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Tuesday, September 17, 2002 |
Inside the Rolling Stones
Fascinating piece in Fortune about the Rolling Stones businesses. Great reading:
The Stones are famously tax-averse. I broach the subject with Keith in Camp X-Ray, as he calls his backstage lair. There is incense in the air and Ronnie Wood drifts in and out--it is, in other words, a perfect venue for such a discussion. "The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws," says Keith, Marlboro in one hand, vodka and juice in the other. "It's why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we'd be paying 98 cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all. I don't want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with. We put 30% in holding until we sort it out." No wonder Keith chooses to live not in London, or even New York City, but in Weston, Conn.
Of course, it wasn't just the taxman's pinch that forced the Rolling Stones to focus on the bottom line. They also got screwed by record labels. "In the early days you got paid absolutely nothing," recalls Jagger. "The only people who earned money were the Beatles because they sold so many records."
9:23:11 PM Permalink
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Idiot Fans
A couple weeks ago, I saw an As game at the Oakland Colisseum. A couple times, a couple morons threw toilet paper onto the field. The Colisseum was filled with boos for the twits who did that. Tonight, watching the Giants at Dodger Stadium, some cretins threw soft drink containers at players, potentially interfering with play, and the stadium was silent. Pitiful.
9:16:00 PM Permalink
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Cross-wiring
This from the Edge interview with Stephen Pinker I cited last night:
Another example is the arts. In the 20th century, modernism and post-modernism took over, and their practitioners disdained beauty as bourgeois, saccharine, and lightweight. Art was deliberately made incomprehensible or ugly or shocking—again, on the assumption that people's tastes for attractive faces, landscapes, colors, and so on were reversible social constructions. This also led to an exaggeration of the dynamic of social status that has always been part of the arts. The elite arts used to be aligned with the economic and political aristocracy. They involved displays of sumptuosity and the flaunting of rare and precious skills that only the idle rich could cultivate. But now that any now that any schmo can afford a Mozart CD or can go to a free museum, artists had to figure out new ways to differentiate themselves from the rabble. And so art became baffling and uninterpretable without acquaintance with arcane theory.
...One reason for the canonization of artists is a quirk of our moral sense. Many studies show that that people hallucinate moral virtue in other people who are high in status—people who are good-looking, or powerful, or well-connected, or artistically or athletically talented. Status and virtue are cross-wired in the human brain. We see it in language, where words like "noble" and "ugly" have two meanings. "Noble" can mean high in status or morally virtuous; "ugly" can mean physically unattractive or morally despicable. The deification of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. are obvious examples. I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor. Anyone else having some claim to insights into the human condition is seen as a philistine, and possibly as immoral if they are seen as debunking the pretensions of those in the arts and the humanities.
I've read this interview twice now; it's tempting to cut & paste the whole danged thing. I highly recommend this interview, and also that Times review I cited.I am very much looking forward to this book.
9:05:44 PM Permalink
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Oppose the Faith-base Initiative
If you think the government has no place in the churches, click here to send a message to your Senator opposing Lieberman/Santorum bill, S. 1924. While you're at it, click here to send a message opposing government programs that encourage your neighbors to spy on you.
8:52:03 PM Permalink
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Mark Twain's The War Prayer
O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to
battle - be Thou near them! . . . O Lord our God, help us to tear their
soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling
fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the
thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;
help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to
wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us
to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended
the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst. . . broken
in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and
denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight
their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water
their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their
wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of
Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset
and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. - Mark Twain
8:44:36 PM Permalink
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How Lock Picking Works
The basic process of picking a lock is actually very simple, but it takes a lot of practice to do it successfully. Explore the everyday technology of locks and keys.
I really enjoy How Stuff Works, and at least scan through every email I get from them for interesting stuff. There's always a wide variety of items covered, and the site now has hundreds of articles covering almost everything. A great resource.
8:31:16 PM Permalink
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Slashdot | Science - Politicizing Science. An anonymous reader writes: "The Washington Post has a story about the government's efforts to remove independent scientific review boards and replace them with officials that match the views of administration. This includes careless elimination of life-saving safety regulations in gene-therapy to help specific business interests and hiring based on political views such as stem cell research and cloning. Is this wrong? Or do those with power get to do whatever they want?" [Privacy Digest]
Answer: It's wrong.
5:32:06 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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