The Atlantic has just published an investigation by Alex Reisner into the scale of copyright theft in feeding the AI fad. (nb, the link may be paywalled). According to the article, Meta employees realised that it would be very expensive to acquire legit copies of the vast number of books they wanted to use and so they had the wizard wheeze of torrenting the contents of a piracy site, Library Genesis. Library Genesis does not disguise the fact that it is a giant repository of ‘free’ books, and I see that its users, or those on Reddit at least, are enthusiastic pirates.
If Reisner is correct, and (a) he is working from legal filings by Meta and (b) I’m guessing that The Atlantic had its fact checkers and lawyers go over it in very fine detail, then Mark Zuckerberg himself gave the go ahead. I find it difficult to believe that Meta was not aware of exactly what it was doing.
Why do I mention this? Because The Atlantic provided a searchable database of the pirated works and I find that my novel The Raven and the Hart is on it. A novel that has, since it was published, earned me the untold riches of just over £200 ($260 at today’s mid-market exchange rate.)
So if anyone finds themselves here through a search for the headline items mentioned in this post and feels like helping a brother out, my books are all available on Amazon and, later in the year, on other platforms. Meantime, it beggars belief that the UK government seems able to condone the behaviour of these thieving bastards.
A solo trip into town last night to the Liquid Room for The Orb and Ozric Tentacles. I’m not especially keen on the Liquid Room as a venue, but I found a spot in the middle of the ground floor and settled in. I’d seen the Ozrics before but not The Orb.
The Orb did their thing. A lot of happy people melted into the beats and enjoyed it a lot; I was not one of them. The Orb’s thing is not my thing – I prefer melody – but that’s OK. There was one really weird moment, though, when it felt like all of existence was reduced to my senses being pummelled by sound and light. It felt strange and somehow important and not, as you might expect, disorientating; it was nice to have that weird sense of being even if my overwhelming feeling during most of their set was please make it stop!
I escaped to the upstairs level where the sound wasn’t so intense and was amused to see the sound man ignoring what was happening and checking his phone messages. Quite a few people were obviously only there for the Orb because they left before the Ozrics came on. Their loss.
Ozric Tentacles bill themselves as Europe’s premier psychedelic trance band and that is as accurate as it can be. Last time I saw them they were on a double bill with Gong and their music swam in the same pond as Gong; this time, with a slightly different line up and Saskia more prominent, they came on like the unholy lovechild of Gong and the Chemical Brothers. It occurred to me quite early on in their set that they were doing everything that the Orb did but with actual musical instruments, played by people. Dear reader, I have to report that your Cosmic Surfer dad danced a lot.
I had another of those moments during the Ozric’s set, and I promise that I had only had one beer with my supper. This time it was longer-lasting and more affirming, with a greater sense of what Jerry Garcia called the form beyond chaos. It pointed toward something other that I thought I understood at the time but didn’t note down and have now, 12 hours later, quite forgotten. Maybe it will come back to me, maybe it won’t; maybe the memory of the meditative moment happening is sufficient of itself.
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Different drummer and bass player, but here’s the Ozrics last year
The Butcher Bird is now out and available in paperback, hardback and kindle editions. Currently it is exclusive to Amazon, though I plan to change that later in the year.
The link to buy is HERE. (link to UK site, just change .co.uk to your local suffix, such as .com or .ca)
Last year, Francis Ford Coppola released his long-term passion project, Megalopolis. The film was largely panned by the critics using terms including sloppy and self-indulgent. Mark Kermode delivered a lengthy rant about how much he disliked it. The film was nominated in 6 categories in the Golden Raspberries and won two of them – worst supporting actor (Jon Voigt) and worst director. Coppola’s remarks at the Rassies are copied in below.
That surprised and disappointed me because I had been looking forward to seeing it when the trailer was released. I didn’t see it in the cinema but I did watch it this afternoon on the small screen.
You may not be surprised to learn that I enjoyed it.
Coppola’s Comments
It is definitely an auteur piece and it is heavily stylised, much as One From the Heart was several years ago. It is also something of a manifesto and an assertive rejection of what has become the Hollywood norm. It is not a superhero film. It does not follow the strictures of the Hero’s Journey. You will not find 15 Save-the-Cat beats. It is much more structured around classical theatre – for Greek and Roman values of classical.
More than anything, it looks at contemporary cinema and shouts from the rooftops that it doesn’t have to be like this, that there is more to the human imagination and to art than is encompassed in the spreadsheets of Hollywood producers, accountants and executives. It is, in a sense, a call back to a much earlier age of cinema when anything was possible. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to suggest that the title is itself a nod to Lang’s Metropolis, a classic of German Expressionist art. (It’s worth remembering that Metropolis was also panned by critics on its release, as, of course, was Blade Runner.) In the context of modern films, Megalopolis induces culture shock, like reading young-adult fan fiction then picking up a novel by Thomas Pynchon.
It also, by a happy coincidence of timing, can be read as a grand satire on the gilded toilet pedestal that sits at the heart of the oval throne room of Trump.
Is it perfect? By no means. Do I plan to rewatch it soon? Yes.
I’ve just had breakfast, idly wondering what to do with the day, and two films sprang to mind: Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and Garland’s Civil War.
I wrote about Zabriskie Point five years ago: They Should Build A Drive-In. I stand by what I wrote there – it is a great film. I watched Civil War recently and mentioned it in a different context a couple of posts ago on February 9th.
I wrote of Zabriskie Point,
We have to start with the obvious statement that Zabriskie Point is not an American film. It isn’t American in conception, execution, tone, pacing or dynamics. It is a film by an Italian modernist that takes America as its subject and object. The notion that there is a lack of nuance in the film misses the point: it is an attempt at a naturalist portrayal of an un-nuanced society. It makes little or no attempt to hide Antonioni’s contempt for what he sees.
By the end, grieving for Mark, Daria sees through the moral emptiness of an exploitative, empty society in which wealthy Lee has a Native American as a housemaid. Leaving it behind, Daria imagines Lee’s house in the desert and all its contents exploding to the aural equivalent of Munch’s Scream, before she drives away. Is she radicalised or just dropping out? We don’t know, Antonioni doesn’t say.
Similarly, Garland declined to do more than allow Civil War to speak for itself. The films are very different in tone and conception, but what they have in common is that both were made about America by Europeans and both were/are routinely dismissed or diminished within America. Civil War is particularly on the nose at present but Zabriskie Point, made and released before Kent State and Watergate and while the Vietnam War was ongoing(1), maps out the social and moral landscape of the next half century. It was prescient in a way that I very much hope Garland’s film is not.
(1) One of the great achievements of George Lucas in Star Wars (1977) was to successfully gull a generation of Americans into supporting the Vietcong against the evil Empire.
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Zabriskie Point features a little of the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star, the full version of which, recorded in 1969, is on their groundbreaking Live/Dead album. Time to head off, you and I, through the transitive nightfall of diamonds.
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