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I love it when artists do something that, merely by an accident of fate, suddenly brings to focus a contemporary issue hanging in the ether but that thus far has not been dealt with.

That’s the case with a “musician” named DJ Girl Talk.

He’s covered in the New York Times a while back, because of his allegiance with the “pay what you want” movement and because of his recent coup, as a headliner of a big music festival in New Jersey last month.

He’s also a lightening rod in the raging copyright debate.

You see, Girl Talk (his real name is Gregg Gillis) doesn’t write his own songs. He doesn’t even play an instrument (as far as I can tell). He merely stitches together bits and pieces of other people’s music.

His craft follows the tradition of pastiche artists of the mid-20th century and the early pioneers of hip-hop. But his aren’t deep cuts, nor are they rearrangements of popular songs. He finds likenesses among them, syncing beats with melodies. The result is some pretty killer tracks that he’s asking fans to pay for.

His new CD is called Feed the Animals. It was released on a label called, um, illegalart.net.

Some say what he’s doing is illegal, but Gillis claims protection under the “fair use” clause of U.S. copyright law, which allows snippets of intellectual property to be reproduced without penalty.

Others say Gillis’ opponents — i.e., music industry VPs already scared to death by BitTorrent and LimeWire — are part of the overall problem with copyright law.

“Fair use,” according to the Times piece, articulating the position of progressive legal scholars, “has become important to the thinking of [what is sometimes called] the “copyleft,” who argue that copyright law has grown so restrictive that it impedes creativity [italics mine].

What the article doesn’t address (not that it should have) is something beyond law. It’s an issue raised back in the early 1990s by a composer named John Oswald (see this profile from Wired).

Oswald is the creator of series of aural experiments generally called Plunderphonics. They are in the same spirit as Gillis Feed the Animals, but on a higher level of art and intellectual rigor.

Best-known in this series is probably 1993’s Plexure. It squeezes and mashes together thousands — yes, thousands — of artists from 1982-1992, the beginning of the digital era, into an 18-minute disc that was the musical equivalent of compressing a lump of coal for millennia until you have a rough diamond.

Oswald, in an essay titled “Plunderstanding Ecophonomics: Strategies for the Transformation of Existing Music,” appearing in the 2000 book Arcana: Musicians on Music, edited John Zorn, makes the following case.

Most of pop music unoriginal and lacking in value that to even cite each and every source in Plexure, and Oswald’s other works, would be giving more credence than the original works are due. (Oswald is keen on creating visual reflections of his music, as you can see to the left with “Jackoscan,” the subject of the Wired profile linked above)

The end, he said, resulted in something wholly original, “a radical transformation of familiar music,” while making a political and artistic comment on the “original” sources — that they weren’t all that important, more of the same really, derivatives of each other.

You may as well mix and match all their names. They’re that distinct from each other.

(In fact, Oswald does that here. Some examples: “Marianne Faith No Morrisey,” “Blondie Sabbath,” “Ozzie Osmond,” “Cheap Pixie Peppers,” “Beastie Shop Beach,” “Lynyrd Lovett,” “Cream Styx,” “Jello Bellafonte,” “Milli Fudge,” and “Ozzy Loaf”).

I tend to feel that most pop music is indeed just filler. With the ascent of single-song downloading, we are certainly more conscious of the fact that most albums, historically speaking, have been samey. Crap, even.

Even with good songs, there are only small portions within that provide that pop of emotion, that snap to hook you. That’s why they’re hooks.

I listened to DJ Girl Talk’s new “music” and I discovered he was doing something similar to what Oswald does, using all the good stuff of very popular songs, everything from R&B to rock to thrash metal to hip-hop.

Eventually, I had to wonder: Perhaps this is better than the originals.

Gillis is taking the best and leaving the rest. Perhaps that’s illegal, but it’s far more interesting.

Charleston City Paper

Here’s a test: Go ahead and name one song this summer that’s as powerful, invectious, and disposable as “Macarena.” Even last summer had a ubiquitous hook (Rihanna’s “Umbrella”) that everyone was humming, even if they didn’t know what it was or where it came from. The summer before that was accompanied by the cool soul of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”

The New York Times sent critic Andrew Kuo to find 2008’s Song of Summer, but didn’t find what you’d expect. Of the eight tunes he heard most frequently blaring out of apartment windows, car stereos, and iPods (among them Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” and Young Jeezy and Kanye West’s “Put On”), the best one is a doing-the-dozens-like trash-talker from HotStylz, a Chicago hip-hop collective. The tune “Lookin’ Boy” is, Kuo writes, “Good enough to hop out of bed and jam out to when a car drives by booming this at 4 a.m.!”

So here it is, the 2008 Song of the Summer.

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Charleston City Paper

Basically, he argues that when too many people own too much of a thing, it doesn’t work anymore and it actually hurts us all.

There’s much about science and technology, but he also discusses culture, especially the problems facing hip-hop artists and sound sampling.

How can we innovate with this problem? What’s the reward of being creative?

Charleston City Paper

That string began with the so-called Montauk Monster on Long Island, then a Big Foot, then this creature found in Texas last year that the discoverer swore was the Chupacabra, or goat sucker, of Mexican lore.

Turns out we want to believe.

Most people simply can’t not believe.

It doesn’t matter how educated you are. PhDs are as likely to believe in ghosts as high-school drop outs.

But those who hold deep religious beliefs are less likely to buy into the paranormal.

Those who attend church infrequently, or never, are more likely to believe Big Foot and the Montauk Monster are really, really real.

From LiveScience: The bottom line, according to several interviews with people who study these things: People want to believe, and most simply can’t help it… . A related question: Does belief in the paranormal have anything to do with religious belief? The answer to that question is decidedly nuanced, but studies point to an interesting conclusion: People who practice religion are typically encouraged not to believe in the paranormal, but rather to put their faith in one deity, whereas those who aren’t particularly active in religion are more free to believe in Bigfoot or consult a psychic. “Christians and New Agers, paranormalists, etc. all have one thing in common: a spiritual orientation to the world,” said sociology Professor Carson Mencken of Baylor University.

Oh, and that Chupacabra? Not the mythical slayer of domestic animals.

Nope. DNA testing showed it’s just a coyote.

The famed glass artist gave a talk and presentation recently at Google’s speakers series in California. Chihuly is widely recognized for his distinct work. His Gardens of Glass series has been exhibited in municipal botanical gardens throughout the country. The Columbia Museum of Art will open a new exhibit of Chihuly’s works called Seaforms, showcasing about 35 works and preliminary sketches of shells within shells, and other forms inspired by the ocean, which he worked on over a 14-year period. That show begins Sept. 5.

I never thought body painting could be more than what you’d find at the petting zoo (face painting for kids) or in the pages of Sports Illustrated.

But I was wrong.

The German city of Mainz has been showcasing what’s possible for five years with a festival devoted entirely to the art of body painting.

According to the German magazine Der Spiegel:

Bodypainters came to the German city of Mainz for the Fifth International Bodypainting Festival at the weekend to adorn models from head to toe with brightly colored and in many cases highly original artwork. It’s a tough job for the models, some of whom have to sit or stand still for up to 14 hours. The artists competed in a number of categories including special effects, facepainting.

Check out a slideshow of this year’s creations here.

I say it’s about time we bring this to Charleston.

We have everything we need for a body painting festival. Well, not the artists. But we can import them.

As for the models, we’ve got plenty. If you don’t believe me, check out the Windjammer’s annual Bikini Bash.

Dan McCue, a terrific business journalist, has sent City Paper a story about Charleston’s connection to Bollywood, which is shorthand for India’s hugely profitable movie business. Dan reports on Robert Miller, head of a local company called ReelSports that specializes in sports action sequences in films like Miracle.

In June, Miller won the Indian equivalent of a passel of Golden Globes and Academy Awards for a field hockey movie called Chak De! India (or Go! India). A scene from the movie can be seen above. Miller is now working on a movie about cricket, which India’s national pastime.

More significantly, Miller, who works out of his office on East Bay Street, is on the vanguard of a global trend in which Westerners are striking gold on the subcontinent. But the showbiz is a two-way street. Indian power brokers are looking West, too.

Last month, The New York Times reported on hip-hop musician Snoop Dogg’s appearance in an Indian music video called Singh is Kinng. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that actor Sylvester Stallone inked a deal with an Indian movie company. And today, NPR reports that a company called Reliance is buying up movie theaters around the country.

Dan’s story comes out in Wednesday’s issue of Charleston City Paper.

What I think we should be worried about is the quality of discussion about arts and culture. If newspaper don't it, who will? Blogs are fine, but they are only one way of covering the arts. Nothing can replace the dedicated, professional, and relatively well-resourced engagement of the arts by a daily newspaper (even The Post and Courier's theater reviews, however small and lacking of substance they may be at times, are still valuable in that they are present and not absent from the newspaper's pages)

* More than 6,300 employees at the 100 largest newspapers have lost jobs through buyouts or layoffs in the past year.
* More than half of those cutbacks have come since the beginning of June.
* Nearly two-thirds of the top 100 papers have cut staff in the past year, including all but four of the top 34 (the two New York City tabloids, the Indianapolis Star and the Cleveland Plain Dealer are the exceptions-and Plain Dealer management has threatened imminent cuts).
* Even papers that haven't made recent cuts have sliced staff in the past couple of years-in all, three-quarters of the Top 100 have eliminated jobs in the past two years or so.
* Twenty-eight of the Top 100 have cut more than 100 jobs in the past year. Seven have cut more than 200 jobs-and those numbers go up significantly if you go back more than a year.
* The largest cuts have come at the biggest papers, not surprisingly, and at chains. (The worst: 350 jobs lost at the Los Angeles Times since February.) Perhaps the safest place to work is at an independently owned paper in a mid-sized market. So far.
* Virtually all cuts are on the print side -- few papers, if any, have cut online staffing, fortunately.
* Until recently, voluntary buyouts were the usual method of cutting employment-but lately, many cuts have been through outright layoffs.
* Job cuts aren't the only thing going on-papers also are freezing hiring and shrinking through reduction of editions and sections, striking partnerships with other papers, closing bureaus and outsourcing some production (even copy-editing!) overseas.
* More than a handful of papers-and their owners-clearly are in fairly dire financial peril, losing money or having trouble making debt payments. And several papers have been put up for sale.

Click here to listen to the article from MIT’s Technology Review.

I found this article by the sometimes controversial feminist writer Camille Paglia (she wrote the Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson). The 2007 article published in Arion, a journal of the arts from Boston University, is actually a transcript of a speech she gave in 2003. You can read the article in pdf format here.

I also came across John Patrick Diggins’ review of The Secular Age by Charles Taylor. It has nothing to say about the rocky marriage of art and religion but does address the role of spirituality in public life, something that has become unfashionable for liberals to talk about since the 1960s, leaving blowhards like James Dobson to do it for them.

I don’t need to describe much in detail. But I do wonder is which of the forms of rhetoric — ethos, pathos, or logos — is Shanahan using when he drops his pants?

You can read up on the news behind this video here if you care to.

From the About page:

This is a tough letter to write as technically you do not exist. “They” say that no one reads anymore and that you spend all of your time watching TiVo’d episodes of Dancing With the Stars, playing video games, or stealing music from your computer. If you don’t exist then neither do we, which seems rather odd as we really did write this letter and you are now in fact reading it.

And thank God for that attitude. Even though many daily newspapers are shedding their books coverages, much of it is bland and dry and more like a fourth-grade book report than the product of one person’s thinking filtered by time, passion, and an informed sensibility.

Here’s an example of a dry-as-dust review, from Sunday’s Charleston Post and Courier. It’s a review of Command of Honor: General Lucian Truscott’s Path to Victory in World War II by H. Paul Jeffers.

This is the first painful sentence in dire need of a thoughtful editor:

In a time when it is commonplace to memorialize the fleeting tenures and scant contributions of politicians by attaching their names to public edifices such as bridges, highways and buildings, it is truly startling to realize, by contrast, that some of the truly worthy heroes of the age have become so easily forgotten.

Lastly, Lit Mob is among a bevy of publications, which are themselves run by young, educated professionals who for the most part are solidly ensconced in the GenX and GenY demographic (the very people who are not supposed to be interested in reading, by the way), taking up the cause for books coverage. n+1, New Haven Review, Dark Sky Magazine (a local web-journal edited by CCP critic Kevin Murphy) and Charleston City Paper (as well as our sister publications around the country that can be found at Altweeklies.com) are adding book reviews, essays, features, etc. to their websites.

This cropped up last week when a musician named DJ Girl Talk continued to challenge copyright law by stringing together a huge assortment of pop songs and then charging people for the CD. He’s claiming protection under the “fair use” clause of copyright law, but some legal experts challenge that claim.

From The New Yorker: The point isn’t that private property is a bad thing, or that the state should be able to run roughshod over the rights of individual owners. Property rights (including patents) are essential to economic growth, providing incentives to innovate and invest. But property rights need to be limited to be effective. The more we divide common resources like science and culture into small, fenced-off lots, Heller shows, the more difficult we make it for people to do business and to build something new. Innovation, investment, and growth end up being stifled. Opportunities forgone aren’t always easy to see. The effects of overuse are generally unmistakable—you can’t miss the empty nets of fishing boats working overfished oceans, or the scrub that covers an overgrazed field. But the effects of underuse created by too much ownership are often invisible. They’re mainly things that don’t happen: inventions that don’t get made, useful drugs that never get to market.

This blogger gathered statistical data to suggest consumption of porn hovers around 58 percent. Broken down by gender, between 30 and 35 percent of men consume porn. That includes porn found online and in print. If you look at print, the numbers show a drastic decline, but that may be because of porn’s prevalence online. For women, not surprisingly, there is little if any change in behavior.

From a blog called Gene Expression: For men, porn-watching declined at least from 1973 until 1980, and increased until 1987. After that, you may be able to see fluctuations up and down but they’re around a pretty steady value of about 35%. The pattern for women is much clearer to see: essentially no trend, but cycles of varying period and amplitude. I interpret these patterns as a decline during the 1970s when porn theaters became unfashionable, an increase during the 1980s as porn became available on VHS, and no change afterward — in particular, no skyrocket due to the availability of internet porn, something I would not have predicted by intuition.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m interested in new ways of thinking, news ways of understanding, new ways of seeing the world. Art, to me, is the ultimate lens through which to see the world. Art is a product of culture and the mystery of the human brain (mind?), so it’s no surprise that a series by SEED Magazine called Revolutionary Minds caught my attention.

It profiles thinkers, writers, and researchers on the vanguard of human knowledge. It’s really interesting in and of itself. You might consider spending some time with this podcast featuring social psychologist Heejung Kim (pictured above) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who is exploring that finest of fine lines between nature and nurture, and how our culture is not merely a product of our genes, but how our genes, over long stretches of time, might be a product of our culture.

From the magazine: Sorting out the competing yet complementary influences of genes and culture is a problem that has captured the attention of some of the most talented scientific minds. Researchers have looked for genes that influence behavior regardless of cultural context. In her first foray into the world of genetics, social psychologist Heejung Kim is taking a decidedly different approach by examining how culture shapes individuals’ responses to their biological inheritance. In doing so she is creating a profound new framework for how to think about our genetic and cultural backgrounds.

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