Friday Review: Compliance

Some movies are labeled “inspired by a true story” to avoid lawsuits and distance the film from the real life inspiration. Others are labeled that way because, if they didn’t, you’d think “there’s no way this kind of shit could really happen.” (Still others do it just to fake you out).

Compliance needs the label because what happens on screen shouldn’t ever happen in real life, but it did.

Between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s there were a string of incidents – more than 70 in all – in which a man would call some retail establishment, claim to be a cop, and convince a manager to “investigate” an underling for some alleged offense. The orders included a strip search, confinement while waiting for the “police” to arrive, and a constant search for purloined funds (for a lengthy article about the scam see here).

Compliance dramatizes the basic outline of one of most heinous incidents – one that progressed so far that it included forced oral sex and cavity searches. Along the way, it asks an awful lot of questions about why people do things others tell them, based on nothing more than what the courts call, in another context, “apparent authority.”

Compliance tells the story of Becky, a 19-year old front-counter employee at a nondescript chicken-based fast food joint. Her manager, Sandra, has lots of things on her mind - $1500 in spoiled food, a “fiancé” who won’t pop the question, and a parcel full of unenthused teens for a workforce – when a man calling himself “Officer Daniels” calls. He accuses Becky of stealing from a customer within the last hour. He also claims that he has the customer with him, that there’s video surveillance of the whole thing, and he’s got Sandra’s boss on the other line. Won’t she help him with this investigation?

Of course she says yes, even though she’s seen nothing to suggest Becky is a thief. The caller uses that initial agreement to drive Sandra (and, eventually, her would-be fiancé) into being his agent on the scene, doing all sorts of degrading things to Becky in the name of “clearing things up” and keeping Becky from being taken to jail.

One of the interesting dynamics in the film is how there are multiple levels of “compliance” happening. First, and most obviously, there’s Sandra who acquiesces to the authority of an alleged cop and, to a lesser extent, her boss. Second, there’s the dynamic between Sandra who has to both bring some of her employees into the action or, at the very least, fend off their questions about what’s going on. In the end, they defer to their boss. Finally, and more esoterically, there’s the entire idea that regular ideas about how the world works should come to a grinding halt in order to secure evidence of criminal wrongdoing. It hangs over the people involved here just as much as it did to folks in Boston when parts of the city were locked down following the Boston Marathon bombing.

Particularly fascinating to my defense lawyer brain was how Sandra used the certainty of Becky’s guilt to keep her own underlings in line. The incident as described by the “cop” doesn’t really make any sense – as several other employees point out. It would have caused a huge scene and the allegedly wronged party would’ve sought out Sandra to complain (indeed, we see another customer complain about a poorly made sandwich – it’s a tough crowd!). Nevertheless, whatever doubt Sandra has about Becky’s guilt is suppressed on behalf of a clear narrative – there’s been a crime, I’m in charge, don’t fuck with me.

In the end, a little bit of skepticism on Sandra’s part would have gone a long way toward averting the whole situation. A simple call to her superior or to the police to confirm the investigation (we learn in a postscript that the police station is only a few blocks away) would have put an end to the farce from the beginning. But that requires the ability to disbelieve, which is hard for some people to do, particularly when it comes to people presented as authority figures. Compliance shows how far some people will go without pushing back against that kind of authority.


The Details
------------------------
Compliance
Released 2012
Directed & written by Craig Zobel
Starring Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, et. al.

We Won! But We Still Suck!

Sorry, this post isn’t about my alma mater’s football team, who managed a complete turnaround to dump Oklahoma State last weekend. Although, hey, woo-hoo for that, right?

No, this is about the stunning cap to the horrible year another of my sports crushes has had, that being DC United. Take a look at the current standings in MLS’s Eastern Conference and you’ll see why:

Not only are they at the bottom of the standings, they’d have to stretch quite a bit to even be the next-to-worst team in the table. For comparison’s sake, the walking disaster that is Chivas USA, the floor in the West, is on 26 points. What’s even worse is that DC had a great surge at the end of last season, returning to the playoffs and making it to the Eastern Conference final (vanquishing NYRB along the way – joy!). Things should have been better this year, or at least not this much worse.

Which is what makes last night all the more confounding and impressive.

This season marks the 100th year of the US Open Cup. This is the American equivalent to the English FA Cup and similar competitions across the world – knock-out competitions (as opposed to league play), generally open to a wide swath of teams from various levels within the country. Essentially, it’s a national championship. It’s fabled, particularly in England, for matches when the lower-division underdogs upset the top-division fat cats.

Well, last night, DC knocked off Real Salt Lake – first place in the West, 1 point behind NYRB for tops in MLS – in Salt Lake to win this year’s Open Cup, 1-0. The lowest of underdogs knocked down Goliath. Thank you, Lewis Neal, for the goal!

As a DC fan I am, of course, quite pleased. It doesn’t erase the turd of a season the team’s had in MLS, but hardware is hardware and hopefully it will be a springboard leading to turning things around next year. But it does make me wonder if such an upset is part of what keeps the broader American sporting public from caring about the Open Cup. After all, the final was consigned to broadcast on GolTV, which isn’t even available on DirecTV or Dish Network anymore. That’s disappointing in an era when soccer is widening its reach on “real” TV – why, even this past Sunday, NBC took a moment during their primetime NFL pregame show to run through the Premier League scores from the weekend.

Honestly, I think the whole process confuses casual fans. In American sports there is one competition, one goal. Every NFL team has one preferred endpoint for the season – winning the Super Bowl. There is no ancillary glory to be won along the way. An English Premier League team, on the other hand, begins the season looking at several ways to win glory – the league itself, the FA Cup, the League Cup, not to mention European competitions. At the end of the NFL season, there is one champ to rule them all. By next spring in England there will be several.

So I’m not sure that the Open Cup fits well into the consciousness of the typical American sports fan. Which is a shame, because it’s a competition with a rich history that rivals the World Series or Stanley Cup and is more ancient than anything professional football or basketball has to offer. It deserves more attention.

And, hey - my team won it this year!

Getting High, Rationally

Many years ago I saw a documentary on HBO about a community of meth users somewhere in the Midwest (I want to say Missouri, but don’t hold me to that). This was before meth exploded into the national consciousness, but the behavior of those folks matched preconceptions of how addicts (of cocaine or heroin, in prior ages) behaved. All they cared about was the hit, the rush, and they’d do whatever it took to make the next score.

But what if that’s not right? What if the decision by most drug users to get high is as rational as your decision about what to have for dinner? That doesn’t fit the stereotype of the out of control junkie, but research is starting to show that might be the case.

The New York Times has an interesting profile of a researcher who has studied how addicts behave in terms of how they decide to get high. He’s got a good reason to be interested in the issue:

Long before he brought people into his laboratory at Columbia University to smoke crack cocaine, Carl Hart saw its effects firsthand. Growing up in poverty, he watched relatives become crack addicts, living in squalor and stealing from their mothers. Childhood friends ended up in prisons and morgues.

Hart’s research has suggested that the popular conception of the drug user isn’t accurate:

when he began studying addicts, he saw that drugs weren’t so irresistible after all.

‘Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted,’ said Dr. Hart, an associate professor of psychology. ‘And the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.’

Hart conducted studies – first with crack cocaine users, then meth users – in which they received a hit in the morning (of “pharmaceutical-grade cocaine,” which must be some good shit) and then offered them a choice later in the day: more drugs or some economic reward (money or store vouchers) in its place. Starting a $5, Hart found that users who had a smaller hit in the morning would take the money later in the day. Users who got a big dose in the morning still chose more drugs.

Later, however, he upped the reward:

He also found that when he raised the alternative reward to $20, every single addict, of meth and crack alike, chose the cash. They knew they wouldn’t receive it until the experiment ended weeks later, but they were still willing to pass up an immediate high.

Which means what, exactly, for how society should view drug use and addiction? It’s actually pretty obvious, if you think about it:

Crack and meth may be especially troublesome in some poor neighborhoods and rural areas, but not because the drugs themselves are so potent.

‘If you’re living in a poor neighborhood deprived of options, there’s a certain rationality to keep taking a drug that will give you some temporary pleasure,’ Dr. Hart said in an interview, arguing that the caricature of enslaved crack addicts comes from a misinterpretation of the famous rat experiments.

‘The key factor is the environment, whether you’re talking about humans or rats,’ Dr. Hart said. ‘The rats that keep pressing the lever for cocaine are the ones who are stressed out because they’ve been raised in solitary conditions and have no other options. But when you enrich their environment, and give them access to sweets and let them play with other rats, they stop pressing the lever.’

Which brings me back to the Missouri meth crowd from the HBO doc years ago. For about the first half hour you think, “holy shit, these people are pathetic junkies,” but the more you notice the world around them, the more you start to think it’s not hard to see why they’d seek any kind of respite they could.

That’s why the War on (Some) Drugs is bound to always be a losing proposition – you’re not fighting an enemy on a battlefield, you’re battling a basic human desire to feel better and to escape the world around you, if only for a moment.

I Am Not Dead

So, hey, everybody – what’s up?

It occurred to me over the weekend that it’s been more than a month since I posted something here. So I thought I’d just pop my head up to say that I’m not dead. I haven’t been set upon by a marauding horde of art snobs or what have you. I just haven’t had much to say that’s blogworthly lately. That and I’ve been expending my creative energies making music and writing (well, polishing) fiction.

I’ll be back, at some point, when I find something about which I can’t keep my virtual mouth shut. Until then . . .

Stick Your High Art Where the Sun Don’t Shine!

OK, not really. I’ve got nothing against what most people think of as “high” art – I enjoy quite a bit of it – I just object to the classification. Regardless of how well-meaning or merely taxonomic it strives to be, it carries an implied judgment of “low” art as being, somehow, not worth as much. By further implication, it suggests that those who enjoy or make “low” art are somehow lesser than those who deal with “high” art.

I bring this up because of a recent essay over at the New York Times philosophy blog by Gary Gutting (with an assist from Virginia Woolf) about the divergence. Along the way, he appears to argue that musical worth, at least (it’s unclear if his metrics would apply to literature, film, or visual arts) can actually be quantified and judged objectively.

Along the way, he lays down this assertion:

Centuries of unresolved philosophical debate show that there is, in fact, little hope of refuting someone who insists on a thoroughly relativist view of art. We should not expect, for example, to provide a definition of beauty (or some other criterion of artistic excellence) that we can use to prove to all doubters that, say, Mozart’s 40th Symphony is objectively superior as art to ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’ But in practice there is no need for such a proof, since hardly anyone really holds the relativist view.

* raises hand *

I’m not sure how many of us there are, but I for one will proudly admit to being a relativist on the quality of art. Someone’s interaction with art is so personal, so bound up in the quirks of our own experiences, that it’s impossible to convert that interaction to some kind of objective measurement. For the record, I’m not ignoring the objective fact of consensus – that I like something a majority of the world can’t stand doesn’t make them right and me wrong, but it does mean I’m swimming against the current.

Anyway, back to the philosopher, who continues:

We may say, ‘You can’t argue about taste,’ but when it comes to art we care about, we almost always do.

Well, yeah, people will argue about things that matter to them, be it art, politics, or sports. Just because we do doesn’t mean the arguments can be won on some kind of objective scale. Humans will argue about anything!

He goes on:

You may, for example, maintain that the Stones were superior to the Beatles (or vice versa) because their music is more complex, less derivative, and has greater emotional range and deeper intellectual content. Here you are putting forward objective standards from which you argue for a band’s superiority. Arguing from such criteria implicitly rejects the view that artistic evaluations are simply matters of personal taste. You are giving reasons for your view that you think others ought to accept

Several things strike me as wrong about this.

The most important one, I think, is that Gutting is conflating the manner in which someone defends a preference with the actual basis upon which that preference rests. I’ve listened to an awful lot of music in my four decades on the planet, from the most popular radio hits to the most obscure wind band compositions. A lot of those I’ve listened to because of “hey, if you liked X, you’ll like Y, too” recommendations. I’m not sure they’re worth any more than a coin flip when it comes to predicting whether I’ll like it or not. Some things move me, some things don’t. The same is true for everybody, isn’t it?

More likely, these “objective” standards upon which Gutting relies are not the considerations we have when we decides something moves us, but post-hoc rationalizations to try and explain why that thing moved us. At the end of the day, I can’t really say why I prefer Marillion to Magma.* I suppose I could dig into the construction of the various songs and come up with some reasons for it, but they’d be meaningless. Most of the time, I’d rather listen to Brave than Udu Wudu. But sometimes not, you know? I can’t really tell you why.

Gutting’s reference to “objective” standards make me think of people who argue about whether one athlete is better than another when they’re separated by decades. Yes, statistics will be trotted out to support argue that Pele is better than Lionel Messi (or vice versa), but they don’t prove anything. Too many years have passed, the game has changed, etc. Ultimately, we have our favorite in mind before the argument begins and scramble to find some justification for it. If it was as simple as “consult these objective measurements” there’d be nothing to argue about.

Another flaw in Gutter’s presentation is assuming that those things he lists are “objective” to begin with. I’ll give him a pass on complexity for now (although more of that later), but the others have not just some, but large amounts of, subjectivity inherent in them. Whether something is “derivative” is a value judgment, in the end. Any musician is influenced by other music she’s heard and is, to some point, derivative of what’s come before. What’s the dividing line for being too derivative? What if it’s a parody, pastiche, or homage, anyway? Even more untethered from objective measurement are a piece’s “emotional range” and “intellectual content.”

As for complexity, how to measure it and what it means isn’t readily apparent. “Complex” generally implies some amount of difficulty, but any musician will tell you that sometimes playing something “simple” precisely and with musicality is more difficult than playing something that’s a tangled flurry of notes. Furthermore, that something is more complex doesn’t make it inherently more likely to connect with the listener. Quite the opposite, in fact. Returning to the Marillion/Magma example, few would argue if you called Magma’s more complex, but that wouldn’t lead inexorably to a conclusion that it was superior. For some folks it would be, for some folks it wouldn’t. For some people, there is a point where there are simply too many notes.

For another thing, using complexity as some sort of taxonomic tool fails to conflate like with like. Of course a three-minute song recorded in the early days of multitrack recording by four guys is less “complex” than a half-hour long symphony written to be performed by a full orchestra made up of dozens of people. So what? How does that help us judge either piece? It’s like saying desert is less nutritious than the main course – it utterly misses the point.

Someone in the comments to Gutter’s piece trotted out Duke Ellington’s aphorism:

There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind

But even that’s not quite right – there’s what you like and what you don’t; what moves you and what doesn’t; what you want to hear and what you don’t. That a lot of people agree with you, or a consensus develops down through history that a particular work is a masterpiece doesn’t change that.

At the end of the day, as I said, art is personal. To label some of it “high” and some of it “low” throws up class barriers where none really exist. People like what they like. Sometimes, they like the same stuff you do. Sometimes they don’t. Deal with it.

* Before I get any angry letters in Kobaïan, I dig Vander’s bunch when I’m in the mood. Don’t take it personally.

Quick Hits

As usual, when I disappear for a few weeks, things start to pile up. Here’s a few interesting things that passed through my field of vision in the recent past.

Good News on Private Prisons?

I’ve written before about the evil of privatizing prisons, replacing one of the state’s core functions (under anybody’s idea of how big the “state” should be) with businesspeople in pursuit of a healthier bottom line. Shockingly, it turns out that when the bottom line is in play, things at the prison actually go to shit. It’s gotten so bad that several states have backed out of their contracts (via).

Admittedly, it’s hard to ignore stuff like this:

Idaho cut ties with the corporation on Wednesday, which turned the state’s largest prison into a violent hellhole inmates called ‘Gladiator School.’ Earlier this year, CCA was caught understaffing the prison and using prison gangs to control the population. The company admitted to falsifying nearly 4,800 hours of staffing records to squeeze more money out of the state for nonexistent security work. Shift logs at the prison showed the same security guards working for 2 to 3 days at a time without breaks.

Similar conditions popped up in Mississippi and Texas (in two different facilities). My cynical side thinks that the only way the private prison movement gets turned back is when it turns out they actually cost more than doing it the old fashioned way. Maybe I’m wrong. I’d like to be.

Your Militarized Police Force

Radley Balko has written for years about abusive police tactics and the Fourth Amendment, first over at Reason and more recently at Huffington Post. In the current issue of the ABA Journal he provides an overview of the rise of militarism in American police forces and how it manifests itself every day. He writes:

Today in America SWAT teams violently smash into private homes more than 100 times per day. The vast majority of these raids are to enforce laws against consensual crimes. In many cities, police departments have given up the traditional blue uniforms for “battle dress uniforms” modeled after soldier attire.

* * *

But it isn’t just drugs. Aggressive, SWAT-style tactics are now used to raid neighborhood poker games, doctors’ offices, bars and restaurants, and head shops—despite the fact that the targets of these raids pose little threat to anyone. This sort of force was once reserved as the last option to defuse a dangerous situation. It’s increasingly used as the first option to apprehend people who aren’t dangerous at all.

Read the whole thing, and don’t forget the various statistical tables and what not spread throughout. The explosion in the number of SWAT teams (and their deployment) over the past few decades is staggering. Balko makes a pretty good argument that the growth is driven by money, particularly a federal grant program with the name Byrne attached to it (unfortunately).

Oh, and they shoot dogs too. Lots of ‘em.

Judicial Idiocy, With a Prosecutorial Assist

Courtroom misbehavior has to really be of the prime variety to surprise me anymore these days, but this situation certainly meets that high standard.

Let’s set the scene – a courtroom in Texas, where a criminal trial is underway. A prosecutor in the gallery (not the one actually trying the case) gets a text, suggesting a line of questioning for the prosecutor to pursue. She scribbled the text “word for word” and has her investigator run the not up to the prosecutor. Now, guess who sent the text?

The trial judge.

That’s right. The judge presiding in a criminal case gave advice to the prosecution appearing before her in that case! Even worse – or at least equally bad – is that the other prosecutor, used as a conduit for the message, didn’t think twice about passing it on. The only positive note is that the investigator reported the judge, probably at the risk of losing his own job.

But the absolute icing on the cake of idiocy? That conduit prosecutor who passed on the note? She’s a judge now, too. Of course she is!

Your Facebook Friends Are Not Legal Authority

The other day I took a little dig at Roger Dean (or his lawyers, actually) for including in his lawsuit against James Cameron an assertion that his claims were “backed up by ‘numerous comments on the internet.’” Sadly, I only had to wait another day for an even sillier version of the appeal-to-the-Internet legal argument to appear, and in a much more local dispute, to boot.

Wyoming County is nestled within the southern West Virginia coal fields, having been carved from neighboring Logan County in the middle of the 19th century. Last week, a group of local religious folks built a Ten Commandments monument on the courthouse lawn, uninvited and without permission (or warning, apparently). What’s going to happen to it now is, of course, a source of controversy.

The county prosecutor, who doubles as the county attorney,* sees nothing problematic about the display. In reaching that decision, he consulted the ultimate authority:

Cochrane asked his Facebook friends for feedback and about 280 people of 300 responded in favor of the monument.

Thankfully, we’re not to the point where legal questions – much less ones of Constitutional magnitude – are resolved by Facebook plebiscite.

Cochrane’s advice to the county commission is to do nothing, right now, and let the monument stay. To his credit, he’s on record as supporting the placement of other monuments, including, perhaps, one like American Atheists recently put up in Florida to complement another Ten Commandments monument. That’s because, presumably, Cochrane has some familiarity with the concept of a public forum.

The Supreme Court has recognized that what speech a government is required to allow in a particular area is largely determined by how open to the public that area is. Traditional public forums – think sidewalks and such – are nearly wide open and are subject only to content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions. Other areas can become public forums based on governmental action.

The Fourth Circuit dealt with a good example of the public forum issue recently. It arose in a case from Lexington, Virginia in which the Sons of Confederate Veterans wanted to put up Confederate flags on some city light poles in honor of Lee-Jackson Day (a state holiday in the Old Dominion). The city agreed, but after protests from the citizenry it instituted a new policy for such displays that limited flags hung from the city poles to those of the United States, Virginia, and the city of Lexington.

The SCV sued, arguing that the city’s decision violated their First Amendment rights. The court disagreed and upheld the dismissal of the lawsuit. The court noted that prior to the revision in city policy they light poles had been a limited public forum, open to all groups and used by, among others, the city’s two universities. However, by adopting the new policy and limiting the displays to government flags, it closed the public forum. Notably, the court shot down the SCV argument that an improper motive for closing the public forum was a First Amendment violation in and of itself.

So, the citizens of Wyoming County likely have two options – leave the Ten Commandments monument up as part of a public forum that welcomes others or take it down and close the forum to religious speech altogether to avoid running into Establishment Clause problems. For, when he says this:

Cochrane said the issue is whether the monument promotes Christianity over other religions, and he doesn't think it does. 

* * * 

‘I researched different religions as far as whether the Ten Commandments is discriminatory or not,’ Cochrane said. ‘Basically a type of Ten Commandments is cut across a lot of religions.’ 

* * * 

The monument promotes laws that are based on some of the commandments and not any religion, he said. Also many people recognize the Ten Commandments as a universal code of conduct.

Cochrane is utterly wrong. Yes, the Ten Commandments includes some broad, general, moral principles to which most people would agree (don’t kill, lie, etc.), though those are hardly unique to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. However, several of the Ten Commandments are explicitly about the proper worship and adoration of the Abrahamic God:

• I am the Lord thy God 

• Thou shalt have no other gods before me

• Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image 

• Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain

Anyone who thinks those apply to “a lot of religions” is in the same headspace as the waitress at Bob’s Country Bunker, who explained that they have “both kinds” of music there – “country and western!” Those are religious directives, explicitly at odds with not only the directives of other religions with billions of believers around the world but with those of us who have no religion at all.

It’s perfectly OK to believe them yourself, to put them up in your house or on your lawn. But if you want the allure of state backing, by putting them up next to the courthouse, you’ve got to invite others to play, too.

* In most of the smaller West Virginia counties, the prosecutor does this kind of double duty, advising the county commission on civil legal matters.

Lawyers Come Out of the Sky, They Sue There

Let’s be honest, the only thing Avatar really had going for it was that it was visual eye candy, a truly impressive thing to look at. I mean, come on, the “Dances With Smurfs” plot was old and hackneyed when Eric Cartman came up with it! But, at least, the move was pretty to look at and immersed you in something you’d never seen before. Unless, of course, you’re a fan of Yes or Asia or many other prog (and related) bands. Not for nothin’, but when Avatar first broke a good number of prog lovers made the point that Pandora looked an awful lot like some of the album covers done by Roger Dean for those bands (and others). Things like:

Yes, Fragile (1971)

Yes, Yessongs (1973)

Yes, Keys to Ascension (1996)

Asia (1982)

Uriah Heep, Sea of Light (1995)

Now Dean has filed suit against James Cameron, looking for a cut of the bounty Avatar raked in (and that the in-production sequel surely will as well):

In his legal action, Mr Dean - described in the papers as ‘an international artist and designer, whose evocative and visionary images... created a new genre of work’ - has claimed Cameron had ‘studied and referenced his art in preparation for the film’. The papers continued: ‘The similarities of each such work are substantial, continuing, and direct so as to rule out any accidental copying or similarity in scenes common to the genre.’

Now, I’m not an IP lawyer, but I wonder how much of a case Dean really has here. For one thing, the history of art is a history of appropriation, between which and outright theft there’s a slim and sometimes blurry boundary. For another, I’m not sure this:

Mr Dean said his claims were backed up by ‘numerous comments on the internet’.

counts as controlling, or even persuasive, legal authority. On the other hand, as this article points out with some side-by-side comparisons, the similarities are striking. And it’s not as if Cameron is completely ignorant of the potential influence:

Meanwhile, since we pointed out the resemblance between Avatar and Roger Dean’s artwork a month ago, there’s been a flurry of discussion on the subject online. Entertainment Weekly asked director James Cameron whether he got his idea for the floating mountains from a Yes cover, and he laughed. ‘It might have been... Back in my pot-smoking days.’

Those are some mighty profitable weed sessions, then, James. Throw Roger a bone for the homage that was much of Avatar. It’ll at least keep him from designing the state set for Yes’s next cruise ship adventure (for which we’ll all be thankful).

A State By Any Other Name

A century and a half ago, today, my home state actually became a state. So, happy birthday, West Virginia! But, did you know, West Virginia almost had a different name? And if it had, might things have worked out a little differently for those of us born without an aunt in Richmond (or, for Charlestonians, near the beach)? When the voters of the counties that would become West Virginia voted (mostly) not to leave the Union, the name originally given to the area was Kanawha, after the Kanawha River that flows through Charleston and into the Ohio. That did not go over very well when the Wheeling convention drafting the new state’s constitution got underway in December 1861. One delegate objected, arguing:

one reason I have for striking it out is that I am a Virginian. . . . It always makes me think of the Virgin Mary, the mother of our blessed Redeemer. It is a name that I almost revere; and I am utterly opposed to leaving it out and substituting the name ‘Kanawha’ in its stead.

Some other delegates harrumphed the importance of maintaining a link to Virginia. Another objected that naming the state Kanawha would lead to confusion with Kanawha County. He concluded:

Therefore I can see no peculiar claim that Kanawha has. There is a very pretty river there of this name - nice river - but there is no particular euphony in the name; or perhaps no claim from historical considerations. I do not know of any.

Anyone who’s heard someone from out of state try to pronounce “Kanawha” has to admit it does have some problems in the euphony department. Still another objecting delegate noted the beauty of the Kanawha river and valley and “suppose[d] they are very clever people,” which is a wonderfully backhanded compliment. Other names were proposed – Western Virginia, New Virginia, Columbia, Allegheny, Augusta and, of course, West Virginia.* It prevailed overwhelmingly in the final vote (getting three times more votes than poor Kanawha). While one of the reasons given for not naming the new state Kanawha was to avoid confusion with the already extant Kanawha County, there were similar concerns expressed about having “Virginia” in the name, too:

this thing may have some practical effect. You are so attached to Virginia that you are unwilling to lose the name. You look for immigration from other states. Will it be one of the means of inducing them to come here that you tell them that this is Virginia still - that you are to create the impression that Virginia policy is still to govern? Gentlemen, let that impression go abroad through the land, and the very name of Virginia, the very idea that Virginia may still prevail over this portion of the State, will prevent hundreds and thousands from coming within your borders.

Another delegate was more blunt:

Sir, there is more in this than perhaps I have said. If you make an agreement with eastern Virginia that after the division takes place, one is to be called East and the other West, or one is to be called Old Virginia and the other New, there might be less impropriety in it; for then it would indicate a division of territory, but, sir, under any circumstances they are to retain the name. They are to be Virginia and we are to be Little Virginia or New Virginia, or West Virginia, or some other soubriquet which is to degrade us in comparison with them. That is what gentlemen are driving at, sir.

Those concerns turned out to be valid. Sure, there are other states with geographically based names, but they’re complimentary to each other – North Dakota has its South Dakota, South Carolina has its North Carolina. But there is no East Virginia, just plain old Virginia. Making things more confusing, there is still an area referred to as western Virginia (a large hunk of which, to make things even more confusing, lies to the south of West Virginia!). It’s not hard to have sympathy for folks raised elsewhere who can’t really separate West Virginia from the old commonwealth (hence the “an aunt in Richmond” joke).

Would our founding fathers have been wise to listen to those concerns and choose a name that was completely unique? It probably wouldn’t have hurt. But I doubt it would had made a huge difference over the past 150 years. A name is not destiny and West Virginia’s current state has more to do with geography, shifting economic winds, and good ole’ fashioned political shenanigans than anything else.

Besides, regardless of what the state would have been called, it would still be Almost Heaven. Still full of beautiful vistas and babbling mountain streams, deep green mountains and rolling valleys. It would still be home to the same kind of slightly-out-of-step-with-modernity population it has today. Whatever it was called, West Virginia would still be West Virginia.

And, hey, if Futurama’s any guide (and when has it led you astray?), we’ll get our revenge on the mother commonwealth:

We’ll just have to wait another thousand years or so.

* NOTE: I’ve always seen “Vandalia” listed as one of the proposed names, but I don’t see it in this transcript, at least. Wikipedia includes it, however. Make of that what you will.

Are You a Copyright Scofflaw?

That sounds like an odd question to ask in the 21st Century, in the era of Bittorrent, when the breakthrough of Napster fades like a crumbling building in the rear view mirror, doesn’t it? But I’m not talking about anything electronic, anything dealing with the Internet, or even the complaints that the modern generation thinks everything should be free. I’m talking low tech. I’m talking old school. I’m talking something you do only around your closest family and most dear friends. I did it just this past Sunday. I’m talking . . . about singing “Happy Birthday.” Yes, that’s right, it appears that “Happy Birthday” is copyright protected:

If you want to sing the song on TV, or in a restaurant, or whatever, you have to pay a licensing fee to Warner/Chappell, the music company that owns the rights. The company makes about $2 million a year off the song, according to one estimate. 

* * *

The story of the song is long and weirdly complex. The short version is: A pair of sisters published a song called ‘Good Morning to You’ in 1893. Over the next few decades, the song morphed into ‘Happy Birthday to You.’ In the 1920s and '30s, a couple versions of the birthday song were published in copyrighted songbooks.

That’s why, for instance, when you see some poor schmuck being embarrassed by a phalanx of unenthused waitpersons on her birthday at some restaurant they’re never actually singing “Happy Birthday.” It’s cheaper to have someone write a song just for that chain (and, hey, you get the brand out there more!). But that may soon change, thanks to director Jennifer Nelson, who made a documentary on the song’s history and place in the culture. When it came time to put an actual performance of the song in the film, she found she had to pay Warner/Chappell $1500. She’s not alone:

Ms. Nelson is not the first documentarian to confront the issue of paying to use the Happy Birthday song. The filmmaker Steve James paid $5,000 to use the song in the acclaimed 1994 documentary ‘Hoop Dreams,’ in which it is sung at a man’s 18th birthday party. ‘It was an important scene,’ Mr. James said in a 2005 article in The New York Times, ‘there was some amazement that Arthur had made it to 18. Of course, we wanted that in.’

What Nelson has done is take the whole matter to court, seeking to have the song declared part of the public domain (the suit is based on work done in a law review article a few years ago). I don’t know enough about copyright law (or the tortured history of “Happy Birthday”) to offer an opinion on her chances of winning. I hope she does, though. Who needs the threat of Warner/Chappel’s enforcers breaking down your door just as the cake and ice cream gets handed out?

Friday Review: The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories)

I’ve had a strange relationship with Steven Wilson. Or with his music, anyway.

My first exposure to his stuff was Porcupine Tree’s The Sky Moves Sideways, which left me completely unimpressed. It wasn’t until I heard Porcupine Tree in their later, more streamlined Stupid Dream phase (via a webcast of their set at NEARFest) that something clicked. I’ve been a fan since, although I’ve not dug back into the older stuff (Sky . . . still doesn’t really do it for me).

Given that Porcupine Tree is essentially Wilson’s baby, it made sense to check out his other stuff. I really like most of what I’ve heard of No-Man (his collaboration with vocalist Tim Bowness) and would really like to get my hands on his droney ambient project Bass Communion (they’re maddeningly hard to come by). So when Wilson went “solo,” such as it was, I came along for the ride.

His first album, Insurgentes, mined a lot of his influences that were tangential to progressive rock, if they had any relation at all. As such, it’s not overtly “proggy,” but has a pan-genre inclusiveness to it that makes it really interesting. I like it more than most people, however. Grace for Drowning, his second effort, wore the influences of his work remixing the King Crimson catalog and went down a much more prog-through-the-lens-of-jazz path. In spite of an amazing list of collaborators, Grace . . . has never done much for me.

Which brings us to The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories). To tour Grace . . . Wilson put together a killer band that included Marco Minnemann, Theo Travis, and Nick Beggs. From that tour he took those guys right back into the studio for The Raven . . .., hoping to capture some of the energy of the live shows.

The result is pretty impressive, even though it doesn’t get me as excited as it does many prog fans. The Raven sounds even more like an homage to 70s symphonic prog, right down to the extensive use of the original King Crimson Mellotron (it pays to be friends with Bob Fripp). It’s used to particularly good effect near the end of “Luminol,” which in other places fires off riffs that remind me of “21st Century Schizoid Man” (or, more recently, another Wilson collaborator – Steve Hackett’s “Mechanical Bride”). The highlight for me is “Holy Drinker,” with some fantastic organ and synth bits. The title track is also a beautiful, mournful cap to the whole experience.

I’ve lived with Grace for Drowning since it came out, waiting for it to grow on me and rip my head off. It’s never happened. But in the few weeks I’ve had to digest The Raven . . ., I’ve found myself warming to it noticeably. Not an immediate “wow,” but definitely an impressive, layered grower. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Details
------------
The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories), by Steven Wilson
Released 2012

Tracks:
1. Luminol (12:10)
2. Drive Home (7:37)
3. The Holy Drinker (10:13)
4. The Pin Drop (5:03)
5. The Watchmaker (11:43)
6. The Raven That Refused To Sing (7:57)

Players:
Guthrie Govan (lead guitar)
Nick Beggs (bass, Stick, backing vocals)
Marco Minnemann (drums, percussion)
Adam Holzman (Rhodes, Hammond, piano, Minimoog)
Theo Travis (saxophone, flute, clarinet)
Steven Wilson (vocals, guitars, bass keyboards, Mellotron)

Another Take On Punishment and Rehabilitation

Two words I would not associate with the criminal justice system are “swift” and “certain.”

Take a conversation I had with a client a couple of weeks ago. I was explaining the prospects for his case on appeal, digging into the procedure of the Fourth Circuit and how the whole thing worked. At the end, I had to tell him that, even if we won on appeal (it’s a nice issue, but you never know, right?) that would be about a year after he was sentenced. Patience isn’t just a virtue for those in the criminal justice system, it’s an essential.

Thing is, the system works the same way regardless of how you’re swept into it. A murder case may be more factually complex than a probation revocation, but the broad strokes are the same – you get charged for doing something wrong, you go to court to argue about it, and some sentence is imposed if you’re guilty. It may take months, if not years, to reach the end point, but which time who can remember what the hell you did to make it here in the first place?

One judge in Hawaii came up with what might be a better way, at least when it comes to probation/parole/supervised release violators. Judge Alm (a former US Attorney) came onto the bench in 2001 and immediately found the current system for such folks problematic and not very effective. So he switched things around:

The program, called Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement, or HOPE, is based on simple precepts that the judge who created it likened to ‘Parenting 101.’ It immediately jails, for no more than three or four days, offenders who miss a probation appointment or fail a drug test. Operating under the theory that judicial punishment should be ‘swift, certain, and proportionate,’ it seeks to turn around behavior that the system ordinarily, though inadvertently, seems to perpetuate. A proffered meth pipe attains a new significance, the thinking goes, when it comes attached to the prospect of an immediate three-day tour behind bars. Moreover, such brief, predictably enforced jail stays are congenial to prisoners used to a more unpredictable and, to their minds, arbitrary system.

So simple, but it appears to be working:

Participants in HOPE were 55 percent less likely than members of a control group to be arrested for a new crime, 72 percent less likely to use drugs, and 53 percent less likely to have their probation revoked. As a result, they served 48 percent fewer days of incarceration.

As a result, HOPE-like programs have appeared in over a dozen states.

Of course, a program like that can really only happen in a supervisory context, where probationers are required to follow lots of rules that don’t apply to regular folks. It’s not clear to me how you could apply the swift/certain punishment idea in new criminal cases without running into serious due process issues.

One interesting observation of those in the HOPE program involves their perception of the process:

’Ordinarily, when you ask an inmate why he’s behind bars, it’s always someone else’s fault,’ Hawken said. ‘ ‘I’m in jail because the judge is an SOB’; ‘I’m in jail because my probation officer had a bad day.’ ‘ But in Honolulu she encountered men and women who, unbidden and unpressured, praised the system that put them away, and told her they were locked up because they had ‘messed up’—something so unusual, she said, that it made her skin tingle. ‘That language of personal responsibility is unimaginable if you’re a criminal justice researcher.’

Now, in my experience the old saw that everybody who is in prison thinks their innocent isn’t the case. People are a lot more honest about their transgressions than that. However, what I have noticed is that there is a certain percentage of defendants who lose sight of any culpability on their part in their plight and view the entire predicament as a kind of game to be won or lost without any regard to their behavior. That’s particularly true when the only real “defense” someone has is a motion to suppress evidence that, otherwise, shows them to be dead-bang guilty. My own personal theory is that it doesn’t help those clients down the road to get caught up in the “game” and lose sight of what they did and how things need to work when they get out of prison.

HOPE offers a different take on criminal justice. It appears to be one of the truly unusual examples of a true win/win situation. The probationers do better overall and spend less time going back to jail. The public benefits by a reduction in crime, reduced cost (due to shorter incarceration), and a more efficient criminal justice system. Let’s hope (so to speak) it continues to spread.

We Asked For This

The reaction to last week’s revelations (courtesy of Glenn Greenwald) at the Guardian) of sweeping data gathering by the National Security Agency, the predominant reaction from the public has been one of outrage.* Even folks who otherwise fall on the “security” side of the security/civil liberties line stopped and asked if things had gotten a bit out of hand. But even the outrage is justifiable (and I think it is), should anybody really have been surprised by this?

Fourth Amendment expert and former NACDL President John Wesley Hall explains how, as distasteful as the NSA’s plans might be, they probably aren’t unconstitutional under current law:

All this data collection is perfectly legal under pre-Patriot Act law and compounded by it. In 1976, the Supreme Court held in Miller v. United States that it did not violate the Fourth Amendment for the government to gather information from bank records of a depositor under investigation. In 1979, the Court held in Smith v. Maryland that it did not violate the Fourth Amendment for the government to put a pen register on a telephone to record only the numbers being dialed because the telephone call wasn’t recorded. That was, after all, all technology allowed at the time. Think of the NSA as one huge pen register.

As for the Patriot Act, Hall notes that it:

became law without any critical thought, and it made it carte blanche for government to gather information about us. Couple this with the information technology available over the last decade and the ability to store Brontobytes of data, and that we see now was inevitable. I’m not the slightest bit surprised. Nobody keeping up is surprised.

Even beyond that, the primary bulwark keeping the government from searching people (and their stuff) willy nilly, the Fourth Amendment, has been slowly hacked away for decades. Well before 9/11 and the War on Terror, we as a society had largely ceded the protections against unreasonable search and seizure in the War on (Some People’s) Drugs. The quantum of evidence needed to search or seize someone has gradually gone down, while the only effective tool to punish breaches – the exclusionary rule – is on its death bed. In the grand tradition of “when they came for the [INSERT GROUP HERE] I did nothing,” society was largely OK with all this, as it only impacted “those people.” Who gives a shit about goddamn drugies, anyway?

Ironically it’s the drug angle that writer/producer David Simon (of The Wire, Treme, etc. fame) uses to explain why we shouldn’t really be all that freaked out about this (via):

Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.

There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones.

Think about it. There is certainly a public expectation of privacy when you pick up a pay phone on the streets of Baltimore, is there not? And certainly, the detectives knew that many, many Baltimoreans were using those pay phones for legitimate telephonic communication. Yet, a city judge had no problem allowing them to place dialed-number recorders on as many pay phones as they felt the need to monitor, knowing that every single number dialed to or from those phones would be captured. So authorized, detectives gleaned the numbers of digital pagers and they began monitoring the incoming digitized numbers on those pagers — even though they had yet to learn to whom those pagers belonged. The judges were okay with that, too, and signed another order allowing the suspect pagers to be “cloned” by detectives, even though in some cases the suspect in possession of the pager was not yet positively identified.

All of that — even in the less fevered, pre-Patriot Act days of yore — was entirely legal.

Simon stresses that, like the NSA program exposed in the Verizon order, they weren’t listening to calls, just getting the “metadata” (if the term was around back then). That information, he points out, is already generated without the NSA’s request and, increasingly, is going to be stored for some kind of future use by the private companies that produce it. To not utilize it for something as serious as trying to thwart terrorist attacks (or develop more traditional particularized individual suspicion) is silly.

I think Simon’s right that the only thing about the NSA program that’s different from his Reagan-era memory of Charm City is the scope of the information gathering, but, unlike him, that still bothers me. It’s possible to, at the same time, not be particularly surprised by something and yet still outraged. Furthermore, Simon appears to take Obama at his word when he says nobody’s listening to our phone calls.** There’s just no reason to believe that. As this piece at Slate points out, there’s a history of surveillance operations straying far afield from the legitimate, limited goals.

While the NSA’s programs are outrageous in and of themselves, what’s more outrageous is that they may be perfectly legal. They’re clearly authorized by statute and have been blessed by Congresspersons in the know. And, of course, they have the approval of a pair of presidential administrations from theoretically opposite parties. Furthermore, I don’t have any confidence that they violate the Fourth Amendment in its current emaciated form.

No, the real outrage is that we’ve let it come to this. For too many years we’ve traded liberty for security, from crime or from terrorism, on a bipartisan basis. If things have really gone too far for too many people, maybe we can start to roll things back. But I won’t hold my breath.

* Or maybe not. Via Orin Kerr at Volokh, a Washington Post poll found that only 41% of respondents think the NSA’s phone program is “unacceptable,” compared to 56% who find it “acceptable.” There appears to be the inevitable partisan gloss as well. We are so fucked.

** To be fair, in the comments he expresses more concern about the PSRIM internet surveillance program, which does appear to reach content, not just technical metadata.

Friday Review: Zero Dark Thirty

Let’s begin with the thought that no representation of a historical event can really accurately capture that event. Even first-hand news accounts based on interviews from people who just witnessed the event often get things wrong, either the minor details or broader strokes. Which is only to say that any movie, even a documentary, isn’t able to present “the truth,” but rather only one variant of it, a variant that’s molded for reasons of art and, sometimes, politics or propaganda.

When Zero Dark Thirty came out last year I wrote about the controversy swirling around of whether it justified torture as the means by which the United States learned the location of Osama bin Laden, ultimately leading to him being killed by Navy SEALs. On the one hand, it was an apologia for torture that shows an efficacy that isn’t borne out by the historical record. On the other, it’s a movie that, perhaps, is taking aim at broader themes. As I concluded:

Which is just to say, you really need to see the movie before you decide its morally horrific. Is there some reason to think that critics, who have actually seen it, just check their moral compasses at the door? Or is the film perhaps more nuanced and subtle than Bruni, et. al., are giving it credit for? Who knows? I suppose we common folk will need to wait until January to find out.

In the end, it’s best to judge for yourself.

So now that I’ve finally seen Zero Dark Thirty, I suppose it’s time to do some judging. Putting to one side Kathryn Biggelow’s ill-advised remark that the film is “journalistic,” I think most of the furor about the film was ill founded.

First and foremost, does the movie come out and say torture was effective in getting crucial info on bin Laden and thus allowing us to track him down? Sort of yes, sort of no. The real problem is that, for dramatic/streamlining purposes, the dozens of people questioned and, in some cases, tortured for information during the search are pretty much reduced to one guy, Ammar. We see him brutalized in multiple ways, during which he either provides no information or incorrect information (in one scene he feebly recites every day of the week as potential answers to try and avoid being crammed into a tight wooden box). Later, after an attack in Saudi Arabia, he’s treated to lunch and a little kindness (in addition to false information about the attack) and only then does he provide some relevant information.

Is Ammar’s story one of torture working in the end? After all, during their little lunch the chief interrogator tells Ammar that he can hurt him again, if he doesn’t cooperate. The threat of more brutality hangs over the conversation like a circling bird of prey. Or, alternately, is Ammar’s story one that shows how torture doesn’t work, since he only gives up important information after the torture stops? Honestly, it’s both.

If Ammar was a real person, a single identifiable individual, I’d say it shows that torture had been effective. The brutality he experienced is a bell that cannot be unrung. After all, the whole reason the bad cop/good cop dance works isn’t because the suspect wants to please the good cop, it’s because he wants to avoid further pissing off the bad cop. Once tortured, any further questioning while the threat (explicit or otherwise) remains is tainted, at least within the short time frame presented in the film.

But Ammar isn’t a real person. He’s a character in a fictionalized account of a real event, one that serves as a stand in for numerous detainees, if not damned near all of them. Dramatically, the distinction between what produces no information (torture) and what produces valuable information (kindness, or at least humane treatment) is stark and dramatically effective.

So, is it a movie that argues for the triumph of torture or not? Did Dick Cheney really love it? Ultimately, I think it works as a sort of Rorschach test for the viewer. There’s enough there for viewers looking for a pro-torture message in the film to find it, such as later repeated references to new limits on torture making the hunt for bin Laden more difficult. But there’s also enough there to read it as a statement on the ultimate futility of torture as a useful information gathering tool. There is never, to be fair, a full-throated moral objection to torture, however. It’s a purely utilitarian argument.

Personally, I see the film as a meta commentary on the United States reaction to 9/11 and our behavior during the War on Terror. In addition to being a stand-in for the person (or persons) who led the hunt for bin Laden, the main character Maya strikes me as a stand-in for the American people as well. She is spurred to action by 9/11, is uncomfortable with some of what that means, but ultimately she’s not willing to completely repudiate it. Her laser-like focus on bin Laden is contrasted with the world moving on around her, raising questions about the need to expend resources on the hunt. And, finally, when all is said and done, what has Maya really accomplished? She heads home, alone, in the back of an empty C-130 transport plane, to an uncertain future. The air of melancholy at the end of the film seems to me to be a giant question mark – like someone’s asking “was all of this worth it?”

Having said all that, is the movie any good? It’s not bad, but there isn’t much greatness in it. Most of the film is a slow, slogging procedural that’s only of interest because of the inciting crime and the target of the manhunt. There’s no real character development, things just move from point A to point B, efficiently and competently, but not very compellingly. The exception to the rule is the depiction of the raid on bin Laden’s compound. Rather than pump it up artificially to be the kind of loud, bright, fast action sequence we’re used to on the big screen, Bigelow lets it play out in real time. It’s a slow, methodical execution of a meticulously assembled plan. It’s all the more chilling for the cold efficiency of the SEALs in doing their thing.

Good art, at some level, is about confronting the audience with something they don’t want to see or think about. On that level, Zero Dark Thirty succeeds in spades. Whatever your ultimate takeaway from the film, it’ll make you think about what’s in it, think about it, and make you reconsider your own thoughts. That’s not a bad result, all things considered.

The Details
------------------------
Zero Dark Thirty
Released 2012
Written by Mark Boal
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, et. al.

Quick Hits, of a Mostly Familiar Nature

Here are a few brief stories that caught my attention while I was away getting’ matrimonyed. A couple of them tap into things I’ve written about before, so they’re a bit familiar. I’m working my way back into things, obviously.

Public Art for Fun & Profit

Back in April I wrote about the latest example of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t public art that was creating a stir. In that case, it was a Banksy mural in the London neighborhood of Harringey that appeared, as much of his stuff does, overnight. Several months later it disappeared just as suddenly. At the time, there were issues over who removed the mural and what it’s fate might be.

Flash forward to last Sunday, when “Slave Labor (Bunting Boy)” fetched a cool $1.1 million at a private auction in London. That came after an initial auction in Miami was scuttled at the behest of the Harringey town counsel. Not surprisingly, the ones selling the mural were the owners of Wood Green Investments, who owned the building upon which it was installed. They were entirely within their rights to do so.

Art Is Not the Artist

I’ve argued before that it’s best to separate an artist from his art. I don’t really begrudge people who can’t or won’t do that, but I think it’s a bit short sighted. You cut yourself off from a lot of interesting art if it all has to pass through some kind of ethical litmus test. Besides, on a practical level, I’d rather you not read what I write because it sucks instead of the fact that I’m a Democrat/atheist/prog fan/DC United supporter.

Here’s a recent example of where getting up on your high horse might not be that good of an idea. A grad student at Northwestern, a member of the University Chorale, objected to being required to perform a particular piece, Howard Hansen’s Song of Democracy. Not because it was too difficult or aesthetically poor, but because the lyrics for that piece were taken from a Walt Whitman poem and Whitman, as were many of his contemporaries, was a big-time racist. The professor threatened to fail the student, but it’s unclear how the dispute was resolved.

It’s one thing to object to performing something that in and of itself is racists, sexists, whatever. But backing up further and requiring ethical purity from the original author is composer is really asking for trouble. As my friend who was recently-doctored in conducting pointed out, such a litmus test would eliminate most of the cannon of established Western music.

I’d go on to argue it would do the same with art, literature, and nearly any other endeavor. And while nobody can take away your right to take umbrage at such things, aren’t there more important things to worry about than whether the lyricist of a song you have to sing in class was a douchebag a century and a half ago?

Oh My, Sexy Werewolves! In Prison!

Finally, here’s a fun story that actually raises important issues of free speech and criminal justice. An inmate in California has won the right to possess (and read, presumably) a book called The Silver Crown. Why did he have to go to court in the first place?

The 262-page novel tells the story of Iris, a werewolf hunter who ends up falling in love with one of her prey. The book contains ‘a great number of graphic sexual encounters, one per chapter through most of the book, including detailed descriptions of intercourse, sodomy, oral-genital contact, oral-anal contact, voyeurism, exhibitionism and ménage à trois. Semen is mentioned,’ Richman wrote.

The judge also notes that the book doesn’t advocate or advance violence and the sex isn’t really all that weird and doesn’t include, for example, bestiality (unless, the judge explains, you include the werewolves!).

Prisons generally aren’t keen on letting inmates have possession of sexually-related materials. The wife used to tell me about dealing with those kinds of regulations during her days at Borders. So it’s a bit of a pleasant surprise to see a court not simply bow down to the prison’s regulations.

But what’s really amusing is that you can tell the judge wasn’t all that happy about having to deal with The Silver Crown in the first place:

’Personally, we would be hard-pressed to say The Silver Crown has ‘significant’ literary value and is a work ‘of great import,’ Richman wrote. But, he concluded, ‘we cannot simply dismiss the work as nonserious literature because it deals with werewolves and other paranormal creatures and activities. For better or worse, some segment of the population is fascinated by werewolves and other mythical beings. ... Werewolves, in fact, have played a role in popular fiction for centuries.’

I’m not sure anyone who writes about himself in the third person gets to knock anybody else’s literary choices.

Hunter Becomes Hunted (Redux)

Back in April I blogged about Ken Anderson, a former prosecutor and current judge in Texas who made headlines for actually being criminally charged for misconduct that resulted in an innocent man being sent to prison for almost 25 years. In that post I mentioned that, regardless of the eventual outcome of the criminal proceedings, Anderson would ultimately be judged by voters when he faces reelection.

I no longer think that will be quite enough.

Scott over at Simple Justice has a copy of the judge’s order issuing the arrest warrant for Anderson, in which he lays out the findings of fact supporting the warrant. Buried deep in the order is this gem:

42. Additionally, as Mr. Anderson explained during the Court of Inquiry, although Brady requires prosecutors to release exculpatory evidence to the defense, as an attorney and former prosecutor, he does not believe in the release of such evidence if it may result in freeing an individual that he believes is guilty. (RR 6:116:18-6:117:4 and RR 6:94:4-24).

Read that again, slowly, and make sure you grasp what Anderson said, under oath, to a court examining his conduct – that if he thinks your guilty, the law is just an impediment to his ultimate triumph of putting you in a cage. It’s hard to think of a more appalling example of a prosecutor who has decided to completely ignore his legal, constitutional, and ethical obligations in order to do what’s “right,” of which he is the only judge (naturally).

Prosecutors have a constitutional duty to turn over evidence to defendants that tends to show they’re innocent of the crime with which they’re charged. This so-called Brady obligation is a fundamental protection of an adversary system where one side has the entire investigative apparatus of the state at its disposal. Yet the very nature of it – evidence is required to be turned over only when it might exonerate the defendant – provides prosecutors with enough wiggle room to get into trouble.

I’ve heard that prosecutors are told that if they have a piece of evidence they don’t want the defense to have, then it’s the kind of evidence they need to turn over. Sound advice, but not followed very often. The law should make the decision much easier – turn over everything. Don’t leave the decision about what to disclose to a party with a vested interest in the result. Human nature being what it is, the temptation to filter things through your own biases is going to lead to bad results.

As for Anderson himself, I’m not sure if the law is capable of sending him to prison for what he’s done, for reasons noted in the initial post. But the Texas bar and judicial disciplinary apparatus presumably has more room to deal with his malfeasance. He is a disgrace to the profession and shouldn’t ever have a place in courtroom, except as a party.

Bloggus Interuptus: Matrimonial Edition

Friends, you may remember that last year the lovely lady K agreed to marry me. The time for us to make good on that promise is upon us! And we just bought a house! So, I’ll be stepping away from FtS for the rest of the month.

See y’all in June!

Friday Review: ROSFest 2013

Last weekend, for the third year running, I trooped up to the rolling countryside of central Pennsylvania for the Rites of Spring Festival, aka ROSFest. Held at the lovely Majestic Theater in Gettysburg, the festival showcases the more melodic side of progressive rock. This was kind of an odd year for me, as there wasn’t anybody on the bill that I was completely ecstatic about having a chance to see – no IQ or Phideaux from prior years. In fact, going in I didn’t know a lot about many of the bands, but I was sort of intrigued by them. Would I find an unknown gem like Sanguine Hum or Tinyfish. Let’s find out!

First, a graphical note – your humble narrator screwed the pooch this year and left his camera at home, so none of the usual pictures of the Majestic marquee setting out each day’s schedule. I already feel your scorn and am remorseful about it.

Friday kicked off with Bolus, a four-piece (on stage, at any rate) from Canada. Aside from a couple of YouTube clips I didn’t know anything about them going in, but I liked their brand of energetic, tuneful, neo-prog. As with so many newer bands these days they occasionally lapsed into a metal riffage territory, but not so much as to ruin it. On their 2013 release Triangulate the band’s only a three-piece, but the live show had a fourth guy featuring mainly on keyboards (a Korg M50, to be precise – represent!), with some occasional guitar. The keys were so prevalent that I was surprised at their near total absence on the album. I also liked the bass player’s MacGeyver’d bass pedal setup (MIDI pedals into a MicroKorg?) – it literally made my hair move when he put a foot down!

Headliners for Friday night were the famous Flower Kings from Sweden. I’ve got a kind of an odd history with the Kings. I really love the Roine Stolt solo album that gave birth to them, but I don’t find their output all that interesting most of the time. I’ve called it “chicken soup for the prog lover’s soul” before, because it sort of hits all the right notes (so to speak) of classic symphonic prog, but doesn’t really thrill me. Having said that, they’re a stalwart of the “third wave” of prog that emerged in the 1990s, are a damned fine group of musicians, and I was glad to be able to see them live.

The first full day of music began with Jolly, a four-piece from New York City. There is a good story to this band. Their studio (and the drummer’s apartment) was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, which would have been bad enough anyway, but (a) the band had just finished a new album and (b) were getting ready to hit the road supporting Riverside. Luckily said drummer saved his computer (with the album on it – this is the 21st century) and their fans rose up to support them so that the tour went on (is going on, actually) without a hitch. Very cool. Musically, Jolly pumps out a tuneful near-prog in somewhat the same vein as Bolus, but with a much heavier, more metallic edge. Not really my thing, but they do it well – the road work they’ve done shows. Another nice touch – if you buy their current album The Audio Guide To Happiness - Part 2, you get a free download of the last one, The Audio Guide To Happiness - Part 1, so you can get the whole concept in one sitting.

Prog metal is not my favorite of the prog neighborhoods. I’ve got nothing against heaviness itself, but the “balls and chunk” metal riffing has never been my thing. So I was apprehensive about Sweden’s Pain of Salvation, given their stellar prog metal pedigree. I was more than pleasantly surprised by their set, which was one of the most diverse of the weekend. Yes, there was the prog metal riffing, but it was interwove with lots of effective dynamic shifts. The band carelessly skipped through a whole host of experiments with different styles, which I always admire. Some didn’t work (the disco tune and the quasi-rap one left me cold), but how can you not love a band that trots out a lounge/jazz/reggae version of Dio’s “Holy Diver”?

Believe, from Poland, turned out to be a good palate cleanser for Saturday evening. Amidst a day of fairly heavy music, their brand of solid, melodic neo-prog played well. They reminded me a lot of IQ and Camel, not to mention fellow countrymen Quidam. Guitarist Mirek Gil took lots of opportunities to stretch out and solo, getting fierier and more intense as the set progressed. The band had a violinist, but she was buried in most tunes, but it was a nice touch when she was more prevalent. Good, nice tunes, but nothing spectacular.

Fairly early in their headlining set Saturday night, Riverside bassist/vocalist Mariousz Duda joked how at first they were the “Polish Porcupine Tree,” then they became the “Polish Dream Theater.” As for now, maybe they’d become the “Polish . . .” – he let the answer hang until the keyboard player ripped off the first couple of riffs from Deep Purple’s “Perfect Strangers.” The Porcupine Tree comparisons were once valid (the Dream Theater ones not so much), but Riverside has forged their own path over the past decade. They’re heavy, yes, but not really in a metal way, but more in a thick, wall of sound kind of way. If anything, these days they sometimes seem like Spock’s Beard’s heavier Polish cousins. Regardless, they were excellent, easily surpassing my expectations. I had three of their five albums going into ROSFest and figured I wouldn’t need any more. I completed my collection on Sunday morning.

On a side note – this was the tenth edition of ROSFest and Riverside was the 100th band to take the stage at the festival. Congrats to George and everybody who puts on the fest for reaching that kind of milestone.

Sunday morning at ROSFest is dubbed the “church of prog,” since, well, it’s Sunday and all. Typically, the band chosen to kick off Sunday gives an energetic performance to help most people shake off the cobwebs of the partying done the night before. Dream the Electric Sleep – a great name and, since they hail from nearby Lexington, Kentucky, almost a local band for me – took the opposite approach. The slid into their set, opening with a pair of longish, spacey sounding tracks. More of a slow warming than a brilliant sunrise. To their credit, the first track had a similarly spacey quote from “Amazing Grace” to start off. I like DTES’s mix of space rock, jammy stuff, and even post-rock (if you squint a bit), but was disappointed by their presentation. Simply put – they need a fourth guy in the band. The power trio setup was augmented by a Macbook that handled not only the occasional intro or atmospheric sample, but also acoustic guitar, synths, and backing vocals. Seriously, I hope the Macbook had a union card, at least.

The key word to describing the set by Moetar (from prog hotspot Oakland, California) is “short.” As in the fact that many of their songs were conspicuously short. I’m not talking about a lack of stereotypical prog epics, I’m talking about a bunch of 2-3 minute tracks that barely get going before they’re over. Still and all, they pack an awful lot into those short bursts, probably too much. The music is really busy, with lots of lightning guitar and piano riffs, augmented by matching vocal lines (think Zappa or Keneally unison vocals, but performed by a powerful female vocalist). Fantastic musicians, but the end product left me a bit cold. The newer tracks seemed a little bit more well developed, so maybe in a few years they’ll really be hitting it out of the park.

Japan’s Asturias is the brain child of multi-instrumentalist Yoh Ohyama – it exists in the form of an acoustic chamber ensemble, an electric rock/fusion band, and the label for Ohyama’s more individual efforts (he’s the “Mike Oldfield of Japan”). It was the electric version that brought the house down at ROSFest. They ripped through a set of smoking instrumental prog, laced with streaks of fusion. As with Believe they had a female violinist (the violinist from Believe is even of Japanese extraction, I think), but she was much more front and center in the sound, providing a nice counterpoint to the guitar and keyboard leads. On top of all that, each band member addressed the audience as some sort of English as a Second Language assignment (guitar player’s response to a random shouted comment – “I don’t speak English”), each of which underlined their enthusiasm for playing half a world away from their home. Simply put, they were great.

Sunday’s headliner was Shadow Gallery, truly a local band, a prog-metal outfit who only played out live for the first time a few years ago. I understand how happy fans were to get to see them, but they’re not my cup of tea (it’s not just prog-metal, it’s cheesy prog-metal), they were running late, and, by that time, I was beat, so I just packed it in. No idea how they’re performance came off.

Going into ROSFest this year I didn’t really expect any “wow!” moments. It’s to the fest’s credit that I still got a couple and, even outside of those, the rest of the lineup was uniformly solid. Barring something untoward happening, I’ll be back in 2014 for the fourth time running. Hopefully, next year, my seat won’t disappear into the ether after I bought it!

Friday Review: Under the Dome

The situation in which regular people find themselves basically stripped of civilization and the comforts of our modern world is a classic fictional trope, from the English school kids of Lord of the Flies to the few survivors of some planetary disaster in The Road or A Canticle for Liebowitz. Generally, those stories take people who may or may not have any prior relationship to one another and throw them into a world of anarchy and chaos.

Stephen King’s Under the Dome turns that trope on its side in two crucial ways. First, the characters in the book are all from the small Maine town of Chester’s Mill, population 2000 (in the off season, as it is in the book) and thus not only know each other but have a complicated web of alliances, bitterness, and business interests (legit and otherwise) connecting them. Second, although the titular dome throws life in Chester’s Mill into utter higgledy-piggledy, there’s no anarchy or absence of leadership. In fact, what’s so terrifying about what happens in Chester’s Mill is that the political machine that’s run the town for years functions perfectly once crisis hits, which leads to apocalyptic disaster.

Overseeing this mess is “Big” Jim Rennie – used car salesman, obnoxiously loud Christian, and gargantuan meth dealer. If Under the Dome is supposed to be King’s meditation on the United States after 9/11, Rennie is the stand in for Dick Cheney as the power behind the throne. Although Rennie is the second of three selectman (one is actually a selectwoman) who govern the town, he wields all the actual power. The analogy doesn’t quite fit – nobody ever voted for Cheney directly, while Rennie had won numerous elections to maintain his seat. If anything, Rennie seems to be King’s warning that, while we focus most of our attention on national politics, the office holders with the most power to really fuck things up are locals and we ignore the low-level political offices at our own peril.

Having said that, to the extent that King is trying to do something more than tell a compelling, terrifying story, he misses some opportunities to explore some interesting grey areas. For example, once the dome comes down, new cops are quickly recruited to brace against chaos and lawlessness. It would have been interesting to see one or two good people in these positions, honestly dealing with the competing concerns of security and liberty. Alas, since Rennie is the one doing the choosing, the new cops are all his henchmen (including his murderous son) and proceed to do precisely what you’d expect henchmen to do given that kind of power.

Another missed opportunity is the lack of any exploration of the Chester’s Mill body politic. The novel’s cast of characters is impressively large and King does a good job of working them all together, even if the individual characterizations are pretty shallow. However, they divide neatly into the obviously evil – Rennie and his flunkies – and obviously good – the couple dozen citizens who oppose him. King isn’t really interested in the rest of the unwashed masses, which is a shame because they’re largely the ones who voted for Rennie again and again. Why had they? Why were they so willing to believe any bullshit story he told them? After all, Rennie’s claim to power is that “the town” is behind him, but “the town” remains nebulous and unexplored.

As for the dome itself, it’s a wonderful literary invention. Although the word “dome” and some of the initial interaction with it would bring to mind the giant glass bowl dumped on Springfield in The Simpsons Movie (with which Under the Dome shares a passing similarity), it’s not a solid barrier. Instead, it’s a somewhat permeable force field of some kind, through which plot devices like speech, heat, and (in a very limited way) air can move but people, vehicles, and explosives can’t. It effectively seals the town off, but allows for some contact with the outside world.

To his credit, King doesn’t just plop the dome down and let it go all McGuffin on him. He provides an explanation for it, one that drives the final hunk of the book. Unfortunately, that explanation is neither all that interesting logically or dramatically. It leads the end of the book to be a real let down.

We tend to think the best of ourselves, that when faced with crisis we’ll rise to the occasion and do the right thing. Truth is, some folks will do that, while others will use the anarchy to enrich themselves (in different ways) and still others will simply be passive observers, numb from the shock of their world going to shit. King grasps that. So long as Under the Dome focuses on life under the dome, it’s a pretty compelling read. Bigger explanations, not so much.

The Details
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Under the Dome
By Stephen King
Published 2009