its life cycle.

Further, I cannot speak to your experience, but I can damn sure speak to mine: when I walk into a bookstore or I flit on over to Amazon-dot-com, I am already paralyzed by diversity. The shelves are full, and so are the databases, and it’s all spines and bright colors and ISBN number and –

You know what’s missing?

Filter.

I find no filter. My method of finding new books to read is, at present, one of two.

One: I take recommendations from people I know, or I read reviews, then I find those books.

Two: I wade into the septic morass and reach through the fetid glurge to see if my searching fingers can find a bauble or three hiding underneath all that goddamn poop.

Taking the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING to its most apocalyptic destination, what happens if all the gatekeepers are eradicated and the aforementioned doors are kicked down?

For the audience, it basically defaults to the same thing. They still have to wade through the feculent froth. They still have to listen to the recommendations of peers and reviewers.

What’s the difference if I’m weeding out a novel about glittery vampires or some bullshit self-pub with a rat’s nest of spelling errors and grammatical fol-de-rol?

John quotes a Salon-dot-com article (“When Anyone Can Be A Published Author“) –

Furthermore, as observers like Chris Anderson (in “The Long Tail”) and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book “The Art of Choosing”) have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren’t utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions.

…except, to me, that doesn’t sound like what will happen when the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING is made manifest. It sounds like what happens right bloody now.

Do You Trust Those Who Keep The Gate?

John says:

I am an author. For now, I’ve bought in to the traditional manner of publication. Get agent, submit books to publishers, get rejected, hopefully get accepted, go through another revision and editing process, have book cover designed and typeset by professionals, have PR and marketing people do whatever it is they do (even if it’s not as much as it was before this age of the internet).

And, finally, know that when my first book comes out, it’ll have run the gauntlet and be absolutely the best product it can be. A product produced by a team of people. I want to be the recognized brand.

And, again, I’m inclined to agree. Obviously, this is the method and the manner I’ve chosen for my book and for future books. The process is the process, and I think that the people in place who groom such books for birth do a good job. Once again, this process has put a lot of lovely books into my hands. What has not put lovely books into my hands is the self-publishing masses. Not yet.

But, once more, I’m forced to look to (cover your ears) THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING and wonder aloud if it’ll really change the model all that much. Agents and editors will probably still exist, but probably with an “unfettered” contingent — meaning, those who are not bound to any one model. The gauntlet may remain: to get a book to stand out, it’ll still have to have That Special Something (even if That Special Something isn’t quality, since even now bestselling books are not necessarily the books of the uttermost quality). You’ll still need a flashy cover, or a good blurb, or a well-read book. Those who accomplish this will likely still submit to the same symbiotic relationships that exist presently: the editor, the graphic designer, and so on. Some of those roles may drop away. I dunno. But you ask me, authors will always need editors. Agents, too, in some form.

Thing is, I think it’s important here to create a a separation between trust in the people and trust in the system. I trust the people. I trust my agent. If I get an editor, I trust that editor. And I hope to even trust the publishing companies themselves, but the entire system is one that could maybe use a little oil for its joints. This system produces bestselling novels of dubious quality. This system produces minimal support for good authors. This is an ecology with an uncertain life cycle — books get returned, books get lost on shelves, authors find themselves frozen out, robust advances can be a curse instead of a gift, and so on.

Good authors will sometimes fail to get into the system despite having a great book and an amazing voice. Could be a luck factor. Could be a sales factor. Original material is often lost beneath tides of rehashes and gross facsimiles: that is not ideal for us as an audience, and it’s certainly not ideal for the art and the power of good storytelling. For instance, John is a great author. I’ve read his stuff. And I hope to Jeebus that the traditional model and the system that’s in place is one that would support him and get him published.

But it might not be.

And that’s where (ahem, cough cough) THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING may have some benefit — it gives authors and creators a new avenue toward publication. It’s one more road toward an audience. See, right now, a book has to earn a fairly big audience to be considered a hit and make anybody any money. But something published on a smaller scale can reach a micro-audience and can still do very well for the author — but only if that story is not yoked to the slow, groggy ox of the old system. Can’t have it both ways.

Once More, We Return To The Formless, Gooshy Middle

And that’s really where I keep coming with all of this. The old model isn’t dead, and the new model didn’t kill it, and the so-called FUTURE OF PUBLISHING is really just the PUBLISHING PRESENT ALBEIT MODIFIED BY A NUMBER OF FACTORS. There will be no e-book revolution.

The new models are not a magic bullet, nor are they an ax to the back of the head.

In a perfect world, we’ll see books in more hands, and we’ll see authors have a few new paths and tunnels toward some manner of publication. But the crap is already out there. The Internet has already made it very easy for shitty writing to find a home — and, as it turns out, shitty writing is still shitty. It’s still misspelled and poorly-conceived and it still gets its tiny crowd of back-scratching Yes Men, but it also doesn’t find its way to a real audience.

The paralyzing diversity exists. The noise already overwhelms the signal.

I don’t know that any so-called publishing revolution can change that.

It’s done. I’m done. It’s over. I’m sad.

Let’s be clear about one thing: I waited far too long to watch The Wire. I had a number of people — trusted sources, even! — tell me, “This show is incredible.” And I just nodded and mumbled something about not having time for a whole five seasons of television. It’s possible that, in a sense, I was right: I don’t know that I had the time for this.

But trust me, it didn’t matter.

We started watching the show here in Der Wendighaus one snowy day — during one of the many El Blizzardo Loco storms — and you could practically hear them buckling me into the roller coaster ride. It took a couple-few episodes for my wife to get hooked, but me, I was champing at the bit from day one.

And now, five seasons later — and five months of life — it’s over. In the can. Back in the hands of Netflix, hopefully going to some other poor asshole who thought he could get away with not watching The Wire.

Bold statement: The Wire is the best television show I’ve ever seen, start-to-finish. That last phrase is key. Start-to-finish. Some shows may have had better seasons here and there, and certainly a few really whopper holy-shit bomb-go-off episodes, but as a package? As a show that begins properly and gets a proper end? It’s The Wire. It’s The Wire by a country fucking mile. You feel me?

Why do I love The Wire? Let me count the ways.

It’s A Goddamn Greek Tragedy Is What It Is

Check out this quote from David Simon:

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

This quote hints at it, but let me say it more boldly: tragedy on the stage is wholly different from what the news will call “tragedy.” There they mean, tragedy is when bad shit happens. In the narrative form, though, it’s a different animal: tragedy is when you create your own downfall. The characters in The Wire all do their damnedest to do the right thing, and so often, “the right thing” is what gets them fucked.

You Want To Learn About Character, You Watch This Show

Another bold-ass statement: The Wire features some of the finest characters in television. Hell, it features some of the finest characters in any form, ever. The characters are nuanced, complex, and even the worst of them are endearing, compelling, and real-feeling. Week-to-week, season-to-season, this show challenges one of the fundamental assertions of television: characters shouldn’t change. Oh, not here. These characters are all subject to seasonal arcs and a series arc — and it’s one of the most complete sets of “character journeys” that registers on the screen. A really incredible feat.

I mean, c’mon. Bubbles? McNulty? Freamon? Daniels? Omar?

My jaw drops just thinking about how well-orchestrated these character arcs end up.

It’s not all perfect: some characters feel a little flat. Marlo’s got a whiff of the complex, but he and his crew don’t really get the same level of nuance that the Barksdale crew gets. It’s necessary in some ways (they are a more malevolent force, to be sure), but I really cared about the Barksdale crew, as bad as they often were. Further, a character like The Greek is just a cipher; a figurehead, a paper tiger.

And If You Want To Learn About Plot, You Watch This Show

I know that this is television, and I know that television is subject to lots of chaos and suffers under the yoke of forced improvisation: even still, this feels like one of the most finely-plotted shows I’ve ever seen. Not as single-serving bite-sized episodes, but as entire stories, each season as rich as an elegantly-penned novel. You want this level of intricacy and detail, you have to be a plotter. You can’t one-off a show like The Wire. You can’t just invent this kind of plot as you go — or, at least, I can’t. It’s got so many moving parts that fit so nicely together, we’re talking about a surefire case of Intelligent Design.

Then again, maybe I’m just seeing patterns like in the center of a sunflower or some shit.

A good quote on the writing of this show:

I think what you sense in The Wire is that it is violating a good many of the conventions and tropes of episodic television. It isn’t really structured as episodic television and it instead pursues the form of the modern, multi-POV novel. Why? Primarily because the creators and contributors are not by training or inclination television writers. In fact, it is a little bit remarkable that we ended up with a television drama on HBO or anywhere else. I am a newspaper reporter by training who wrote a couple long, multi-POV nonfiction narratives, Homicide and The Corner. The first became the basis for the NBC drama of the same name; the second I was able to produce as a miniseries for HBO, airing in 2000. Both works are the result of a journalistic impulse, the first recounting a year I spent with the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit, and the second book detailing a year spent in a drug-saturated West Baltimore neighborhood, following an extended, drug-involved family. Ed Burns, my coauthor on The Corner and co-creator on The Wire, was a homicide detective who served in the BPD for twenty years and, following that for seven years, a seventh-grade teacher at a Baltimore public school. The remaining writers—Richard Price [Clockers], Dennis Lehane [Mystic River], and George Pelecanos [The Night Gardener]—are novelists working at the highest level of the crime genre. Bill Zorzi covered state and municipal politics for the Baltimore Sun for twenty years; Rafael Alvarez, another Sun veteran, worked as a merchant seaman and comes from two generations of port workers. So we are all rooted in a different place than Hollywood.

Hear that?

If you write crime, please, please watch this show.

Rectify your errors. Come to the light, as I did. Don’t make me stop this car.

Aaaaand If You Want To Learn About Dialogue, Well, You Get The Idea

Dang, I don’t even know what to say. Just watch this. Some light spoilers, though I suspect they’re largely context-free if you haven’t seen the show –

It Rewards Careful Viewing

…and, I suspect, rewatching.

This show gets what many writers don’t — you don’t need to coddle your audience. If what you’re doing is good, you can hit the accelerator and speed along at a nice clip; they’ll catch up, I promise. The Wire doesn’t fuck around with over-explanations, or, sometimes, any explanations. A lot of scenes are left on the table with the attitude of, “Just watch, you’ll figure it out.” Some scenes don’t have pay-off until later in an episode, or even later in an entire season. Hell, some little bits remain outstanding for entire seasons.

The show assumes that you’re not an idiot.

I’m an idiot, but even still, I made it through, and I’m glad the show didn’t treat me like the frothing baboon that I just so happen to be.

That Theme Song

Every season added another version of the Waits classic (including the Waits original, in Season Two). Remember: you gotta keep the Devil way down in the hole.

My favorite: Season three, baby. Neville Brothers.

…so good, so tasty.

Omar

Motherfucking Omar. I dunno. Might just be one of my favorite characters of all time. Righteous. Complex. Honorable. Mean as a snake-bit dog. Gay. So proper.

Though, I can’t lie: so many of these characters are characters I could live with season after season.

Hell, I’d watch a show just about Freamon.

But that’s another interesting thing about this show: each season puts the spotlight on different characters, but never forgets a character. They all get play. They all get in the rotation.

Even Rawls.

Like, for instance, when we see him…

In a gay bar.

Anybody see that? That blink-and-you-miss it scene?

Never again addressed. Fascinating shit.

Howzabout You?

All right. I gotta tie this one off and get to business for the day. If you haven’t seen The Wire, then you and me aren’t friends until you change that. You can stay over there. In the corner. Standing in the dog poop. When you’ve started to watch it, you may step free from your shitty little corner and we can once more resume communication like two human beings.

If you have seen the show, hey, let’s talk this shit up. What do you like best about The Wire? Let’s wank-fest this. Wankity-wank-wank-wank. Fave character? Fave season (If I had to rank them, well, it’d change depending on my mood. Season Two is probably forever at the bottom, but the rest jockey for position above.) Favorite iteration of the theme song? Favorite quote? Any damn thing you got, throw it at me.

He’s got the fire and the fury… at his command…

Feh. Okay, I was overreaching. I haven’t had the morning coffee yet.

Anyway. Let’s talk about porn. Let’s have a pornversation.

Porn — man, maybe I’m just getting older. Maybe I’m just getting wiser. Could be that I’m just getting crankier. But for all the myriad ways we can now receive our pornography (I, for instance, just had a tall frosty glass of pornography with my oatmeal, and later I will receive one free porn video downloaded straight into my nipples when I buy a Venti Mocha at Starbucks), I’m getting kind of weary of it all.

By golly, I have complaints. Porn industry, are you listening? Are you listening to the complaints of this humble, brilliant man? Will you at least hear my plaintive complaints?

Will you hear the lamentations of my women?

Let’s get down to it. Let’s bitch and moan about pornography! Yeah! Woo!

The eXXXtreme Closeup!!1!

Listen. Listen. See this flower? It’s beautiful, isn’t it? White petals. Velvety folds. A burst of color near its center. Now, let’s take this beautiful flower, and get closer. And closer. And closer. So close, in fact, that we are smooshing the flower under the grinding sensation of the camera lens, smashing it into the sidewalk, back and forth, back and forth, until it’s all just a meaningless smear.

The vagina is like a lotus blossom, and the penis is like a… well, I don’t know, it’s hard to think of a beautiful metaphor for a penis, so let’s just go with “shiny rocketship.” But, man, same rule applies. You keep getting closer, and closer, and closer, and eventually I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore. I have no context. I just see warty pink parts colliding. I see fluids collecting like run-off from a broken air conditioner. I see veins and crevices. It’s like someone’s smashing two piles of cold cuts together.

I don’t need to live down there. I don’t need to hang out where the sexy parts meet. Stop showing me five minute swaths of time where that’s all we get: smash, smash, smush, smush, squish, squish.  You’ve ruined the vagina. I’m not a baby coming out of there. I don’t need to get a close-up of her C-section scar. I don’t need to see the labial pores. Oh, and damn. The dick is worse. You get too close to a dick and that thing looks like a knobby knee of Cypress wood. It’s horrifying. It looks like the insides of an exploded deer. It’s a hot dog left too long in the microwave.

At a reasonable distance, a lot of things are beautiful.

But man, you get too close, oooh. Shudder. No. No! No.

You want to go in for a quick zoom, like a plane flying low over a majestic ridge, go for it. At least I still have context. But you linger down there for minutes at a time, and I lose all sense of visual meaning.

Where’s the Story, Morning Whorey?

Am I weird that I want story with my porn?

Is it just because I’m a writer? Do I instinctively look for the story? For the context? The meaning?

Porn seems to have lost all sense of story. I feel like an old man on the porch regaling you with Days of Porn Past (“I remember, back in nineteen-porny-two, the porn we watched had a story! A housewife and a plumber! The seduction of a pizza boy, perhaps. Two busty CIA agents going undercover, if you know what I mean! Undercover, like, under-the-covers? Oh, you shut up! You go to hell! Get the hell off my porch or I’ll shoot a load of hot steaming lead into your rear end! What are you laughing at? Stop laughing at me! I’m old! I have a gun!”). I remember watching porn with stories. Some good, some bad, but at least I had context. It’s like Penthouse letters. The stories were generally terrible, but you could follow the narrative.

Now, it’s cut-right-to-the-chase. Gone is the pretense of narrative. Straight to the deep dicking. Right to the scissoring. Naught but a moment before the animal masks and giraffe-tail butt plugs come out.

I lament the loss of story from porn. I’m probably a rare bird in this regard.

Is it so weird that I want to know who these characters are before they get down to the rumpy-pumpy, to the slap-and-tickle? Is it weird that I call it “rumpy-pumpy” and “slap-and-tickle?” Is it weird that I have a growth growing out of my lower back that looks like a tiny version of me? And it has a face? And it whispers vile things? Shh. Shhhhh. It tells me how to end the world. Listen.

Revenge of the Naughahyde Balloon Women

Two words: natural women.

That’s what I want. I want women who look like women. I do not want women who look like emaciated tackle dummies wrapped in vinyl and filled with silicone in all the “right” places. I want women who were born out of a human uterus, not out of some plasticky robot “birth-chute.” I fear breasts that look so swollen, straining against the flesh, that it looks like they’ll explode if someone touches them. That’s just nasty. And weird.

They look comical. Cartoonish. Bony thin here, bloated and ballooned there. Skin pulled taut. Inhuman smiles. It’s like, HR Giger’s version of people.

Now, I’ll admit: the porn industry is probably the leastmost offender here. You look at models, you look at straight-up Hollywood actresses, and I think the problem is endemic there more than it is here.

But even still, here I have to see them naked.

And if they look more like CGI and Photoshop than, say, “human being,” I’m far likelier to send out an extermination squad to eliminate you and your SkyNet sisters from my television screen lest you all finally decide that humanity is no longer useful to you.

Please, more human beings in my porn.

Thank you.

Ambush Porn

Let me define “ambush porn.”

You’re watching. Everything seems good. “Oh, okay. She’s getting naked. She’s preening. This is good. This is fine. Oh! Oh, what’s this. A knock at the door. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, go answer the door. Who is it? Is it the plumber? Is it the pizza girl? It’s — oh god. Sonofa–! It’s a naked old man! And now she’s on her knees and licking his frosty gut hair, ohh, no, no, I didn’t ask for this! He’s like a gnarly old hobbit! A salty boat captain, his flesh worn raw by the briny sea! I didn’t order this! I didn’t want Old People Porn!”

In other words: abort launch.

Ambush porn: the “art” of sneaking in shit you didn’t really ask to see. Scene’s going along at a nice clip, and before you know it, someone’ s peeing in someone’s mouth. Wait! No! I’m not knocking anybody who wants that. Hey, you want pee-pee erotica, more power to you. You want to get all hot-n-greasy checking old some old dude going at a “barely legal” girl, hey, that’s your bag of tricks.

It’s just, I don’t want that. And I don’t want it randomly appearing before me.

See, that’s the tricky hell of hentai. You’re like me, you think, “Okay, fine, at least this has a story. I’ll watch.” And some of it does its duty admirably. But a lot of the time, it’s soul-crushing and boner-deflating. Once again, everything seems to be going fine until — wham. A hard left turn into horror town. “…I’m pretty sure he’s raping her. Yep. Yes. This is rape. It’s not even like, a rape fantasy. I need to turn this off now. Oh. Oh no. He’s growing demon wings. And he’s got tentacles. And they’re ejaculating some kind of demon fluid. This is fantastic. Please stop. Please stop. Why won’t it stop?” *claw eyes*

Oh, And Speaking Of “Barely Legal,” Ew

“Barely legal” is code for, “Congratulations! You’re almost a pedophile.”

It’s creepy.

Stop it.

Ew.

I Should Never Yawn While Watching Pornography

Jesus Christ, pornography is getting boring.

…and yes, I did just evoke the Lord’s name in describing porn. What? Shut up. He’d think so, too. He’d yawn and be like, “It’s a miracle I’m still awake. I mean that. An actual miracle. Write it down.”

I feel like I’m seeing the same thing over and over again. An endless parade of samey-same sexy-time. Nobody really looks into it. Everybody looks fake. They’re all shot in the same California mini-mansion or in the same dingy apartment. I’ve seen that same set of bedsheets again and again.

By the way, this, this is why people go to the really wacky holy-shit-what-the-fuck porn. Because they’re bored. “I want to see a girl make love to a ghost. No! No. Two ghosts. And there should be a cup. And the ghosts should excrete extoplasm into the cups and pour the ectoplasm back and forth into one another’s mouths. Two ghosts. One girl. One cup. So hot. So hot.”

No story, no context, no quality, no nothing, total boring.

Yawn. Naptime.

You Stay Classy, Pornography

Arty porn. You don’t see much of it. In photography, yes (and are people still calling that “erotica?”). With the written word, too — once in a while you get some surprisingly well-written stuff out there. But video? Nehhh. Not so much. It’s all cheap-looking. Harsh lighting. Overhead view. Garish and glaring. Sterile, awful, suburban, dull. Why can’t we get some high quality arty stuff? Doesn’t have to be top dollar — heck, you can do indie films for the cheap, why not indie porn? Is there an indie porn industry? Am I missing it? Am I asking for too much? Will I be mocked? Run out of town on a rail?

Porn feels trashy because it’s basically trash. Lowest common denominator.

C’mon, people. Let’s treat our porn better. Let’s dress it nice. Let’s elevate its self-esteem. Let’s give it something to feel good about!

Let’s put art into porn.

Or, porn into art.

Or something into something.

(And while it’s ancillary, let me also lament the loss of quality sex scenes in non-porn films. Hollywood loves explosions and blood squibs, but has fallen prey to the Moral Censors and no longer shows truly sexy stuff in film anymore. Kind of sad, really. We’re a nation supposedly scared of sex, and yet, and yet, we spend billions on porn. Ahh, sweet, sweet repression.)

I dunno. What about you, Internets? Porn good? Porn bad? Porn skeeve you out? You okay with the lowest common denominator feel of it all?

Let’s talk about the oil spill. I wasn’t going to. I know, it’s silly, and it’s selfish, but man, with selling a house and trying to juggle projects and planning a new novel, it’s like… I read the news and I feel overwhelmed by it. Swept away in its foul current. Easy to read the goings-in in the world and come to the swift conclusion of, “Oh, right. We’re all ruined.” It’s hard not to see Cormac McCarthy’s The Road not long down the pike.

And so I said, hell with this. I don’t want to blog about the awful.

But I don’t know that I have much other choice.

So. Thoughts. In no meaningful arrangement.

It’s The Animals, Stupid

It was the images of the animals that did me in.

I don’t think I’m supposed to post those pictures here, ’cause I don’t own them, though a part of me wants to say, “Hey, fuck that, everybody needs to see these no matter what, and failing to click the link is not an excuse.” I mean, everybody should see this stuff.

Whatever. I urge you: click this to look at animals caught in the oil spill.

And read this article about it, too. A quote from said article:

“When we found this dolphin it was filled with oil. Oil was just pouring out of it. It was the saddest darn thing to look at,” said a BP contract worker who took the Daily News on a surreptitious tour of the wildlife disaster unfolding in Louisiana.

I know. It’s silly that it takes pictures of sad animals to make me — or others — care. But hey, it works. The more you think about it, animals represent a kind of innocence. They’re just animals. They didn’t do anything to deserve it. Fish gets eaten by a shark, well, okay. That’s the circle of life. That happens. Shark drowns in an oil slick, that’s not life. That’s awful. That’s wanton disregard. That’s far outside the weave and weft of standard operating procedure. So, the animals represent a strong image in this: as humans, we’re inclined I think to self-hate. “Well, there’s oil out there, and we fucked up, and maybe we deserve it.” Maybe. Maybe not. But the rest of Mother Nature, she’s innocent in all this.

Dolphins, fish, turtles, dead, dead, dead.

Birds, dead.

Marshes, grasses, sea plants, all dead.

The cleanup efforts may deoxygenate the oceans, causing further instability.

That’s just in the Gulf Coast.

Yesterday, the oil was spotted nine miles off the coast of Florida. Heck, tarballs were found in Key West in mid-May. (“Tarballs” was also my nickname at Fat Camp.)

The oil isn’t stopping. Hurricane comes, they say the oil could go far and wide.

The Info-War Is On

Information about the oil spill is growing online. Took longer than expected, I think, given the speed with which the Net disperses stuff. But now I’m seeing more and more memes geared toward the BP disaster (i.e. “Deepwater Horizon Spill”) –

The “suck my dick” shark.

Spongebob, dead.

Fake BP ads.

The fake BP Twitter feed.

Equal parts funny and sad. Two things the Internet does very well.

It seems lazy. As if commentary alone fixes things.

But satire has a place in all this. Satire’s working to get me worked up. And when you see things like the above article where BP is trying to hide the dead animals, or where they’re trying to conceal the things they already knew about the problem — hell, they had whiffs of the problem in 2009 — you start to see that this is very much a war of information. Yes, obviously, it’s about the oil and the containment and capping and cleaning of oil, but beyond that, it’s about who knows what, and when.

The Internet is an unregulated flow of information.

It’s good if we use it to channel truth. Or, at least, something approximating truth (as could describe satire).

It’s bad if we let corporate interests use it to channel propaganda. (And this is another reason why we don’t want a corporate-controlled Internet, by the way.)

Hell, the touching, frustrating blog post by Cherie Priest put me on the path toward writing this blog post. (And may I again say, “Read Boneshaker?” Yes. Read Boneshaker.)

Information is power. And we have that power.

Blog about this. Talk about it on the Twitterspaces or the Faceyfeeds. Retweet the images of the animals. It’s not a huge thing. But it’s something.

One of the most clear and affecting sites? If It Was My Home. Click that. Spread it around.

Oh! Hey, Look! Halliburton is Involved!

…because that’s always a good sign.

Halliburton is like one of those fictional companies in genre stories that’s always at the center of really bad shit. It’s like they exist just to fuck stuff up. Hey, the Iraq War’s going really bad — oh, look! Halliburton won more contracts! And they’re overcharging America for their shitty service! And soldiers are dying! What’s that? Halliburton accidentally released a toxic cloud in Farmington, New Mexico? And they’re implicated in “improper cementing,” thus helping to cause the goddamn awful ocean-destroying oil leaks in the Timor Sea and the Gulf Coast? Good times, good times.

I expect to turn on the local news, see a story about a guy who kicked a puppy to death, and see him wearing a Halliburton jumpsuit in his mugshot.

Halliburton: a company even Osama bin Laden thinks is evil.

Regulation, Baby, Regulate

Hey, great. Another reminder why we need to regulate giant companies.

You fuckfaces who think we need to de-regulate? Fuck off. Fuck you. The GOP has twisted a message and somehow turned people (like the Teabaggers) into defending Giant Corporations Who Are Rich And Will Go Stompy-Stompy On Your Ass If Given Three Dollars To Do So. To make an extra two cents on the dollar, these companies will poison you. Your children. Your dogs.

The anti-regulation crowd has tied the fortunes of Middle America to the fortunes of Big Companies. It’s insane. Newsflash, asshats: those people are rich, you people are not. The gulf between the rich and the poor in this country is growing just as fast as this damn oil spill and is easily as toxic.

De-regulate.

Shut up.

Seriously? You really trust Humongous Faceless Corporate Interests over the interests of your fellow man? You’re saying we should trust them to do the right thing? Are you fucking apeshit? Companies do what’s in their best interest. And you can’t blame them. That’s Capitalism. But you can regulate them. You can put fences in place so they don’t leave their predefined area and go, ohh, I dunno, dumping oil in the bellies of baby seals. You can make sure they don’t repackage septic mortgages. You can make sure they don’t create and legalize corporate scams. You can make sure they’re not putting pesticides in our baby foods.

(Of course, the Teabaggers and the “deregulate!” crowd trust all the big companies, pretending like they have implicit confidence in humanity. Of course, “humanity” really means “white people.” They trust Monsanto and their terminator seeds, but they don’t trust… oh, that black guy over there. Or, God forbid, Mexicans in and around Arizona.)

We’re pretending like regulation damages Capitalism. Hey, dumbfucks, it’s not called Ethical Capitalism. It’s not called Compassionate Capitalism. Capitalism is just an idea. It’s just an economic model. You know what matters more than economic models? People. Actual, living, breathing people.

Also: dolphins.

Dolphins are more awesome than Capitalism.

We need to remember that the dollar serves us. We don’t serve the dollar.

And so I say: regulate. Regulate the unmerciful fuck out of giant companies. They have untold power. They have the ability to sway government in ways you could not possibly imagine. You’re for small government? You’re for the common man? Fine. Then own that. Mean it. Act on it. Giant companies create giant government. Giant companies stick an asbestos boot up the poop-chutes of the common man.

We don’t trust the common man: it’s why we have police.

So why do we trust big companies? Why don’t we have laws in place to protect us there?

How can you support that?

Write your legislature.

Demand regulation. Demand a criminal investigation into BP. Demand that lobbyists be shot in the head like the zombies they are.

Are We Fucked?

Probably. I sometimes think that things are just too big. The problem’s like a bad cancer. Not just this problem. Not just the oil spill. But everything. It’s like a mold problem. Or termites. “It’s everywhere.” You want to clean it out, you gotta just burn the house down.

Man, this is starting to sound like a crazy person’s manifesto. For the record, I am not advocating violent recourse. Please do not shoot lobbyists. Just, y’know, spray them in the mouths with bear mace.

It also doesn’t help that I’m watching The Wire. Seriously, if any show will make you doubt society’s ability to maintain itself, it’s that one.

But, even in the face of overwhelming awfulness, we can try to do some stuff, right?

What You Can Do

I was always told not to bring up a problem unless you have some solutions.

Okay. Solutions.

Some big, some small. In no particular order:

Stop sucking on the teat of bottled water. It’s a bullshit industry. No, really, check it out.

Design BP’s new logo for them.

Do not fill up at BP stations. Also: remember that some companies are subsidiaries of BP.

Donate to the National Wildlife Foundation.

Send a message to Congress. This one’s easy. The letter’s already written.

Cut oil consumption. Or, for every dollar of gas you buy (or oil for your oil tanks), send ten cents (i.e. 10%) to a charity like NWF or Oxfam.

Blog about it. Talk about it. Spread the word.

What else? What else can we do?

I remember watching the pilot episode of Lost in part because I’d heard an interview about it on NPR that day. The interview was vague enough, but suggested that more was going on than a simple survival show. That, coupled with the fact that it was a very expensive show and looked incredible said to me, “Hey, maybe tune in, see what it’s about.”

I tuned in.

And at the end of the pilot, I was rapt. Glued to the television. Slack-jawed and stunned. What the fuck? Who the? Where the? What was that thing? Was that a…? Where is that coming from? Wuzza? Wooza?

Six seasons later, I was treated to one of the weirdest, craziest, holy-shit shows… well, probably not ever, but certainly the only one to last six seasons. (X-Files, for all that it did, is a fairly pedestrian show compared to the tangle of madness that Lost represents. Do any other shows really compare? Shows that lasted this long? I’m not coming up with any.)

It’s a show that made me happy, sad, confused, angry, frustrated, and amazed from episode to episode. Hell, I sometimes ran that gamut during the course of a single episode.

For a show to accomplish that — I mean, wow. Hot damn. And thing is, it’s not just a weird show with a tangled plot. It’s a show that takes seriously powerful literary traditions that have informed the greatest novels and films. This show could be a primer on how to inject all that great stuff — themes, foreshadowing, metaphor, flashbacks, flashforwards — into a television show. In fact, Lost uses such literary techniques often literally; flashbacks and flashforwards are not merely narrative tricks, but rather, fundamental parts of the story and the plot. The island is a place where such narrative conventions come alive; foreshadowing can be for real, and some characters (Eloise Hawking, for instance) seem actively tapped into what you might think of as a “literary matrix.” It’s like she knows she’s in a story, and can read it that way. Metaphor, too, is a living thing, the way the Man in Black as Smokey can become characters or ideas (like the black stallion). Themes, too, are real, palpable, livable; they play out again and again, the cycles of history manifesting through twins, through light and dark, through the shades of gray to the polar coordinates of black and white outside that fog.

I also love that the show constantly gives us allusions to those literary nods: Sawyer’s reading habits, for instance, are a constant reminder that they take this stuff very, very seriously.

It’s a dope-ass show, is what I’m saying.

Even when it fails at what it wants to accomplish, it’s a brave and powerful experiment.

And now it’s coming to an end.

I figured I’d ramble my way through some thoughts as we reach the closing hours of the show (2.5 hours, though now they’re saying the DVD will feature another 20-30 minutes that help to further clarify). Don’t expect these thoughts to be well-arranged or anything. I’m not writing an essay. I’m just fumbling my way through the tangled warren to which this rabbit hole brought me.

Favorite Episodes

Is it worth talking about our favorite episodes? It might be. While the show I think will be remembered largely as a whole picture, the individual parts of the elephant are still notable.

Obviously, the pilot rules just for what it was able to do.

“Numbers” is great, because we dig into the Curse of Hurley.

“The Long Con” is a great Sawyer episode — we meet Cassidy, and we get more on Rousseau. The finale that season (“Live Together, Die Alone”) was a pretty great one. Michael and Walt leave. Our heroes captured. Desmond. Penny. A polar station where they find coordinates which may very well be the island. Boom.

The father-son thing with Hurley and his Dad (fathers and sons = major theme) is great in “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead.” Plus — the van! The beer! The skeleton named “Roger!” Good times.

“Some Like It Hoth” — for the title alone, baby.

“Ab Aeterno” — The truth, er, mostly, about Richard Alpert. Great stuff. Batmanuel with his beautiful eyes really sold the episode, I think, made me really feel something.

What about you? Favorite episode? Why?

Favorite Season

Best seasons for me are the first and this last. Both represent seasons to me that feel purposeful, that come together, that feel like the writers and creators have control over their story. The opening season introduces a lot of the Big Mysteries, and this latest and last season seeks to answer a lot of the Big Mysteries. They’re bookends, hemming in the good and not-so-good volumes of text in the middle.

The middle of the series got a little wonky. They were necessary, but it feels like certain arcs represented them getting, erm, lost in their own story. Mr. Eko, for instance, or Anna Lucia and the Tailies — the second and third season represent some zig-zagging. I don’t blame anybody for this — really, the problem was that ABC hadn’t yet let them off their leash. Television is a tricky beast. Is your show successful? Then you’re renewed! Not successful? Then you’re canceled!

That’s been the model for God Knows How Long, and it serves the jobs and the network, but doesn’t serve the story or the audience. Both BBC and Japanese television know how to give you shows that rise and fall in arcs and end when they need to. So, once ABC allowed Lost to continue only to a certain point regardless of its success or failure in the ratings, well, that was huge. Big ups to that network, actually — you don’t see a lot of properly-concluded television shows. Babylon Five. Battlestar Galactica. Any others?

Once the creators knew they had a proper timeline, they could start firing on the plot and story elements and answering mysteries in parcels as opposed to, “Uhhh. Just drag it on like the X-Files did.”

What’s your favorite season of the show? Least favorite?

Favorite Characters

The best thing about this show is, for me, not the mysteries, but the characters. The mysteries matter only because I care about those affected by them. Another big win for Lost.

Jack was a character I generally didn’t like through… three or four seasons. First season, yes. After that, not so much. That may have been necessary, because now? Now I see that he’s the guy the island needs. I can look back through those struggles and see how it is that he came out on the other side. Still, he’s a challenging character throughout for me. (And he was supposed to die in the pilot, go figure.)

Kate, too, is another challenging character. So strong in the first season, but real wonky and wobbly throughout. Is she a weak, man-starved woman? A chaotic element? A murderer? A mother? A runner? She’s too many characters throughout. Sometimes I adored and admired her strength. Other times, you just want to grab her and shake her like a baby. And not in a good way — not in the “suspense is created because the character is making the properly wrong choice,” but in the way that, “why would the character do this? do they even know their own character?”

Still, though, the show gave us such great characters.

Sawyer, maybe my favorite. Hard not to be. A meaner, quippier Han Solo.

Hurley is the show’s moral and non-mysterious center. He’s the only character who basically throughout is like, “Hey, can we talk about stuff? I totally just saw some weirdo shit out there.”

Miles is always Miles. And for that, I really dig him.

Juliet was for me the strong female character, the anchorpoint. Her death (er, spoiler alert?) was the most tragic and the most keenly felt — though Libby comes up close, because you could feel it through Hurley.

The Kwans, I liked, but their… er, conclusion felt overly tragic.

Ben is one of the most powerful characters on television — a keenly creepy play-both-sides villain-you-love-because-maybe-just-maybe-he’s-not-a-villain.

You? Fave characters?

A Brief Note

This show feels like the biggest and best example of a roleplaying game writ large. It has a lot of those “at the game table” trappings — groups of characters; keeping secrets; shuttling from one area to the next; uncertain mysteries; sometimes it feels like people are just making shit up (which is okay); central location; certain rulesets; etc.etc.

I don’t say this as a bad thing. I think it’s kind of awesome, actually.

You could very easily tell a Lost-ian game with the World of Darkness Storytelling System.

Unanswered Questions

The unanswered questions to this point are so myriad, it’s not worth even digging out the list, is it? Suffice to say, my prediction is that they’re going to answer the Big Questions, and fail to answer a lot of the Little Questions. Oh, and by the way, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

Here’s what I suspect: the little questions will have answers near to our grasp when the big questions are handled. Nobody may address, say, the island’s healing properties directly, but we know that the island is a source for some crazy miracle light, and so we can infer an answer to the healing properties — “Well, it’s the light, stupid.” Do we really need to know where Walt’s powers came from? Isn’t it enough to look back over the whole scope of the island story and say, “The show has very plainly told us that some people are special. Walt had powers, and that’s what matters.”

That’s not to say there won’t be some nagging outliers. But I suspect they’ll be less troubling than expected.

Plus, I predict the fan community will have a great post-show life. The show is so rich, so dense, that the fan community will have meat and gristle to chew on for years after the show’s end. Part of the fun will be going back through the show and pulling threads together, see how well they weave.

How Could It End?

I won’t bother saying how it “should” end. I’m comfortable in saying that they know their story better than I do. Still. Predictions?

The Sideways timeline needs to bridge the gap. I predict that we’re in store for a surprise here. I predict that it isn’t exactly what we think, that’s it’s not just, “They set off the nuke and undid the timeline.” I think that’ll figure into it, but not in the way we have in mind, maybe. I feel like we’ll get a turnaround here on par with the one where the “flashbacks” revealed themselves as the “flashforwards.” At first I toyed with the notion that the Sideways timeline was some kind of purgatory created when Smokey got loose, so we’re seeing the effects of “his world,” almost like Stephen King’s own darkly twisting Dark Tower mirror worlds (and by the way, wouldn’t that be a fucking trip to find out that Lost is actually one more part of the Dark Tower story?). But I’m left feeling that this isn’t quite right. The Sideways story is actually a pretty good one for the characters. Everybody’s got a fairly good life. Kate doesn’t, but she’s (theoretically) paying for her crimes. Sawyer’s a good guy. Jack’s got a good relationship with his son and now knows his sister. Hurley’s in love. The Kwans didn’t get married, but are still in love and may now be free together.

But then you have the Desmond factor. The fact that he’s trying to wake everybody up to “let go.” Is it possible that this isn’t even a timeline? Is that the ruse? Is that timeline some kind of dream? Some kind of illusion that the Man in Black conjures? And only if they can awaken from it can they stop him? I dunno. What happens when they all become aware? Hurley is clearly very aware — not just of flashes, but of the whole scope. Clearly something means something here. They’re not just trying to make others aware; they have purpose. They must awaken.

In the current timeline, where is Desmond? I wonder if we’ll find him somewhere, connecting the timelines.

We’ll have to see Eloise Hawking again.

I figure that our show’s most prominent con-men — Sawyer, Ben Linus — will run a con. Maybe on Smokey himself. Or maybe on Jack. Could either become the Man in Black to Jack’s Jacob? (It occurs to me now how Jack, Jackob, Jacob, very similar names. I wonder if something else lurks in there, something about the power of names.)

Kate, I dunno. I wonder if she’ll bite it. That’s the other question. Who dies? Sawyer and Ben could be good sacrifices. I actually don’t think they’ll kill Kate, and the creators have hinted they won’t “answer” the Kate-Jack-Sawyer triangle, which I assume means that may not resolve.

I hope we find out that Hurley has some prominent role. I actually think, honestly, Hurley could’ve been the island guardian — it’d be unexpected and not entirely inappropriate. He’s kind of Zen. He was directly communicating with Jacob. He has that pleasantly plump Buddha Ho Toy thing going for him. Plus — free Dharma food! Woo!

We may see Jack with awakened powers. Jacob clearly had powers beyond our ken. We at present must assume that he arranged for everyone to come to the island. We may even assume that Hurley’s “curse” was his responsibility. Jack is now a major X-Factor as the island guardian. For better or for worse, he’s our Neo; awareness and enlightenment translate directly to magical abilities.

Will we see other island roles fulfilled? Someone becomes The Others? A group serves Jack? Will there be a new Richard? A new Ben? A new Man in Black Smokey Cerberus NotLocke?

We’ll see Juliet again. Getting coffee in the Sideways world. But that scene may mean something more than just that. It might be a pivot point. (Or maybe I’m nutty.)

I dunno. What else? What else am I not thinking about? Come. Dream with me. Predict some shit. Hey, go wild. We’ve nothing to lose. What do you think will happen?

Final Question: Are They Making It All Up?

They’ve had a plan all along, they say. I’m inclined to believe them and I think the show’s central premise and story have been (loosely) in place all along. But I also think that a lot of the mushy middle will be the result of them making stuff up as they went.

And I don’t blame them for that.

It’s a shame that they didn’t have some kind of inhuman authorial control, but c’mon. Reality has to come into play here. First, they’re dealing with a television show. I’m involved now in the plotting and planning of a television pilot, and I promise that looking three or six seasons down the line is nearly impossible. Second, a television show is not subject to the vision of a single creator. We’d love for it to be, but it ain’t. The network. The producers. The actors. The ratings. The community. A television show is like taffy, pulled this way and that. In the end, I actually think they’ll have created a far more “put-together” show than any human beings have the right to create. A show like this is an old boat on storm-tossed oceans. You’re not looking to land at a specific dock — you’re just trying to make it to shore alive.

So, yes, I suspect the truth is, they’re making a lot of this up as they go. I don’t mean episode-to-episode, exactly, but season to season. And that’s okay. It’ll give us more to talk about as the years go on and we try to suss out those questions that have hidden answers, and those that just plain have no answers at all.

In the end, it matters little. It fails to diminish what this show accomplished. It fails to reduce the potency of the Lost phenomenon.

The end is nigh.

I am so bloody geeked.

I just — it’s just — inside me is — fnugh! Rage! Raaaaaage. Seething suppurating fury.

Every little thing this week has been like an earwig crawling in my cereal. A guy cuts me off in traffic this week, I’m all like, “I’m going to drive to that guy’s house, and then I’m going to bite his hands off. I’m just going to bite them right the fuck off. I’ll spit them in his eye. I’ll spit his own hands into his eyes.”

This morning? The coffee took like, ten extra minutes. To brew two cups. Sputtering the whole time. Why? Why did it do that to me? And then then it was done, it didn’t even brew a full two cups. The coffee maker shrugged, and was like, “Ehh? I dunno. I kind of faded out in the middle there. By the way, when you leave the kitchen, I’m totally going to go bang the toaster.”

The sun visor in my car is broken. It has no visible damage. But it hangs limp like a gull’s broken wing. Now it’s always perfectly placed for optimal vision-blocking. And the sun? Oh, the sun gets a free pass. The sun is allowed to piss sunshine right in my eyes. The Daystar is a jolly god, and I am its angry servant.

Did I mention our heater is broken? Oh, it is. We don’t need the heater so much (though, even in mid-May, we’ve needed it a few times this month), but of course since we’re planning on selling the house I still have to have somebody come out, and they charge a “diagnostic fee,” which could also be called “we’re just being a shithead fee.” The thermostat knows when the heat needs to come on, because it makes this productive-sounding click! — like, click! Here comes that sweet, sweet heat! And then nothing happens. No blower, nothing. And, of course, since we live in the Northeast, we have oil heat. (You ever seen the map? Oil heat is in heavy use only in the northeastern part of this country. It’s expensive, this oil, and it’s in all the houses.)

Everything happens slowly. You ever notice that? Life is this game of inches, and as I’ve well-noted, I am not a patient man. I put 2:00 minutes on the microwave, I turn that fucker off with at least three seconds to spare because waiting that long is an ulcer-forming agony. The Internet does not help this problem. The Internet has instilled in me an unrealistic sense of swiftness. “Video? Now! Music? Now! Porn? Now! Cat pictures? Now! Tweets? Now! Now now now now! Muhgubrbletubnbbtrble!” So, the fact that real life does not simply happen at the push of a button is as irritating as having your undies stuffed with burrs and fiberglass insulation and then being made to slowly walk a mile.

Itch itch itch! Now now now! Gaaaaah!

But my biggest irritation right now?

The greatest source — the neverending well-pump — of my frothy indignation?

House Hunters, on HGTV.

You ever watch this show? It’s hard not to, because it’s on all the time. Every other half-hour is an episode of this, and my wife? She loves herself some HGTV.

Problem with this show is, it’s always a bunch of privileged knuckleheads buying houses you could never manage to buy. And they complain!

“Well, if we’re going to spend $650,000 on a kitchen, I’d like it to have a gas burner and be a lot bigger.” Bigger? You could play a game of Jai Alai up in in this motherfucker! You could build two more kitchens inside this kitchen! And sure, I’d like it to have a gas burner, too. I’d also like a pony. And a mythical creature to dance for me any time I successfully use the ice-maker. And an omelette-making robot.

They always want the same shit, too.

“Granite countertops.”

“Stainless steel appliances.”

“A double sink.”

“A view.”

And the women so often say the same thing when they encounter a prodigious walk-in closet. “This is my closet,” she’ll say, but then make this wicked laugh and look to her husband, “but I dunno where your stuff is gonna go.” Oh, snap! Well-said, stereotypical clothes-and-shoe-hound!

Oh, and if they have kids? Jesus Christmas on a crumbly cracker. Everything has to be super safe, for one thing. “Oh, little Justin Bieber, Jr. is going to hit his head on these corners.” Is he an idiot? Are you an idiot? The world isn’t Nerfed, lady. When I was a kid, I played around an old barn and I’m still alive. I played with live whitetail deer. Hell, our current neighbors (on the other side) let their kids play on a yard that looks like a tetanus farm. And these fawning Momma-Bears on television are worried about every little bump, dip and corner in the house. Your child is not made of balancing tea cups.

And when they go to look at the kid’s potential bedroom? Oh, goddamn. “It’s really not that big.” Well how fucking big does it need to be? Your child is a small human. He can deal with a small room. And, by the way, I don’t mean these rooms are glorified walk-in closets. They’re full bedrooms. Your three-year-old Yuppie-spawn hell-progeny — Jaden or Madison or Addison or Logan or Lexus or Mercedes or Apple or iPad or Little Tristan Abercromie — does not require a bedroom bigger than, say, any inner-city home in America. He’s three. That little shithead could sleep in a piano crate.

The guys are just as bad. They always need like, some giant corner of the yard for grilling. They always need a “man cave.” Then the woman says something about her “craft room.” Then the guy will always talk about where his big-screen television will go. “Oh, this here, this is the spot where the television goes.” Really? That’s the make-or-break it moment for this house? You’re looking at something with 4000 square feet, and you’re concerned about not having one area where you can place your flatscreen television?

These assholes. These assholes. They go through houses that are nicer than any I will ever live in, and they bitch and babble. “This house has a lot of problems.” No, what they mean is, “This house has white appliances.” Or, “I don’t like the tile in the bathroom.” Or, “This oven is five years old.” Or, “I don’t see any omelette-making robot.” Big problems, indeed.

Do these dipshits know how hard it is to clean a stainless steel appliance? Go to Best Buy. Marvel at the fingerprints on those appliances. Justin Bieber, Jr’s sticky jam-hands and poo-fingers will do far worse.

What the hell do granite countertops do for you that… say, other countertops do not? If it’s Corian, will you need to spend ten minutes weeping into your apron every night? It’s not like someone’s asking you to buy a house with countertops made of old soda cans and a burlap veneer.

“This is a great space for entertaining.” Who are you, Wayne Newton?

“I could see myself cooking in here.” Oh, holy shit, Kreskin. Your imagination is precious.

“Oh, this color is nasty.” So paint it. Paint it. Jesus invented paint for a reason.

Rage. Raaaaage! Die from tetanus! May piranha eat your children, privileged house hunters! I hope your granite countertops slide off their mooring and crush your legs.

Okay. Okay, I’m calm, now.

Pant, pant, pant.

For the record, on the flipside, I actually quite adore the other version of this show, House Hunters International. Because there, I at least feel like most people get their comeuppance. They go to Italy to buy some palace, and they end up buying like, a pile of rocks. Or! Alternately, you get people like me who have a very modest budget and then then they go to like, Thailand and learn that they can end up living in a place that looks like the King of Siam’s summer home, and they’re always amazed and happy. “This is mine? This is for me? I’m so lucky!” Yes. Yes! Thank you for appreciating how far your dollar will go. Thank you for understanding value.

Anyway.

I think I’m feeling better, now.

Thanks for letting me rant, Internet. None of this shit is important anger, mind you — and most of it, I can fix, but it’s just one of those weeks where stupid irritations get under your skin. Other people have, y’know, real problems, I’m just clanging together pots and making some noise over here.

If you want to vent about anything — big or small — hey, look. Comment boxes! Let’s all vent some spleen.

Spleen.

Spleeeeeeen.

That’s a fun word.

It begins with the first Diana Gabaldon post (where she comes out pretty firmly against).

It goes to the second Diana Gabaldon post (where she softens her tone a little).

Then you might want to see the Charlie Stross post (with whom I agree).

Or the post from game designer Andrea Phillips (“Threat Or Menace?”).

All good stuff. All interesting.

I thought about getting into Twitter discussions (tweetscussions?) about it yesterday, but the reality is, Twitter is just plain awful for big thoughtful conversations (and yet I can’t help but notice how many sillyheads try to have those conversations, which is often like trying to hold a rodeo in an elevator).

So, here I am. Rambling rant ready to roll.

You want to know what I think about fan-fiction?

I think it’s an awesome problem to have.

Let’s put it into perspective. You’re an author. You have a dedicated community of fans, some sane, some nice, some talented (most not), some crazier than a shithouse owl, and all of them have one thing in common: a love of your work. They love it so much they’re willing to waste countless hours talking about it, writing about it, imagining your setting and your characters at the center of their own efforts.

Uhhh. How… awful?

Oh. Wait. No! It’s not awful. You have an engaged fan community. A community that has investment in your work above the work of others.

You’re breathing rare air for a writer. That’s a sign you’ve ascended to the next level.

I’m making up a number here, but I’ll bet you that about… ohh, 95% of all published authors never have a zealous fan community out there wiling away the hours writing fan fiction about their worlds and characters. You get to the point where you have fans writing this stuff, you’ve jolly well fucking made it.

Some authors balk at this. They reject fan-fiction at its core. That’s fine, that’s their right — though I have to say I certainly don’t understand it. Seems to me the last thing you want to do is go pissing on the heads of your most ardent proselytes (the ones who potentially helped get you to the point where you had this “problem” in the first place). Seems to me that this is a group with whom you’d want to engage. Hell, even further, it seems that this is a group you’d want to empower.

Empowerment can come with limits, and probably should — as Stross and Phillips point out, that stops at the cash register. Anybody makes money off it, well, suddenly they’ve crossed the line from fan to content vulture. Lucasfilm allowed fan-fic to exist provided it wasn’t sexual. Or, even better, look at the Creative Commons license situation offered by Jim Butcher (ahem, fellow DMLA-er! wooo!). Alternately, as Phillips points out, transmedia branch-outs are a good alternate way to empower the community and give them investment and ownership in the world and characters you’ve created.

Ahh, but is it legal?

Fuck, I dunno. What am I, a lawyer? I can’t and won’t pontificate on the legality, only that despite those who trumpet how the law is “clear” on this front, it’s most certainly not. Lawyers are free to respond all lawyer-like, but authors are not best served by the ban-hammer. Authors should do their best not to be dicks to their fans.

But isn’t fan fiction… y’know, weird?

Yes! Of course it’s weird. Hell, sometimes it’s downright butt-puckering. “In this story, Luke Skywalker mouth-rapes one of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park while Sherlock Holmes and Stretch Armstrong rub Luke down with mystical sex lube.” Holy shit, no. I don’t want that. I don’t want to look at that. (Well, maybe just a peek. I mean, I just want to make sure the raptor fares okay. I love those silly guys!)

Is fan-fic weird?

Is it poorly-written?

Is it puzzling?

It can be all of those things. But it can also be fans trying to engage. It can be an expression of love and interest. When I was a kid, I wrote endless stories about Pac-Man and the xenomorphs from Aliens. I was part of several collective storytelling endeavors on BBSes and in notebooks that used other people’s characters to tell my stories. I didn’t call it “fan-fiction,” but that’s what I was doing. I was just having fun with characters I loved. (And, by the way, it helped me learn to write.)

So, my thought is, fan-fiction? Hey, fuck it, great. Do it. You love my work that much? Enjoy it. Roll around with it. I may not like it or read it, but who cares? Fan-fiction is a truly most excellent problem to have; it’s like being out of caviar. It’s like, “I can’t afford to buy that horse made of gold because I just bought this horse made of gold.” Uhh. Boo-hoo? Here. Dry your eyes on some starlet’s panties.

You heard it here first:

I ever get that popular, you can fan-fic the shit out of my work as long as you don’t make a dime.

Though, I reserve the right to change that opinion once the lawyers come at me with shock-lances.

Let’s form an assumption just for the purposes of this post. Let’s assume that piracy cannot be stopped. Let’s pretend that it isn’t necessarily a malevolent or even a selfish directive put forth by a gaggle of impatient or greedy individuals. Let us instead make-believe that piracy is simply a force-of-nature: a thing that cannot be changed. It is as ineluctable as the tides. It is the hurricane in October. It is the cracked asphalt after winter. It is the Nor’easter storm that paralyzes a region.

In the best situation, we can prepare for the forces of nature.

Hurricane windows. Salt on the road to prevent freezing. Asphalt patches to fix the holes. For some disasters or forces of nature, we even have ways of making those things work for us. Hell, a Nor’easter ain’t no thing. Big snow comes, I stay inside. Maybe I get a little more work done, or I spend more time with my wife. Maybe I catch up on The Wire. I make the snow work for me. Either for pleasure or productivity.

So. Piracy is that, let’s say. It is an unstoppable thing, says the assumption.

Gravity. Inertia. The cycle of the seasons. Piracy.

What that means then is, we need to figure out either how to work around it or work piracy into an opportunity. If we know that “hobos keep wandering into the library,” is the issue, we can come up with the answer, “and now we institute hobo literacy programs, or at the very least we abduct them and turn them into human book carts.” Problem creates a solution, even an opportunity.

I’m just some rambling dipshit; I don’t have huge answers. But I can play along and continue this make believe and maybe come up with a couple-few. Let’s talk about this, real quick. How can we either plan against piracy, or how can we can to include piracy? Can we defend against it? Can we include it? Maybe we can take lemons and turn those yellow fuckers into lemonade. Or, pirates into pirate juice! Mmmm.

Big John Law’s Big Damn Hammer

Hey! Hey. Get that out of your head. We’re not talking about persecutions, so get shut of it. That “one size fits all” solution isn’t much of a solution. It’s that whole Princess Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin speech: blah blah blah, more you tighten your grip, blah blah blah, the more star systems slip through your creepy old man fingers, blah blah blah.

Moving on.

Monetize Free

Just make it free. You make it free, nobody can take your stuff because you’re already offering. Now, sure, this sounds like, “Just lie back and think of England while your missionary husband marriage-rapes you. It’s easier if you pretend to enjoy it!” — but really, it’s something, erm, much better than that. The point is, you release it for free, but ironically not for the purpose of being a starving artist despite what it may seem. No, you release it, and you find ways to make money around this free thing you just loosed into the world.

Merchandise? Advertising? Donations? Offer special future editions? Hard copies of free digital? Whatever it is, to receive it, one must pay for it. But, by releasing the initial (and entire) product for free, you’ve gone a long way to pull piracy out of the equation. It isn’t theft if you’re giving it away.

Patronage

You look at Jess Hartley’s Shattered Glass Project, or David Hill’s Maschine Zeit, and you see Kickstarter campaigns and patronage models. You see that these creators are insulated from piracy because they are getting something up front for the work. It doesn’t release into the wild until a certain target is hit.

It’s a sane model. It covers expenses and it assures that at the bare minimum the creator is comfortably covered against losses, at least in theory. By the way, check out David’s thoughts about piracy.

Put A Face Behind It

(First, do me a solid, go check out my writing partner’s column over at Filmmaker Magazine: Culture Hacker. That link talks up piracy from a couple angles, and also uses an interesting term I happen to love: “piracy agnostic.” It’s relevant.)

My bullshit totally-made-up psychological notion is this: people are likelier to pay for work if they’re able to envision the artist. We played with this concept yesterday in the comments, and it seems that a public relations campaign is really the solution to the piracy thing, and it also seems that the idea of “cost” or “willing to pay” is something bound up with how one feels about the product or the artist. If a downloader has no sense of the creator and only sees a creation, I suspect he’ll be all the likelier to just grab-and-run. But, if that person can be made to understand the work that went into it — and that there is a face or many faces behind the product — then I further suspect they’ll be willing to toss some bucks.

A few ways to do this.

First, it’s a PR thing. Anywhere your product lives and you control the advertising, make sure to put a face behind it. Doesn’t have to be a forthright plea for “please don’t pirate me, bro,” but by creating a human connection (“Hey, here’s who we are as a company, here’s what I believe as a creator,”) I suspect you might see a little more cash come in.

Second, put something right into the product. At the front or back of the product, say, “Hey, did you pirate this? Thanks for enjoying the product, but as it turns out, I gotta pay a mortgage and buy formula for this baby — here! Look. A picture of my weird baby. So, if you wouldn’t mind paying something after the fact, I’d appreciate it. One dollar, ten dollars, something. At the bare minimum, please tell others that you loved this work and that maybe they should pay for it? Pretty please?”

Third, same thing, but less direct. Simply ensure that the product makes clear who you are and what you do and that you do not do this alone or for free. Even a quick, “And if this is financially successful, maybe we can do more like this.” A little nudge. An elbow in the ribs, a tickle in the wallet.

You Can’t Pirate A Physical Copy

Pretty straightforward.

You can’t pirate a physical copy. I mean, okay, you can, that’s a huge lie. But it’s a lot harder. Yes, someone might scan a whole book. But, physical products often have an air of the special about them. The Internet is all about information, but a physical product — what Rob calls the “bucket” — is harder to replicate, and if the audience is willing to ascribe more value to the bucket than the water that’s in it, well, they might be likelier to pay for it. Maybe. Kinda. Sorta.

By the way, if you didn’t read Rob’s truly brilliant comment, here it is again:

When I buy a book, I am effectively buying water (the content) and a bucket (the actual book, with all it entails). I am taught that most of the value is in the bucket, because that’s what pricing is keyed off of. Hard vs. Softcover establishes the price, not the quality of the content, nor even things I might take as indicators of quality, like the author. So right off the bat, the bucket industry has trained me that the price of water is low, maybe even free. They don’t care though, because they make their money on buckets.

To muddle things further, I have been taught by living in a civilized society that it is entirely reasonable for me to drink the water for free as long as I don’t steal the bucket. That is, once I own a book, i can resell it or give it away and if I don’t own the book I can read it for free by borrowing it from a friend or from the library, or even just by having it read to me. Once again, I’m taught that the value is in the bucket.

Now, the bucket makers aren’t necessarily happy with this arrangement, but they’re kind of obliged to deal with it. Part of that is social pressure – this freedom is part of the culture of books, and fighting it makes you the bad guy – but another part of it is more cynical. See, every other non-consumable good in society is tied to these rules as well – you can gift and loan tools, jewelry, cars or anything else you can think of. To buck this trend, the bucket makers would have to say “Well, wait a minute, we’re different than these other goods. We have this great water which has value of a different kind” and that’s a problem, because so far the whole model is based on putting value on the buckets, not the water, so they don’t want to upset that cart.

This has worked great for a very long time, and people really love their buckets, but some crazy guy has invented plumbing. Suddenly I can get my water from the source, and that really fucks things up. The ways in which it fucks things up are a whole other conversation, but here’s the bit that interests me.

What happens when, if I want to make a gift of a book, I don’t need to buy a new bucket?

See, I will never feel bad about libraries or gifting read books, at least under the current model, but I also feel it probably hurts creators more than anyone else. The idea of “gifting” an electronic file really means “giving a duplicate” unless you want to do something particularly cumbersome with it, and I can see a universe where, in the absence of buckets, the cost of that is small enough to pay casually, and goes directly to the creator.

Sure, this upends a lot of assumption. If money goes to the creator directly, he then becomes the person who has to _hire_ all the people who make a book possible rather than them hiring him. That’s drastic, so much so that it may seem impossible. But in my gut, I’m wondering if it’s the only possible outcome.

Complexity Defeats The Lazy

The more complex a product, the harder it is to replicate.

So, a “transmedia novel” app has lots of moving parts and is married to certain platforms. They’re harder to steal. It’s that simple. If your “eBook” is just a PDF, anybody can take it. But the more it fails to fit inside expected boxes, the more it becomes its own animal. As a result, it gains value, it becomes unique, and it grows in complexity.

And complexity tends to thwart the lazy. Yes, really dedicated pirates can still do their magic.

But it’s like protecting your home from robbers: the more you crank up the “inconvenience factor” (good locks, dogs, alarm system), the likelier it is you thwart those who are driven by opportunism and laziness. And that’s probably a far more significant lot than we think in terms of people who want to pirate your stuff.

Work With The Pirates

Pirates might be trolls, sure.

But they might be customers, too. Customers who just don’t have the money to pay.

Is there any way to work with them?

Do you offer a free version of your work directly to stem the tide?

Do you approach them directly and say, “Hey, don’t pay me, but can you at least spread the word so I get something out of this?”

Do you use their distribution channels, as the Culture Hacker column suggests?

Anything Else? Whaddya Think?

None of this is particularly new. I’m not a revolutionary thinker, just a guy trying to eke out his existence in this increasingly bizarre-o and unstable realm. You tell me. Anything I’m not thinking of? Surely there is. Opine if you got the opinion. Spit it out, by golly.

(Oh, and I told Julie S. that today’s post would be about her. Oops. I lied. That’ll be over the weekend.)

Rather, “Some punk on the Internet stole my book!” (Or movie. Or article. Or photo. Or song. Or pants.)

Piracy kind of fucks me up when I think about it.

Intellectually, I oppose it. Grr! Piracy bad. Of course it is. It’s stealing. I don’t mean that sarcastically. I mean, I made this, it’s a product you normally have to buy, and you just just ganked that shit. In terms of small companies, it’s easy to see how that theft can do certain harm to the company’s bottom line. Every sale counts, which means every theft counts, too. In terms of larger companies, while the company’s bottom line doesn’t necessarily take a hit on each theft, accumulated thefts could appear to do aggregate harm (think coastline erosion), and further, individual creators might see their own margins sliced thinner and thinner either through legitimate concerns over piracy or a company excusing the marginalization due to ephemeral piracy fears.

In simple, Hulk-esque terms:

Piracy bad!

Theft smash!

Nyaaaar!

It just isn’t that simple, though, is it?

Oh, we treat it like it’s that simple. “You stole this. That is wrong.”

What that fails to do, though, is account for the myriad shades of gray. It’s the same as saying, “Drugs are bad. Using drugs is wrong.” Well, sure. Except, different drugs have different criminal penalties. And some drugs are decriminalized. Some drugs are medicinal, legal, necessary. Every approach in the past to destroy the drug trade with One Big Hammer has, well, failed. Are we in danger of doing the same with piracy?

Let’s be honest. The Internet is awesome. But the Internet fucked a whole lot of shit up, too. The raw potential of the thing is profound. Data is no longer precious; it’s infinite. Diamonds for all! Pearls for everybody! Which, of course, is equal parts fantastic and worthless. Diamonds are pretty no matter how you value them, but if everybody has a fistful of diamonds, their value goes down, down, way down. Information on the Internet is like that. Pearls before swine, and we’re the swine. The Internet makes sure that everything is information — word definitions, recipes, rants like this one, tutorials, catalogs, everything. That also means books are information. Music is information. My fiction is information.

And information wants to be free, right?

Bzzt. Wrongo, friendo. Information doesn’t want anything.

We want information to be free.

That’s where the many shades of gray come in, because the Internet has changed the nature of theft.

I steal your car, you don’t have a car.

I steal your music, well, you still have it. In fact, everybody can have it. Huzzah! Woo! Equal access to awesome music!

It’s hard for the pirate to see the direct harm. They don’t see the pushing of a button as the same thing as walking into a store and stealing a book off the shelf. They see what they’re doing as no different than, say, burning a CD for a buddy, or lending friends a book, or getting a magazine from the library. Of course, this fails to recognize that one’s “circle of friends” has gone from those four slacker lackwits in the corner and has now become a circle of, say, 100, or 1000, or a million. Letting your friends listen to the same music is okay when it’s five guys burning CDs for one another, but now it’s a million dudes deep.

The other issue is, it’s hard to prove direct harm. Again, I steal your car, that has a very real, very physical consequence. An obvious one. Where’s your car now? Oh. I have it. You don’t. And I’m driving it around. And I’m picking up hookers. And driving over old ladies. And when I’m done with it, I’ll drive it into a ravine where it will become the home to a gaggle of happy muskrats. And you still don’t have the car.

But stealing a non-physical item creates no direct chain of consequence.

Consider this article, which states that in 2009, music sales are down again.

And, the easy response is, “Piracy.”

Of course, how do you prove that? You’re in danger of the post hoc fallacy there, the fallacy of the single cause. Piracy may be a contributor, but is it the only one? What about the RIAA and how it has treated customers? What about how the quality of music (personal opinion forthcoming) has taken a slow swirl around a rust-encrusted drain? Further, can you then prove that: a) people downloading those songs illegally wouldn’t have gone on to download them legally? And b) people downloading those songs would’ve bought the tracks had they not had the availability for a one-click-and-done theft?

See, here’s the thing.

I used to steal music. All the time. LimeWire, Napster, whatever.

And this is what I’d do: I’d grab tracks, I’d listen, and if I liked it, I went somewhere and bought it if I could. If I didn’t like it, well, I never listened to it again.

My music spending went way up with the advent of piracy. Because suddenly I had new routes to discovery and was no longer reliant upon, say, radio or MTV. Now, once the Internet caught up and made it easier for me to listen to music free online (free album previews, Lala-dot-com, Myspace, Pandora, whatever), that became less off an issue, but that also creates more of an issue. By upping the free discovery factor, it reinforces the notion that music is information and information is free.

See how fucked up that gets? Free can net you sales, but free also reinforces that single value point of zero dollars, zero cents.

In terms of books, the same “cuts both ways” factor can be an issue, I figure. On the one hand, I don’t want to just buy a book unbidden. I want to see it. I want to read some parts of it before I commit. Of course, the more of that book — or of other books — we offer for free, it’s possible that once again we’re reinforcing the notion that free is the proper price point. (Hell, not just “free,” but “convenient,” too.) We’re committing to the value. (This goes back to some of my earlier arguments where writers should claim value for their work, because free material runs the risk of devaluing paid material.)

What the book has going in its favor for now is that for many the “hard copy” is still dominant. The e-book revolution isn’t quite catching fire yet, to my mind, and the reason for that is very simple: we interact with physical books in a way nobody ever interacted with DVDs or CDs. I don’t pick up a DVD and feel its heft. I don’t use a marker or a turned corner to mark a song on a CD. I don’t underline song lyrics or DVD chapters. Even though movies and music were married to physical devices, we had no real connection with those devices. The shift from physical copy to digital hasn’t changed much.

But a book, that’s a big change. A digital book has no context, has no interaction. A physical book is a thing, a fetishistic item with texture I feel on the cover, with pages I can turn and words I can underline. I can write notes in margins, I can put it on a shelf for display, I can smell the pages.

I’m digressing, of course, but for now, that’s what books have as a guard against piracy, I think.

Those days are dwindling.

You’ll note I have no conclusions yet. How could I? This subject is a sticky wicket. It’s like trying to wrestle a lubed-up breeding ball of garter snakes. Anytime you get your arms around it, the little bastards keep on slipping through your arms, your fingers, and down into your pants.

My only real conclusions so far are these:

First, piracy of media is not the same thing as stealing someone’s physical stuff. Maybe it’s better. Maybe it’s worse. But any time you treat it the same, you’re going to fail in any solution.

Second, the Internet has changed everything (a-durrr). It has not just democritized information; it has socialized it. I’m not assigning a quality to that, but I think it’s basically a fact. With piracy, you can’t put the bees back in the hive on this one. Trying to stop piracy with a big hammer will cause just as many repercussions as the advent of the Internet, and I’m comfortable saying that those repercussions will not be good ones. Getting mad at piracy now is what I like to call, “Yelling at the tides.” You’re angry at something that has become a force of nature. You’re allowed to be mad at it, just as you can be mad at the tides rolling in and out. But yelling at them won’t stop them.

Third, the way to defeat piracy is probably not a legal issue, but more one where you make piracy less attractive. In terms of novels, making a novel more of an experience — something that cannot easily be replicated by downloading a single ePub file or PDF — will create value-adds. Yes, people might still steal the PDF, but they might then go on to pay for the book because they want the app that allows them to listen to the author’s comments or click on hypertext links that gives them, say, fantasy maps or word definitions. Books thankfully have axes of awesomeness that music cannot offer. The sooner we as creators start to think about these potential “value-adds,” the better off we are.

Fourth, good luck ever proving that Piracy = Loss of Revenue. I’m not saying it’s not true. I’m just saying it’s too complex a thing to prove. We act like it’s someone reaching into a pocket and taking a twenty dollar bill, but that’s a very clear action and consequence. This is not that.

This is a unique animal, and I don’t think the overall response recognizes that, yet.