I wasn't a huge fan of Pearl Jam until they moshed in Ticketmaster's face. Unfortunately Eddie Veddar and company jammed up against one of the more powerful monopolies in entertainment today.
Disgusted with the ridiculously high "service charges" and lack of security (huge blocks of tickets systematically going to scalpers) PJ decided to try a more fan-friendly way to put asses on seats. They got theirs burned in the process.
Ticketmaster threatened Microsoft's Sidewalk last week in what was either a lover's spat or a chum fest for corporate sharks. Dashing Barry Diller (HSN, Fox, Paramount, Hell) stepped in to calm everyone down while he walked away with the assets. Barry Diller, TicketMaster and Microsoft. An evil triumvirate if there ever was one, and you and I can hardly avoid making them richer. That's entertainment!
I'd link to Ticketmaster out of courtesy if nothing else, but I'm now afraid they'd sue me. It's not nice to tick off Ticketmaster. Pearl Jam found itself locked out of major venues in major cities for not playing along. The venues must cooperate with Ticketmaster or be cut out of the lucrative loop of tightly-controlled big name shows.
Concert promotor Barry Fey, an institution on the Denver music scene for decades and whose operation sells over 900,000 tickets a year, is flirting with one of Ticketmaster's competitors. He may have trouble The company is called Teleseat, whose approach offers such conveniences as kiosks in supermarkets where you can see your seat, swipe your credit card and walk out with your ticket and your canned goods.
Ticketmaster doesn't play around. The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Baily circus liked the Teleseat approach and wanted to try it for their Denver appearance. Ticketmaster threatened to hike the "service charge" on the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Baily's other shows around the country if they chose to go with Teleseat in Denver. TicketMaster's business plan is based on the tried and true show business truth: there really is a sucker born every minute.
My grandfather ran a factory that manufactured Rum & Maple pipe tobacco back in Kentucky fifty years ago. When the government started telling him how to run his own business he decided to shut it down. Around forty hard-working citizens faced unemployment until my father stepped in and took over.
These days small business owners face increasing interference from afar. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a self-serving and bloated government agency in the fine Washington tradition, has released guidelines which will make it more difficult to rid your workplace of a disruptive and/or unproductive--even destructive employee. (Your tax dollars at work.)
This nation, founded on individual initiative and balanced on the back of small businesses, is allowing itself to become hamstrung by distant uncaring agencies who justify their existence by writing bizarre "guidelines" supposedly protecting the great unwashed. What baloney.
The EEOC has a bunch of lawyers on the payroll. The EEOC released "guidelines" for business that will undoubtedly lead to a ton of lawsuits. Makes sense if you're a lawyer. It's lunacy if you're a small business owner.
I was subjected to a full background check and even had to pee in a cup to get my current gig. Some prime candidates may be deeply off-put by such intrusions and simply pass. Bill Clinton has never held a job in the private sector in his life. Do you have to take a urine test to be the President of the United States? I bet you don't. (One obviously doesn't have to take a lie detector test.)
Born of the best intentions, the EEOC has done some fine work, but the bureaucracy seems to have run out of big problems to solve and instead busies itself with creating small ones.
The music industry gets pretty uncomfortable with any technology that facilitates high-quality duplication. Back in the old days bootleg vinyl albums were a nuisance to the recording industry. Bootlegged albums were generally a labor of love, of lesser quality and lacking the lush packaging of the "official" product.
Most of my bootleg records have blank sleeves and blank labels. Purchasing them was an act of trust, usually a cash-only transaction occurring in a secret hotel room floors above a ballroom "record convention." To nab a particular Beatle boot at one such convention I even had to have a password and secret knock.
Now you can download (albeit painfully at the moment) the same digital information that is on your store-bought CDs directly to your hard drive. The recording industry has good reason to fret about copies and lost revenue.
We've discussed in this space artists such as Todd Rundgren and David Bowie offering direct-to-consumer top-quality downloads of new releases via the net. The iceberg under these tips is a huge one. With a CD-burners hovering at five hundred bucks, high-speed cable modems becoming the new standard, this stuff is right around the corner.
To address some of these fears, or perhaps simply to capitalize on them (and why not, there's big business in terror of extinction) a company called Solana has developed a digital watermark that is embedded in a downloaded audio file. Not that this will deter copying, but it might provide a path back to the original file that may have spawned thousands of truck stop dupes.
So when the Chinese or Japanese duplicate hundreds of thousands of illegal boots of a new release, will knowing "who" downloaded the master make a big difference?
I have a special place in my heart for The San Jose Mercury News ever since they ran a story about The Angle and spelled my name right. So it is with great sorrow I witness the paper owning up to some fundamental faults with the explosive series entitled, "Dark Alliance" they ran concerning possible CIA involvement in Los Angeles cocaine dealing.
We've become too accustomed to the CIA, the FBI, the military--(what have you), lying to the American people (who employ them). It's part of the their job, I guess, to lie. All we ask is that they do it well and with a sense of style.
Apparently, something went kind of weird with the funding of the Contras. All the cloak and dagger maneuvers may have resulted in massive amounts of drugs being dumped on the streets of LA. The rest of the "conspiracy" might be, to use Harlan Ellison's phrase,"angry candy." Whatever you choose to believe, if you want to connect the dots, you don't have to go very far to find the next one, and the next.
More likely, the CIA who was in bed with the Contras, who were running cocaine like we sell cigarettes to the world--knew of the drug being distributed in Los Angeles but simply didn't care. Collateral damage. Certainly they weren't instrumental in the genesis of the problem in their view. If folks want to buy the stuff and ruin their lives that's their business, not the Central Intelligence Agency's.
Gary Webb won the "Journalist of the Year" award for the series. No news yet as to whether he'll have to give the award back. He still maintains that the CIA-Contra connection resulted in the ". . . first mass market in America for crack."
I knew they had oxygen bars in Tokyo, where fresh air and Western cool is the stuff of dreams, but Los Angeles? I guess it had to happen. But Woody Harrelson? Isn't he the dope who is constantly promoting the right to breathe marijuana smoke?
Woody, erstwhile co-star of the "Cheers" television series which promoted alcoholism, building a bar where everybody knows his name, and all the hot air is fresh. For sixteen bucks plus tax, you can hook yourself up to a tank which pumps plain or gently scented air up your nose for twenty minutes.
(Usually in Hollywood it costs a lot less to have someone blow smoke up your . . . oh never mind.)
Los Angeles has had smog problems since the Native Americans built camp fires there. The lay of the land traps stale air in a capped pocket hovering above the city. Often brown. The culprits include everything from the obvious auto traffic to backyard bar-b-ques and gardener's weed whackers. Huge tractor-trailer trucks with their belching black diesel smoke might have something to do with it too. Los Angeles has air you sometimes have to chew before you swallow it.
I'm just not sure what twenty minutes of pine-fresh oxygen will do to offset the effects of 23 and a half hours of breathing polluted air. Proponents say it can ease headaches and stress and allows you to think more clearly. I wonder how many walk away, sixteen bucks lighter, clearly thinking they must have been nuts.
Sounds like the typical LA quick-fix to me. Anybody remember high-saline, floating "isolation tank" relaxation therapy? It all makes me wonder what "flavor" air is in the tank Woody hooks up to?