Month: May 2001

Like millions of other Americans, ranging from the pre-tennies of Generation Z to my fellow superannuated old farts, I had, over the last year or so, gotten used to exercising my First Amendment rights (and, yes, a little harmless greed) through that medium of computer exchange known as Napster.

Starting sometime early in 2000 I had been hitting the website with the little ghoulish icon regularly enough to have accommulated a library of some 400 MP3 files Ñ as lush, probably, as anything my ears can hear and ranging from pop to rock to classical to post-modernist whatchamacallit. Trading back and forth with other site-users to download everything from ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears” to Ornette Coleman’s “Chronology” to a choral version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Most of the collection is Golden Oldies, from Rocket 88 (by Ike Turner and by an early-bird Bill Haley, all the way up to some latter-day rave mixes. LaVern Baker’s in there; so is Lotte Lenya. So is the gospel singer James Carr.

I had resigned myself to abdicating from this paradaisical Nirvana (yep, got them in there, too) when I learned, a month or two back, that Napster and its Generation Y founder and the populist corporation that grown up around the file-trading phenomenom had been dealt what seemed a decisive blow by a court decision holding them in violation of music copyrights and requiring Napster to filter out no less than a million selections. (The bona fides of the suit can best be judged by the fact that it was initially brought by the bad boys of Metallica, those supposed scourges of the bougeoisie, who now chose to operate as the last bastion of privilege.)

In practice, this meant that one could not go to the Napster well, type in “Elvis” or “the Beatles” or any well-known latter-day musical act and draw back anything at all. Ditto with the best-known musical tracks (you can access files that way, too, of course). Where once the responses had been teeming, and for any given selection one could pick and choose between line speeds (Cable, DSL, T1, 56K, etc.) and ping and nitrate options (whatever the hell those were), now one got back Zilch. De Nada. Nothing. Talk about a message in a bottle!

The number of fellow users shrank from the million or so who used to be on line at any given time (as the little Napster box in the upper-left-hand corner of your computer would proudly tell you) to a few scattered thousands. And the files made available were correspondingly truncated in dimension. It was like marching home with Napoleon from Russia. Where’d everybody go?

But the Emperor lives, clothed in new hope, and sure to attract new legions. Here’s what I discovered this week, quite by accident, as I went looking, in defiance of all logic, for “The Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits. No luck, this is a major-label act, after all. But then, on an impulse, I typed in “Dire” by itself. Bingo! I got back “The Sultins of Swing” by someone listed as “Dire Straights”. And other selections by “dire strait.” And “Dire Striaghts” and “dire

striats.” And various other permutations– virtually enough to account for the group’s canon. I also got, along with some French selections– “dire” being a verb in that language– two versions of “Dire Maker” (sic) by Led Zeplin (sic).

I soon realized that, among the quarter million or so files out there (the number had, strangely enough, been mounting upward in recent days) were, very likely, some other treasures to be had via someone’s misspelling of the correct file names. And, sure enough, answers began coming back to queries in the names of (one had to experiment to get the right combinations) “beetle” and “rolingstone” and “Madon” and “Temtations” and “Van Morison” and the inevitable “Bob Dillon.” And, my post-toddler daughters will be keen to know, “Brithney” (a name that showed up in numerous other variants), “Agulera” (ditto), and”Nsinc” (ditto). One got results from even so subtle an adjustment as “Back Street Boys.”

I went after the most shielded name of all: Elvis. No luck until I somehow hit upon the expedient of “Elvise Prestley.” Bingo! By that time I realized that nobody was a bad enough speller to be making all the “errors” I was encountering. All these shadings had to be purposeful adjustments. Ventures in code to escape the censor. Acts of conspiracy. Evidently only the correctly spelled names and selections of major-label artists are filtered out. For a sensor (or censor) to be exact enough to catch all the variants imaginable (and guessable) would be to wander so far over into the vale of free expression as to be patently unconstituional. Besides being mechanically impossible.

And what was to prevent little hip ‘zines to spring up expressly for Napster traders, that would suggest a Code Name du Jour for any given artist? This month users might be asked to disguise their “Elvis Presley” files via the name “Zach X.” Next month “Droit de Seigneur.” And so on. Legalized suppression would become virtually impossible. The genie would be back out of the bottle. Napster, he innocent little venture started as a lark by a teenager in 1999 might escape its cage and become a fully-fledged eagle again. Soaring, free, and triumphant, after all. The music industry’s minions conjured up the specter of a conspiracy? Well, they got one.

Count me in as a conspirator. You, too. Take my word for it. You can find anyone and anything you’re looking for. I’m sure even Metallica, though I can’t be bothered to go looking for that.

(Jackson Baker KICKS BACK whenever the mood strikes on whatever topic interests him. In other words, watch this space.)

Last weekend, when “Scary Larry,” as he is known in his neck of the woods, fell off the picnic table into a pile of rocks and then took me four-wheeling through the steep trails of the Catskill Mountains to show me the elves he had hand-carved in his trailer … well, there’s not much more to it than that, but I had to say at least that much, since it was such a nice slice of Americana. And you know, just when you think America is the world’s most civilized country (some of you, that is; I am not among that group), great stuff happens to make us look like a bunch of clowns. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. My favorite story now, though a bit sad, is the one about the toothless former stripper who was befriended 10 years ago by Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who was arrested in February for spying and compromising United States intelligence. This was before George W. Bush was in office, so there’s no threat of that now, of course. Unless someone uncovers the fact that Bush probably intends to clear all the lumber from Yellowstone National Park so workers can see more easily while traveling through on their way to turn Washington State into an oil refinery. But back to the toothless stripper. According to her, Hanssen was merely trying to bring her closer to God– by giving her cash, trips, diamonds, and a Mercedes. (Why does this kind of thing never happen to me? For a million bucks, I’d be at Bellevue Baptist listening to Adrian Rogers’ drivel every day!) Unfortunately, it didn’t do her much good because she hocked all the gifts and spent the money on crack. So there you go. And now I’m tired of writing about that. Speaking of civilized, now we finally have a governor who wants to legalize marijuana. New Mexico’s Governor Gary Johnson, a former handyman, has gone public with his support of legalizing pot, recently appearing at a convention where people were wearing T-shirts depicting the Cat in the Hat smoking a bong. Said he used to smoke pot all the time and loved it but quit because, he says, “the more you use it, the less you get out of it.” Don’t quite understand that one, unless he’s talking about the old tolerance-level thing. Anyway, the dude came out with all this a few years ago, really pissing off then-federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey, who started calling the governor “Puff Daddy Johnson.” See? America. You gotta love it.

I think perhaps I am going mad. Or maybe everyone else is. It’s hard to tell.

This was my week. Thursday night, I went to the Peabody. There was a Sunset Serenade going on, which I’m sure would have been fun had I been on my way there. As it was, I was just meeting a friend, happened to go up to the rooftop to see if she was there, saw multiple throngs of people heading every which way including toward me in a stampede-like formation, got scared, ducked into the ladies’ room, happened on some woman complaining very loudly about men while smoking a cigarette and fixing her pantyhose, and quickly ducked back into the elevator. Downstairs I found my friend, sat down at a table and began a discussion when a man asked if anyone was using the extra chair at our table.

We quickly said no and waited for him to take the chair away so we could continue our conversation when said man plopped heavily down in said chair still sitting at said table. Despite the lack of another chair, his friend joined us, and I’m pretty sure I caught him looking at my breasts when he had a perfectly good set of his own he could have gawked at instead. Without going into too much detail — I’d rather not relive it if it’s all the same to you — we started out talking about industrial soap and by the end of the 10 minutes, one of those guys was practically accusing us of being narcs.

Okay, so on Friday, my friend and I went to see a delightful little bit of cinema called Josie and the Pussycats. This is in no means a review, but I really enjoyed it. Only, once in line at the Malco theater for tickets, we were told that they didn’t take credit cards. And their cash machine was broken. And no, they didn’t know of another one in the area.

So we go outside, ask a security guard if he knows of a nearby ATM, he doesn’t, then teenage boys make loud, (I guess) sexually suggestive, slurping noises at us, we find a bank (with an ATM) right next door, go back inside, buy our tickets with cash, get coke icees from the concession stand and then head toward the guy who rips the tickets.

At any rate, one of us was holding both tickets, the other had both drinks. For expediency, we had each gone through a line. Anyway, the ticket guy looks at us and says, “Oh, a girl can’t carry her own soda?” I’m not sure how well this is conveyed without tone or the smell of buttered popcorn in the air, but the way he said it, it sounded like there was only one girl there. As in, the other one of us wasn’t a girl. But I’m here to tell you both of us were girls, and I would even go so far to say that both of us look like girls (for partial evidence, see below).

After the movie, we went to eat at an East Memphis theme restaurant where our “tour guide” really wanted us to get the Cuban bread. I don’t know why; he just kept talking about it. For 10 minutes, he went on about what it was made with, how it tasted; whatever he could have said about it, he did. I tuned it out after a while, but he just kept talking. Finally we got our food. You’d think that would have been the end of our static cling waiter, but no. Every few minutes, it was like, “How is your pasta with chicken? Does it fully satisfied you?”

Of course he was just trying to do his job, which I totally respect, but then we wanted to pay separately. Luckily, the restaurant, unlike the movie theater, did take the plastic, so we handed them over and just as our waiter was scampering away, I said, “Just so you know, I’m Mary, and this is Rita.” That way he could put the right check with the right person. “Oh,” he said as he came back to the table and extended his hand, “I’m Alan.”

Um …. nice to meet you. I shook his hand, Rita shook his hand, and I suddenly got the feeling he thought we were trying to hit on him. Not that I have a problem with flirting with the waitstaff. I like flirting with waitstaff. Why do you think I go to restaurants? For the food? No. Because mostly young (and thus, hot) people work there. But this person, whom my friend deemed “our waitron” because of his rather robot-like delivery and social skills, I did not want to date. I just wanted to leave.

Saturday seemed to be a little more sane, except I was at the zoo for their first “It’s a jungle out there” party and there were two people dressed as gorillas that kept running around.

Cricket Wireless’ lime green couch was also there, and you could take a picture on the couch, and the people/person with the best pictures won … something. I don’t know what. At any rate, my friend had this idea that we would win if we both did handstands on the couch. Unfortunately she didn’t realize that I cannot do a handstand. Nor did she realize that she can’t really do a handstand, either. This is how it went down. I devised a plan where I would just kick up my legs in a handstand-like motion and the camera would catch me in mid-air. She would actually do a handstand.

So we’re standing next to the couch and the camera man asked us if we were ready. We said yes, he raised the camera, I kicked up, she kicked up, the couch tipped on two feet, I came down and pulled my back, she flipped over and knocked down the Cricket backdrop.

When we came to, we asked the cameraman if he had gotten it. Apparently it had all happened a little too fast for him. The hecklers in the crowd thought it was funny, though. And then the camera man told us to hurry up — there were other people in line — so we just sat down on the couch for our picture, although I did do my best impression of heroin chic.

Afterwards, as we were hanging around the booth, trying to figure out if we could enter again, and trying to figure out if we had an idea that could win, a girl walked over to us and asked, “Would either of you be open to doing something slightly pornographic on the couch with me?” We both politely declined.

So what do huge crowds of young professionals, a duo of doofuses, a movie theater still operating in medieval times, theme restaurants, possibly mistaken gender, slurping schoolboys, and a slightly pornographic invitation have in common?

I have no idea. I was perplexed by each of these events individually. I certainly can’t make any more sense of them when they’re all together. Maybe this is just the world we live in today, where everyone is half-off their rocker and completely unapologetic about it.

Or maybe not. I just thought I’d share.

( Mary Cashiola writes about life every Friday @ memphisflyer.com. You’re invited to come along.)