Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn is beautifully-produced by Tinhouse Books and it is a beautifully-written, readable book, featuring entertaining aphorisms and some sex stuff which might be titillating to people who are not me. A peculiarity of the book is the juxtaposition of absolutely brilliant cultural insights about the art world, the educated world, California, and the larger society . . . with really off-base gullible claims about the porn business.

Memoir is usually the process by which the writer imposes story on his or her life. In Los Angeles, memoirists depressingly often impose the tale of their descent into and return from addition as an overlay on their life stories. Zak Smith apparently does not particularly partake of the cocaine he mentions is pervasive in Porn Valley, so his memoir does not fall into the twelve steppers rewrite of existence and that is a plus for any Los Angeles memoir. Zak Smith makes it clear in his anecdotes about his experiences as a successful painter in New York that he doesn’t really like employing narrative structure in his art and he is aware of it. He seems to anticipate that someone might note the lack of narrative structure in his memoir. One of the most interesting things about the book is that Zak Smith does porn partly as artistic exploration and he is very aware of the meta nature of doing the thing to write about the thing.

Like me, Zak Smith (Zak Sabbath to his porn fans) comes out of the DC punk scene. Maybe this commonality is why his comments about California really resonate with me, but I feel like he has at least a really good East Coaster grasp of Cali. Zak Smith writes, “It’s not easy to know what’s going on in California . . . The people in charge are often trained actors, and two of its biggest businesses are aerospace — which is secret — and movies — which is lies . . . I’m from DC. DC punk bands are known for refusing to play ball. In New York, they’re known for trying to play ball, and failing, and then going back to not playing ball. SoCal bands are known for playing ball and being good at it and liking it and laughing at you. And then being on cable TV shows where they get tattooed.” Too true.

In We Did Porn, Zak Smith also writes about the peculiar mood society was in during the “zeroes” at the turn of the millennium. The best art explains something the viewer believes deeply to be true and expresses it in a way the viewer had not previously considered. Zak Smith’s deconstruction of the millennial culture of whiny BS is art; the first thing I thought reading it was that other people needed to read this too. He talks about how politics and news had gotten to the point where the disparate versions of reality presented were utterly incompatible with one another. He points out that the internet facilitated the creation and dissemination of antifacts. Zak Smith postulates that this cynical time lead to a sense that reality was slippery and indistinct, with blurred cause and effect. He writes, “People’s essential hopelessness made everything seem boring and they only talked about a topic if everyone could agree that it was stupid. Wit consisted of coming off as the least bitter complainer.” He describes reality television as offering “the thrill of finding yourself a victim of electoral fraud without the disappointment of realizing it might matter.” Most poetically, Zak Smith ruminates on zombie popularity, “In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.” A lot of the descriptions in We Did Porn reference this sort of slippery reality, stating maybe it is A or maybe it is not A, and this really works for the material.

The most amusing water cooler fact in the book is that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to use semen as disappearing ink. “Happiness writes white”, he says. I hope the semen thing is not an antifact because it is awesome.

Okay, I know the book is called We Did Porn and I haven’t really mentioned the porn part yet. The porn part is really odd to me. Zak Smith writes with wit and self-knowledge in so many areas, and I hesitate to call a memoir wrong in any way, but he just has many of his basic facts wrong on porn. Zak Smith effortlessly sees through the surfaces in the art world, but it is like he swallows whole every nonsense bullet point Porn Valley wants him to believe. When obviously intelligent people spew implausible marketing claims, I tend to assume that they are simply part of the astroturfing effort, but Zak Smith comes across more sincere and genuine than that. It’s just that some of his keen insight is blunted, when it comes to the porn industry, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions.

Most notably, he claims that porn is bigger than the mainstream movie industry and bigger than the automotive industry. Okay, a while back, an adult industry magazine told a newspaper reporter that the adult industry accounts for fourteen billion dollars of business gross every year. Many sources have repeated that the porn industry accounts for ten to fourteen billion dollars in the United States and fifty-seven billion dollars world-wide. Every year. First of all, these numbers are fictional. Playboy has a market cap of a hundred million and grosses about three hundred million a year. Even if you figure that Penthouse, Hustler, Vivid, and Private all do much bigger numbers than those, there is no way porn accounts for that much financial activity.

But let’s say, for some reason, we believe that porn moves $14 billion in the USA annually and $57 billion globally. Toyota has a market cap of one hundred thirty billion and an annual gross of more than two hundred billion. Ford has a market cap of twenty-three billion and grosses around a hundred fifty billion annually. Porn biz is not even a blip compared to the auto industry. It is more difficult to determine precise numbers for companies which produce non-porn movies, as many also sell alcohol or other fairly unrelated products, however I think Box Office Mojo is an excellent source for how movies are charting. They estimate around an average of ten billion in box office yearly and their site explicitly states that, “Box office tracking refers to theatrical box office earnings. Additional sources of revenue, such as home entertainment sales and rentals, television rights, product placement fees, etc. are not included. All grosses published reflect domestic earnings, i.e., United States and Canada, unless otherwise noted.” Heck, all told, with everything factored in, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen alone might do more dollar volume than the entire global porn industry.

So the statements about the size of the porn business are the wrongest ones, but Zak Smith’s explanations of why people do porn are the oddest. He is not totally off-base on many of the motivations, some are insightful, and I’ll probably even write an article later about his intriguing statement that some people like to get paid for sex to evade responsibility for their actions. I laughed out loud at his awesome description of inviting a friend to BBQ and watch a samurai movie in his chapter entitled, “How do your friends talk to you after you start making porn?” This was familiar to me from how friends from school or other areas of my life sometimes treat me. (I’ll spare you all the porn vs. erotica, mainstream Porn Valley vs. independent counterculture debate for the moment.)

The book opens with Zak Smith writing about a disastrous Valentines Day date where the girl he is with has sex with someone else in the bathroom during their meal and then weeps extensively without explaining why and then posts about it online. He says that he loathes the uncertainty of dating; he hates not knowing what is going to happen. I saw Nina Hartley speak at a feminist conversation series a while back and she pointed out that the biggest attraction of porn for her was negotiated sex scenes. She likes to know what is going to happen and found that porn allowed her limits and activities to be comfortably defined beforehand. I don’t know Zak Smith, so I could be wrong, but I think he has the same reasoning as Nina Hartley on that motivation. Narrative structure would require that, having introduced the gun of hating dating in the first act, it would go off in the third act when explanations for why people perform in porn videos are offered. But narrative structure is not Zak Smith’s thing.

Full disclosure: To this day, Zak Smith and his girlfriend Mandy Morbid remain the only people to ever cite working with SuicideGirls as a reason they could not work with Blue Blood. People that Zak Smith and Forrest Black and I know in common, such as Voltaire, had mentioned a number of times that Zak Sabbath wanted to meet us. So I was surprised when Forrest Black and Zak finally met at the Young Hollywood party for Carlos Batts and then Zak said SuicideGirls wouldn’t let him do anything on the list of things I’d assumed he wanted an introduction for. Forrest Black and I actually shot and went to lunch with Voltaire during one of the stays at her home that Zak Smith mentions in his book, but Voltaire was irritated that Zak was trying to get her to do porn, when she’d already said no, so she didn’t invite him to lunch.

So I had an oddly wistful reaction to the We Did Porn memoir. A lot of it resonated with me and made me want to discuss parts of it. Zak and I both got liberal arts educations from high end New England schools, which we then turned to creative output, over-intellectualizing pop culture and underbelly. We both spent some formative years in the DC punk scene. I like the aesthetic he and Mandy Morbid present. But there is also a chasm of differences. All the big American mainstream porn video companies Zak Sabbath has worked with have asked me to direct for them and I’ve chosen not to do so. In fact, although there are certainly differences in our interests, despite the commonalities, the Venn Diagram of who he hangs out with and who I do still has surprisingly few people in common. I guess he plays for a different team.

When I started publishing Blue Blood in 1992 from the DC suburbs in Maryland, maybe I was just too new or too far away from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to realize there were teams. Maybe the teams arrived with the internet. I don’t know. At the time, however, the best part of doing Blue Blood was the enormous access it gave me to interesting people. It makes me feel a bit melancholy that now doing Blue Blood sometimes throws up a wall instead. I don’t really understand how the teams are delineated or chosen. I think they handed out the rulebooks in Hollywood and I was in Rockville at the time and missed it. I don’t know if I ended up on the wrong team. Or Zak ended up on the wrong team. But he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who should be on a different team from the one I’m on, so I feel like somebody did something weird with the draft picks.

I feel like the lines must have been drawn all wrong. If someone would show me the map people are using, I think I might be able to figure out the flaw in the cartography.

Back when I worked in other people’s offices, I used to refer to myself as technologically bisexual. I was equally comfortable on a MAC or a PC. I mean, most of my work was in Photoshop, PowerPoint, and PageMaker, with the occasional call for MicroSoft Word, Quark, or Illustrator. Once in the blue moon, I’d need to use some more esoteric software, but it was generally something available on both MAC and PC. And once I was inside the software, it was fundamentally the same thing on either platform. I could handle the amazingly wrenching switch from dealing with a doohickey key to a control key.

When I bought my own machinery, over the years, Blue Blood has been almost entirely PC. There has been the occasional person who already had a MAC that I bought MAC stuff for, such as a MAC cam or something like that, but, for the most part, Blue Blood has been entirely a PC-based company. I was not prejudiced against MACs. Certainly not at the beginning. I thought the machines were fundamentally the same, except a MAC had a nicer case, and a PC was more bang for the buck. This is not to say that a PC was in any way a technologically better machine. It wasn’t. It just cost a little more money to get the same thing in MAC format. Plus I could buy PC parts and really save by building my own power workstations.

But then Apple came out with their series of Think Different advertisements which made my teeth itch. First they bought all that footage of really cool dead people, like Apple had a fucking endorsement from Einstein or something. Then Apple pitched a fit when The Church of Satan web site, made by actual living person Peter Gilmore, put an Apple logo and a Made with Macintosh web badge on their page. He also made a Think Different tribute featuring a photograph of Anton LaVey with the Apple slogan in the format of the Think Different Apple campaign. Now Anton LaVey actually did own and use Apple computers. Unlike say Einstein who was probably spinning in his grave as Apple utilized his image. Jessica M. Brody of the powerhouse law firm Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn went after The Church of Satan for trademark dilution, despite the fact that there were numerous places on the web which encouraged Apple users to fly their lame substitute for a freak flag high.

I remember from my other people’s offices days that some designers were afraid to work on a PC, simply because they never had. They would try to claim that really the MAC was better for design, for reasons they could never explain. This was awesome because I would get their jobs.

The only reason designers liked MACs better were that the MAC platform tended to be marketed more towards creative professionals. And people who are not tech savvy are often afraid to try varied technology. Musicians sometimes liked MACs better because new software iterations for certain music software packages tend to be released for MAC first. Slacker losers tend to like MACs better because the Apple marketing lets them feel extra creative without them actually having to do any, ya know, creative work. That and Apple did a series of crazy successful ads featuring John Hodgeman from The Daily Show claiming to be a PC and the dude from Accepted claiming to be a MAC and like so much cooler than John Hodgeman. I know I could go to IMDB or even probably just search for the article on BlueBlood.net I wrote about the Accepted party at Comic Con to find the name of the dude from Accepted. But my point is that, even in the Apple adverts, the MAC guy is actually less accomplished than the PC guy. But you can’t have turned on a television or watched video online for very long without seeing the I’m a MAC and I’m a PC advertisements, so I won’t bother to describe them, other than to say they irritated the fuck out of me. And their impact on slacker losers who started talking about the MAC tech superiority because of those adverts just drove me nuts.

And, of course, Apple astroturfed the heck out of forums on the internet where they would have their ridiculous and illogical bullet points posted. And of course the meme-susceptible and the emotionally-needy would pick up those laughable talking points and run with them, causing a viral-born illness of technically inaccurate information all over the web. To anyone who finds mentions of viral marketing makes them think of the claim that a MAC is safer than a PC, because its secure operating system makes it less likely to get a virus, (a) a MAC can get malware, but (b) it does make more sense to program anything first for the operating system with a ninety something percent market share, so I guess that goes for viruses and adware too.

After all that, I started actively avoiding use of or purchase of Apple products. Not because of their technology, which is sometimes slightly ahead, sometimes slightly behind, and generally simply in the running with other similar products. I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone. I have a Sony music player from Japan where Sony released product with higher capacity drives and not an iPod. I have never made a single purchase from monopolistic iTunes which is trying to control what music you can listen to and which musicians can make a living and which can’t. Even though I once received an iTunes gift card as a holiday gift. (Apologies to Matthew Cooke; I did still appreciate the gesture even though I didn’t use the card.)

So I’m terribly terribly pleased that MicroSoft is smacking stupid Apple back with their current Windows Not Walls ad campaign. First off they found an actual MicroSoft employee who looks so much like John Hodgeman that the viewer has to double-take. They point out Apple’s bigotry of cool. Bill Gates apologizes for wearing glasses. Basically they call Apple out for acting like anyone who used a PC must be a geek and nerd and the only worthwhile thing in life would be to be cool and hip. After succinctly demonstrating the loathsomeness of Apple’s fundamental point, the MicroSoft commercial goes on to show that most of the world runs on PCs. A string of successful people in extremely varied jobs from politico to teacher to athlete to musician to actress to guru point out that they use PCs.

I do not dislike Apple products, but their marketing makes me actively irritated. So I would like to thank MicroSoft for bitch-slapping those smug and ignorant astroturfing Apple freaks back.

The biggest problem with the astroturfing style of marketing is that it makes everyone very skeptical of everything; it makes it very difficult to believe in anything. If a star willingly gets naked on camera, there will be some puritanical types who will think ill of them for it. Yet most people who enjoy being in the spotlight and being immortalized have a hankering to be in the spotlight and be immortalized even when they are, ya know, doing it. I have frequently run into famous people who want me and Forrest Black to shoot artistic nudes of them, but who do not want anyone to see the finished work. As an artist, it is important to me that people actually see what I create, so we have, to date, declined private commissions of this sort. A combination of following the various sex tape scandals, and my own personal conversations with people who wanted to get naked on camera without the social repercussions, has lead me to assume that most sex tapes are released with the knowledge and consent of the parties involved. That way, they can get the erotic attention and the victim sympathy.

The problem with this is that some people actually want their private lives to be, ya know, private. I have come to believe that actor Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy is being invaded with the current sex tape clip making the rounds and, at the request of his manager, I am having the honestly barely PG-rated clip removed from BlueBlood.net.

Late this evening, I received an email from someone named Ray Hughes who said that Verne Troyer was his client and who attached a PDF of what appear to be court documents pertaining to a temporary restraining order or TRO. A TRO is something issued by a judge to stop something potentially damaging from continuing while the court determines whether that thing is actually damaging. I couldn’t find any web references connecting anyone named Ray Hughes to Verne Troyer and I actually couldn’t find anyone named Ray Hughes listed as an attorney in Los Angeles. I could easily have blown it off until Monday and spent the evening watching a canceled science fiction series on DVD with pals, as planned. Instead, I read the court documents, which seem to be from a suit against Kevin Blatt, Sugar DVD, and TMZ and sent the following email back:

Hello Ray,

Although I may have shaken Kevin Blatt’s hand at a party, it could have been his brother’s hand, as I sometimes get the Blatt siblings confused. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to Kevin Blatt, TMZ, or SugarDVD, so I don’t think I could easily be characterized as falling under the category of agents, servants, employees, officers, directors, representatives, attorneys, successors, or assigns of Kevin Blatt, TMZ, or SugarDVD, or those acting in concert with them. The video I have displayed is embed code from YouTube which runs off of the YouTube site. Beats me whether the TRO would apply to my situation or not and 10 o’ clock on a Friday night is not the ideal time to get legal advice.

Nonetheless, acknowledging that I have not had benefit of legal counsel and admitting no wrongdoing and waiving no rights I may have, I will express my initial gut response to your request. I believe that my article on BlueBlood.net was respectful to Verne Troyer. It was certainly intended to be respectful of him and his accomplishments. If Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy was invaded, I will cause the references you request to be removed and issue an apology. It is difficult, in today’s virally-oriented marketing environment, to ascertain who truly wishes to keep their sex life private and who deliberately released their naked ass to the public and just pretends concern so no one dings them for being naughty.

I guess it might be possible to figure out contact information to verify via the court on Monday, but, if you could please forward me your response from an email for a recognized law firm before then, my opinion, pre-counsel, is that I can probably accept that as sufficient proof that Verne Troyer is truly concerned about invasion of his privacy. When you email me from an official email address, which I’m assuming you will, can you please advise me whether it is the YouTube video clip embed or the link to TMZ or both which you wish to have removed.

Best, Amelia G
http://www.blueblood.net

Ray Hughes emailed me back a hour later, explained that he was Verne Troyer’s manager (not attorney as I’d assumed) and that he always did business from his Gmail account, but he did CC an email which appeared to be for a Tracy B. Rane at McPherson & Associates, although he indicated that he’d just as soon not involve the attorney. I guess Verne Troyer’s lawyers don’t work on the weekend either. However, the court documents attachment references McPherson & Associates as where to send whiny-ass reasons why it is vital to the public interest to be able to keep naughty Verne Troyer video live on the interwebs. Verne Troyer is listed on the McPherson & Associates web site as a client. I popped over to TMZ to see if they had any mention that they were, ya know, being sued and found the following:

Verne Troyer has filed a $20 million lawsuit, claiming TMZ violated his rights by publishing and airing portions of his sex tape.

In the suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in downtown L.A., Troyer claims TMZ violated his privacy rights and infringed on his copyright and trademark by running portions of the tape on TMZ TV and TMZ.com. He also alleges TMZ violated his right of publicity and misappropriated his name and likeness.

Troyer says the tape was stolen and ended up in the hands of Kevin Blatt, the guy who distributed “One Night in Paris.” Blatt is also named as a defendant.

In addition to damages, Troyer wants an injunction prohibiting further dissemination of the video.

Calls to TMZ were not returned.

I know that a lot of people are inclined to flip any papparazzi from TMZ the bird and nobody wants to pick up the phone to give TMZ a comment. Apparently, TMZ won’t even answer a press query from TMZ.

So anyway, the sex tape video clip has been removed and my sincere apologies to Verne Troyer for any distress my post may have contributed to. I want to be clear that I may not be legally required to remove the clip embed and I am definitely not legally required by any law or settlement to apologize for posting the video. I want to apologize because I feel very strongly that someone who wants their privacy should be allowed to have it, unless there is news which is important to the public interest. It is rarely vital to the public interest that we all be able to watch other people have sex. Not that watching other people have sex can’t be perfectly entertaining, when all parties consent.

I first came across Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction when I was a teenage metal DJ on the radio in Connecticut.

A little background explanation: I got into doing this gig partly because I’d gone to high school overseas and the American overseas high schools I attended were woefully behind the times when it came to music. Like really behind. I used AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters when I ran for class president. (I won. I mean, of course I did; there were AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters.) I was shocked when I found out that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, the big slow dance number where I went to ninth grade, came out more than a decade earlier than I would have guessed on a multiple choice test. So I arrived at college with more of an Aerosmith taste in music than the average student at a competitive, left-wing, East Coast school normally would have. Although I loved bands like Janes Addiction and The Dead Milkmen and The Cure and The Violent Femmes as soon as I was exposed to them, I held onto the hard rock thing because you never forget your first musical loves. Oddly, although my classmates identified as free-thinking liberal individuals, they seemed to hold the view that bands like Motley Crue and Dokken were for lower class stupid people. My annoyance at this classist hypocritical bigotry is probably the reason I became a metal DJ. I was frustrated that my classmates could be so close-minded about something like music. I enjoyed hard rock in my personal musical mix and I wasn’t about to fake like I didn’t just to impress people I went to school with. To bring home the part where I was not hiding it, I ended up playing it on the radio. Never let it be said that I do things by halves.

Before Appetite for Destruction came out in the stores, it was naturally released to radio stations. One of my listeners called up to request the track “Paradise City” and I took a look and we had this album with an appalling Robert Williams painting of a girl up against a wall with her panties down. Only the requested track had lyrics about wanting to go down to Paradise City where the girls were pretty. Ooh, artistic emotional conflict! I was intrigued and had to listen to the whole thing. Appetite for Destruction changed my life. There was plenty of music which had moved me before this. I was a DJ, after all, but this was something new and different and deeper. If not for Guns n’ Roses and William Gibson and Jay McInerney, I would probably be an attorney or a management consultant for McKinsey or some place like that right now.

Last week, something happened which might have made me break my self-imposed rule never to download music. A blog called Antiquiet leaked nine tracks from the long-awaited Guns n’ Roses Chinese Democracy album. On June 6, Antiquiet editor and media expert Kevin Skwerl wrote an article Crying Chinese Democracy where he said he thought Geffen should just release the freaking album already. He said that he stole Appetite for Destruction from his mom’s record collection when he was eleven-years-old and has been waiting literally half his life for Chinese Democracy to come out. His definition of terms is hilarious:

The phrase is now more universally defined as the new Guns N’ Roses album than as the actual political movement in China that inspired the titling. And over the years, the phrase has developed a second meaning: It can also be used as an adjective, to describe something eternally “in the works,” promised countless times, yet never, ever, ever delivered. As in, “that raise I need is fucking chinese democracy,” or “that big break your boyfriend’s shitty band swears is going to happen is totally chinese democracy, tell him to get a fucking job.”

The gist of the rest of the article was that he’d personally worked at Universal and knew a fair number of music industry folks and that everyone he knows, who Axl Rose has allowed to hear Chinese Democracy, thinks the music is beyond excellent. In a very well-written feature he posited that the only way Geffen could ever make back their ridiculously huge investment in the new Guns n’ Roses record was if it turns out to be really good. Kevin Skwerl then brilliantly breaks down the sales aspect of GNR:

In an attempt to recoup some of their eight-figure investment after closing out Axl’s tab in 2004, Geffen put together a greatest hits compilation, with not a single new or previously unreleased track, or any promotional efforts by the band. It sold more than 1.8 million copies. It was the world’s ninth-highest selling album that year. But of course that album had one thing that Chinese Democracy probably won’t have: Welcome To The Jungle . . . Appetite For Destruction still sells 5,000 or 6,000 copies each week.

On June 18, Rolling Stone reported that the Antiquiet blog had posted an article We’ve Got Chinese Democracy, And It’s Worth The Wait. Antiquiet immediately had a bunch of comments from people saying how much they loved the Chinese Democracy tracks. Other sites which linked the downloads also got a bunch of positive comments about the music. Oddly, there was an undercurrent of Motley Crue vs GNR commenting, but the majority of the comments were people saying the music was great and they wanted the CD or legal downloads to come out. Apparently, someone from GNR management then phoned and asked Antiquiet editor Kevin Skwerl to remove the tracks, which he did. On June 24, Rolling Stone reported that FBI agents had come to Kevin Skwerl’s place of employment to chat with him about the situation, and he explained his actions saying that he thought posting the tracks was a legal gray area as the songs were potentially not the final mixes (WTF?) and that he had received the files from an anonymous source which he had since deleted at the request of GNR management.

Cynics question whether the brief leak was a deliberate publicity ploy to “get people talking.” Very few commenters who post about liking the music are people who are signing real names or known online nicks. It is possible that no tracks were ever posted and the whole thing is smoke and mirrors and fake sock puppet comments.

On the other hand, I just discovered Kevin Skwerl’s Antiquiet site and I’ve been really enjoying his writing and Johnny Firecloud’s all morning. They seem to disclose their biases and work backgrounds and it may be unfair to wonder about secret plots. I know it annoys me when people read something journalistic that I wrote and discount it as possibly having an agenda.

The problem is that all the astroturfing of recent years has left people very cynical. A lot of consumers thought they were being forward-thinking by using ad-blockers and claiming total resistance to traditional marketing. So the marketers adapted with fake grass-roots support and forced viral marketing. The record labels shunned rock journalism and attempted to replace it with articles written by publicists, who are bought and paid for out of artists’ future royalties. Add to all that that the record labels decided that the internet age meant they could and should stop servicing journalists and radio. Supposedly they just got sooooooooooo frightened that journalists and DJs would pirate the music and post it to torrents and file-sharing networks, but I think a lot of it was that they did not want to deal with an independent writer’s genuine opinion and they preferred corporate radio’s complete control where the DJ never gets to choose the song. So now we never know whether to trust what a journalist says. And we definitely know (or should know) never to trust what a supposedly random man on the street says. And the radio rarely offers up anything new that we want.

So people are still pining for a new effort from a band like GNR where at least they know they liked it for real the first time around. I know music industry people in LA who tell me lots of bands sounded like GNR in the late 80’s and the label just signed them all and buried them in order to prop up Axl Rose and co. Maybe I just have more visibility to how the sausage is made now than I did then. They say nobody wants to eat sausage, once they see how it is made. It seems to me that, if lots of groups of talented rockers could have been thrown together to make a Guns n’ Roses, then the record labels would already have done so and that manufactured rock just is not the same.

Maybe it is all a sham, but it moved me at the time it first came out. If not for Guns n’ Roses and William Gibson and Jay McInerney, I would probably be an attorney or a management consultant for McKinsey or some place like that right now. I should totally sue those guys.

Note to music industry: Seriously, guys, I don’t want to read a well-written blog and wonder if it is real, so can you please stop ruining all the cool pop culture which inspired me to take the road less traveled. Thanks.

Astroturfing is the word of the week. My brother just told me that one of his model/starfucker friends just called him up to chortle over the word astroturfing. This tells me that it is officially part of the internet lexicon and everybody needs to know the expression.

The term is, like the term spam, derived from an actual product. AstroTurf is the leading brand of fake grass ground covering. Developed in 1964, AstroTurf has been a particular boon for major sports arenas in areas where real grass is not easily grown or cared for. AstroTurf takes their products very seriously and promises to provide whatever is needed for every possible sport:

” The broad range of AstroTurf products ensures that there will be a synthetic turf system engineered to meet the demands of your team’s sport. Whether it’s a field hockey team that prefers the hydrophilic properties of AstroTurf 12™, or a soccer team that prefers the high-density fiber of AstroTurf PureGrass®.

Whatever sport your team plays, there’s an AstroTurf product ready to take the field.”

Grass roots support used to be what you called it when a band or political candidate had a lot of people who believed in them, whether or not the record labels or political machine did. Astroturfing is the act of faking grass roots support.

For example, if you see a point being made over and over again on MySpace or LiveJournal or in forums, and the point is usually made by people who nobody knows in real life, who tell you nothing plausible about themselves, and who do not have known online nicks, then you are probably looking at astroturfing. This means that, when you see certain points made over and over again, by potential sock puppets presenting what they supposedly think in a bullet point sort of structured way, you are looking at astroturfing or fake grass roots support. It is my understanding that often dating sites and sites which sell music street team services to bands are the two types of organizations which most commonly set up fake profiles. Astroturfing is not the only function of a fake profile, but it is a favorite. A non-digital example of astroturfing would be when the news media found out that the enthusiastic fans waiting in line to buy various products when they first came on sale . . . were not really enthusiastic fans. Many bands, when either touring or showcasing, hire good-looking girls to come cheer in the front row, but traditionally one at least had to find real live good-looking girls to be willing to act like they supported the band. Now they can be wholly fictional.

Astroturfing has become popular for three primary reasons. Firstly, the current younger demographics have been bombarded with traditional advertisements for so many years that a certain immunity to them has resulted, forcing marketers to be creative. Secondly, because the internet was initially (ROFL) supposed to be a noncommercial environment, a lot of marketers came up with innovative (and icky) ways to circumvent people’s resistance to blatant and honest commercial presentation. Thirdly, artists and politicians who have actual grass roots support are very hard for the corporate world to entirely control, so corporations prefer popularizing something fake through astroturfing to having to deal with individuals who have personal power.

Now everyone go use the term astroturfing in a sentence this week.