Confession? Get it? Catholic joke.

I was recently screamed at about my selective ethics. About intellectual property no less! For years I have been a subscriber to NetFlix. Love it. Sometimes, I can’t watch the videos when they send ’em to me—I’m out of town or whatever. So I rip ’em. Yep I do. And then, perhaps a month later, I watch ’em. But then I toss ’em. This is bad, if for no other reason that I’m contributing to the toxic waste problem. But more to the point, it’s also a violation of federal law that states that no copying at all is allowed. Tough, I say. It passes the JCHVSEST because at no time do I pass the content on and never do I watch more than once before giving the disc the boot.

And while I’m confessin’ the blues, I’ll tell ya another way I’m a total scofflaw. I got over 800 DVDs at last count. I purchased pretty much every last one of ’em used for […]

…and I ain’t talkin’ about the Sade song which changed me life back in ’81. What I’m talkin’ ’bout is an article by ‘ethicist’ Randy Cohen of the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04FOB-ethicist-t.html

I have problems with this article.

First, his conclusion is that it is somehow ethical to download an illegal copy of any software (aka ‘intellectual property’) if you already own a legal copy. That’s rubbish to me. To me, the problem with all such arguments is that they don’t pass JC’s Hardware v. Software Ethical Smell Test (JCHVSEST®) which, as you already know, says the following:

If it smells fishy for hardware, it’s probably just as ethically cod-like for softwares

Look. You buy a great looking pair of jeans that really make your butt look great. You go on holiday to some totally bitchin’ place. On the first night out you reach for those go-to trousers only to find (to your horror) that you forgot to pack them. Do you…
a) Go to the local shop and purchase another
b) Go to a local […]

You can now find all your fave JCHMusic CDs and MP3s at Amazon. (You can still buy them here directly and at iTunes, of course.)

For, since her own father… who, when he seemed about to
recover, suddenly felt the icy hand of death upon him,…

With apologies to Michael Palin.

People who came into this saga of career-ending injury in the middle of the show have asked me to comment as to what exactly are the current symptoms that prevent me from blazing new trails on the six string. I call it ‘the icy hand of death‘. Basically, it comes down to the fact that my thumb has a short span of attention.

The good news is that, with a lot of practice (and hand lotion), I was able to get pretty much all the twiddling capacity back in my thumb. However, what happens now is that, after about five minutes of continuous twiddling, either with the up/down motion of a pick or via fingerpicking, my thumb seizes. I mean it just stops moving. And it refuses to re-start without a good twenty minutes of rest. If you’ve ever lifted weights, you […]

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last five years about hip hop and the dreadful state of pop music.

And I blame it all on Phillip Glass and C.P.E. Bach.

Back in music school there was this discussion of the constant tidal movements of complexity v. simplicity in all the arts. Some argued that this is ‘the Dionysian v. the Apollonian’, but I disagree.

Basically it works like this: every artistic movement starts out simple. Simple. A reaction to the mature prior aesthetic which has run out of gas. This can be a very good thing. The incoming group has fresh ideas that are stark and stripped down to their essence. They make the establishment look old and slow.

To contemporaries, ‘baroque’ music was a totally stripped down and simple aesthetic. But to modern eyes and ears, the term is applied to the overly ornate filigree that was only a part of the deal at the very end–when it was already being replaced by the classical period. Remember that J.S. Bach was considered […]