Michael Geist gave confirmation today that he did indeed contact Curtis Cook to verify his statement. This assumes, of course, that he would delete a comment on his blog that was claiming to be him if it wasn’t him, which is a fairly reasonable assumption. With his reputation for being rather meticulous when it comes to looking at new copyright legislation, it would be surprising if he did not verify a source as important as Cook. I’m still left a bit disappointed that more people weren’t asking for clarification on this. Yes you could interpret his original post in a way that suggested that he had verified Cook’s identity, but the interaction between Geist and Cook was still hazy, relegated to three words in the blog post: “with his permission”, which still could have meant that it was simply the permission of whoever it was who posted the comment, not necessarily Cook. Now, however, that aspect of the story is clear. More traditional news sources are also starting to pick this up. I don’t believe we should necessarily give traditional news sources any more authority than blogs these days (both are apt to make major mistakes from time to time), but with a greater variety of sources comes a greater variety of research methods, and one would hope that, collectively, any poorly researched aspects of the story would be weeded out.
Now that we can reasonably assume the truthfulness of this development, we can now load the heaps of scorn on the Conference Board of Canada that it deserves.
A week ago, I found myself writing a snarky email to Gillian Shaw about her article on the Conference Board of Canada’s “research findings” on the strength of Canadian copyright. I’m a huge fan of BoingBoing and Michael Geist, and I had been following their reporting on this quite closely. I’m going to put up the content of that email not because I’m especially proud of it (I consider it, more or less, to be giving in to a very seductive form of righteousness that myself and my fellow lefties like to indulge from time to time), but to show how much of “a believer” I was and am in a less-is-more approach to copyright reform. And I’m doing that to give you an idea of how much I did not want to get into the conversation I got into today regarding the latest allegations against the Conference Board of Canada, post fuck up. (And to be clear, they did fuck up. I just think we’re jumping the gun a bit as to how much they fucked up). On with the email, then…
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I was noticing a lot of images floating around the web that shared a common theme. They either were or looked like a post card, and they had some sort of secret hope or fear or memory written on them. A couple of days ago, I finally decided to track down the source. Of course, in the age of Google, tracking down the source hardly ever amounts to more than an hour of dedicated searching. The only difficulty with these images was that they didn’t contain any sort of brand logo… only a certain style. In addition, the images I had been looking at had no sort of attribution made by the person who had uploaded them (tsk, tsk!) After typing in a few of the secrets, I eventually found a link to one of the images, which mentioned “Post Secret” and voila! I had found the source. Kind of.
Frank Warren had the idea back in 2003 to ask a bunch of strangers to send him their deepest, darkest secrets. Turns out, a lot of people have some pretty interesting secrets. Enough for Frank to be swamped with postcards and have enough material to pump out five books (that I know of) to date. I now have four of them on order. Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about:
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In Obama, the Arts, and Soft Power, Raymond J. Learsy talks about the increased focus Barack Obama would will give the arts if he is when he is elected President.
I have mixed feelings about public funding for the arts. I’m certainly not a big supporter of government grants to individual artists. Perhaps this is because I’ve never attempted to apply for these grants myself. I think I share with a lot of other Canadian artists, a disinterest in trying to mold my work around some status quo definition of “Canadian identity” which is certainly something that helps a lot of the folks I see getting grants. I do see a lot more funding that doesn’t seem as focused on preserving that nebulous notion of Canadian heritage, but the same essential problem still remains. Who decides which artists get funded and which ones don’t?
In a pure market economy, it’s everyone, voting with their money. And while this doesn’t always result in good art, it is fair in the sense that artists are rewarded by how much the public wants them to produce new works. With government grants, you essentially get a small group of people dictating what will be promoted to the public. There’s always the chance of a benevolant dictatorship, but more often than not, it turns into a game of who knows who.
That said, after reading Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, I’m intrigued by the ways in which funding the arts can boost today’s rising creative economy sector, thus justifying a certain amount of public funding. Here’s Florida’s thesis in a nutshell:
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Check out Popular Mechanics: Types of Skills Everyone Should Know to brush up on some of the things we forget about in the day to day. The most interesting stuff to me is on vehicle repair. I remember my uncle telling me about how you can check codes on your car while he was helping me install my own brake pads for the first time.
Especially to my fellow artists: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, talked a lot about how artistic types sometimes avoid figuring out how things work. A classic scene was where the narrator fixed his artist friend’s bike with a piece of aluminum from a coke can, much to the horror of the friend. His point was that if you take the time to think about these things, they’re not really a big mystery, and that once you understand something, you can be creative in solving a problem associated with it.
Us artists tend to concentrate on what we see as “beautiful”, and normally don’t think of day-to-day mechanical devices (like cars, or bikes, or computers) in that sense. If you can appreciate the beauty of human ingenuity, that’s the first step to a little more independence, and a little more cash in your pocket to spend on your passions. Yes, it takes time away from focusing on your art, but if art is based on your life’s experiences, won’t adding a few more practical skills only improve it?
Installing my own brake pads probably saved me $200-300, and it really wasn’t that complicated. So next time you’re going to “bring it in”, whatever “it” is, ask around a bit and keep the same open mind you have in your artistic exploits… you might find someone only too willing to show you a new skill – and get some new material to write/paint/talk/whatever about in the process.
Tags: maintenance, car, DIY, artists
I’ve always felt that the major selling point for most religions is that by believing you’ll get all your wishes granted. Certainly, for many, faith goes much deeper than this. And you could argue that the true believers of other schools of thought, like capitalism or communism for example, are also simply people who think they’ll benefit from them. Anyway, I think Neil Swaab expresses these sentiments better than I ever could. Check out this great comic strip and see if you feel the same.
