Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

A message in a bottle washed up at my doorstep the other day, a CD from an old time friend from the shores of Long Island, Tommy Davis. He’s the lead guitarist in surf twang band, Shecky and the Twangtones.

Many folks on Long Island know Tommy for his reggae and blues guitar music, and the tiki lounge surf rock sound of The Ventures and Dick Dale is an exciting new addition to his repertoire.

Live Diamondhead performance video on YouTube. More videos on the Shecky web site: BAJA and Around and Around.

After discovering the photo references made in the New Yorker’s American Hardcore collage (see story below), I emailed The New Yorker bring it to their attention. A reply and apology came surprisingly fast from the Art Director of the piece, and a reasonable offer of compensation. John Ritter, the illustrator also emailed and apologized for a mixup of images during a tight deadline. Everything has been cleared up in a professional and ethical manner, and there are no hard feelings at this end.

I have a problem about blowing my own horn, but in this case you will hear a Mile’s Davis plays Jack Johnson virtuoso blow out. Not that it’s any big deal, but I’m casually thumbing through the Sept. 25 copy of The New Yorker, and all of a sudden I see one of my photographs on page 48. Fragments of two of my photographs as I focus a bit more carefully. The central figure is from one of my favorite shots of a crazed slam dancing punk.

The other image used is a guy with a buzz cut who got knocked on the floor.

He looks like he is prostrating to a more powerful punk, and so I collaged him into a Beefheart message for his song Ashtray Heart, accusing 80s punks of using him.

In today’s interconnected Internet world there is much media to be found. This often works in my favor, as Google and other web crawlers sniff me out. Some of these rock photos have been found by book, audio CD publishers, television programs and ad campaigns and they respectfully write and request permission to use and we negotiate. My policy is to make a fair deal, so that the photo gets published and the publisher is not over charged.

A recent example is a biography on Michael Stipe by Rob Jovanovic. He made a request, we negotiated terms including a very nice copy of the book, and everybody is happy. Worked the same way on an earlier project about R.E.M. publishing my 1982 photos in Adventures in Hi-fi.

These are some great images, and I can understand why somebody might want to steal them. I was fortunate to be on the scene, have my act together shooting the film and processing it myself, and enjoy publishing the images on my Media Spin web site.

People on Myspace began linking them for their home pages over a year ago. It’s sort of a punkish thing to do, and non-commercial.

In the case of John Ritter’s collage image in The New Yorker, he most likely received compensation and credit for “his” work. The problem is, this is a collaboration and Mr. Ritter did not acknowledge it. I enjoy being published in The New Yorker, and due credit and compensation would make it feel right.

P.S. After making this blog entry I contacted The New Yorker by email and received a very quick response from the Art Director who handled the American Hardcore collage piece.  I’m happy that the situation has been properly remedied.  The artist, John Ritter also contacted me and was very kind about making amends over the incident.  Things happen under quick deadlines.  All’s well that ends well.

A couple of days ago I got on the BART and sat down next to a big guy who was reading the paper. All of a sudden he says loudly in my direction, “Remember what?!”

He seemed a little angry, and I looked at the speaker. He appeared to be a middle aged native American Indian, wearing a red bandana headband over his long hair. He had a kind of tough, beaten up face with a little bit of mustache and beard. He wore a jacket that had various tribal patches and emblems on it.

“Remember what?” I repeated back to him.

“9-11… what was that?” He said, obviously playing games with my head. His newspaper had a big story about never forgetting 9-11.

I mumbled something like, “Yeah, that’s what they’re writing about this week, you know.”

I went back to my reading as he spoke about his people migrating here over the Bering Strait, losing their land and ending up in jail. He mentioned being in jail himself and doing sweat lodges with Archie Fire Lame Deer.

“Look at all the disease and death in Africa these days,” I offered to the red man. “It seems like most of the world’s problems are due to overpopulation. Do you really think the tribal native American lifestyle could have lasted?”

That didn’t seem to cheer him, and he sat quietly brooding. He got up for his stop and as he exited the train, he called out to the passengers, “All you foreigners have a nice day!”

I guess you might say he’s been anti-immigration for a long time.

Monday I participated in a design review for Youthgive, a youth oriented charitable community web site. At the table were a number of writers, thinkers and designers with strong knowledge of web design and Internet development, such as Howard Rheingold and game developer Anselm Hook. Part of what we did was to share links to innovative web sites such as OpenLayers, Wayfaring, Wetpaint and ID Mashups.

Following up and tracking many of the new mashups, creative displays of local based information, I found MappedUp. Of course anything that looks this cool was done in Flash. MappedUp is an application that tracks a large number of RSS news sources and displays their latest items on a world map, geographically and in real-time. It’s been developed by Jeroen Wijering a grad student in the Netherlands.

GG Bridge from Presidio. Originally uploaded by goblue72.

So, it was good get outside and see what other folks are doing. A meeting on the Presidio campus with the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin Headlands out the window allowed the mind to air out a bit. I need to do this more often.

Finally I ended the week by impulsively starting up another blog, Tubular Times, devoted exclusively to the explosion of online video. It’s on Goggle Blogger, which handles Flash video more gracefully than this WordPress blogging software does.

In today’s news, Norman Pearlstine, a long time top manager at Time Inc., the magazine division of Time-Warner, will be joining The Carlyle Group a Washington, D.C. based global private equity investment firm with more than USD$40 billion of equity capital under management, as a senior advisor.

I briefly met Mr. Pearlstine while at Time Warner, when hired to work on their experimental “Full Service Network” interactive television effort in the early 90’s. When introduced as a technical lead for the New York office, he half jokingly asked me, “Are you the one who is going to save us?” I good naturedly replied that I’d try my best. We knew we were in over our heads.

The Time Warner Cable FSN project was a technical boondoggle in deep trouble and would not be able to launch their tests at Celebration, FL for the scheduled date 4 months away. From what I gather, something was launched over 2 years after our meeting, but by that time broadband internet was all the rage, and TW was eying AOL as their path to interactivity. Back in those days, I advised TW to use the Internet as a channel on their interactive cable TV service, but the idea was dismissed, although not by Pearlstine himself.

In the days leading up to the FSN’s proposed Spring 1993 launch date, I had a longer discussion with Walter Isaacson, who was then the Managing Editor of Time magazine. In order to protect my immediate superiors at Time Warner Interactive, I was not able to disclose to him how feeble the FSN effort actually was. How would that look in a Time magazine article!? Even if I had told Isaacson of the many flaws in the system, I’m not sure what good it would have done, but I regret not having a deeper, more honest discussion. So much for office politics and paranoia.

Today I continue to work as the consultant behind the consultants, advisor to the advisors. I spend more time in the real world, hands on in leading edge places, from which many of the upper echelon are insulated and unaware.

The Medical Illustrations CD-ROM which I had worked on for 6 months last year has recently been published by Purestock, a division of SuperStock. The CD-ROM contains 200 images that were rendered in 3-D using Maya software. The high resolution still images are based in part on previous 3-D bio-medical animation.

Just received my copies of a newly released CD, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band Amsterdam 80. This is an extremely clear 74 minute recording of Don Van Vliet and his band performing live at The Paradiso in Amsterdam on November 1st 1980. The CD album jacket includes 6 color photos I shot of a Beefheart show from the same tour in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on December 10, 1980. For more details about that fateful December show, looky here.

The CD jacket also includes some fine shots of Don by photographer Deborah Feingold. As the man says, This could be the best batch yet.