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Ian Rowan sees the dark side of Disney’s ‘magic kingdom’
In the currently raging debate over intellectual property which has inevitably revealed an increasingly unhealthy marriage of private guilds and corporations with the Leviathan state, those who argue in favor of draconian restrictions upon technology and the end user/citizen have made a number of sweeping claims, among the most preeminent that without such restrictions, artists will not be properly compensated for their labor, and creativity itself will wither and die.
I find this particular stance especially galling due to its hypocrisy. While Disney has indeed done some very nice work in the past if you like that sort of thing (my wife does; where I tend more toward the Warner Brothers school of animation, as a friend of mine suggests most males align themselves with the Three Stooges to the exclusion of most women), they have joined the ranks of most success stories by placing increasing emphasis upon slick appearance and lack of actual creative substance. They simultaneously lobby the state for the further extension of copyright, to the point that one can only conclude that their goal is to be able to retain the right to sue people who portray Mickey Mouse in an unflattering context until the heat-death of the universe; rest on their laurels by continuing to milk their classic creations ’til the memory is distorted beyond all recollection; and churn out ‘new’ movies consisting primarily of established and existing folk tales, or when absolutely pressed, a cookie-cutter, blandly inoffensive and ever-so-correct morality play with all the moral tension of ‘Davey and Goliath’.
Yet for me, even these established and indisputably reprehensible tactics pale in comparison to Disney’s recent “crackdown on kung fu”.
While it is relatively simple to avoid giving any of my time, attention or money to Disney’s creations, they are now claiming ownership and control over works they have not themselves produced, but which they have acquired from others. Specifically, the Disney sub-feifdoms Miramax and Dimension Films are claiming “exclusive North American distribution rights” on a fast increasing number of Asian films, to the point of threatening legitimate distributors who offer the original versions.
When released to the American public, the rule of thumb has been to dub the dialogue into English (and to replace the original soundtrack with bad rap, a separate sin and one beyond the scope of this essay). Worse yet is for films to have material completely removed, and not just in terms of plot or comedy deemed too ‘foreign’, but in the essential action sequences. Even Drunken Master 2, which was edited less than any other ‘Disneyfied’ Asian film to date, was not spared a dub job, and the result was music and sound effects far inferior to the original. It’s not for nothing that Harvey Weinstein has earned the nickname “Harvey Scissorhands”:
Asian cinema? I was doing Asian cinema fucking 10 years ago. Crouching Tiger – is that a new thing? Give me a break, I own all the Jackie Chan back catalogue in America, all the Jet Lee, all the Chow Yun-Fats. I was so far ahead of myself. [And apparently full of himself as well -Ian Rowan]
While I can regrettably understand the ‘bums on seats’ arguments from the bean-counters in favor of such a maneuver, even given the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a theatrical release and even a traditional home video are wholly different animals from a DVD. While this newer format has its own superset of not entirely unique issues, one would still think that its ability to contain multiple soundtracks would satisfy both the company and fans if all flavors. Foreign distributors seem to recognize this, as most imported discs contain far more languages on average than their typical North American counterpart. But the choice has been made for you, and more distressingly, Disney is resorting to the gun of the law to prevent people from acquiring the original product through lawful purchase.
A more cynical person might suggest that Disney is attempting to create the impression that they are the actual creators of these works, concealing their true origin for a number of nefarious reasons, but I don’t really care about their motivations. It’s bad enough when the state presumes to tell me what I am allowed to buy and who I’m allowed to buy from, but when a private guild goes begging to that same state for the privilege to enforce their dubious claims on that same authority, they have committed a far greater evil than any amount of tasteless over-marketing or vapid product. Weinstein’s remarks above are certainly revealing, in that he speaks as if his keen acumen in acquiring the rights to the works of others is the equal of having created those works in the first place.
Those who desire the original soundtrack and an unedited film have over the years turned to various importers for material which for whatever reason was not available in their own country. Unauthorized copying and sale still occurred, but as long as there were legitimate sources they did a reasonable business, with an informal network of fans taking advantage of the Internet to inform each other of disreputable or unreliable merchants. With the outlawing of such sources, however, Disney’s behavior will ultimately prove self-defeating. The longer they sit on and butcher these movies, the greater the demand will grow for unauthorized versions — and the laws of economics dictate that where there is demand, there will be a supply to fill it. Thus, Disney’s own actions create and encourage the very copyright violation they have sworn to stamp out.
Ian Rowan
I don’t know if this is a good way to find out about Formula One racing car racing, but this is blogland so there’s a link for you.
I’m now watching the TV re-run of the Monaco Grand Prix, which was held last Sunday and which David Coulthard won, I believe. And this has reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to say to the world for some time. Why can’t they have more racing car races in places like Monaco, which is an actual place, with hotels and houses and a sea-front with super-luxury yachts parked in it, and fewer racing car races in places like all the other places where they have racing car races, i.e. the racing car racing equivalent of out-of-town shopping centres?
I thought this was not going to be political, but as I blog the question I realised what the answer is, and it’s deeply political. In Monaco you are allowed to take your own risks. You are allowed to race a racing car at 200 mph within two yards of a concrete wall, if you’re good enough and if some insane millionaire or cigarette salesman will pay you. And you are allowed to stand just above the concrete wall in the direct line of fire of any bad driving that might occur and watch all this insanity. At most grand prix circuits you need a pair of binoculars to see what the hell’s happening, because before a racing car driver can stage a decent crash for you he has negotiate about a third of a mile of gravel and a giant wall of rubber tires.
It is no coincidence whatever that in Monaco they also allow you to keep most of your money. In most parts of the world they run your life, and tax you half to death to pay their wages. In Monaco you run your own life, almost entirely.
Two different things: low taxes and a fun racing car race track. Same underlying philosophy.
Perry’s internet connection has been on the blink all day, on account of it being cable-based. That little power cut (see my previous post below, end of) apparently deranged his cable company. (His cable TV was out also. I hate that. Always keep business and pleasure on separate kit, I say. That way, when one fails you can still do the other.) Anyway the upshot is I promised Perry I’d shove something onto Samizdata tonight. Which is now.
Well the blog fairy has spoken, and I have my topic. It’s one of those mildly entertaining American movies (I’m combining blog pleasure with the pleasure of late night junk TV) about decorative but badly behaved people with nicer houses and swimming pools and weather than they deserve. It stars David Caruso and Marg Helgenberger and is called Elmore Leonard’s Gold Coast. And the David Caruso character has just said something calculated to annoy Samizdata and just about all its friends and readers everywhere:
“People who don’t own guns don’t get shot as often as people who do.”
That sounds like one of the big pro-gun-control mantras to me. Now most anti-anti-gun-controllers are no doubt familiar with all the wrongnesses of this mantra, but indulge me. It’s a somewhat new claim to me, and I want to explain (basically to myself) what’s wrong with it.
Error One – that the only bad thing a person with a gun can ever do to you is shoot you. But of course there’s something else, in fact a lot else. He can threaten to shoot you, and then without actually shooting you he can do lots of other bad things to you, or that you would otherwise have stopped him doing. So even if owning a gun yourself might have got you into a gun fight, the risks of such a fight might easily have been preferable to what happens as a result of you not being able to even threaten such a fight. Not getting shot is not a guarantee of happiness. You may not get shot, but you may be raped, or robbed, or powerless while your family ditto. There are worse things than getting shot, even than being shot dead.
Error Two – most of the above applies also to when you are attacked by someone physically stronger than you, but when neither you nor he has a gun. It all applies if, for example you are an averagely strong male who is not good at hand-to-hand combat, while he’s an above averagely strong male who is. In those circumstances you brandishing a gun makes all the difference (provided you’re willing to use it), even if you do take the risk that the physically stronger attacker does have a gun after all and waves it back at you in “self defence”.
Error Three, and I think this is my biggest objection – the benefits of widespread gun ownership among non-criminals for the purpose of self-defence are dispersed throughout society. Even if it were true that “people who own guns don’t get shot as often as people who do”, and even if getting shot was the worst thing that could happen to you, and the risk of getting shot was the worst risk you could take, that still wouldn’t mean that non-criminals being forbidden to own guns (the real world effect of gun control laws) is a good public policy. The widespread existence of non-criminals willing to take the risks alluded to by the David Caruso character may not make life safer for each non-criminal gun-owner, but between them these people sure as hell make for a better world. And if enough non-criminals can be persuaded to accept these burdens, the criminals pretty much give up, and the guns need never be fired, just owned. Think of the non-criminal gun-owners as soldiers in the war against crime, a war which they and only they can win. And think of David Caruso as the guy who says, don’t be a soldier, you’ll only get yourself shot at. That may make sense, even if the “only” is overstating things. But pacifism as a public policy absolutely does not make sense merely for that reason.
As for the claim that it’s the job of “experts” – like the good police – to do all the good gun-fighting against the bad criminals, and not the good civilians, well that seems to me like saying that you can win a land battle with the massed ranks of your own infantry stripped of all their weapons, but backed up by “expert” air power. Tell that to the Marines.
That last little metaphor might actually have contributed something useful to the argument, in the form of an aphorism worth copying and pasting to other places. Keep writing for long enough, and eventually you find yourself being brief, and to the point.
It has been of extreme concern to me for several years now that the sinister person who does the voice-overs for the sinister BBC “children’s television” show, The Teletubbies, at any rate in the version shown here in London, sounds exactly like Britain’s sinister Prime Minister, Tony Blair. What can this mean? Or am I dreaming this?
Sharon Stone is looking pretty damn good for someone recovering from a stroke!
And what is this nonsense about the self styled ‘American Jewish Congress’ urging Jews to boycott the Cannes Film Festival because ‘the French are anti-Semitic’? And which ‘French’ would that be? The 80% who did not vote for Le Pen? Spare us the collectivist crap, guys… I do not see why a foreign Jewish organisation should feel the need to provide the neo-Nazi barking moonbats in France with an excuse to say ‘See? Those mean old Jews are boycotting all of France!’ Duh.
In the linked article, it also says ‘satirist Michael Moore’ is making a documentary about the Columbine school massacre. But satire requires wit and insight, so I guess there must be more than one Michael Moore because the only one I know of is a talentless ignorant prick, not a satirist.
Bugger it!
But life, and blogging, must go on.
Staying with the Middle Europe theme, it looks like a great deal of partying went on in Hungary when Brian Linse of Ain’t no bad dude blog fame went there to make his movie Den of Lions, with Steven Dorff, Bob Hoskins and Laura Fraser… I wonder if they remembered to actually shoot the movie?
As I have heard rumours they are still clearing up and rebuilding in Budapest post-Brian, when the dreaded Bad Dude of the Blogosphere arrives in London to do the movie’s post production work, I wonder what havoc will be wrought here? My liver hurts just thinking about it.
The classical end of the music recording business has been enduring a slow crisis caused by the fact that the classical repertoire is (a) stagnant and (b) now all recorded. Classical freaks like me now have all we need. We have multiple versions of everything good, and although the newly composed stuff is occasionally worth hearing, most of it is a load of old Boulez. The only serious unfinished task is the recording of the entire operatic repertoire on DVD instead of just on CD.
The usual answer to the plight of high culture is that low culture should subsidise it, but these are also bad times for the economically serious end of the recorded music business. The free internet downloading of pop music is playing havoc with record company profits.
Which means that classical music, just when it is least able to, must now pay its own way. Big classical names are now having their hitherto automatically renewed contracts terminated by the dozen. And as these former titans slide into penury, their cultural centrality disappears. Big star classical performers in 1960 were really something, because the very first stereo recording of a major item of the repertoire was a big event. No matter how good it may be, a recording now (the thirtieth) of the same piece cannot possibly matter so much. Herbert von Karajan was a more central figure in European culture than Karajan’s newly appointed successor at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle, can ever be, no matter how much “better” the critics may tell us Rattle is.
The politicians are not helping nearly as much as the likes of Rattle think they should. Suddenly the cabinets of the western world consist not of old-time culture-lovers but of ageing Beatles fans. They still dole out arts subsidies but they are cutting back on supporting “elitists”. Instead they are “democratising” arts spending. Instead of giving huge gobs of money to high-culture high-talent parasites, they now prefer to give lots of little gobs of money to lots of no-hoper parasites. Such trends take time to work their way through (hence the continuing significance of who gets to boss the BPO), but you can feel the oil tanker turning, slowly but surely.
Classical music itself will last for ever. This is the great historic achievement of the classical music recording business. But historic achievements don’t pay wages now. What is to be done?
One answer is to cut prices and to cut costs. Wrench the price of new classical CDs (not just of regurgitated old recordings) from the best part of twenty quid down to a fiver, slash the fees paid to the performers and generally cut out the crap. This is what Naxos has done, with great success.
There’s much talk of new “business models” for the recording and “delivery” of classical music, with the copyright and long-term royalty streams remaining with the artists but with any first time round income going to the recording companies. In other words the recording companies no longer place bets on artists. The artists place their own bets, and the recording companies are now bookies. To me this sounds like a thinly disguised pay cut. Or, even more cruelly: vanity recording. (Bloggers won’t need to have this trend explained to them.)
So, when all else fails, go with babe appeal. I give you Hilary Hahn. Now I do not yet get all the subtleties of Samizdata‘s editorial policy, but when it comes to babe photography it is my clear understanding that we are all for it. So here are some Hahn likenesses, taken from her website.
Hilary Hahn is not just a pretty face. She can definitely play. Her recording of three of the six Bach unaccompanied violin pieces is one of my all time favourite CDs, and all her four recordings so far are decently done. But from a business point of view it is clear what is happening here. In the sleevenotes accompanying her latest recording, of the Brahms and Stravinsky violin concertos, released just before Christmas, I counted no less than fifty six photographs of her, together with three of her conductor Sir Neville Marriner, and three of the two of them together. Total number of photos of Johannes Brahms: zero. Total number of photos of Igor Stravinsky: zero.
This is not a long-term answer, either for the classical music recording business in general or for the likes of Hilary Hahn in particular. (That Brahms/Stravinsky disc is already being heavily discounted in London’s HMV stores.) But while it lasts it’s fun to look at.
Like many a Londoner living in the middle of the city, it is all too easy to take the cultural riches of this place for granted, such as its many art galleries. And of course my interest can be all too easily blunted by the mind-erasing trash that goes under the banner of “Modern Art”. So it was great to have seen the American Sublime show at the Tate Britain gallery last weekend.
The exhibition features work from landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Francis Cropsey and Thomas Moran. Some of the pictures were small, some of them were vast canvasses showing the sheer grandeur of the landscape in the early days of Jefferson’s Republic from the early to the middle of the 19th Century.
What these works all had in common was stunning mastery of paint, a razor-sharp eye for detail and an awareness of how to ram home the vastness of the Rockies, the huge waterfall of Niagara or the rough weather found off the coast of Maine. The virtuosity is staggering, and all achieved without the aids of modern technology. Some of the paintings had a melancholy feel, some overtly religious, some were designed merely to revel in the mastery of paint. All left me moved in some way to feel my admission fee was money well spent.
The show also reminded me that all too many of our current so-called artists haven’t the skill to pull off the kind of visual achievement of their 19th century forbears. They cannot be bothered to put in the painstaking effort, and mask their incompetence behind such nonsense as sheep preserved in liquid or bits of dung chucked onto the side of a wall.
The American Sublime exhibition is a demonstration of how great art can be but also that can be no substitutes for effort and practice. If the purpose of art, as the novelist Anthony Burgess once said, is to enhance life, then these painters achieved that goal brilliantly. Or, to take the definition given by Ayn Rand, art is the selective re-creation of reality in the light of certain values. For these painters, they picked out the great, the awe-inspiring, the sheer scale, of what they saw as America was opened up in the rapidly industrialising world of the 19th Century. These were things that mattered to them, and it shows.
I cannot recommend this exhibition highly enough. It continues until May 19. Fellow Londoners have no excuses. Go see it.
I spent an hour this evening having my blood slowly boiled by another of ‘The West Wing’, (Yes, they do show it over in the UK on Channel 4)
When the series first appeared, last year, I thought it was rather promising. Yes, I realise that the premise was a Democrat President but, nonetheless, it was blessed with a good cast, a sharp script and the kind of slick production values we have come to expect from these high-profile American TV dramas. Of course, I had to put up with left bias but it was, for the most part, tut-worthy rather than infuriating. But it is rapidly becoming infuriating. Tonight it almost jumped off the scale.
The whole series seems to be nothing more now than a barely-disguised vehicle for left-wing propoganda and American ‘liberal’ neurosis. The threadbare plotlines are nothing more than emotive appeals on behalf of some chic left-wing canard such as gun-control, the environment, affirmative action and ‘hate’ groups. The President is, apparently, obsessed with these subjects and little else. The rarely-seen (and never heard) Republicans are always portrayed as knuckle-dragging racists who only want to get into power so that they hang homosexuals from lamposts.
The once-sparkling dialogue has debauched into a painfully contrived polemic and the attempt to disguise it as a dialogue makes it all the more embarrassing:
“C.J. we should be going after these hate groups now”
“No, Josh, its an election year. Our priority has to be to save the Alaskan Spotted Beaver”
It really does get that bad. The characters do everything short of making a direct appeal to the camera and, in some ways, it would actually better if they did. The whole thing smacks of an increasingly ham-fisted exercise in getting messages across rather than entertain. If anyone has not seen ‘The West Wing’ yet then I recommend you do so, if only to learn how not to do TV drama.
Still there is one good thing: the actress who plays the character of ‘C.J.’ – Hubba hubba
Famed smoker of Communist cigars and cunning blogger Brian Linse of Ain’t no bad dude fame has finally ‘got with the programme’ and posted some pictures of the delectable British Actress Laura Fraser at the Den of Lions blog.
In case you do not know, Brian Linse moonlights as a film producer when he is not blogging and is currently in the midst of shooting an action thriller in Budapest called Den of Lions, staring Stephen Dorff, Bob Hoskins, Laura Fraser, Ian Hart, Laura Fraser, David O’Hara, Laura Fraser.
Laura Fraser prepares for a scene in the movie Den of Lions Did I mention that Laura Fraser was in the movie?
Check out Brian’s Den of Lions film blog. It is yet another fascinating way in which blogs can be used, providing interesting information and insights as the project develops on-site in Hungary, with updates to follow when the film enters its post-production phase.
As I once mentioned before in an earlier blog article, I am not one of those people who thinks the term ‘modern art’ is an oxymoron. That said, I am somewhat in sympathy with the Stuckists and regard much (or even most) ‘installation art’ as not so much bad art as not art at all.
This picture of the late Queen Mother, whilst clearly a piece of classical portraiture, is also quite modern in its lightness and style. It does not attempt either soulless photographic hyper-realism or remote abstraction but instead captures the rather charming essence of the subject’s mixture of formality and accessibility.
It is a reminder that we do not have to look very far back to avoid “British art disappearing up its own arse” as Ivan Massow put it. I do not think art should just be formal portraits but I do think it must have meaning that rational observers can actually divine.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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