Adam D. Roberts

The Ethics of File Sharing

You can download any album you can think of right now for free. You can also, probably, download any movie. The technology that allows you to do this, BitTorrent, is (according to Wikipedia): "a peer-to-peer communications protocol for file sharing." What that means is that if a person has a movie that you want on their computer, you can use BitTorrent to place that file on your computer. Never before has so much media been so readily available to so many people and because it's so readily available, it forces questions about the nature of music, the nature of film, and the ethical obligations we owe to artists for their work.

Let's start with music. What is music? Music, I'm pretty sure, is not the CD that you buy at the store, it's the sound that comes off the CD when you put it in a stereo. Music is intangible: it's not a thing you can hold, it does not, intrinsically, have value. You wouldn't go to a merchant and say, "Give me some music." If you did and he played you a scale, he couldn't say that it was more valuable than if he played you an arpeggio. We assign music value and we do so based on many factors, not the least of which is the packaging: who makes this music? How new is this music? What does it mean for me to be listening to this music?

Pop stars understand this formula better than anyone. Madonna is a master of packaging: her music is good, but it matters little next to her persona. And, therefore, to hear her music live--because of the exclusivity of the event, the care that goes into the presentation--costs you hundreds of dollars. A person standing outside the arena where she plays might hear the same music for free, but they're missing the point: live Madonna music without seeing Madonna is pointless, much like a Fellini movie without the images is pointless. In pop music, image is everything.

Would it be unethical, then, to "steal" a Madonna CD online? What are you stealing when you download her album? You are stealing a duplication of a duplication of her voice as recorded at a particular moment in time. Its value is only proportional to the pleasure you get from hearing it. If Madonna wasn't famous, and she came to your doorstep in a mask and sang "Borderline" how much would you hand her from your wallet? $5? $10? $20? That last value, $20, is what you're expected to pay for her newest CD at the store. That raises the question: who's robbing who?

Isn't something valuable based only on how precious it is, how hard to attain? Doesn't the very fact that BitTorrent exists change the value of music recordings? There was a time that to hear music you could only do so live. Then came the phonograph, then the 8-track, then the audio cassette, then the CD. With each advance in technology, the marketplace shifted. Now the music industry has to answer to the fact that the product they sell is immediately reproducible and immediately shareable. That's not true of a loaf of bread, a diamond ring, a house in Vermont: it's a function of the intangibility of music that makes the present predicament so hard and so strange.

Same with film. Once upon a time, you could only see a movie at a movie theater. When VHS came out, I remember it was a big deal. My parents spent an insane amount of money for the Mary Poppins VHS they bought me for an early birthday: it must've amazed those who grew up having to go to the movies to be able to watch movies at home.

Now, if I wish, I can download Mary Poppins on BitTorrent. If I did, what I'd be stealing wouldn't be a tape or a DVD, it'd be a series of numbers--a code--that my computer would process and turn into images and sound. I could pay for this code if I bought the movie on the iTunes music store, but the question arises: why pay for something that's right there for me to pluck off a network?

The answer to that question is worth billions of dollars to both industries. Moralists will say stealing is stealing and even if it's online, even if it's just a click away, it's the same thing as going to a store and putting the DVD under your shirt. And yet these same moralists might burn CDs for their friends or borrow a DVD to watch instead of renting from a store. Isn't this also stealing? Where do we draw the line?

I'm conflicted. I don't know. Part of me thinks that because the landscape has changed, because music and film is now transferable online, the industries will have to catch up and shift the market back in their favor. If that means encrypting CDs and DVDs more vigorously, if that means containing the online media somehow, the responsibility falls to them. I don't think it's a matter of punishing those who trade files online: they should focus on the cause, not the symptom.

What matters most, ultimately, is what's best for the forms themselves: what's best for music? For film? Is it better to make media limitlessly accessible, so we all expose ourselves to artists we'd otherwise never spend money on? Or do we damage their careers and make it impossible for them to continue if we steal their product? I think it's a little bit of both. So artists too will have to answer to the new technology and make it work for them.

It's an exciting time to be a fan of the arts. More people than ever before are creating new content, and their content--along with the old content--is only a click away. How we get this content and what we pay for it are questions that'll shape the future of entertainment.

Lollipop

Moistworks is a website I read frequently that posts mp3s and offers a writer's take on the songs. Since they seem to be doing this legally, I think I can do the same. I'd like to share with you my new favorite sugary pop pop poppy song. It's called "Lollipop" and it's by this emerging European artist, Mika. Like candy, it'll stick to your brain and then rot it. So what!? My favorite part is when the little kid sings. And the rest of the album is pretty great too---I listened to it while driving around San Francisco. Enjoy your lollipop!

Listen to Mika's Lollipop.

A Bar of Soap

I am home for my brother's graduation and since my brother and I share a bathroom, I found myself in the shower with no other recourse but to use "his" (in quotes) bar of soap, a fancy Kiehl's bar given to him by his girlfriend for his birthday. This raises the question: how unsanitary is it to share a bar of soap? I mean: it's soap, right? Soap cleans things. So isn't a bar of soap automatically clean? I held it under hot water for a few seconds, rubbed it in my hands, and put it to use. However, when I told my brother he was mad and begged me not to use it again. What do you think, America?

American Idol

It's a Jordan/Melinda game. Melinda's the more talented--more nuanced, more in control--but Jordan's younger and fresher. Craig's money's on Jordan, but I'm rooting for Melinda. Blake's a goner.

Make Guilt Work For You

Jewish guilt and Jewish mothers go hand-in-hand. When the voice of self-discipline turns on in my head, it's my mother's voice--Queens-inflected, gum-cracking--and she questions my actions in a pointed way that forces me to re-evaluate whatever decision I'm making. "Adam," says the voice, "are you really going to wear jeans to this very important meeting?" Or: "Adam, how can you not call your father on his birthday? Call him!"

The voice becomes the most vivid when it comes to the subject of "work."

"What are you working on?" And when I answer the voice responds: "You call that work?"

It's very hard for my parents (and my grandparents and all their friends) to wrap their heads around my chosen vocation: writer. "What do you do all day?" "How can you afford your meals?" "What if this doesn't work out?"

The truth is that most of their questions are valid ones. As I told a friend recently, I feel like I'm ice-skating on the edge of an abyss. I'm circling round and round--polishing my first book, working on another--and at any moment it might all come crashing down. And so I press on and I don't really think about how delicate my situation is.

How do I press on?

It's a process of harnessing guilt. I use the guilt of my chosen vocation--the late mornings, the pleasurable lunches--to motivate myself to work my ass off the rest of the day. It usually works like this: wake-up at 10, shower, write e-mail, go eat lunch, arrive at coffee shop, feel guilty, work work work, go home, make dinner, feel guilty for making Diana and Craig do dishes, blog.

One might look at this and think: "How spoiled!" I look at this and think: "How much more fulfilling this is than when I worked at a law firm!"

When I worked at a law firm, I arrived at work at 9 am. I checked e-mail. I drank coffee. I asked my boss for an assignment, he gave it to me. I took my time setting it up and soon it was lunch. We all went to lunch (my fellow interns) and lingered and chatted and came back around 1. Then I checked e-mail again, surfed the web, and gradually finished my assignment so it was done by 5 and I could go home. My time was not spent efficiently, but people still praised me for my efforts. Like most people my own age, I scraped by doing as little as I could do for the maximum reward. In other words: I was ambivalent and safe. I hated it.

Now I'm wildly passionate about what I do. I love the work that I call "work." When I spend my afternoons writing, I couldn't be happier. And when I blog later in the day, I love seeing the immediate results, I love reading your responses. Yet why do I feel so guilty?

Cue the voice. "Because a REAL job is a job you go to. There's no stability in what you do. What if your book's a flop?"

Many might be defeated by these words, but--as the post title implies--I make this guilt work for me. It motivates me to write exuberantly, to read and re-read exhaustively, to revise mercilessly. It makes me stay an extra hour at the coffee shop table with my head in my hands, my iPod on full volume, trying to figure out how to replace the word "perfectly" in chapter five (because I've used it once before). I harness the guilt and I get the work done and I pray that I can keep doing it until I no longer feel guilty, when I realize that this lifestyle is actually a career and that many others (the names stacked on tables at your bookstore) live the same way.

My friends who struggle to get writing done--to finish that novel, to start that screenplay--either suffer from too much guilt or too little guilt. Those with too much guilt feel like they have to work an impressive job with upward mobility to feel good about themselves at the end of the day. They come home exhausted with little energy to write and fall asleep cursing their bosses instead of themselves. Those with too little guilt, casually toss off pages with little fanfare, taking for granted the free time they have and hardly re-reading a word because their first drafts are "good enough." I used to be that way when I was in college, when the short story I was writing for Creative Writing class only mattered as far as how loudly my classmates would laugh at what I'd written. Now it feels like my whole life hangs in the balance.

If I'm successful, then, I owe thanks to God, Moses and my mother for making me feel so guilty. If I sell another book, their guilt will finance my therapy.

The Sound of Music, Deconstructed

Diana and I, Masters of Dramatic Writing (at least it says that on our diplomas), watched "The Sound of Music" the other night and reached the following conclusions:

- The major dramatic question of "The Sound of Music," the thing that keeps us glued to our seats eager to know what happens next, is a question articulated at the beginning by nuns in song: How do you solve a problem like Maria?

Maria, as portrayed by Julie Andrews, is a conundrum: she's a nun, so she's taken a vow of chastity (among other vows) and yet her heart yearns to "laugh like a brook when it trips and falls over stones on its way." In other words: she's horny. A horny nun. Say what you will, but that's what's driving the movie.

And so the question becomes: how does Maria reconcile her yearning with her chosen vocation? Enter Captain Von Trapp. In their very first interaction (which involves a dog whistle: kinky!) sparks fly:

Maria: Oh, no, sir, I'm sorry, sir. I could never answer to a whistle. Whistles are for dogs and cats and other animals, but not for children and definitely not for me. It would be too... humiliating.

Captain von Trapp: Fraulein, were you this much trouble at the Abbey?

And thus a great movie is born. The great movie, with great music by Rogers & Hammerstein (working at the height of their powers) lasts about two hours. It begins with Maria on a hillside and it ends with a wedding, after which a pretty boring movie begins.

- Once the major dramatic question is answered--when Maria, who flees the Captain when the Baroness tells her that he's in love with her (the crisis), reveals to the Mother Superior her feelings about the Captain, the Mother Superior sings "Climb Every Mountain," giving Maria the kick in the ass she needs, Maria (at the climax) returns to the Captain & kids and the Captain dumps the Baroness and takes Maria to a gazebo where they sing "Nothing comes from nothing / nothing ever could"--the movie slips into a silly Nazi escape movie. Sure, that may sound like sacrilege, but think about it: when Maria and the Captain return from their honeymoon, she all but disappears. Maria is the heart of the movie! And when she's back she has nothing to do. Sure, she helps the Captain get through "Edelweiss" when he freezes up in front of his fellow Austrians, but then she's both literally and figuratively hiding behind a rock (or a sculpture) as the Nazis come hunting for them. Boring!

This is what happens when filmmakers (or, in this case, musical writers) are too dutiful to their source material. Sure, the real Von Trapps did escape from the Nazis by climbing mountains, but that's not the story they're telling here. The story here is about a horny young nun who finally gets laid.

- Musically, though, the motifs play out nicely. If there were no words and it were a silent movie, you could pat Richard Rogers on the back for weaving through the "Lonely Goatherd" theme (Diana said that song was a waste of time, but I pointed out how the song is about Captain Von Trapp "high on a hill" with all his goat-like children) which is a melody that repeats throughout the movie, both at the party and (I think) at their wedding. And, of course, how "Climb Every Mountain" comes back as they climb every mountain. But, at that point, the movie's lost its sizzle. Dramatically, we're exhausted and we've lost our patience. Though it's fun to watch Captain Von Trapp disarm Rolf, the little mailman-cum-Nazi.

All in all, the good parts of The Sound of Music far outweigh the bad. The best segment of the movie is when the Captain returns with the Baroness while Maria and the children arrive, dressed in window curtains, on a little boat which topples over. The exchange that ensues between Maria and the Captain about how he's neglecting his children ("It's really dark," says Diana, "it's about a father who hates his children because they remind him of their mother") is the most soulful and powerful part of the movie. There, the story naturally reflects the larger themes it wishes to address: how "music" (liberation, democracy) will ultimately conquer "discipline" (fascism, Nazis).

It's when the real Nazis enter that the movie falls apart.

A Blog, By Any Other Name, Would Smell Less Sweet

You've heard of taking back a word, but have you heard of taking back a name? That's what I plan to do with this blog, my eponymous blog (don't you love that word: eponymous?), since my identity on the internet suffers at the hands of two very powerful forces.

The first force is a science fiction force, a critical force, an academic force. That force is Adam Roberts of adamroberts.com. My whole life I've been Adam Roberts. And so, apparently, has Adam Roberts. If you Google Adam Roberts, he's the first result. He even has a Wikipedia page devoted to him. I have an author page at Random House, but that's not really as cool.

So I've adopted a D. A middle D (for "David") that will help me combat this first force that squashes my identity on the web. As Adam D. Roberts, I will join the ranks of G. Gordon Liddy, Arthur C. Clark, and J.K. Rowling as a person with a prominent initial in my name. I wonder if these people always used these initials before they became famous public figures? Because for me, at least, it's quite unnatural to have that D there. I've always been Adam Roberts, my whole life, and adding that D makes me feel like a different person. Not a bad person, necessarily, but more accountant than rock star, don't you think? That D. ages me about 10 years. With that middle initial, I feel like an adult.

Force #2 is a force I've created myself. My Frankenstein force. My main stage blog, The Amateur Gourmet. That person is me, for sure, but because The Amateur Gourmet has been so successful I feel like my life is so saturated with food, I've lost touch with all my other interests.

I mean, my God, all of the pictures on my computer right now are pictures of food. Craig (my boyfriend) and I just celebrated our one year anniversary and I tried to make a slideshow of pictures from the first year of our relationship, and you know what? Almost all of the pictures involved food. Craig eating, me cooking, us at a restaurant. Yes, this is my career nowadays, but there has to be room for all the other parts of myself on the web. I'd say that 28% of my day is spent thinking about food (clearly more than the average person's) but the large majority is spent thinking about, dreaming about, and worrying about subjects that vary from Rosie O'Donnel's strange notions about September 11th to my grandmother's capacity for survival. My friends and I sometimes discuss food subjects, but more often than not we're arguing about "Children of Men" and the length of time we can hold our breath under water. We argue about politics, we argue about recycling. My life is a jungle of topics that need a forum on the web and that forum isn't a food blog.

And thus a new blog is born, a blog with a peculiar name that will slowly become my own. Welcome to Adam D. Roberts, home of the other 72% of my brain.