Culture

Welcome to the end of internet radio. I don’t buy top 40 albums, and I certainly don’t listen to the radio stations on offer in NYC. The US government has decided that webcasting music is the equivalent of publishing, so that a webcast station is now subject to royalties and publishing fees, unlike radio broadcasts, which are only subject to the former.

Here is the homepage of Save Internet Radio, and here is a 90-second version that explains what’s going on. For more information, I recommend reading the relevant articles on slashdot, Plastic and kuro5hin.

I think one of the important points to make here is that even broadcasters like soma fm or Tag’s Trance Trip that rarely play RIAA-associated musicians, will still be subject to the fees. The RIAA’s position is that they will sue anyone who doesn’t pay, and it will be up to the “victim” to document and prove that they don’t play any music that has fees attached.

This ruling is also retroactive to 1998. Webcasters can be present with a bill for the last four years if the RIAA so desires.

One other nice item contained in the DMCA that our lovely congress and president (Clinton) passed in 1998, just as an example of how stupid politicians can be: It is illegal to play more than 3 songs by the same artist in 2 hours. Radio stations that broadcast over the air and online can’t play a full album anymore. They can do it on their radio broadcast, but they have to replace it with something else for the online stream. If you have a web station and want to play an hour of John Lennon’s music on the anniversary of his death, you can’t. It’s illegal.

If you can find the MP3s on Kazaa or Limewire, do it. If you can buy it at a used CD store, do it. Remember: many of those “indy” labels are still owned by one of the biggies. Here is RIAA’s own members list.

Nice essay on Brian Ferry in Salon. As the photos show, he is aging very nicely.

I won’t tell you what I was doing on this site. OK, I will. I looked at it because Choire linked to it in a very undertandable need for escapism.

The Art Newspaper has an interesting article on two books dealing with homosexual themes in art.

A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality is a newer one that I haven’t seen in person yet – it should appear in the USA this month.

Mr Fernandez begins with something of a Gay Eden, or Olympus—a Greece where man-boy love was a crucial part of an instructional passage from youth to manhood, hence its regular depiction in sculpture and on vases. As cultures proscribed homosexuality, works of art reflected its enduring presence. The author savours biblical examples from Rembrandt, Orazio Gentileschi, and others. The broad range of Mr Fernandez’s enterprise calls to mind the discipline of systematic theology, from St Sebastian to St Genet.

We have the other one: Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art. It consists of four case histories of queer artists that were the targets of censorship for homoerotic content in their work: Andy Warhol, Paul Cadmus, Robert Mapplethorpe, and David Wojnarowicz.

I had the honor of meeting Paul Cadmus in person in June 1999, at the opening of a show at the Aldrich Museum. He was a beautiful, gentle, man (he was 95 at the time). I felt like I was meeting a saint, and in a way I was.

I love that the Navy’s web site has a page on The Fleet’s In.

I am bouncing around all of the stations at soma fm.

I’m not posting much lately because I’m going to a lot of films at the New Festival. I’ll make comments later on my favorites. Almost nothing I’ve seen has been sold out (since I tend to shy away from this sort of material), so all of you reading this should go see some movies!

An artist who amuses me, Eric Doeringer, got a mention (and photo) in Artnet for his bootlegs project. His show at Caren Golden opens June 14. A visitor to my apartment today mistook my bootleg Rob Pruitt for the real thing.

We saw Reno tonight at the Zipper Theater on West 37th. Cool space, fabulous show. It’s a bit more “produced” than when I saw her at La Mama. I love her, and highly recommend seeing it. She hates Telecharge as much as the rest of us, so you can go buy tickets at the box office instead.

Afterward we went to Market Cafe. Bargain! $12 entrees, great wine list, and a waitress that reminded me of Amy Sedaris. I ordered a bottle of Morgon (pronouncing it the French way), and she said – oh, you mean Morgon, like Morgon David.

There’s a nice essay in Salon on the new Tom Waits CDs I just bought – Alice and Blood Money.

Alice is from a musical theatre work created by Robert Wilson and my friend, the brilliant Paul Schmidt — his Chekhov translations are highly recommended.

Blood Money is based on Buechner‘s Woyzeck.

The Axum Obelisk, brought from Ethiopia to Rome by Mussolini’s soldiers, was damaged by lightning yesterday. The CNN story has a picture. There’s more on the history of the obelisk here.