With Your Permission...

 

Hello Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

I spent this past week trying to figure out how to secure all the necessary permissions to eventually use a song in my blog, and let me tell you, it was a dizzying mass of confusion.  And for the life of me, I don’t even know why I’m bothering to try to do this legally.  As an aspiring young attorney once told me, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission, and I have to say that I’m beginning to believe that he was right.

Actually, several of my friends have asked me why I’m so intent on using the song legally, and while I gave them all a good, righteous answer about the need to respect the rights of others and to recognize that music represents the labor of someone else who deserves to be paid for it, the truth is just that I don’t want to run afoul of the law.  I’ve seen too much Law and Order to knowingly give some hell-bent-for-justice D.A. with a moral superiority complex a reason to chase me down.  I mean, if this was Law and Order, I’d use the song illegally, someone would hear it, that person would get murdered, and I’d somehow be dragged in and charged as a co-conspirator.  And at that point, the best I could hope for would be first-degree manslaughter with a sentencing recommendation, only if, of course, I was willing to roll on my accomplices, which I couldn’t do because I wouldn’t even know who they were because all I would’ve done was use a song on a blog without getting all the necessary permissions.  So, I’d pretty much be screwed.

And I’m not the kind of person who would do well in prison.  Can you imagine me and my fellow inmates sitting around in the Big House talking tough?  They’d all be exchanging charges—armed robbery, felony assault, possession with intent—and then they’d get to me:  “What are you in for?”  Then I’d have to put on my scariest face and say in my most menacing voice, “Copyright violation.”  And of course, it wouldn’t work.  I mean, seriously, you could say “copyright violation” in a tone so belligerent that it would peel paint off a car, and it still wouldn’t keep you from getting a beat down on a daily basis if you were in prison.  

I’d try to fight back and stand up for myself, of course, but I can just hear the taunting now as some hardened convict steals my last pair of socks—“Yeah, so what are you gonna do about it?  Reprint something I wrote without my permission?”  What a nightmare!  Martha Stewart could pull off prison, but let’s face it, I’m no Martha Stewart.  Heck, I’m not even Jimmy Stewart…and he played a guy with a six-foot tall invisible rabbit friend in Harvey.  

I think the hardest part of it all for me, though, isn’t really figuring out who to ask for permission or even trying to determine how things have to be licensed.  It’s the whole idea of having to ask an actual live human being for permission to do something.  And sometimes I really wonder if that doesn’t have something to do with my childhood.

Of course, in my family, you never started with my father unless you really wanted to be shot out of the sky right off the bat and pretty much for good.  “Dad, can I hold my breath for ten seconds?”  “No, you’ll get brain damage.”  “But I hold my breath when I’m swimming all time.”  “And see what it’s done for you?  If you hadn’t wanted to swim, you’d be at Harvard right now.”  “But Dad, I’m only eight years old.”  “I don’t care. I better never catch you holding your breath again.  Ever.”  “But I have to hold my breath if I’m underwater.”  “Then you’re never allowed to be underwater.” “But what if I’m in a flood?”  “I absolutely forbid you to ever be in a flood.” “Well, what if it’s only raining?”  “I will not have my children out in the rain.”  “OK, then, what if it’s just sort of cloudy?”  “That’s the most dangerous time!”  “What if it’s completely sunny?” “No daughter of mine is ever going to leave this house on a sunny day.  And that’s final!”

And on and on it went until all you were allowed to do was sit motionless in your room.  For the rest of your life.

So, we always just started with my mother because at least she was slightly more rational and less likely to make sweeping proclamations that permanently barred us from ordinary, everyday activities like leaving the house.  The trick, though, was learning to translate what my mom said into what she really meant.  I finally, though, managed to work out a rudimentary chart of my mother’s typical responses to the question “Mom, can I…?

My Mom’s Response	What It Really Meant
No.	What the hell is wrong with you?
We’ll see.	No, and stop talking to me right now.
Go ask your father.	No, and stop talking to me right now.
You don’t need to [name of activity]	No, and stop talking to me right now.
Maybe another day.	No, and stop talking to me right now.
I guess if you really feel you must.	God, there really is something wrong with you, isn’t there.
Yes.	Whatever, just stop talking to me right now.
That would be great.	Am I going to have to give you money to get you to stop talking to me?
You should definitely do that.	How much money am I going to have to give you to get you to stop talking to me?

Of course, the upside to being able to translate my mom’s answers was that if you could get her to some form of a “yes” answer, you could ask a couple of follow-up questions and get a little more out of her.  My sisters were both much better at that than I ever was, though.  I rarely made it through more than two answers before I got shunted over to my dad.  “Mom, can I go to the movies with my friends?” “Oh yes, you should definitely do that.”  “Cool.  In that case, can I have $10?” “Go ask your father.” Oh no, shunted!  “Dad, can I have $10 for the movies?” “No, you’ll sit too close to the screen and go blind.”  “What if I sit in the back row?”  “Then you’ll be too close to the speakers and go deaf.”  “How about if I just stand out in the parking lot?”  “Go ask your mother.”  Oh no, reverse shunted!  “Mom, can I go stand out in the parking lot while my friends go to the movies?”  Long pause, quizzical look. “No.”

And as I’m walking off to go sit in my room for a while, I hear her mumble to herself, “What the hell is wrong with that kid?”

Of course, getting the various permissions to use a song on a blog can be kind of intimidating, but it doesn’t involve nearly the level of human interaction that dealing with my parents does, and I actually find that kind of comforting.  I mean, I think about something like Capitol Records, and I can’t even conceive of that existing as a human organization.  To me, it’s just a big, round, skyscraper in L.A. that I’ve seen on TV a bunch of times.  It looks like a dead Transformer.  It’s just a building.  And I have no fear whatsoever of writing to a building to ask for copyright permission, and even  if it says “no,” I don’t get that upset.  I just can’t take anything a building does to me that personally. 

The music publishers like ASCAP and BMI seem even less intimidating than the big record companies.  I mean, they’re just collections of letters, and how threatening is a collection of letters?  Oh sure, things like “IRS” and “FBI” are just collections of letters, and they can certainly throw some fear into you.  But it’s not the organizations themselves that are so scary.  It’s their agents. And we’ve seen those people.  They’re all over TV.  But when was the last time you saw a TV show about the high drama and intrigue of working for the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers?  Seriously, that’s just a ratings disaster waiting to happen.  So, having to deal with ASCAP or BMI or SESAC doesn’t faze me at all.  It’s a form and a credit card payment.  To me, they’re just kinder, gentler incarnations of Skynet that haven’t quite become fully self-aware yet.

And even though the main agency that grants mechanical licenses for interactive streaming, (which you have to have but no one really knows why because no one really knows what interactive streaming even is) has a human name attached to it, it’s still just basically a form and a fee.  You can actually e-mail them and ask questions about what kind of license you need, though, and they will answer you very quickly.  But the reply you get won’t be from an actual, specific person.  It’s just a reply from a department.  So, I just envision them as a large cubicle farm, and there isn’t anything that particularly scares me about acres of cubicles.

(It is worth mentioning, though, that I initially e-mailed the agency to ask if I needed a license, and I got back a response telling me that I did and directing me to a part of their website where I could obtain it.  The thing is that upon further checking, I discovered that they don’t seem to represent the owners of the song I want to use. So, I wanted to write to the agency and ask, “Why do I need to buy a mechanical license from you if you don’t represent the owners of the song?” but I could already imagine the reply:  “Because if you don’t pay us, we’ll send you to prison.”)

Anyway, the only really scary part of all this has been contacting the copyright owners because they aren’t a big record company.  They’re a very small record company, and to me, that means only one thing—actual real live people.  Shunting, reverse shunting, double-shunting, the big shunt fake-out.  God, the possibilities are endless.  But I knew that if I didn’t contact them and ask for permission, I’d be halfway to lockdown before I even knew what hit me.

The thing about writing to a small company is that all I have to go on is their name, and that’s hard.  I need a company to be called Happy Shiny People Music or We Already Like You Records to really be comfortable dealing with live humans.  This company is named Wild Mess Records, which just seems kind of neutral to me.  So when I sat down to write an inquiry e-mail a couple of days ago, my first thought was “I got nothin’here.”

But I wrote the e-mail anyway.  And then I decided that they probably wouldn’t be interested in my life story or creative vision, so I started editing it.  And then I just kept editing it until I finally read it and thought to myself, “Great, now you sound like the shadowy figure on the grassy knoll.”  But then I got this image in my head of how I’d look in handcuffs if I used the song illegally.  And then I started to panic.  And then I just hit “Send.”

And I think of that e-mail now, printed out by mistake, and subsequently tossed in the dumpster, where a homeless man picks it up and reads it through.  He imagines me living in a seedy motel room somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, furnished with upturned wooden boxes and wobbly chairs while a lone table with only three legs sits in the corner, incoherent graffiti covers the walls, and a sandwich lies rotting on the counter of a makeshift kitchenette.  He takes a moment to thank his lucky stars that he’s not living my life and then lets the page drift slowly off on the breeze out into the street, where a smart woman in a business suit picks it up, reads it through, and as she crumples it into a ball and tosses it into a nearby trashcan, thinks to herself, “Jesus, what the hell is wrong with that kid?”

But despite the obstacles, real or imagined, I have two things going for me:  time and an insanely dogged sense of persistence.  Well, that and a really deep-seated fear of incarceration.  For what it’s worth, though, I actually do respect both copyright law and performance rights because I know their histories, and I understand why they exist.  And I’m really not up for a daily prison-yard beat down, either.

(By the way, the song I’m chasing hither and yon is Jennifer Batten’s “He’s Calling.”  It’s a great song, and Batten is an extraordinary musician.  I mean, there are days when I put that song on and then immediately have to leave the area because I know I’m not cool enough to be in the same room with it.  So, crank up your mojo, and go check it out for yourself).  

Anyway, in the end, I suppose that my young lawyer friend is correct.  It is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.  But asking for permission forces you to go beyond what you’re comfortable doing.  It gets you to take chances and to deal with risk.  And it requires you to learn and to understand exactly what you’re asking permission to do.  But maybe above all else, it just obligates you to keep asking the one question that really is the glue on which a civil society is built:  “Do I look good in an orange jumpsuit?”  Well, do ya, punk?

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.

As Time Goes By...

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you. 

At the end of this week, I have a birthday coming up, so getting older and how we think about that has been on my mind lately.  It’s a strange thing, for example, that even after an baby is over a year old, we continue to refer to his or her age in terms of months for a while.  I don’t know why we do that (and neither does anyone else—I’ve asked around), but personally, I think it’s because it makes the baby seem older.  “Eighteen months” just sounds older to me than “a year and half.”  It makes the baby seem wiser and more worldly, like someone you would actually trust for stock advice.  Of course, I can understand why we drop the use of months after a while.  After all, I don’t think I’ve told anyone that I’m going to be 588 months old at the end of the week. That doesn’t make me sound wise and worldly.  It makes me sound ancient.  In the extreme.

A good friend of mine actually came up with a great way of conceptualizing herself when she turned 45.  She said that she preferred to think of herself as three 15 year-olds.  Unfortunately, for this birthday, that won’t work.  The only thing this birthday will resolve neatly into is seven 7 year-olds, and I’m just not up for having to be that many people at one time.  True, I could be my own Brownie troop, but all that means is that I’d be entitled to wear a uniform (well, several uniforms, actually).  And that’s just not enough of a draw for me.  I had a hard enough time pulling off a Brownie uniform when I actually was a Brownie, and besides, there’s just something about a middle-aged woman in a Brownie uniform that strikes me as perverse, especially when you add on the matching beanie.

So, I’m going back to my old standby of looking at my birthday as an anniversary.  I like thinking of it that way because it makes it seem like I married myself and that this year’s 20^th anniversary of my 29^th birthday denotes some sort of monumental achievement in communication and compromise.  It stands as a shining testament to my love and commitment to myself and to my willingness to persevere through all those times when being me was just a big, giant hassle.  Anyway, I like the idea of celebrating a birthday as an anniversary.  It makes it seem so much more noble than just admitting that I don’t have the ability to prevent time from passing, and besides, it makes people have to do math to figure out how old I really am.

When it comes to getting older, though, I have to admit that I’ve always been intrigued by my parents’ attitudes.  My mom is easy to figure out:  she just refuses to get old.  She’s just not doing it, and that’s the end of that story.  My dad is more of a challenge, though.

My father’s side of the family had a strange sort of reverie for old age and infirmity that seemed almost Southern.  Of course, they weren’t from the South, which just made it all the more odd, but anyway, that’s the kind of environment my dad was raised in.  So, I think there was a part of him when he was younger that just couldn’t wait to get old, but then again, there is a part of him that just never seems to age.

The thing about my father is that he is the undisputed Master of Crazy Ideas and Hare-Brained Schemes, and that is one thing about him that has never changed.  One of his earliest ideas that I remember was the front-yard driving range apparatus.  We lived in a nice middle-class suburb, and our house was on a corner lot.  So, our front yard was bigger than everybody else’s and worked fairly well for practicing hitting golf balls as long as you used wiffle balls.  But my dad got tired of hitting wiffles after a while, so he thought up a way to hit a real golf ball.  Basically, he got a big, thick square of hard rubber matting, embedded a golf tee in it, and anchored a long, elastic chord to it.  He then drilled a hole in a golf ball, ran the chord through it, and secured it on the other end with a bolt.  Then one evening, my sisters and I all assembled on the front lawn to witness my dad’s new invention in action.

He took a couple of practice swings and then stepped onto the rubber mat.  He took a beautiful swing, and we all watched as the ball sailed out past our yard, across the street, and halfway over our neighbor’s yard.  Then the chord reached its maximum stretch, and at that moment, that gently flying golf ball changed direction and became a ballistic weapon headed right at us.  And of course, since it had a bolt in it, it came complete with its own shrapnel.  All I really remember after that was my dad screaming, “Get down! Get down!” and three grubby little children hitting the grass as fast as possible.  After the Golf Ball of Death had passed over us, we all raised our heads…only to see it flying right back at us.  After several passes back and forth overhead, the ball finally lost its momentum and dropped to the ground, at which point, we all jumped up and yelled, “Do it again, Dad!”

Now, I suppose it’s worth mentioning that my father may not have realized that hitting a golf ball attached to an elastic cord would have that kind of effect, but then again, I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that the man was a physics teacher, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, my mom made him disassemble the front-yard driving range apparatus, but I’m pretty sure he’s still got all the parts somewhere. 

More recently, there was the attempt to solve the problem of the dog and the car.  More specifically, my parents’ Corgi, Nigel, was getting old and couldn’t jump up into their SUV anymore, and neither one of my parents could lift him.  So, my father decided to build a ramp for Nigel.  That way, he figured, Nigel could go up the ramp, they could just put the ramp in the back of the car, and they could get it back out when they got to wherever they were going.  It all sounded perfectly reasonable.

Now, my dad is at that age when a strange thing happens to old men:  no matter how much money they might have, they refuse to pay for anything they think they could otherwise get for free.  I mean, I know old guys who wouldn’t pay a penny for a dime because they couldn’t stand to part with the penny.  They’d rather just walk around in the street until they find a dime on the ground.

So, a couple of years ago, my dad started keeping an eye on what the neighbors were throwing out on Trash Day.  Of course, given that there are several other old men in the neighborhood, he isn’t the only one scouting out the scene, and I think Trash Day is kind of like a cross between the Olympics and a World War II re-enactment.  But my dad has truly earned the title of Dumpster Diving Diva because he is devious, perfectly willing to lie to his neighbors, and completely capable of tripping his friends if it means getting to the good trash first, and I have to admit that the other guys in the neighborhood have a certain grudging respect for him on that account.

And I can just see some of the younger couples on the block watching the Trash Day drama unfold one morning.  “Honey, that old man is in our trash again.”  “Well, just don’t feed him…and don’t even go out there.  This one’s got a BB gun.”  I imagine those young people standing at the window yelling “Shoo! Shoo!” at my father, which of course only serves to alert the other old guys that there is a good stash of refuse at their house, and from there, it is only a matter of time until the whole thing blossoms into a swarming situation.

Anyway, my father finally dragged the pieces of an old bookcase out of someone’s trash one day, and he used the wood to construct Nigel’s ramp.  Unfortunately, there were two things he hadn’t factored in.  First, Nigel had an absolute phobia of ramps.  He wouldn’t go near the thing, let alone walk up it.  Of course, he may have known more about where the wood came from than he was letting on, but at any rate, the dog simply refused to participate no matter how much my parents coaxed, cajoled, and finally just threatened him. So, there was that.

The second thing is that in building the ramp, my father had become so heady with glee over having gotten the wood for free that he hadn’t thought much about weight issues, and in the final tally, the ramp weighed more than the dog did.  So, my father built the ramp because my parents couldn’t lift the dog into the car, but even if Nigel had been willing to use his ramp, they couldn’t get it in the car anyway, so Nigel could never get out.

My father’s next plan was to dig a giant trench in the driveway.  The way he figured it, if he couldn’t raise the dog, then he would lower the car.  As luck would have it, though, Nigel (who was around 14 years old at the time) passed away before my dad was able to find a backhoe in someone’s trash, so my parents’ driveway remains intact to this day.

The strangest thing is that the time between the front-yard driving range apparatus adventure and the great dog ramp experiment spans nearly 40 years, and in between, my dad has come up with any number of other, whacked-out, crazy ideas (the plan to daisy-chain ten PC Jr computers together to make one normal machine is one of my all-time favorites).  But I can honestly say that my parents, both of whom are in their early 80s now, haven’t changed one little bit from who they were when I was a kid.  They aged, but they just never got old.  For my mom, it’s all about simply flat-out refusing to get old, and for my dad, it’s the excitement of dreaming up his next hare-brained, ill-conceived project.  And I really hope that somehow both of those things are genetic traits that I inherited.

So, the next time you start to feel the creepy hand of time sneaking up on you, take a page from my mom’s playbook—just say “no,” and go back to playing your favorite video game on your iTouch.  Then take a cue from my dad—think up the craziest way possible to solve a simple problem, make the project as complicated as you can, push it right to the boundary of just plain stupid, and then have it.  And while you’re working on that, consider a question first posed by the great Satchel Paige:  “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.

In the Beginning...

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.  This is my first post, so it seems only fitting that I should spend my time (and yours) letting you know what this blog is about since the title could be taken in several different ways.  So, let me start off with a question…

Do you ever wonder what philosophy really is?

Probably not, I’m guessing.  I mean, “What is philosophy?” isn’t a question that comes up as often as, say, “Can I park my car here?” or “Does this milk taste bad to you?”  After all, those really are the kinds of important questions that shape our everyday existence because they have real consequences. Not being able to say what philosophy is doesn’t generally produce catastrophically negative results, and it’s a lucky thing that it doesn’t.  Can you imagine a world where someone could be dragged out of the shower, hooked to a tow truck, and dragged nude through the streets just because he/she couldn’t define “philosophy”?  After about a week, the entire planet would be nothing more than a giant impound lot filled with ignorant naked people, and I don’t know about you, but that’s really not the kind of world I want to live in.

But, look, just in case that sort of Kafkaesque nightmare does arise at some point, here’s one definition of “philosophy” from the dictionary widget on my computer (which as far as I’m concerned is the fount of all the linguistic knowledge you’re ever really going to need)—philosophy is “the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.” 

Well, OK, so that’s huge.  And kind of hard to see any practical application in, but hey, if it’s all that’s standing between you and the impound lot, it’s worth memorizing.  So do it.  Do it now. 

The entry also adds that this definition is especially applicable when philosophy is considered as an academic discipline, and I think for most people, that’s the only way they ever consider it.  I mean, I don’t know too many people who think of philosophy as a recreational activity or as a particularly good substitute for television. Such people probably do exist, though, and they’re probably sitting at home right now.  Alone.  In the dark.  Crying.

(Being an academic philosopher also pretty much requires you to wear a tweed jacket, smoke a pipe, and have a beard.  Even if you’re a woman…or violently allergic to rough-textured woolen fabrics.  But, hey, no one ever said that the pursuit of knowledge wasn’t going to involve a little sacrifice).

Now, I have nothing against academic philosophy.  Actually, I’m all for it.  In fact, I think more parents should force their college-aged children into studying it.  I mean, the world has enough business majors and aspiring sports psychologists.  We need some people who can think about the inherent pitfalls of a purely analytic philosophical system if for no reason other than the sheer entertainment value of witnessing that kind of intellectual turmoil.  And besides, nothing toughens a kid up for the harsh sting of the real world like a stiff course in symbolic logic.

But that isn’t really the kind of philosophy I’m interested in here.  Trust me, I don’t want to involve myself in anything quite so daunting.  Rather, I’m interested in the kind of philosophy that ordinary people engage in every day because whether we choose to see it or not, we ask philosophical questions all the time.  Who hasn’t discovered a dead car battery and asked, “Is this really all there is to life? Endless heartbreak and despair?”  Who hasn’t drifted off in a staff meeting, inadvertently focused in a on a colleague’s chest and wondered, “Are those real?”  Who hasn’t been completely ignored in a restaurant and thus forced to ponder the veracity of one’s own existence?  I mean, seriously, it’s not like philosophical questions are things we have to go looking for.

But beyond just conducting philosophical inquiries into somewhat trivial things, my interest is in looking at a specific class of trivial things, and that’s where the “Hungry Planet” part of the title comes in.  First off, though, no, this isn’t going to be a blog about food or cooking.  Blogs about culinary journeys of self-discovery have already been done, and besides, given that I’ve never successfully broiled anything without starting a fire, any cooking-based spiritual quest that I might go on would necessarily be a journey through hell and would likely involve a trip to the Emergency Room.  So, I’m passing right over that route.

As well, this isn’t a blog about world hunger because I don’t have an awful lot to add to that discussion.  Hungry people should be fed, and that’s about where I stand on that.  Of course, how to feed all those hungry people is a whole other matter…which is likely being discussed productively and at length in someone else’s blog. 

This blog is about hunger more broadly construed because at its core, hunger is about desire.  It’s about want, and from what I’ve observed, most people don’t hunger after gigantic, life-altering, world-changing things.  Global peace?  Sure, most people really do want that, but they’re more likely to break into a libidinous sweat over the perfect set of radial tires or a TV so powerful that it can peer into Rachel Maddow’s soul.  Real justice?  Well, that would be nice, but I know more than a few people who would much rather have a good explanation as to why we kicked Pluto out of our solar system but decided not to rename Uranus as long as we were revising our view of the universe.

And I’m really no different than any other ordinary person.  I want things, too.  I want to figure out how I can qualify for the Meals on Wheels program so I don’t ever have to make dirty dishes again.  I want to own 1000 pairs of underwear so I only have to do laundry every 2.73972603 years.  I want to know if sleeping in a pair of Depends just for the sake of convenience is really such a terrible thing.

And don’t worry that I’m ultimately going to conclude that people shouldn’t want whatever they want or have whatever they’ve got because I’m no advocate for living simply.  Personally, I think that life should be lived in as complicated a manner as is humanly possible and that an opportunity to become emotionally over-wrought or utterly confused should never be passed by.  I mean, life is about learning, and no one ever learned anything by being level-headed, fully-informed, or completely devoid of meaningless possessions.  We don’t, of course, have to elevate small questions to a level of global importance and then act as if the continued rotation of the earth depends upon our answers, but then again…what the hell!  Let’s do it!

So that’s what this blog is about.  It’s not about asking, “Can I park my car here?”  It’s about asking, “Why can’t I park my car any damn place I want?”  And it’s not about asking “Does this milk taste bad to you?”  It’s about why I think it’s better to encourage your friends to engage in behaviors that might make them throw up than it is for you to engage in those activities yourself.  It’s about all those random little philosophical inquiries that all of us make everyday into what we want, why we want it, and how we’re going to get it.  And it’s served up hot and fresh every Friday.

It’s philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.