Hi, I’m James Hepplewhite. My name or face isn’t important, but introductions are.

There’s no dignified way to say this: I was looking down Sandra Malak’s corset.

A bit of background, you say? Here we go. (Here we go! Here we go!) I was watching the World/Inferno Friendship Society (Check episode 20. Does this feel like a comic book yet?) perform in the Pittsburgh area (Millvale) earlier in 2009. Jack Terricloth and Co. were very clearly having a lot of fun, as the venue (Mr. Smalls) afforded them a rather sizable stage. About a third of the way through, I noticed, that the bassist (Mrs? Ms? Etc? Malak) of the nattily-dressed ensemble (guitarist Lucky Strano, excepted, who is contractually obligated to have a Disfear shirt on) was wearing a corset.

This is the World/Inferno Friendship Society, a raucously anachronistic band. Not a surprise, given that the men were wearing suits and ties. (And I mean real suits and ties, not a “punked out” skinny black tie.) But the problem first started when Malak was leaning down to yell the words back at the audience and my eyes slipped.

I looked down her corset.

My first reaction, aside from the neurological wiring, was “Hey, that’s a rather nice view.”

My second reaction was “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

(If now, you’re thinking, James, this is a World/Inferno show, you’re probably thinking too hard about this, which at an Inferno show, means you’re dangerously close to missing the point, you’re probably right. But, on the off chance I’m not thinking too hard, I continue.)

Here, now is the issue of identity politics.

Of course, I wasn’t thinking in academic terms at the time. I wasn’t that coherent or lucid.

The voices in my head went like this:

My first question was: Am I respecting her as a member of World/Inferno and as a performer? She’s playing, right now, music I like, in a band I’m pretty fond of. Choosing to look down her corset and I use that word carefully, since I had control of my body and my mind, does the performer a disservice. My gut check was swift and decisive. Really? A disservice? This is a grown-ass woman in a band whose major themes tend to revolve around debauchery, alcoholism, drug abuse, dancing and chasing girls. The band is not Escape The Fate, by any means, but let’s be honest: ambiguity, allure and intrigue are three of the cards World/Inferno has been playing for a long time. This kind of thing has to go with the territory.

Okay, okay, but what the hell does drug use and alcoholism have to do with the possible objectification you may have engaged yourself in, I thought. Also, what about the themes of solidarity, status quo subversion and dissent generally? Those don’t fit as easily into your casting of World/Inferno as a quote unquote crazy rock band.

The counter argument came pretty naturally. Point taken, but… objectification? You peeked down her corset maybe five times over the course of an hour and a half, which she wore onstage, in a public place, where she knew she was going to be viewed. (This is distinct from the “she was asking for it” argument.) She’s older than you, so odds are pretty good this is something she’s thought about before, so saying she wouldn’t know theoretically insults her intelligence. Also, you tended to avoid looking at her as soon as you realized what was up. Saying that you objectified her is hard to sustain on that basis. More to the point, do “serious” performers have to be without attractive hooks? Must performers be viewed outside sexual appeal? That’s a pretty white/Protestant view of musicians and performers, isn’t it?

Touche. Jack was making a big show out of the slit that broke his pants, terribly close to his crotch. And I acknowledge that viewing a performer as an entity outside of epistemic location reinforces that status quo of viewing performers “correctly” in the male/female/queer context. (Guys in punk bands post-Black Flag are supposed to be belligerent.) But, consider your epistemic position. You’re a young white person watching a female onstage for pleasure. You, of all people, need to pay attention to those boundaries.

How was I looking at her, I thought? I was looking at her as the bass player in World/Inferno Friendship Society (a band who’se four studio full lengths I own, 3 on CD, 1 on vinyl) who made a choice in her wardrobe which possibly affords audience members a view of her cleavage, which may be more or less important to particular people in the crowd. Male gaze aside, this is a band that pays very close attention to how they look. It’s reasonable for me to look, given they want that attention and that’s a large part of their strategies, gig in and gig out, to get it. It’s likely part of an exaggerated, but calculated onstage persona, which, odds are, loosely match their offstage personalities. How they look is a huge part of their presentation. She’s also a woman in a rock band, who wants have fun making music and make money. I’m a male fan. Do the math. That entire band plays up how they dress as part of their act, which – *gasp* – can be usefully monetized.

That said, I’m not sure I can prove any of that.

I can’t find a quote on the internet where she or someone from the band says, “Yeah we dress up because it’s fun for us, it’s a neat little shtick and it makes money.” I haven’t looked, so let’s say no. But, I don’t think the point can be usefully avoided. I’m at a concert, situated as a white male, watching a group of performers who are like me and it’s reasonable to ask, I think, to what extent physical attractiveness plays a role in that performance. Dan Yemin (episode 18) takes off his shirt at Paint it Black shows, Trent Reznor has a fondness for tight black tshirts and (much love and respect for both bands) while I’m not quite the target audience, if I don’t mind it there, why should I mind it here?

That said, I’m not sure those are equivocal. There’s a power imbalance that you’re not taking into account.

Bullshit and yeah, there’s a power imbalance, it’s not just that she appears to be female and I appear to be male, but that I’m a fan and she’s a part of the band. Not everything can be reduced simply to white male dominance and a gaze from the relative safety of the crowd. It goes with the territory. It’s more complicated and more nuanced than that, I think. Are we being used?

No, we’re not being used, in that she’s probably not thinking or vocalizing, “You know, I want the fans to pay attention to my breasts so they’ll buy more tshirts.” That doesn’t make it okay and by suggesting you’re impugning her integrity without evidence to support it. Also, it’s not like she was bending over to give people a better view, she was engaging in the time honored tradition of performers in punk bands who aren’t the singer engaging with the audience, despite a barrier or stage. Yes, its showmanship (showpersonship, maybe?) but not in the way you think. The moment was entirely innocent (as if a moment can be) but it was without guile, I’d be willing to bet. It’s about that connection with the audience, and probably, yes, it is part of that “look at me look at me look at me” performance variety that Franz Nicolay lovingly touched on in an interview.

Okay. But more than that, am I over-thinking this? Could I just be looking at an attractive woman onstage, that being the end of it and making the preceding pages an exercise in pretense and intellectual masturbation, like the smarmy male character in Propagandhi’s Ladies Nite In Loserville?

Uhhhhhhhh…well…I…hadn’t thought of…Hey! Look over there! There’s a cute girl 20 feet to our left. They’re playing Brother Of the Mayor Of Bridgewater. We ought to dance with her.

Yes, we should.

And really, I got to feel uncomfortable around a different girl and that settled the argument for that night. But looking back on it, that doesn’t end this questioning in my head. I don’t have any answers, but maybe a couple provisional suggestions. (I find it kind of silly to be attempting to offer answers to the question it took me a couple pages to even get to and is still consuming me.) If any female performers see this and want to share their perspective, let me know. I doubt Ronen is going to mind.

1) Don’t gawk.
2) Don’t be a dick.
3) Really. That’s all I’ve got.

Don’t gawk is pretty obvious. That part really is about respect. Don’t be a dick is a related point, which means consider the feelings and perspectives of the people you’re looking at. My thoughts really come down to respect and being contrite. If I’m right, or at least looking in the right direction, then the “answer” is thinking of other people and looking beyond yourself, which is one of the big important lessons I should have internalized from punk years ago.

I guess there’s still more learning to do.

With all of the hub-bub going on over in Iran right now, the role of Twitter (and Facebook, and YouTube, but mostly Twitter) has become amazingly important. When it comes to freedom, Iran is not so awesome. Information control has been essential to how things have been run there since the overthrow of the Shah, and the basic rights of people to assemble, to protest, to speak against domination – these rights have been largely non-existent in any meaningful way. Instead, the Iranian government just keeps repeating the notion that their people are in fact free – maybe they hope that by saying it enough, this will become true.

Twitter and Facebook take a lot of shit from old-timers who don’t like or want to understand the new ways in which people communicate. I once taught with a “senior” teacher who berated a seventh grader for wanting to go into the video game industry when he grew up. In her antiquated disgust, she blabbered about how the kids these days just waste their time with video games. No future, etc. Little did this old gas-bag know that the video game industry had already been growing faster than the film industry for a few years.

Technology is a language. It also defines the way the people of Earth look at and understand their surroundings. If we want to be able to communicate in ways other than speaking, yelling, whispering or singing to anyone close enough to hear, we need technology. A feather dipped in ink. A woodcut ink-press. A typewriter. A fax. A blog. And most recently, text messsages, Twitter, and social networks.

The guys who invent these cool internet gadgets must be pretty blown away. I’ll bet they never imagined that their ideas could affect the outcome of world events. Congrats to them.

Check out this story from CNN about metal in Pakistan. Pretty interesting.

It’s no secret that China is home to the great fakers of the retail world. Let’s take, for example, an American brand, the Apple iPhone. Do you know about the Meizu M8 (pictured left)? Looks a lot like an iPhone, right? Or how about the iPhone Air, which is neither an iPhone, nor made of air. What about the CECT T5, pictured below and to the right? Other than having a little extra trunk-junk, this one looks really close, even down to the call screen and home button. It actually runs Windows Mobile 6.

Snatching intellectual property like the specific design of an iconic product and then flagrantly copying it as closely as possible? Eh, I dunno. It might be easier to justify if we were talking about medicine or some democracy-promoting technology. But the fact is that any of the Chinese bootleggers, whether making fake iPhones or anything else, are purely profit-driven and intellectually lazy. Of course Apple is also driven by profit – but at least their products are inspired and actually developed by people working at the company.

Think back to the ‘08 Beiging Olympics –  engineered by China to act as a demonstration of the country’s smarts, spirit and size, flecks of that same special brand of shady showmanship were everywhere. Do you remember the digitally-enhanced fireworks controversy? What about the 7-year-old girl who sang the national anthem, but was too ugly to represent the Chinese nation? A beautiful 9-year-old lip-synched the performance for the world to see. (Of course, no one was supposed to know about the actual performer.) And what about that whole thing with cloud seeding? China was literally controlling the weather during the opening ceremonies. That is crazy.

But the biggest deception came as Chinese government constructed what it called the “culture wall” – a three-meter high structure built along the official Olympic marathon course, designed to hide dilapidated slums and abject poverty in some of Beijing’s worst neighborhoods.

Obviously this has nothng to do with the Chinese people, but rather with their government’s obsession with keeping up appearances. It shouldn’t be too foreign a concept; after all, here in America beautiful women and men with fine clothing and spa-treated hair, nails and skin continue to blacken their lungs with cigarettes, clog their arteries with saturated fat and indulge in otherwise unhealthy habits. True, the national psychology of a country as large and storied as China needs to be respected; you can’t really blame people for wanting to return to the prestigious status they once enjoyed throughout the world.. But scamming your way to the top of the pile never really pans out.

Enter the beleaguered American real-estate market. A recent story on NPR detailed the novel tactic employed by seemingly desperate real-estate agents: actors are hired to walk dogs and have cookouts in a neighborhood where a potential sale might be made. In other words, the agent brings the prospective buyer to a home, where that consumer sees lots of appeal – friendly faces, a seemingly warm and robust community. The consumer surely factors these things into their home-buying decision, but little do they know that the guy on the grill and the hot girl walking a puggle are fakes, there to paint a picture that isn’t true.

And the line between what’s right and wrong? Well, it’s blurry – at least on paper, the only place where it really seems to matter – as evidenced by real estate developer Randy Denaro’s response to questions regarding the honesty of this tactic. With transparent disregard for all things, you  know, fair and honest, he says:

“Look around. You don’t see anybody impersonating a cop, do you? Because why? Because that would be illegal. It’s an image of a nice neighborhood, even if it’s not nice right now.”

Hey, at least American cheaters and fakes follow the law, right? 

You can’t plant your seeds in sour soil. That’s especially true if you’re talking about taking people’s money, or fucking with people’s lives vis-a-vis their real-estate. Are most Americans profit-driven and intellectually lazy? Wait – don’t answer. 

How about this – a little less “me” and a little more “we”.

Postscript: Oh, that NPR piece was an April Fool’s gag. But people should still be honest!

Although I’ve been yapping about the ills of corporate America for years, I’m not here to drag anyone through the mud. In fact, I know a number of good people who have, directly or indirectly, worked for Live Nation; in my role as musician, I’ve also played shows with tickets sold by Ticketmaster. I still have the stubs.

But concern regarding the planned merger between these two giant companies is justified. Most people seem concerned with the economics of the deal, citing a potential stranglehold on ticketing prices and other “fixes” which could yield an environment hostile to artists, promoters, unions, etc. – that is, hostile in a financial sense. Like I said, these concerns are surely justified. 

But the real threat posed by the creation of such a live-music monolith lies in the potential for centralized control of content – more specifically, it puts into question the quality and diversity of the content and performances which will be available to the public at the mainstream venues controlled by a possible TicketNation or LiveMaster. Live music performance is a huge component of Western culture – should the vast majority of those performances be controlled from coast to coast by one large corporation? Remember, a corporation’s primary interest is not necessarily the products and services it sells. By definition, a for-profit company’s number one motivation needs to always be the pursuit and acquisition of cash money profit – not powerful music or providing the people of America with moving performances.

Everyone knows that diversity is good for just about everything – biology, ecosystems, decision-making bodies, blah, blah, blah. Of course, that means diversity is also good for the marketplace of ideas that we shape with interesting songs, concept albums and reactionary haircuts. Despite reassurances or pandering meant to hush those questioning the intellectual and cultural safety of the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, profit motive eclipses any other possible rationale for such a merger. That should be of concern to anyone who believes music is an important form of cultural expression.