Tuesday, March 16, 2004 3:43 PM | Matthew Jeanes Today is the second day in a row that I've been greeted at lunch downtown by the trucks with the aborted fetuses on them that look like spaggetti-o's with the word CHOICE written real big on the side. This is the kind of thing that necessitates no-cruising laws which our downtown is apparently sorely lacking. Really, any rolling billboard is a tremendous eye-sore and a hi-jacking of public space, but these Anti-Abortion rolling propaganda trucks have gone too far! What the abortion debate needs is less scare-tactics, less propaganda, less PR campaigning and less brow-beating from BOTH sides. What it needs is some honest, science-based analysis and consensus. Beyond that, if the matter of life being a soul that is connected to, but developed independent of the physical body is your hang up, well you can understand why people will be skeptical. On the one hand, the debate is dominated mostly by fundamentalist Christians and ardent religious followers who believe that abortion is tantamount to murder. When you look at that position, it's easy to understand why they resort to terrorism and propaganda: to people who believe that the soul of the person comes into being and should be protected from conception, abortion is essentially murder and they are just standing up for the unborn the way human rights activists stand up for war victims. The irony of the fact that many of the SAME PEOPLE who campaign so strongly against abortion also support the Republican-led war on Iraq is not lost on me, but that's a topic for another day. On the other hand, you have adamant pro-choice women's rights activists who act like any suggestion that abortion is wrong is equal to rejecting the notion of women's rights and propping up the partriarchal structure even further. Where is the common sense? I mean, that's where this whole debate crumbles into lunacy. People who hate religious zealots or have issues with Chrsitianity immediately just accuse the pro-life movement of being crazy Christians. The pro-life people stoop to calling the pro-choice people murderers and baby-killers and suddenly, it's not about the issue, it's about the people raising the issue. It doesn't bother me that the men driving these trucks looked like your fairly average middle-aged, church-going guys... they probably were and that's fine. I believe they have a right to think or believe or even talk about whatever they want. However, it makes me angry that these guys and the people who put up the money to support them can't see how fruitless and counter-productive their propaganda campaign is. Seeing giant 16 ft photos of dead human tissue is not helping anyone decide how they feel about abortion. If anything, it's further scaring the people who already agree that abortion is wrong and it's further alienating the people who believe that abortion is okay. How is this helping? When I boil it down, it comes down to a few fairly straightforward but complicated questions. When does life begin? What lives are deserving of protection? How do you balance the interests of the mother with that of the child? That's really it, as far as I can tell, and each question you answer gives you a further, more difficult question. For instance, question 1 is a real kicker, and its one we don't have a scientific answer for. The development of a fetus is pretty standard, but it's not universally the same so there is no precise moment at which you can definitively say for all pregnancies that the fetus is 'a person'. Is it a person because it has human dna? Is it a person when it has a brain? When it resembles a human? When it has measurable activity in the brain? When it's a viable organism that could live outside of the mother? All of these are jumping off points that have their defenses, but unless you answer this question, you aren't ready to talk about the others. In my mind, this is what the pro-choice movement neglects to see. They seem to largely ignore this question and skip to the third question about the mother's rights. That's a tough one too, but it's something that's not even worth getting to unless you have a solid answer for the first two questions. Almost no-one would agree that infanticide is okay if the life of the baby will inconvenience the mother, but it's a curious situation that we universally extend that protection only after the baby is out of the womb. And therin lies the problem with these billboard trucks: they are making a spiritual plea using scientific evidence. To me, a mass of bloody proto-human parts is disgusting and potentially tragic, but if I'm not convinced that it's really a 'person', that is, if I don't believe there's an independent soul, then all that billboard is doing is making me sick. Animal rights activists try to fight the same fight by showing animals instead of meat when talking about meat, but at the end of the day, if you don't believe animals are deserving of a right not to be slaugthered for meat, then those pictures of little baby chics aren't really doing much. I just wish that people on both sides of these kinds of issues could calm down a bit, rationalize, and talk about what the problems are. Of course in this country, as in many others, the war of public opinion is fought with shock tactics and hyperbole and always will be. Monday, March 08, 2004 12:29 PM | Matthew Jeanes Jon Whitney posted a nice rant on this week's Brainwashed Brain about people blaming each other for the financial demise of the music industry. As an insignificant, tiny little gnat-sized member of that swarm called 'the industry', here are my two cents: There's a weird scale at work in the music business, but there are analogues in other businesses. Take for instance someone who bakes cookies. You may even know someone with a knock-out cookie recipie, the kind of person who brings cookies to parties that elicit responses like 'you should sell these' and 'can I get your recipie?' Now, if YOU are that baker, depending on your inclination, there are a couple ways you can run at this point: You can give out the recipie to anyone who wants it and help them bake your cookies on their own because you just think everyone should be able to have those cookies whenever they want. You can sell small batches of cookies to people out of your home, making essentially enough money to buy the cookie-making supplies, but not enough to cover the time and love you put into the cookies in any substatial way. You can try to start a mailorder business, advertise your cookies online and hope that your domestic partner can support the family while you try and turn your recipie into a profitable mailorder business. You can aim for the top, hire staff, buy a facility/storefront and sell cookies and other items, risking bankruptcy and working 80 hour weeks with the hope that one day big investors will try your product and buy the recipie and name from you so that you can have your face on 100,000,000 bags of cookies and never have to lift another finger. The home-baking industry is really a lot more like making music than I thought, in fact. The point is, as an artist, you have to know where in that pantheon you sit; what are your goals and how do you fit into the greater scheme. Personally, I'm probably somewhere between example 2 and example 3 most of the time-- I'd be happy for people to hear music that I create and I never expect anyone to like it enough to pay for it or support it, but I'm sure happy that they do. I think I've graduated past the stage of doing this just for fun, but not quite to the point where I'm ready to give up a day job and just make cookies 60-70 hours per week! Part of the drive to do all of this is the knowledge that I can walk away from it for a day, a week, or several months if I want to. Part of what makes it possible is the knowledge that I can do whatever I want because I'm not relying on music to make a living--there are no radio promoters to please, no target audiences to cater to, and no corporate image guidelines. I admire people who can jump into it that fully, but for me the lower-pressure environment of baking small batches of cookies works. So how does filesharing affect this process? Well, getting back to the cookies, if I was just trying to spread around some cheer and get people fat on my cookies, people could share that recipie, post it on websites, spam it in emails, and write it on the moon for all I care. However, since I'm dealing with a label now (Ad Noiseam) and since the hardware and software required to make music is considerably more costly and complicated than an oven that already comes with your apartment and some baking sheets, it would be nice to make some money from the venture if I'm going to keep it going. So, giving out the recipie so to speak, letting people have copies of Fashion Victim for free is probably going to hurt the bottom line a little bit. The problem is that people who use filesharing A LOT tend to be dismissive about buying music, and when music is a little off-the-beaten path as ours is, it's understandable that people who can download it for free would never make an effort to seek it out. It's not that filesharing can't be a useful tool to get the music out there, and it's not that I disapprove of people checking it out for free: it's just that I don't see enough people making the necessary connection between the value the music has for them and the value is has for me or the label. At some point, it boils down to personal responsibility and whether or not a person wants to support or reward those who have provided them with a product of service or experience. There will always be people trying to get on the guestlist because they don't want to pay, and there will always be people who download music without ever buying it, but I'd like to think there are enough people who will understand that paying a $5 cover to get into an underground show or spending $12 on an independent cd release that they like goes a long, long way. This goes back to the notion of scale... Mrs. Fields isn't really too affected by whether or not I buy a bag of her cookies, or if you do, or if everyone I know does... she's passed beyond all of that to a place where she makes more money from the use of her hame and likeness and recipies than she ever did actually selling cookies. For her, passing around a recipie for her cookies isn't really going to hit the bottom line because her cookies are priced so that it makes more sense to just buy them than it does to buy the ingredients and spend the time making, and possibly screwing them up. With music, major labels have dug their own graves by marking cds up to the point that it's NOT in a consumer's best interest to fork over $17 for a CD with a handful of worthy singles and a bunch of filler. But still, there is a confluence of factors that are leading to the poor economic showing of major labels, and filesharing is just a small part of that. For an indie label though, dealing on the order of hundreds or thousands of copies (versus tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies) of a release, filesharing can have a huge impact on the bottom line. The question then becomes: "what is the bottom line?" For me, and other artists working at this scale, I'd say the fairest way to state the bottom line would be that "I would like for the people enjoying the music to support its creation". By signing with a label and spending money in a studio and all of that, I've made the conscious choice to commodify my art, but I'd be very content to sell it "at cost". It's a bit like doing a lot of favors for a lot of 'friends' in a way; I will bake you the cookies if you'll pay for the dough and butter and a little bit of my time. It's a fair proposal, I think, and one that doesn't suggest that just because I have created something, that I am entitled to compensation. (That's the easiest mistake to make--to carry that false sense of entitlement where you feel like your art or work should be worth a certain amount.) I don't know how much Larvae music is worth, but I know how much it costs to make, and for the time being, that's all I'd like to see from it. Eventually, like most cookie businesses, if the music is good enough and enough people like it and want it so that demand increases significantly, then maybe Larvae will take that next step towards being careerists in music. For now, it's out there, we hope you will enjoy it, we are happy if you can get a taste of it for free, and we'd be thrilled if you liked it enough to buy a dozen! :) Tuesday, March 02, 2004 4:26 PM | Matthew Jeanes One question I get asked a lot in interviews and by people interested in Larvae is "how do you think the social and political messages that your music is about get communicated by abstract, instrumental music?" It's a fair question, but its one that I think will be answered a little more clearly on this tour. The music itself obviously can't carry the detail of these writings, or of simple conversations I have with people all the time about some of the issues and ideas behind the album. The songs need to be able to stand on their own and breathe and be entertaining in a way that straight up brow-beating commentary cannot. And not only that, but the songs are inspired by certain ideas and themes, but they aren't necessarily a position statement about those themes. I hope they serve as a springboard for some discussion, but I'm not trying to get someone to listen to a song and think a certain thing. With the live show, I'm hoping we can provide even more of a platform for people to leap off into discussions and reflections on some of the ideas behind the record. Seeing Chris and I bob our heads to some beats will probably only interest those select few in the audience who are deeply enamored with human motion studies, so we're trying to bring along some visuals for the show that will work with some of the same ideas as the songs. Seeing Consolidated when I was a teenager had a great affect on me; not only did their videos heighten the urgency of their message, but they were also entertaining and well-integrated with the music. Our stuff will be appropriately more abstract, but I'm hoping it will give people something to watch and serve as a way to more explicitly connect some of the songs to their underlying themes. Finally, the mystery of Tonystark will be revealed!

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