When Copyright Atrophies

slogans from Eric Eldred's campaign to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act

 Never thought I'd live to see today... the day on which new works enter the United States public domain.

In the mid-1990s, it still seemed to be a routine matter for copyrights to expire on older work, with the occasional news story about which works of 1920, 1921, and 1922 were becoming free for all to access, publish and adapt.

Then in 1998, 20 years were added to all existing copyrights, after copyright holders realized they could simply lobby for increasing the lengths of existing copyrights that were about to lapse (as opposed to the gradual lengthening of how long copyrights will last on new works). Eric Eldred's taking to court the unconstitutionality of such potentially-perpetual retroactive delays (which pretty clearly contravene the Constitution's statement that such terms shall last "for limited times") resulted in the Supreme Court upholding them in 2003.

By the time I joined Distributed Proofreaders the following year, I thought that we'd be confined to merely digging up more and more obscure material from before the 1923 cutoff date. Yet while those 20 years took, well, 20 years to pass, the feared "oh wait, we need 20 more years to, um, go back in time to give century-old creators more incentive" renewal has not. (Ironically, works created in 2004 would have become public domain today under the original copyright length of 14 years.) Americans can finally create like it's 1923!

Three are Free, Baby

It has been a while since I last blogged about writing for Thomas L. Knapp's William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, but at long last I've capped off a planned troika of op-ed commentaries started this summer with the Oscar-baiting "The Madness of the Academy."  "Can't Stop the Bookstore" struck back with my examination of how Amazon's $15 wage may not be the pure concession it has been assumed to be on both sides of the conflict. Along the way, I took a look at the forgotten history of corporate liberalism, explained how a small bookstore has succeeded where Barnes & Noble failed, and found a plotline that The Simpsons hasn't done yet. The trilogy concludes with "Protectionist Presidents are the Parents of Our Country's Trusts" taking on the still-current fallout of Trump's trade policies, uncovering the hidden history of free trade as a progressive cause.

It's a World, World, World, Wide Mad

When I posted last week about my commentary piece "The Madness of the Academy" I didn't know if my take on the Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film would get any attention. After some time circulating through the series of tubes, I dare say that it's more popular than the Oscar itself. It's made its way to the New Haven Register, Citizens Journal, USA Today's The Spectrum, and Counterpunch (and, via Counterpunch, to Open Mind News, Radio Free and Bestseller Magazine).

It's even made it to the print-as-in-on-actual-newsprint opinion pages of The Register Citizen, The Middletown Press, The Daily Lobo and Salt Lake City Weekly. And no, I'm not Tom Knapp (but then again, that's what I want you to think - have you ever seen us in the same place?), but the words inadvertently credited to the guy who created The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, wrote 99% of its content, encouraged this piece and got it ready for publication, and sent it to thousands of outlets are mine (as corrected in the online version).  And I dig Salt Lake City Weekly's cool and well-designed layout, in which a reader opening the page to those words of mine would see them in the company of Peter Yarrow, He-Man and She-Ra with beer buddies Skeletor and Orko (the Trollan's imbibing explains a lot), and even an installment of Tom Tomorrow's cartoon This Modern World!

This won't be the last op-ed I write for the Garrison Center (how many I write and how fast I write them depends on how much Tom has to pay me for them), but if there are any publications you think will be interested in running this not-yet-dated take on the Academy, let them know!

In Which I Grouch About the Oscars

"The Madness of the Academy" is my take on the Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film, my first commentary piece in a long time for Thomas L. Knapp's The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism. I've enjoyed getting back in the op-ed writing game and set to write a couple more in the coming months ... but I'll be able to write more of them if Tom has more money to buy them from me!

Mother Knows Bester

What, me patriarch?

"Even in Pleasantville, there was more to life than Pleasantville," as Jesse Walker noted, but there was even more among the undead in Mockingbird Heights:

"Herman, as head of the house, I think you should get to the bottom of this. Now, you go right on upstairs and have a father-and-son talk with your boy."

"Well, gosh, Lily, I'm not very good at that, y'know, dear. You're his mother. Why don't you go up and have a father-and-son talk with him?"

"No! A think like that is up to the father!" Anyone who's watched Father Knows Best for nine years ought to know that."

"All right. But Donna Reed always handles these things on her show, y'know."

(Eddie's parents in the Munsters episode "Operation Herman")

Hidden Treasure: The Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre

The first of an upcoming series of Joel’s overlooked personal favorite places, events and other things that should be better known.

What is it?

A palatial movie theater.

Where is it hidden?

In Jersey City, New Jersey.

Why is it a treasure?

The screen is huuuge.  Like, very huge.  That-aquatic-dinosaur-in-Jurassic World-that-dwarfs-a-whale huge.  While some IMAX and similar screens may be larger, the sheer feeling of an entire building devoted to one humongous screen is like nowhere else.

Popcorn and drinks are a dollar each. With tickets usually going for $8 (less for double or triple features!), there’s no better value for a dropped Hamilton.

The building is unique and historic.

It dates back to 1929!  Built just before the stock market crash, the last pre-Great Derpession moment when lavish building for a mass audience was economically feasible, it maintains much of its original style.  Much of the facade still needs fixing up from decades of disrepair, but the core functions of a theater are fully operational, and the twist on the original grandeur makes it perfect for an Addams family reunion (which actually was a theme this past Halloween!)

How did I find it?

I knew about it for a while (I’d sometimes seen flyers for its upcoming screenings at NYC theaters such as Film Forum), but it was the closing of Manhattan’s Ziegfeld theater in early 2016 that spurred me to check it out.

Why is it hidden?

It’s a little out of the way of the NYC-focused revival theater circuit, and not as hip as the Alamo Drafthouse theaters in Yonkers and Brooklyn.  As a non-commercial theater, it doesn’t do current releases or have big marketing campaigns.  (Then again, the Ziegfeld was neglected when it was run like a typical big-chain commercial theater in its later years.)

And unfortunately, it lacks a working air conditioning system, so it has to take a summer break during peak moviegoing season.

What is the path to the treasure? Well, literally a PATH, since it’s across the street from the Journal Square PATH station.  “JSQ” is part of a subway line (though not part of the “NYC subway” system, another reason it’s quasi-“hidden”) that bridges New Jersey and Manhattan and connects to various transit systems.

There is one last movie screening tonight before the summer break — The Red Shoes at 7PM — and the building will be open for the JCArts Annual Year-End Gallery Show.

Is this thing still on?

It's been a while.

This blog was never updated on a daily basis even in its early heyday, but it trailed off in a major way.  Some of this is due to Twitter and then Facebook, and my attempted clean break to Wordpress was unsuccessful in starting new momentum where the old had stopped.

But I've been craving a return to the old-school blogosphere from the maelstrom of gossip and trivia and venting that is social media.  That's where everyone seems to be nowadays, but some of my fellow bloggers who started around the time I did, like Tom Knapp, have kept at personal blogging with a regular if relatively small readership, so it can be done.

And I was sick through most of May, so any attempt at doing a whole month of writing would have to wait.

So in a new month, here I am.  Are you?

MeTryWriMo

My challenge to myself this month: how much can I write, including but not limited to this blog, in the shortest month of the year?

happy 100th, centenarian mathematician Richard K. Guy!

Some mathematicians die young, like Galois, Abel, or Zhitomirskiy. Others are active well into their 90s, like Bertrand Russell, Martin Gardner or Richard K. Guy, the last of which turns 100 today.  I recently remembered an article a couple years back about him walking over 800 steps to the top of a tower every year, and looking it up shows that he did it this year:

From the The Strong Law of Small Numbers to the glider in the game of life, Guy's discoveries (and compilation of the undiscovered, in Unsolved Problems in Number Theory) will be leading to new mathematics in 2116.  Happy birthday, Richard K. Guy!

newspaper roundup

On April 1, my op-ed "The race is on: Uber versus the real sharing economy" ran in the newspaper Jamaica Observer.  And no, that's not an April Fools joke.

In fact, the piece was written all the way back in February, a month in which it appeared in print in both The Des Moines Register (not online, except behind the paywalls of the paper's subscriber archive and the ProQuest academic database) and La Tribuna Hispana (in that paper's own Spanish translation!).  The same month, two of my letters to the editor also appeared in newsprint: "Tests and time" in Queens Chronicle and "Jews Onscreen" in The Jewish Week.

The September-October Country

It's the 13th of October. Boo!

Worst Blu-ray cover ever: National Lampoon's Vacation.

There are plenty of terrible Blu-ray covers out there, but none of them can quite match the one for National Lampoon's Vacation.

The theatrical poster had a badass illustration by Boris Vallejo in the style of his own sword-and-sorcery book covers:

Then, the DVD cover used what I would have bet my life was the crappiest possible Chevy Chase photo on it:

Luckily I didn't make that bet, because the Blu-ray cover achieved the Herculean feat of using an even crappier Chevy Chase photo.  Feast your eyes on this:

back to (modern) school blogging

It's been a while.

In the past two years, I've been away from this humble BlogSpot(TM) blog, experimenting with a move towards a WordPress(TM) platform.  But I just couldn't get the hang of it.  I had used WordPress for more disciplined writing on other sites (but that just made personal blogging feel more like a chore than self-expression), but I could never figure out how to set up the plugins that gave it all the bells and whistles on my own.  And worst of all, my readership was not just the intermittent trickle it is here (hello, all 4 followers I've retained over the years!) but nonexistent.  For better or worse, my claim to Internet fame remains on this blog.

I began to need a change from my change of pace.  Something without the customizable fussiness of WordPress, something more like the "type in a box and press Publish" simplicity of the interface that got me posting online in the first place.

Something that plenty of the bloggers I enjoy reading still use for personal musings and community to this day.

So here I am... again.

To kick things off, I'm trying again at modern school week!  Last year's attempt in WordPress exile fizzled, but with the upcoming 43rd annual reunion of the Friends of the Modern School coming up this Saturday, I want to see if I can post something Modern School-related every day this week!  (No I haven't attended all 43... more like the last 10, give or take.)  My blog post about the 2006 reunion is the most comprehensive overview I've written of this unique educational experiment so far, but that should change... this week!

Update: aaaand the very first promise I make when returning to blogging, I fail to keep.  That's why I try to avoid making promises about personal blogging...

National Lampoon's European Socialist Vacation

When C4SS Media made this video, they obviously forgot to include this background image:

The Court Intellectual Mindset, In Fifteen Words

"Most intellectuals are attracted to power, but none with less ambivalence than Arthur Schlesinger Jr."

 

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A candle in the cold and the dark: 17 years without Carl Sagan

Sorry to not have a more substantial post, but I thought I'd check in with the blogosphere on the 17th anniversary of Carl Sagan's passing.  It's been a long seven years since the 10th anniversary blogathon (yet Sagan would have only just turned 79!), and the Internet is a very different place, but I am thinking about how to revive something like the blogathon on an ongoing basis.

go see Suspiria at the Museum of the Moving Image

Must-see film screening of the YEAR: Dario Argento's horror classic Suspiria at the Museum of the Moving Image tomorrow.

Yes, it gets shown all the time at revival theaters.  But there is no movie that more demands to be experienced in the very best possible visual and sound quality, deservedly celebrated for both its gorgeous cinematography and stunning soundtrack.  I've even been to a screening where the theater had the truly unenviable dilemma of putting the film either on a screen with sound-system problems, or one with better sound but markedly worse visual quality.  And this is almost the Platonic ideal of a presentation: in the Museum's gigantic main theater with the most impeccable revival screening environment in New York, in not only a 35mm print in an era when that is becoming increasingly rare, but an "imported 35mm print of uncut UK version"!

the opening sentence of an upcoming book review

"In 1975, two leftists, one of whom had been a top GOP insider, anarcho-capitalist, and a founder of the American libertarian movement, collaborated on a book published by a leading Washington, D.C. left-wing think tank and the Unitarian Universalist Association advocating decentralization of political and economic power from the federal, state and city levels to local neighborhoods — hopefully facilitated by the passage of a Republican senator's bill to divert 75% of income tax revenue to them."

Santa Claus Conquers the Gray Lady

Little-known fact: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians received a positive review in The New York Times praising Pia Zadora's "appealing" performance. No, really.

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Lost in Non-Non-Translation

At one point, this was how the Chrome browser's built-in automatic translation handled the header of mutualismo.org: