Pop Geek

Just heard part of an interview with Business Insider's Henry Blodgett about the impending Facebook IPO. It was largely focused on Mark Zuckerberg, and whatever cult of personality he's managed to summon beyond his starring role in a really good David Fincher movie (or so I'm told; I have kids, so I don't see movies anymore). 

It was a pretty amazing bit of audio because the whole time, they proceeded from this basic supposition that Zuckerberg is clearly the heir apparent to the "Palo Alto visionary" mantle of the late Steve Jobs. Oh, it wasn't explicit, but it was there under every anecdote, especially the one about how Zuckerberg takes key new hires on this hike or something in the hills and then the hike and Zuckerberg's pitch both end when the group reaches this amazing summit with a breathtaking view.

"That was Mark's innovation," Blodgett actually said, with a straight face, or so I imagine in my theater of the mind. "Steve Jobs was famous for taking long walks through Palo Alto with colleagues, but Mark's hike ends on this magnificent view."

Wow, if that's what passes for "innovation" in a post-Jobs world, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. 

I like Facebook a lot. I enjoy using it. 

But let's get real: Facebook itself is a tool, and a shitty one at that, which enables amazing connections to happen. Just like Twitter, just like the telephone, just like smoke signals. 

There's certainly powerful innovation in creating these tools that enable connections. Man, what's more innovative than the telephone?

But Facebook? As a product? It sucks wind. It's horrible. The user experience is constantly changed in ways that (anecdotally, at least) seem to anger users more than please them. Glitches and bugs plague it constantly; sometimes I get notifications on my phone, and sometimes I don't, and other times the iPhone app just hangs there forever and shits the bed, or the website just says "Hey, we're not working, see you on Twitter."

And this isn't a "OHEMGEE, JOBS WAS GOD, WE MUST GENUFLECT" thing. It's more about delight. 

I've never been delighted by Facebook. Maybe by people using Facebook or words written on Facebook. But I've never said, "Wow, that Timeline is awesome." 

I have been delighted by Apple products. Still am, on a regular basis. I've been delighted by Android products too. To me, that's what makes a great product, an innovative one--something that connects fundamentally with a user as a product, not as a tool for doing something else that just happens to work (or work sometimes, anyway). 

None of which has anything to do with Facebook's IPO, which is predicated on the site's ability to aggregate and leverage data about its users, some of which they may not even realize they are sending to Facebook every time they click on a dancing cat video. 

THAT is Facebook's product. Zuckerberg is putting on a good show. He's positioned himself and the company well. But it's just an elaborate tap dance. 

As a product, Facebook is crap. As an endless supply of actionable, SELLABLE data, it's genius. 

So I guess Zuckerberg is pretty innovative, just at the expense of a couple billion morons like me, who trade privacy for access to friends and family in other parts of the world. 

Notes on a policy change here at Mattville, Inc.:

I think I'm gonna have to see The Avengers.

I say "have to," like there's some health related reason, like I will somehow develop an inoperable intestinal blockage if I refuse to see this flick. 

I don't "have to" see it. It's pathetic to view it that way. The truth is that I really, really, really WANT to see it. And because I've decided life is short and I like fun, I am compromising my own beliefs to do so.

I'm also backtracking on that whole "yeah, but giving money to the Hero Initiative ignores the PRAAAAHHHBLEHHHMM, WAAAAAA" nonsense. If I'm gonna let my backbone collapse in the face of some cool commercials and gushing tweets, the least I can do is let someone benefit from my weakness.

Here's an important question: Why the hell am I typing this, and why should you care? I can't answer the second part; I guess you probably shouldn't.

I am, however, documenting my own minor interior struggles over these issues as a way of helping to process my thoughts, and to suggest that whatever each of you with eyeballs seeing this decides to do with your money and time, you will at least have considered the issues around creator rights when you plunk your cash down to see this Whedon geekgasm on screen.

So to recap: I still believe deeply that on moral grounds, Jack Kirby's heirs deserve to share in the immense financial success of their fathers' creations. I'm just a wimp so I'm going to see a really cool movie.  

Thank you and whatever. 

Image swiped from everyone's favorite little stuffed bull. 

So how about this: You’re probably going to go see The Avengers and, judging by the early reviews, you’ll probably enjoy it. How about - as a thank you to the creators who brought you these characters in the first place, who gave you something to enjoy so much - you match your ticket price as a donation to The Hero Initiative?

Warning: I will spoil big moments in both Stephen King's latest book and a critically-acclaimed cable series you may someday wish to view on DVD or Netflix. You have been warned. 

I'm having a bit of an insane week when it comes to my entertainment. 

I've been reading Stephen King's 11/22/63 for a few weeks (damn, it's long) and I'm coming up to the book's climax. At the same time, we're catching up on the Showtime series Homeland and we're about three episodes from wrapping it up. 

So all the entertainment in my life is racing toward its inevitable conclusion. I guess the fact that they're wrapping up so closely together is making me consider them with relation to each other, even though they're only similar in the sense that they are both suspenseful diversions. 

What jumps out at me most about both 11/22/63 and Homeland is the way in which each story uncorks its plot, and in both cases, some specific and explosive plot points.

(Y'all, for serious: SPOILERS)

11/22/63 is a bit of a departure for King; it's a horror book in which the "monster" is time itself. It's actually a time travel novel about one of the great speculative fiction corkers of all time--what if you could go back and stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing John Kennedy? 

I won't go too deep into the specifics cause they're not important, but a few months before the moment when the book's main character is supposed to have his window to kill Oswald, he's beaten nearly to death by a group of gangland thugs, and suffers partial amnesia. 

Outside the context of the book, that seems a bit cheap--this guy's had to live through like six years of his life in the late fifties and early sixties, stalking Oswald practically the whole time, and now all of a sudden this big fat plot twist upends his entire scheme. Only it didn't feel that way, which is what interests me.

It didn't feel like mechanics--or rather, like the Unseen Hand of God was monkeying around with the story to create more suspense--for a few reasons. King makes a big point throughout of reminding us that "the past is obdurate; it doesn't want to be changed," which is what ultimately turns the past into the bogeyman of the novel, which is pretty damn brilliant. 

But he also gives us many reasons to invest in the characters of the book as much as the plot, so that when the lead is struck such a crippling blow (many of them, in a row, with pipes and steel-toed shoes), we feel for the guy in our guts before we even have a chance to think, "Hey, that seems a bit too easy."

On Homeland, the big plot twist is that one of the two POWs captured in the Middle East wasn't dead as everyone believed, but was instead alive and acting as a sleeper agent for the terrorists. This came at about episode 6 or so, right when the "is he or isn't he a terrorist" question of the show's co-lead, the other of the two POWs who had been rescued by American forces after eight years in captivity, was really heating up. 

So THAT plot twist didn't absorb itself quite so easily into the story. It felt twisty; you saw the Unseen Hand of God. And it didn't really matter if they continued to keep the show gripping and the characters really fascinating and damaged; the echo of that single twist reverberated throughout the series. 

It felt a lot like The Killing's first season, which had the Unseen Hand Of God's greasy fingerprints all over it. How many dead ends did the detectives end up chasing, anyway? I lost count. It felt like three or four hours of story extended over thirteen, just by virtue of all the false leads and fake-outs along the way. 

The twist in Homeland wasn't false; neither was the twist in 11/22/63. But the latter worked better than the former, and I think the key was misdirection. Look over here at these characters getting into your brain and becoming your imaginary friends, while I shove this plot knife up under your ribcage. 

My friend Jeffery Simpson had some comments on my last post about Before Watchmen, and I did reply to that comment, but there's a chunk of my reply that I think could stand on its own, so here we go.

First, let's decide what the Before Watchmen situation is not. It does not APPEAR to be a legal issue. In other words, based on a distanced view with no first-hand information, the legality of the contract appears to be upheld by the current situation. Moore and Gibbons signed a contract, that contract allowed the property to rever to their ownership in the event of certain conditions being met, those conditions have never been met.

So what's the problem? MORALITY. 

I do not believe it is MORALLY RIGHT for DC Comics to proceed with these projects because I believe they have a moral obligation to honor the spirit of their contract, which was designed to eventually put the property in the sole ownership of Moore and Gibbons. 

I do not believe it is MORALLY RIGHT for Marvel Comics to continue to exclude the heirs of Jack Kirby from direct profit participation in his many creations for the company. I believe they have a moral obligation to honor his contributions that goes beyond whether they are legally bound to do so. 

I believe corporations have a moral responsibility to their employees, their freelancers, their customers, and society at large. I believe that responsibility CAN coexist alongside their responsibility to shareholders and owners. 

So sure, DC is making Before Watchmen because they want to make money and in theory that's what corporations should do. 

But why are we assuming that corporations should be allowed to act in an immoral fashion, showing no real responsibility to a relationship with their employees, their freelancers, their customers, or even society at large?

I am reaching a point for myself where I do not understand why I would want to excuse a corporation acting so flagrantly with regard to creator rights (as one example) just because I like Batman. I'm boycotting Marvel because of their treatment of Jack Kirby, and I don't buy a lot of DC anyway, but even those small purchases are being called into question.

This Before Watchmen conversation, or the larger conversation about creators rights in comics and how they continue to be treated with willful ignorance by major publishers--it needs to rise above armchair lawyers spouting wise from the comfort of their laptops. It needs to rise to a new level, where we are discussing not the legalities of these situations we largely know nothing about, but the morality of situations that we CAN judge from any distance, because the behavior of DC and Marvel in so many situations is obviously immoral and exploitative beyond the simple drive toward profitability. 

I believe America should be driven by a competitive corporate environment that does not prize the value of profits over the value of people. I think that's possible and worth supporting--worth voting for with my dollars, as it were. I believe the knife cannot go any deeper into my own gut.

Your mileage, as always, may vary. 

So if you don't know what Before Watchmen is, you should read this, and then you will know what's horrible about it.

It bothers me for those reasons too--the naked cash grab of it, the creative bankruptcy, and the violation of the moral obligation, if not the contractual obligation, to Watchmen's original creators.

But here's what bothers me the most: It's just a drop in a bucket that gets dumped into a minor tributary that flows endlessly downhill into a vast ocean of injustices that are perpetrated hourly by the mainstream comics industry. Or hell, let's not be coy: By DC Comics/Warner Bros. and Marvel Comics/Disney.

These are two companies whose entire worth is built on the backs of creative men who were rarely compensated for their contributions in proportion to the value of those contributions. Only when shamed into action do these corporations choose to act in what is a moral and just fashion.

Otherwise, Marvel and DC as corporate entities exist almost entirely to fuck people over.

Maybe that's not fair. Maybe it's more like they're the drug dealers, or the madams, and these beloved characters are the heroin or the hookers. If you go in with a realistic view of the transaction you are conducting, then you get what you pay for, and you deserve nothing more.

But spend a split-second really contemplating what you're paying to receive, and only the most callous person could believe they are committing a victimless crime.

Jack Kirby slaved at a drawing table for decades to put food on his table for his family. Today, his children receive no material benefit from his hard work and sacrifice, while Marvel literally makes billions of dollars annually from his creations. (I know, I know, Stan Lee. I'm not talking about him.)

DC Comics almost gleefully publishes books every month with the kind of sadistic gristle that once was solely the province of hardcore pornography. Want to see a woman in a cat suit fuck a guy dressed as Batman? DC Comics--There's No Stopping Them Now!

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons enter into a contract with DC, believing that their signatures on a legal document will uphold the fundamental meaning of the agreement. Instead, that agreement is abused, twisted, and ultimately used to prop up a shameless attempt to suck money from a bloodless wound.

How many times do these companies need to demonstrate their complete lack of any moral responsibility before any sane person simply says, "Enough"?

It's not about Alan Moore.

It's not about Jack Kirby.

It's not about legal rights.

It's not about comics.

It's about corporate entities relentlessly supporting their bottom lines with flagrant disregard for the rightness, the morality, the justice of their actions. Even as they pump out stacks of pulpy pablum designed to explore the "reality" of heroes who fight for justice every day.

I know most of the people who work for Marvel and DC are fine folks. But these corporate entities are vile, unAmerican, and shameless.

It's disgusting that we give them money.

So Bruce Springsteen is a talky rocker.

Always been that way. He used to tell these epic, rambling stories that became minor masterpieces of comic timing. You hear them on bootlegs and they feel so natural, so organic. 

These days, the Boss sounds like he's reading from a teleprompter, and I think he might be, which is fine if you need to remember the words to songs you wrote forty years ago, but it's a bit of a bummer when you think the guy's just rappin' at ya, and instead he's reading a speech.

It's getting awkward. It's perhaps most disappointing when he refuses to let the goddamned songs he wrote speak for themselves.

On the current tour, Springsteen launches with a tight four-song set of uptempo, angry rockers before offering his 2002 tribute to New York City, "My City of Ruins," which he infuses with deep meaning as he talks about what we've lost--his bandmates in E Street, the reality of the American dream, homes and jobs and faith in those in power--and what remains.

It's pretty speechy, but it's maybe okay, because the meaning is so important to the theme of the show.

THEN he plays one or two real old songs that are always fun, and then he seriously says something like this, every night:

"We're having a lot of fun in here, but it's some hard times out there."

Seriously. Listen.

09_Intro_to_Jack.mp3

(download)

Click here to download:

09_Intro_to_Jack.mp3 (1.63 MB)

I've been obsessively downloading bootlegs from this tour and every time I hit this point, I'm embarassed. He sounds like a high school history teacher, or one of those local hosts on the Jerry Lewis telethon delivering the most awful transistion ever composed. 

Yeah, he's coming out of party music and he's going into a cycle of songs that are gonna get pretty bleak and slow, starting with his masterful ballad from Wrecking Ball, "Jack of All Trades." 

But you're not performing for morons, Bruce. Most of us can understand that when you start singing about the hardships of American life, we should shut the fuck up and listen, and not expect it to somehow relate to interstellar mongrel nymphs. 

It's such a tone deaf moment that it continues to astonish me. I can't believe how long it's remained in the set. 

The Boss gets gasbaggy again when he intros a pair of Motown covers that were introduced at March's radio broadcast from the Apollo Theater in New York. He goes into this whole spiel that starts good about how much soul music meant to him as a young musician, but then it inevitably veers into territory where he's got to tell us what soul music MEANS. 

Hey Bruce, here's an idea: You want to tell us what soul music means? Shut up and play the soul music. You are really fucking good at it. 

Overall, the guy needs to get off the soapbox and let his songs speak for themselves. His mission, his themes, his meaning have never been more clear. It's a powerful new record and in concert, it's coming to life in rich ways as it collides with his back catalog. He's making music of loss and he's making that loss feel personal and political at the same time. That's his sweet spot, what he does best, his great gift as a songwriter and performer.

But it doesn't work when you think you have to spend twenty minutes telling us what you mean before you sing a note. Just sing, damnit. Sing your songs. Let them speak. They say everything.