“The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.” —Czeslaw Milosz

Ashley Bickerton’s paintings are a form of combat between attachment and its opposite, a fusion of subject matter with distance between the parts. His mastery of tone—tone as defined by writers, not painters; that elusive internal, fluid, ambient quality in art that is shaped by the attitude of the artist towards his subject, or towards his audience, or towards himself and his way of painting, that nearly impossible-to-define tug of war—through a dialectic, sometimes dialogic, angular use of tone he holds things together but also always apart, and that is refreshing. Total integration is a terrible thing. In any work of art, and probably in life as well.

Chekov once said that if a playwright hangs a gun on the wall in the first act, there had better be a murder by the third. And that is the reason I don’t watch plays, except when they’re written by a friend and I can’t find an excuse fast enough. They feel claustrophobic, an elevator, a closed box taking you in a simple line, opening up into the deracinated self-consciousness of the artist’s private aesthetic salon or, at the very least, onto a grotesque scene of the artist clutching his subject like a monkey.

It’s exhilarating to find an artist who can sip a slurpie while watching an atrocity without losing his capacity for care.

I stood in Bickerton’s Bali studio looking at Preparation with Green Sky, a vaguely Polynesian bacchanal taken to bounteous limits, and a part of my mind kept drifting towards the callipygian shape in the background. “I like something about the unselfconscious glee in which the fecund young women proffer their piglets and their buttocks to no one in particular while the blue man offers his bounty directly to the viewer,” Bickerton says.

And the critic answers, “I can’t stop looking at that butt.”

Continue reading Ashley Bickerton

The New York Times just had an article about search engine optimization. Apparently my headlines are all wrong. I need Taylor Momsen, though I have no idea who she is. I need “Jon Stewart Slams Glenn Beck.” At least I know who John Stewart is. I’ve never used Google Trends or Omniture or what have you. I know it’s old fashioned, I know “news” is just code for advertising and propaganda, but, still, I’d like to at least maintain the pretense. When you have  Sears partnering with AOL to create a news site that only runs good news, called Good News Now or GNN, that’s a Disney dream — not just because it’s sickly sweet, but because that sweetness is always a wrapper for advertising. As TechCrunch writes, get ready to barf.

A commenter says perhaps that’s a welcome relief from the current “you’re surrounded by terrorists and child rapists panic Panic PANIC NOW!!” news system, but media like Fox News seem to have blended them into an algorithm, ten minutes of panic panic, ten of the world’s getting worse, and ten of “elderly couple tie the knot.” Who’s left to confront power?

Madison, the 4th US president, said: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

The world is not getting worse, at least not in terms of violence and safety, the things that are most often cited by the panic-now crowd. Every century has had significantly fewer violent deaths from the previous century, going back to the dark ages. Yes, the famously violent 20th century had far fewer violent deaths than the 19th, which had fewer than the 18th, etc. But in terms of what it means to be human, I’m not so optimistic. Call me old and conservative, but Taylor Momsen with her three million Google hits seems a bit of a step down from Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Bach, or even from the New York Post’s famous “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline.

A long long time ago, in a land far far away, I ran a gallery that had a philosophy of integrating art and life. Gaya (in Bali) includes a restaurant and, after I left, added a gelateria. I love gelato, mostly because it comes in hazelnut. “Ice cream” doesn’t come in hazelnut. It comes in double-caramel-fudge marshmallow rocky road, chunky monkey, or whatever flavor can stuff the most chocolate, nuts, and other goodies into an ice cream bucket. The more explosions, the better the ice cream. Like a Hollywood movie.

On most days I’ll take Taxi Driver over Tarkovksy’s two-hour landscape pans, and, similarly, I’ll usually take a Brooklyn pizza over its poor Italian beta version (do I dare wax poetic about the lasagna pizza at Broadway and North 7^th, run by Mexicans, a full lasagna on top of a pizza, or would that kill what little is left of my credibility?) But ice cream’s not pizza. There’s something about the purity of a hazelnut gelato that trumps the multidimensional density-whorls of New York Super Fudge Chunk.

Continue reading Edible Language.

The Harvard Law Record recently did a profile piece on me, “From Law School to Novelist and Art Critic.”

Alexander Boldizar ’99 became recognized by Slovakia’s president as the “first Slovak citizen to graduate from Harvard Law School” when, as he puts it, “small country nepotism” got him back the citizenship he’d abandoned in 1989 (he thought it would be unsafe to keep it during a visit to the crumbling Berlin Wall). Since then, he has managed an art gallery in Bali, established a flourishing career in editing and freelance writing, and has continued to seek publication of his magnum opus, The Ugly, a satirical novel about a dispossessed Siberian tribe that sends one of its members, Muzhduk, to learn the ways of lawyers from HLS, a plotline which helps express Boldizar’s frustrations with law and legal reasoning. Below, Boldizar writes on his path from the law to novelist and art critic, followed by an excerpt from The Ugly.

Read more on their site.

“Homo vult decipi; decipiatur.”

Through years of traveling the world and writing articles in magazines, I’ve developed psychic powers. I can influence your actions by controlling the cadence of the text on the page as you read it. Unlike some charlatan astrologers, psychics and witch doctors, my skill is based in science, a lifetime of studying how the rhythm of language influences brainwaves, particularly certain passages buried deep within the English language, passages that were dictated to me by an old woman, a hermeneutic. The study of those passages demanded supreme scholarship to interpret, years of intense application, and it has still not been wholly worked out. In order to help me, the old woman gave birth to my grandmother, who bore my mother. When my mother gave birth to me, there I was, deciphering the dictations of the old woman.

Continue reading Magic

First a rant — forgive me, I’m flying and can’t help myself but marvel at the magnificently low IQ of the people in charge of airport security.  Because the latest attempt to bring down an airplane involved starting a fire in the last hour of the flight, now we can’t get out of our seats during the last hour. When the attempt included a shoe, everyone’s shoes got checked. After the liquid plot, liquids. Always fighting the last “war,” no matter how ridiculous a category.

If anything, after 911 airport security should have been DECREASED, except for bomb sniffing dogs, as now passengers will mob and kill any hijacker on sight instead of obeying like sheep and waiting for the authorities to handle it, as they were taught to before.

911 made airplanes far safer–because of more aggressive passengers and because of reinforced cockpit doors, not for any other reason–and security should be relaxed accordingly. Instead, we get more rules. Rules that are supposed to be idiot-proof. But when the people making the rules are themselves idiots you have this wild synergy of idiots drafting what they imagine to be idiot-proof rules, and the whole thing spirals into absurdity, orange alerts, and passengers peeing their pants while keeping their hands in their laps, visible at all times. And we’ve created such a society of passive obedience, that the majority of the audience in all this security theatre nods their heads and patriotically understands the necessity of waiting four hours in security.

The irony is that what foils people like this guy, or the shoe bomber, is aggressive, independent thinking passengers. But the government/TSA reacts — always — by creating rules geared towards increasing the docility of passengers. It’s like a one-way ratchet.

Even from the perennial perspective of cowardice (“safety first!”) that has become a default for our society, it’s frustrating. For the pretense of lowering a risk of dying that is only one in four million passengers, we’re willing to double wait times, costing 300 million passenger hours (or 450 lifetimes) each year. I don’t have the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet a large sum of money that deaths from blood clots as a result of being unable to get up from your seat the last hour will be higher than one in four million passengers, let alone than the actual decrease in risk from enacting this rule (i.e., one asshole who burned his balls). And imagine if those 300 million hours per year were put into something useful — medical research, community service, whatever, how many more lives that would save.

For that matter, imagine if the money put into the whole war on terror were put somewhere efficient. Forget morality, freedom, etc. Even simple efficiency comes to the same conclusion: if $100 billion directed to security saves 4000 people, but $100 million directed to health care saves 100,000 people, then simple cold, right-wing-style economics and rational thinking should say it’s more efficient to allocate the money to health care.

But sometimes one gets tired of railing against a tyranny that protects itself in large measure by marketing itself as nontyranny. It’s a subject that I get into arguments with my friends on both the Left and the Right. The Right seems to think that health care is tyranny but endless police powers make them free, an argument that I don’t understand at all. I don’t understand how they can see the enforcement/coercive power of the State as benign while seeming to be terrified by the additional option of government-provided health care. Or how their capitalist arguments in favour of efficiency can be squared with the cost-benefit numbers of military vs health care spending. As you unravel government, it seems to make more sense to unravel the inefficient bits first. And, as an anarchist/libertarian, I would add that it makes more sense to unravel those segments that are fundamentally anti-individualistic, which starts with the institutions that limit individual choice (police, etc), and leaves to the very end those that increase choice (health care, education, etc.)

And on the Left, I have friends convinced that Bush/Cheney engineered 911 in order to crown themselves kings, destroy democracy, as though their goal was to establish a tyranny — when what they fail to understand is that a tyranny becomes much less powerful once it’s seen as such. The strongest source of power in our tyranny is precisely the fact that the majority of its subjects don’t see it as such. By being selective, they can shut down any real threat to their power. I can speak and write as I want because I have no influence, no power at all, and by writing this I ensure that I never will. It would only be the most childish, unsophisticated of tyrannies that would attack people who are clearly no threat at all, simply out of paranoia or offense. Tyrannies like that mobilize their own enemies, and eventually fall. And nobody can accuse the military-industrial-multinational complex of being unsophisticated. Unfortunately, most of its critics on the Left are, and their use of poor argument tends to pull down the rest of us with it.

So enough about tyranny. Let’s talk about bladders instead, since we’ll all be holding them for the last hour of the flight.

The TSA rules have made me wonder why we have bladders at all. Only placental mammals and bony fish have bladders. Yes, I can use my bladder for marking my territory, or to prevent myself from leaving a trail that predators can follow, to pee my name in the snow and other evolutionary displays of social fitness. In a corporate high-rise office building setting, the ability to delay dribbling down one’s leg increases the odds of reproduction.

But how did we come to evolve them? The fish bladder is not homologous – fish tend to disperse of their ammonia through their gills, using their bladder for osmoregulation. That part still makes sense. But the vent in birds, the Malpighian tubules in insects, and the cloaca in reptiles, amphibians, marsupials, and monotremes combine all of the excretionary functions in one neat unit, and it works just fine. Why did we evolve first a separate urinary tract, and then a bladder?

What makes the whole thing even more puzzling is that other than humans and trained pets, most mammals don’t use their bladders to hold in their urine. They dribble it out as soon as it comes in. (Which weighs against one of the main ad-hoc explanations of the bladder, that its purpose is to prevent us leaving a scent trail for predators.)

Developing a whole organ takes some doing. Kidneys can reabsorb liquid, and generally make a lot of sense. Bladder, not so much.

The only thing that makes any sense at all for the bladder is that the bladder evolved as some aspect of osmoregulation in fish, was dropped by everyone other than mammals, and survived in mammals as peeing became an art form. Still, there’s a big gap there.

Obviously I don’t believe there is a nonevolutionary reason. That doesn’t mean anyone understands the evolutionary reason behind the bladder. In other words:
1. the adaptation was evolutionary (this is a statement of probability, as is all science, not “faith”)
2. nobody knows why it came about and survived long enough for peeing to become an art form / source of social status, etc.
3. once peeing became social, a whole new series of evolutionary reasons started to support fancy bladders.

Anyway, evolutionary biologists seem to have no idea and consider urinary bladders one of the few remaining Great Mysteries. And mysteries are always fun. And it’s easier on the blood pressure to think about bladders rather than tyranny.

Perhaps we can have a reality show, where everyone removes their bladder. Or has peeing contests. Or something equally distracting, to help us pass that last passive hour on the plane during which we hold our pee, keep our hands visible on our laps, and seek refuge in the TV in front of us. Temporary, of course. If the TSA manages to stick to this last-hour rule, then I wonder how long before the in-flight “entertainment” during the last hour of every flight becomes 100% commercials?

People who are uneducated, demoralized, distracted, and afraid are far easier to govern than those who are educated, unafraid, and engaged. And every shoe bomber, ball-burner, liquid mixer makes the job of those in power in our political system — the modern “fusion of state and corporate power” that Mussolini once defined as “fascism” — easier. Every one of those fanatic assholes shifts a bit of power from the people to the authorities.

Anyway, I’m just glad the guy didn’t try to set his pants on fire inside the toilet. If he had, the United States organs of state security would probably have banned all toilets from airplanes. Talk about demoralized and distracted.

I’ve always found it puzzling that my Christian friends find it puzzling that I celebrate Christmas even though I’m not a Christian. Or that my Jewish or Muslim friends correct me when I wish them a Merry Christmas. Christmas is a time for family, which is always a great excuse for a holiday. And, growing up, our Christmas was the sort of pantheist hodge-podge that only a family of atheists would come up with, including gefilte fish during Christmas dinner right after a specifically Slovak garlic-wafer-honey ritual that wards of demons and has fused with Catholic communion ideas, a Buddha and a Shiva on the mantle next to the Nativity scene, and so on. But in doing some research today to verify a suspicion that Christmas is already a pantheist hodge-podge (or “synthesis,” see below), I came across something that warms the religious cockles of my heart: that Santa is Odin in disguise.

Of all the gods, the only one that even as a kid I could ever imagine worshipping was Odin, but I’d thought him dead. And here I found he’s been hiding under my nose every Christmas for 38 years. This makes me happy: I can join all my friends in having a touch of religion, even if nostalgic childhood-ish religion, in my Christmas.

During the Germanic holiday of Yule, Odin led a great hunting party through the sky. Both the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, describe Odin as riding an eight-legged flying horse named Sleipnir. Among Odin’s names are “long beard,” and “Yule figure”.

Children would place their boots, filled with carrots, straw, or sugar, near the chimney for Sleipnir to eat. Odin would then reward those children for their kindness by replacing Sleipnir’s food with gifts or candy. This practice survived in most of continental Europe after the adoption of Christianity and became associated with Saint Nicholas (patron saint of children) as a result of the process of Christianization — St. Nick still fills children’s boots in Europe with candy on Dec. 5th/6th — though the holiday also started as a provocation to the church, with a child dressed up as a bishop, the burning of smelly shoes instead of incense, and rhymes with swear words like ‘kapoentje’ (castrated male chicken — a jab at the bishops) woven into the original Christmas carols.

Saint Nicholas, or Sinterklaas in Dutch, came to North America through New Amsterdam (renamed New York after it was traded to Britain), and turned into Santa Claus. Here, the boot ritual evolved into the hanging of socks or stockings at the fireplace.

And Odin, of course, was always associated with the tree, where he hung for nine days, Himself sacrificed to Himself, in order to learn wisdom. Although the leap from a tree to a cross is not large, trees were central to pagan rituals and, as such, this was one area where early Christianity did not try to graft itself onto existing beliefs. Rather, it tried to fight them: the Christmas tree is explicitly prohibited by the Bible. Jeremiah 10:1-5 says [2] …Learn not the way of the heathen… [3] For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. [4] They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

There are other tempting Christmas-tree associations in history. The shamans in Siberia used to pick the red-and-white amanita mascurias mushroom and use it for visions.  They’d found that if you ate the mushrooms directly, you’d have visions, but you’d also die of toxic shock. If you dried it over the fireplace in a stocking and fed it to a reindeer, on the other hand, the pee that passed through had only the good parts and you could fly through the air until spring, if you wanted. Which was good, since they lived in yurts that, in the winter, they entered through a chimney hole in the ceiling.

Getting high off reindeer pee may be a bit of a stretch for Christmas, but no more so than any Christian claims to the holiday. These claims revolve around the idea that Christ was born on December 25th, a belief that has no basis in either the books of the Bible or in early Christian history. For the first 330 years Christ’s birth was celebrated on the eve of January 6, and even then only paranthetically (since early Christians considered any celebration of birthdays to be a pagan custom) as part of the feast of Theophany. It was moved in 330 AD in an attempt to replace the Roman (pagan) festival of Saturnalia and the Sol Invictus festival of December 25th, the birth of the unconquered sun. The Romans believed that the winter solstice lasted three days, and December 25th was the first day with a detectable lengthening of daylight hours.

From Wikipedia re Saturnalia: “The celebrations included a school holiday, the making and giving of small presents (saturnalia et sigillaricia) and a special market (sigillaria). Gambling was allowed for all, even slaves. It was a time to eat, drink, and be merry. The toga was not worn, but rather the synthesis, i.e. colorful, informal “dinner clothes”; and the pileus (freedman’s hat) was worn by everyone. Slaves were exempt from punishment, and treated their masters with (a pretense of) disrespect.”

There is no evidence whatsoever associating Christ with December 25th that is older than 330 AD except for several manuscripts of Hippolytus’ Commentary on Daniel, a work of the early third century, that state

For the first appearance of our Lord in the flesh took place in Bethlehem eight days before the Kalends of January [25 December], on the fourth day [Wednesday], under Emperor Augustus, in the year 5500.

But most scholars of the period believe that the reference to 25 December is a late correction of the date actually stated by the author. The author’s date may be preserved in a single manuscript which curiously contradicts itself by giving two dates: both 25 December and 2 April. For two reasons, it is likely that 2 April is the original reading.

1. A third-century work called De Pascha Computus, which, it is agreed, is based on a lost work of Hippolytus, states that Christ was born on Passover. It is therefore probable that Hippolytus himself was of the same opinion. Although the date of Passover Eve varies from year to year, it is never far from 2 April.
2. In the Lateran Museum at Rome is an ancient statue of Hippolytus which was probably executed shortly after his death. This statue bears the dates of Passover for the years 222-333, and next to one date, 2 April of a certain year, is inscribed “genesis ['birth'] of Jesus Christ”. No doubt the statue was intended to honor Hippolytus as the one who calculated the dates of future Passovers. We therefore surmise that in the third century, it was believed that Hippolytus set Christ’s birth on 2 April, one of the recurring dates in the Passover cycle.

Then there is the whole issue of sheep. Not only were sheep rarely grazed in the wintertime, even in Palestine, but the particular sheep in the nativity story were sacrificial lambs being prepared for Passover. And there is a variety of (questionable) astrological “evidence” pointing to Christ’s birth in spring, which I won’t detail because it all depends on a correct assignation of the Star of Bethlehem in a particular constellation.

But if Santa is Odin, the tree and all “yule” celebrations are Germanic-pagan, the gift giving and feast are Roman, and the date has nothing to do with Jesus, what part of Christmas is Christian?

Not that this takes anything away from Christmas. I think it’s a wonderful holiday, and if people want to attach a religious significance to it, by all means, they should do so. For myself, I’ll focus on Odin/Santa, which adds a nice touch of tragedy to Christmas–I can’t help but feel a little sad for him, to go from a warrior god to a jolly fat man. But I guess that’s a natural part of the aging process for men and gods alike.

But my point today: throw out the toga and the dogma, and put on the synthesis and the freedman’s hat, Christmas is for everyone: Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, pagan, pantheist, atheist… MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

A brand used to be a symbol burned onto a cow’s butt. [When] a ranch had a long-standing reputation of raising healthy cows, the brand was its symbol of quality. But once the “-ing” was added to the word “brand,” and agencies started to ply the black art of “branding,” a brand was no longer the symbol of quality and reputation earned over time. Instead it was something that was just made up by ad agency creatives applying ingenuity to the disingenuous.”

— Augustine Fou

When people who are paid to opine wake up to a new industry dynamic, they often overreact. As pundits on the periphery of the branding industry belatedly noticed consumers exchanging information directly via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, the field began to echo with shouts of “Branding is dead!”

I don’t buy that argument. Would you, if I could name an $80 billion market that gets customers to pay between one and ten thousand times the price of an identical competing product, with nothing to differentiate the two except for 100% pure clean branding?

No, it’s not art, though I’ll come back to art later. It’s bottled water.

Continue reading The Brand Is Dead! Long Live the Brand!

Over the years the people I’ve met who self-identify as “anarchists” tend to be among the dumbest and the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure or displeasure of knowing. Very few reasonable people attach that label to themselves. In an attempt to avoid being lumped with the dumbest, I thought I’d distill my reasons for doing so, from the least to the most important.

1. Anarchism as the conscience of law. Given democratic notions of legitimacy, the fewer people who believe in “the rule of law” (i.e., the more who believe it is just a veiled imposition of power), the more transparent the veil, and the more the law has to obey its own rules in order to maintain legitimacy. When rule-of-law marketing and propaganda are insufficient to create legitimacy, the powerful have to limit the arbitrary use of their power and shrink the number of cases they can treat as extraordinary. Anarchists weaken the faith element within law, and by doing so force it to obey its own rules.

2. Anarchy as a vector. Through very gradual change, we’ve created societies in which nearly every aspect of our day-to-day life is controlled. I tried to go to a sunny outdoor bar at a lake with my three-year-old son the other day. I was told that (a) I had to wear a shirt; (b) my son couldn’t be in the bar even without drinking; and (c) I couldn’t get the beers to go. These were all rules created by my neighbors, though none of the three had any impact on them. I don’t necessarily want to live in full-blown anarchy, except perhaps in a small anarchic community where all the individuals are highly educated and empathetic. But I do think we need to go in the direction of less order.

When you put a frog in water and turn the heat up suddenly, it will jump out. When you turn the heat up gradually, it will stay in and cook. Human beings work the same way, and we have overcooked ourselves with rules to the point where (shifting culinary metaphors for a moment from frogs to pasta) our modern societies have become a porridge in which you can no longer tell whether you started off with fettuccine or with fusilli or, for that matter, with frogs. If full anarchy is raw pasta, then yes, perhaps it’s hard to chew, but when you’re starting with a tasteless overcooked mess, raw sounds pretty good.

At any rate, I don’t believe in utopias. There are no stable end points, only movement and vectors. Given where the world is today, I’m an anarchist.

3.  Anarchism as ontologically authentic. Groups, being soulless, don’t exist except in the abstract. The individual human—who is born, lives, and dies—is the only relevant metric by which any non-abstract phenomenon in this universe can be measured. Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends,” and Heidegger spelled out in magnificent nuance the importance of being-towards-death as the only possible structuring mechanism for life, authenticity, and meaning. Institutions, organizations, corporations, unions, countries, societies, religions, legal systems—soulless collectives of all sorts—don’t live towards death. An immortal abstract entity without subjectivity or a soul can never understand the concept of authenticity, let alone sort through the ever-present ambiguity between what is authentic and what is not. And any individual who abdicates his personal sovereignty to the value system of a group gives up his own chance at authenticity and meaning. These require responsibility, or the ability to respond to specific situations on a subjective level.

Each individual can find meaning and authenticity only by personally rolling in the mud. By climbing a tree (considered “disorderly behavior” in many US cities; see e.g., NYC Parks and Recreation section 1-04(l)(2)). By facing death. By stealing fire from the gods and slugging it out with the angels. By exercising personal responsibility and care. The only political system I know of that doesn’t clash with these criteria is anarchism.

4. It’s fun to break the rules.

I’m an anarchist and it’s OK was first published in the October 2009 issue of Liberty.

After Boing Boing blogged, yes, Boing Boing blogged, about Ralph Lauren’s most recent photoshop disaster, they (obviously) included the photo. The one over there, on the left, with the model whose head is larger than her entire pelvis.

Ralph Lauren’s law firm cynically sued. I say cynically, because you don’t get a more perfect bull’s eye on the fair use exception to copyright: a reproduction “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,” etc. But large companies do this all the time. They sue knowing they’ll lose, simply because the blogger or magazine can’t afford to defend the case for years. They use the law as a club, and in today’s cautious culture, many, maybe most, people cave.

But Boing Boing’s blogger Cory Doctorow didn’t cave. In a rare (everyone else took the photo down) dual display of backbone and funnybone, he responded with this brilliant post:

So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn’t give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will:

a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and;

b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and

c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.”

Thank you Mr. Doctorow!

He also writes, “As Wendy Seltzer from the Chilling Effects project said, “Sounds like a pretty solid fair use case to me. If criticism diminishes its effectiveness, that’s different from the market substitution copyright protects against. And I’ve rarely seen a thinner DMCA form-letter.”" And yet Photoshop Disasters’ ISP took the image down, as did lots of other cowardly sites. Shame on you, Google Blogspot!

In the type of world I’d like to live in, for every coward who took the image down ten more would put it up. Not because I care about Ralph Lauren or the whole argument about skinny models (I personally don’t want models to look like regular women, though as a man looking at an image I find nothing attractive about a giant skull on spindles; and just so I don’t seem effeminately enlightened, I’ll add that I prefer models to have more characteristics of balloons and fewer characteristics of sticks; but whatever), but I do care about bully companies and literary freedom.

This is the type of case I became a lawyer to fight. Instead, I found myself reading 512-page addenda on ball-bearing classifications, or on a team with 120 other lawyers spinning Palm off from 3 COM (giving away my age now…). But if I can’t fight this as a lawyer, the least I can do is stick my neck out as one additional defendant for Ralph to sue.

(I’ll say it again: “Boing Boing blogged”. It’s a good thing to write.)