May 2008 Archives
Sometime after I wake up I'll chat about more do-goody things from the conference--including why I said we're in danger of creating Stepford charities--but for now, the absolute coolest thing that has ever happened at an academic meeting:
I met John Burrows, and yes, he is alive.
Alas for y'all I promised not to reveal any more, but suffice it to say I'm still smiling.
(For the obligatory social enterprise connection, here's the latest on the sale of the Elvis is Alive Museum.)
I'm in Canada for a law conference, and I've already learned several things.
(1) It's impossible for me to think of Air Canada without singing it to the tune of "O Canada" and improvising flight-related lyrics
(2) Alan Childress, of the mighty Legal Profession Blog, notes that you can track the progress of U.S. House & Senate bills on dedicated Twitter accounts.
(3) A Canadian guide to social enterprise is available here. Contrary to what one might think, apparently Canadian law is not just U.S. law, except colder.
(4) True fact: Yes, there really is a Captain Canuck, and back in the day I was seriously stocked when I nabbed a first issue. Tres exotique!
That's a quote from Shubert theater chair Gerald Schoenfeld, and it's key to Bloomberg's Jeremy Girard take on the capitalist vs. nonprofit conflict latent in this year's Tony Awards:
This year more than ever before, the nominations, announced May 13, favor narrow-focus, small-scale shows over high-volume Broadway glitz. The awards -- which will be broadcast by CBS on Sunday evening, June 15 -- pit private investors who have staked $15 million or more for a new musical or $2 million or more for a new play against publicly subsidized companies that don't pay taxes, get major breaks in union costs and have flop insurance in the form of thousands of discounted, presold seats.
I'm immersed in other things for a couple days, so for now I'll just recommend that you read the whole thing, which builds to an impassioned argument for expanding the Awards--also, by the way, a nonprofit enterprise--to include off-Broadway shows.
(On a related front--again, alas, time constrained--I haven't checked out the Tony Awards licensing arrangements, but the Oscars have, IIRC, historically yielded the Academy over 50 million a year tax free. More on that eventually, promise.)
Polygamy is now illegal in the U.S. thanks to a 1878 Supreme Court decision that declared it to be inconsistent with the principles of "civilized" nations. Whether that opinion would survive in light of contemporary jurisprudence--especially the right to privacy--is a unresolved question.
A Christian law professor gamely gives it a try in Christianity Today and concludes--surprise!--that polygamy should remain illegal. He recognizes that his arguments are kind of sketchy, though, so he builds up to the one that he thinks is irrefutable:
The strongest argument against polygamy is the argument from moral repugnance. Polygamy is inherently wrong—"just gross" as my law students say, "malum in se" as we law professors put it.Y'know, if the "just gross" test is the standard for malum in se, shouldn't it also be a crime for middle-aged professors to hit on 20-something students?
The current season of Doctor Who has several running themes, one of which is disappearing bees. The educational comic story featured above, by R. Kikuo Johnson (other contributors to this PBS series include Mark Evanier, Rick Veitch, Thomas Yeates, Lauren Weinstein and more cool comics folks) notes that "the search for solutions . . . is a race against time," which means that the Doctor may be just the right person to figure it out.
(I'll keep this spoiler free by holding off the explanation I think makes the most sense--at least in Doctor Who terms--but in case you're wondering, click here and read around the highlighted terms.)
The ethic of personal empowerment expressed in Web 2.0 takes many forms. The recent exponential growth of sex worker nonprofit activism is one.
The ironic dark doppleganger: the nihilistic sexual predation within so-called traditional charity. It's long been a dirty secret known to folks in the do-gooder biz willing to face the sad truth; in fact, the very title of this blog--Uncivil Society--comes from a project where I spent several years looking at bad things done in the name of civilized benevolence. "Who watches the watchmen?" indeed.
At the Fiesta Flambeau Fandango Run in San Antonio, a charity race that encourages participants to wear costumes.
Above: a nifty meta-Twitter t-shirt
I'm still just a tentative Twitter checker-outer, largely because I'm a bit wary of adding yet another dataflood into my day. Which is why I just removed the following alpha-Twitterer from my stream:
9:12: Showering before trip
9:25 Dressing for trip
9:30: Put on Nike sneakers
9:33: Sesame bagel w/ cream cheese
9:40: Bathroom via Twitterberry
9:43: Flushed
9:45: Getting in cab to airport
9:46: Still in cab for airport
9:48: Traffic light on way to airport
(47 traffic updates deleted)
10:15: Arrived at airport
10:16: Self check-in
10:19: Luggage tagged
10:22: Latte!
10:23: Removed by @jefftrexler
Nothing against travel tweeting--I've actually learned some interesting things from someone who has used it in informative ways, blending personal updates with useful new stuff--but micro-logging every frakkin' minute of every frakkin' day? As much as I want to engage new technology, I'm not quite prepared to spend my mundane existence watching someone else's.
It's Memorial Day here in the U.S., which for me brings back memories of our annual high school band march in the Topton, PA Memorial Day parade. It was usually hot, and the band uniforms thick and synthetic, which meant that occasionally some kid would faint and we'd wonder if there would actually be someone we knew to memorialize.
But those days are long past, and in the spirit of the weekend I've been thinking of the actual military veterans in my family line, from my brother (not a veteran, but now in Iraq for reals) to the very first Trexlers to set foot in this fair city.
And therein lies the tale.
Y'see, the original plan was not for the Trexlers to end up in Mertztown and thereabouts in PA Dutch Country, which at the time they arrived here in the 1730s was just a bunch of trees. Nope, they arrived right here in NYC, on Governors Island, where they were quarantined for a bit before settling down to farm by the Hudson River.
The deal, discovered a local historian, was relatively straightforward: they'd develop a plot of arable land and in exchange, the local British folk would give them agreed-upon provisions until things stabilized.
Except, as it turned out, they got crappy land and small supplies of subpar food that was, per the reports, often rotten.
The admins of PA heard about the Hudson Germans complaints and issued an Invitation: come to this undeveloped spot in PA where there is REAL arable land, we'll treat ya nice: potatoes, venison, massages, free wireless, the works.
So off they went and created a town. Well, actually, a bunch of farm-studded roads in woods part of which eventually got called Mertztown by a bunch of ungrateful glory-seeking parvenus (Mertz? Pfah! It should be Trexlertown 2!). And the land really was arable--I didn't realize until I went to college that the whole country wasn't coated with deep dark rich topsoil.
Which leads me to Memorial Day. Thirty odd years from the relocation to PA, the colonies declare their independence and take up arms against the British. Look in the colonial military roster and you'll see the Trexler family, whose mistreatment by the British was still fresh in their minds.
The moral of the story: don't serve me bad food or I just might take up arms.
Sexuality in the Arts meditates on the latest essential issue of The Comics Journal, which examines David Michaelis' new biography of Peanuts creator Charles Shulz. "In Schulz’ incredible body of work, anyone could pick many individual strips that are autobiographical for their individual life"--or social movement.
When I was a burbling tyke, one of the shows I had to watch--in the sense of must-see TV absolutely wanted to watch--was Davey and Goliath. As you can see from the recent Mountain Dew (licensed) parody above, a lot of other kids watched it too.
It's easy to make fun of the simplistic religious moralism of the D&G films, although as a kid who mainlined South Park's Butters I have to confess that thought never occurred to me. But the truth is, these shows were genius. Not just because they snuck in controversial social commentary--the whole idea required a leap of thought that is far from typical in do-gooding, let alone religious media strategy.
On one level, you see in Davey and Goliath an ur-text for Calvin and Hobbes, right down to sledding.
More fundamentally, you see a creator who looked at one medium--television--and saw that the traditional mode of communication in another medium--church--would not fit:
Mr. Sutcliffe was director of Lutheran radio and television ministry in New York when he was approached by church leaders about using television to reach young people, said his daughter, J.T. Sutcliffe of Dallas.
"They wanted to do a little sermonette sort of thing, and Dad said, 'In the television medium, people aren't going to put up with that.' "
He proposed a format that would offer sound theology while being entertaining, his daughter said.
Marshall McLuhan generalized this insight in his observation that a new medium initially repeats prior patterns--TV shows plays and symphonies; people post static pages to the web--until the form of the new medium reshapes how we communicate. In the electronic environment, McLuhan argued, if you don't see that education is also entertainment you understand neither.
Sutcliffe saw that merely replicating old content wasn't enough; fun iconic scenes were the wave of the future. And as we can see by all the Youtube links here, he was right.
Below, a landmark avant-garde parody of D&G: He Was Once by Mary Hestand with Todd Haynes.
One of the items on my list for My June of Comics Projects is a practical legal guide for comics-related charity fundraisers. The two-part story above looks takes a fun look at one important issue: namely, accounting for a valuable gift.
In this instance--a one-of-a-kind private recording by Elvis himself!
For larger readable versions of the story, click here for parts one and two.
And a quick thanks to Wil Wheaton for highlighting Greg Williams's Blogjam, which turns readers' stories into comics.
Street art from South Korea.
Do You Know Any Of These Farmers?WARREN T. WOTRING Mertztown, Pa. and KENNETH NEWHARD Allentown,Pa., originally uploaded by robert lz.
Last night we finally checked out the superhero fashion exhibit at the Met. More about that soon enough--right now, a quick note about what happened afterward.
The Met has a rooftop exhibit & bar. On line: a group of four twenty-somethings who looked like they were in the first jobs after college. Which, apparently, they were, judging from the rather boistrous conversation about a once cool college friend who'd left the City & gotten engaged to a farmer. The alpha-girl in the group shouts: "A FARMER? Who farms anymore? Isn't that, like, an archaic profession?"
Adding insult to injury, the farmer was obviously an "asshole" because he didn't like her purse pup.
Pictured above on the left: the land whence I came, Rural Route 1 in Mertztown, PA, which back in the day was thick with folks who grew food, which we apparently don't need anymore now that it's all imported from China or something.
A coincidental pattern spotted in a shop window in New Zealand.
My favorite place for accidental patterns: Faces in Places.
Man, this hurts. One of the things I'm doing now is pulling together work for a side project for later this summer, for which I needed some rare Russian books. I knew exactly where to go: Victor Kamkin Books, my old haunt in NYC in law school and, since that store shut down, in Maryland just a short hop from my in-laws.
I knew the Rockville, MD store moved a couple towns over recently after some financial trouble, but I wasn't prepared for the image above: their inventory destroyed, in keeping with the local sheriff's orders, after the store missed rent payments.
400,000 Russian books destroyed, with the remaining 150,000 presumably gone soon afterward. Much of this--assuming the stock remained consistent with what it had been for decades--was rare historic material you'd simply not be able to find anywhere else in the U.S.
Sometimes, sad to say, manuscripts do burn.
The next ten days are, I hope, the last of the frantic end-of-semester deadline dooms (article, conferences) before I can get to the various projects I have on hold for June. That's why the posts are a little less sustained and a lot more of the cool-things-I-want-to-archive variety.
Or uncool things.
These three articles came across my screen today and for some reason converged:
- Rising cost of airfares will alter comics convention plans
- Expensive comics crossovers--a luxury good from boom times?
- NYC Food Bank demand up 24%; donations down 44%
From the last link, a Dylanesque quote that resonates on several levels: "We have a lot of cereal but we don't have enough milk."
Where I'm going with this is not the gratuitous and ultimately unhelpful puritanical assertion that comics are frivolous compared to food or some such--far from it, actually. Social gatherings and creative expression are essential aspects of human identity, and to say that we should set these aside until poverty is gone is to strike a Faustian bargain in reverse--we go to hell now to get nothing in the future. Moreover, rumor has it that at least one or two people in the comics industry use it to get money so they can buy food themselves. But as information like the above propagates through the system, so too will the pressure to take palliative action, some of which will be counterproductive over the long term.
In a somewhat related note, the following comment on the Hero Initiative's Gene Colan fundraiser merits a response:
Um… way to come up with a great idea then mess it up.
If this is to raise money for Gene, why would you limit it to 250 pieces???
That’s only $6,250!!!! Unless they’re planning on releasing 20 different covers or his illness is only an ingrown toenail, it’s not gonna help too much.
Hospitals charge on average $5,000 just to STAY in the hospital for a week. This doesn’t include doctors fees and surgery costs.
I hear this sort of thing all the time in my primary gig--I teach & write about charity & business--so a word of explanation. What you hope for in a fundraiser like this is
- to get people to buy a sizable number of goods they wouldn't otherwise buy at a price they wouldn't otherwise pay, and
- to inspire people to make additional donations both for the immediate need and general programs.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, increasing the number of available items does not necessarily increase the amount of money raised. It can actually create a sense of abundance, which in turn can depress sales & contributions compared to a market with a relatively limited supply. This is often referred to as the scarcity principle, and it has applications in a number of areas of life beyond the marketing of goods.
Like, um, becoming a "chick magnet"--
Oy.
This is a charity ad in a recent issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The event: the truly impressive Can't Stop the Serenity, which according to the original poster has over the past two years raised $150,000 for Equality Now. The CSTS screenings start in June, so if you're interested be sure to click through for the dates near you.
Every so often folks ask me if I make this stuff up.
Frankly, I'm not that creative.
Wow, how did everyone miss this? The New Yorker cartoon pictured below actually came from a Jack Kirby drawing!
That, anyway, is the shocking claim of University of Wisconsin Oshkosh professor Thomas Lammers, who all by his erudite lonesome sherlocked the cartoon's secret origin and took his story to the big city press. Lammers alleged plagiarism, and the New Yorker has graciously added a reference to Kirby online.
My initial take still holds. PR folderol aside, those who needed to know that this was an homage knew that it was an homage, which is why the artist & key editors aren't being sacked. If Lammers had done his homework, he'd have connected the dots--the image is one of the most famous of the genre; the artist is a respected cartoonist with record of comics homages, and the New Yorker's graphics editorial has strong comics connections & is quite familiar with Kirby's work.
At any rate, the good professor's going around pretending that he's the lone genius who noticed this supposed outrage is pretty lame, smacking more of pedantic self-promotion than diligent insightful inquiry. Although to be fair maybe they don't have Google yet in Oshkosh.
Now if only the New Yorker had better taste in caption finalists . . .
Yesterday we featured an artist who has built his commercial career around his interpretations of DC and Marvel characters. Above: what appears to be a more informal, albeit rather impressive act of appropriation: Superman street art in chalk.
It's from 2007, so I would imagine it has long washed away.
Via AVN:
X-Play and Hustler Video have joined Bill Margold's Protecting Adult Welfare (PAW) and performer Amber Lynn in a fundraising effort to help ailing adult director Henri Pachard, who is battling throat cancer.
X-Play will donate one dollar for each Not the Bradys XXX DVD sold through Hustler Video between now and June 20 to PAW's Henri Pachard Cancer Fund. Producer/director Jeff Mullen of X-Play encourages distributors, stores and customers to purchase copies of the movie to help Pachard and his family.
"Sometimes we forget that our troubles are minor compared to what others are going through," Mullen told AVN. "Henri Pachard has had kind words for me every time I have seen him and if we can help out a person who was one of the men that helped pave the way for our business, it is the least we can do. I encourage everybody to pick up a DVD copy of our Bradys XXX so that we can generate a nice donation for his cancer fund."
Can you spot the attendee grabbing the chance to celebrate life at this New York benefit?
Several Lost fans in Spain have purchased a copy of Mystery Tales 40 in an eBay auction and are placing a scan of the story on a dedicated blog. Below, the fans receiving their prize from FedEx this morning:
In related news, Lost fans have been asking Marvel to reprint the story, which leads me to wonder if the company couldn't have drawn people to its own digital comics initiative by placing its own scan online.
As for copyright--assuming it hasn't lapsed--pursuant to the Berne Convention Marvel could seek to enforce its copyright in Spain, although as a practical matter the question arises as to whether Marvel would want to try and how much the foreign fans would push back. They could make a fair use argument, but Marvel could object that they're going beyond the bounds of fair use by copying the entire work.
Meanwhile, I'm sure there's a key-to-figuring-out-Lost exemption somewhere in copyright law, or at least there will be at some point in the future or was in the past.
In my lectures & classes on social enterprise I make the point that the car was originally seen as an environmentally friendly alternative to the horse. The horse filled cities with shit, stink and disease; the car created a cleaner world by sending little clouds to the sky. Just look at early automobile ads, I tell folks. Mountains, clouds, clean air--what we now see as exhaust-spewing monstrosities were the earth-friendly hybrids of the day.
Here's another example from Vintage Ads:
Proceeds from parking meters fund the Easton Community Foundation in Ohio. The Foundation even notes that it gets a cut of ticket fines.
Cartoon & comics trademark watchers may recall the Mighty Mouse vs. My-T-Mouse dust-up a decade ago. Now the tables have turned, as a computer mouse-maker is suing CBS & Apple over rights to the Mighty Mouse brand. Here's the complaint:
James Lileks recounts his encounter with a nonprofit convention at Walt Disney World--and an advocate who doesn't quite grasp the importance of context and empathy. As Elvis was wont to say, welcome to my world . . .
We’re staying at the Coronado Springs, which is also a convention center. It makes for a different mix; among the families, most of which are pasty and mid-thirties with jouncy-belly kids, there’s a big contingent of pasty people in their mid-forties lugging gimme-sacks full of incredibly important material from very important conferences. The women look like managers and the men give the impression of someone who wants to golf, but cannot. The convention has to do with the Humane Society, I think. While checking in I was in front of a woman who had a T-shirt with a picture of a dead pig, and the words AUSCHWITZ BEGINS. I peered at the shirt to divine the full text: “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals - Theodor Adorno”
I suspected that if an actual Auschwitz survivor had approached the woman in the shirt and upbraided her, the woman would have shrugged it off: well, she’s a little too close to the matter to see the deeper meaning. Who the *$(#% wears a picture with a slaughtered pig and a specious Auschwitz equivalence to a Disney resort check-in line, anyway? Who picks that one out of the drawer and says, oh, spot-on?
The latest of the Letters from Working Girls provides a revealing look at the subtle but significant re-branding of sex work as a social enterprise:
It has always seemed to me that it was more like being a therapist, albeit a very intimate one, than something dirty or immoral. . . . [I] got married, got divorced, and am now back in the business. I live in a very hip, alternative, new-agey mountain town, where being 50ish is not the kiss of death for a woman. I'm calling it "intimate touch for healing and well-being." I found I missed it. Also, I grow organic vegetables.
In response to the recent controversy sparked by unauthorized Superman charity auctions, comics writer & novelist Peter David has posted the following limited release on his blog:
As the creator and copyright holder of "Fallen Angel" (with Dave Lopez) and "Sachs & Violens" (with George Perez), I hereby give artists permission to create and donate to the charity of the artist's choice (including on-site for charity auctions) original art containing original characters from "Fallen Angel" and "Sachs & Violens." The only requirement is that the artwork have, on the front or back, the following notice--
"NOTICE: THIS ORIGINAL WORK OF ART IS OF ORIGINAL CHARACTERS FROM THE COMIC BOOK SERIES "FALLEN ANGEL" COPYRIGHT PETER DAVID AND DAVID LOPEZ and/or "SACHS & VIOLENS" COPYRIGHT PETER DAVID AND GEORGE PEREZ. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THE IMAGES OF THIS ORIGINAL WORK OF ART MAY NOT BE COPIED OR REPRODUCED FOR ANY PURPOSE EXCEPT FOR DISPLAY AS PART OF THE AUCTION."
One thing to note in this regard is that the release refers only to copyright. The Superman auctions also raised important issues regarding Superman-related trademarks, and given the potential for losing the mark if it's not policed, most companies would be reluctant to allow anyone to use the mark without a more specific and narrowly tailored license.
The following paragraph from a recent ABA article on trademark law illustrates why trademark owners such as Time Warner are so aggressive:
The federal courts have similarly discussed a trademark owner’s affirmative duty to police their marks on the Internet. For example, in Hard Rock Café Int’l (USA) Inc. v. Morton, the federal trial court noted that the plaintiff “did not have an adequate program of trademark control, policing, or due diligence in place regarding third-party use of its trademarks on the Internet.”. . . . Clearly, the court felt the burden was on the plaintiff to police its mark on the Internet.
Under federal trademark law, trademark owners who fail to police their marks run the risk of marks losing their distinctiveness, and therefore their strength. “The trademark owner who fails to police a mark both shows that he doesn’t really value it very much and creates a situation in which an infringer may have been unaware that he was using a proprietary mark because the mark had drifted into the public domain…” A systematic policing program can provide proof of the strength of the mark. In evaluating the strength of a mark, the federal courts typically conduct an appraisal of the owner’s policing efforts to ensure that whatever distinctiveness or exclusivity originally associated with the mark is not lost through neglect, inattention or consent to infringing uses. For this reason, trademark litigants frequently introduce evidence of their policing activities when prosecuting infringement cases.
Note particularly "consent to infringing uses" in the penultimate sentence. If you wondered why Time Warner only begrudgingly allowed the auction to proceed with only one reposted drawing, that's your answer right there.
FYI, as to any Fallen Angel marks, a quick check of the USPTO trademark database indicates that Top Cow had registered an unrelated "Fallen Angel" mark for comics, but that this mark was abandoned in 2002--a year before David's Fallen Angel series was first published by DC.
This Illinois Department of Transportation campaign has seductive women tempt dorky guys into buckling up. Like death, dumb ideas seem to come in threes:
Meanwhile, here's how the pros do it:
Pat Buchanan on conservatism's current woes. Mutatis mutandis and all that:
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
Of Two Minds points to this archive of vintage psychiatric drug ads, which tout social benefit ventures we tend not to want to acknowledge:
Last night brought the news of the death of Rory Root, whose Comic Relief in Berkeley has for years been a mandatory stop every time I'm town for an academic or legal whatever. As any number of people have observed, the shop is a reader's paradise, a place where an anonymous visiting law student could see an issue of Plastic Man & chat not about its condition or Overstreet price, but how cool it would be if DC would reprint the entire Jack Cole run. Paul Levitz' poignant eulogy on Blog@ is essential reading, especially for the way it captures how for many people a comic store is not so much a shop as a community:
Most of you know someone a little like Rory, because it’s the reason the comic shops are some place we love to visit: run by folks who share a passion for their brightly colored contents and their friends who are, coincidentally, their customers.