Donuts at 2 A.M.: The Remix
by Gary Phillips
Neda Agha-Soltan
The week of June 22 sure was a doozy. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and the Gloved One died. Thus the mythical triad of celeb passings was achieved, if that’s the right word, with each successive death upstaging the other. Then there was the return of the wandering hiker, international playboy South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. While the post-vote unrest and crackdown in Iran, presented to us in herky-jerky cell phone video feed and tweets, went on—with the murder by security forces of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, the Saturday before a tragic symbol of the upheaval. And, oh yeah, the Voting Rights Act being essentially upheld (with only ol’ handkerchief head Clarence Thomas dissenting), a fatal light rail crash in D.C., and Mayor Villaraigosa on CNN stating emphatically he won’t run for governor—a footnote in a week of big events.
Speaking of footnotes, pretty much unnoticed that week was an interesting admission of plagiarism ... sort of. Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson was blasted, online appropriately, for lifting unattributed passages from Wikipedia in his forthcoming book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. A book about the dichotomy of making money on the Internet while giving away content. According to Carolyn Kellogg, who covers the book world in the L.A. Times in print and on the groovy online Jacket Copy, Waldo Jaquith on the Virginia Quarterly Review blog had posted this allegation after reading an advance reader’s copy of the book for a future review.
Kellogg quotes Anderson’s response, “I made the decision to nuke the notes because we couldn’t come up with a comprehensive attribution form.” For factoids gleaned from the Internet, as far as Hyperion, Anderson’s publisher, was concerned, you not only cite the source, but the date and time you accessed that page. And Jaquith, in his piece on this matter, wrote, in part:
Though reproducing words or original ideas from any uncredited source is widely defined as plagiarism, using text from Wikipedia presents an even more significant problem than reproducing traditional copyrighted text. Under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, Anderson would be required to credit all contributors to the quoted passages, license his modifications under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, note that the original work has been modified, and provide the text of or a link to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Are you fuckin’ kidding me? Pierce the various online aliases of contributors/editors of any given Wikipedia entry?
I’m not defending Anderson’s decision not to attribute, but Jaquith is suggesting that source and timestamp are insufficient, and these other steps have to be taken. Procedures you wouldn’t do for printed material you’ve quoted from in book or magazine form. Though I did click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry for the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” and the terms of use seem more in line with how you approach traditional copyrighted text.
Nagging too is the notion of whether a given Wikipedia entry is accurate. When Sarah Palin was about to become a household name, GOP operatives accessed her Wikipedia entry and sweetened, let’s say, several passages. Sherlock Homes was used in my example because recently I was writing a piece on him, and was troubled by the entries for the consulting detective on Wikipedia. It had been decades since I’d read my Holmes, and I read quite a few of the short stories, but something wasn’t quite right.
Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes’ creator, had killed him off in a fight at Reichenbach Falls with Prof. Moriarty in “The Final Problem” so as to move on to other writing endeavors. Wikipedia accurately chronicles Dr. Doyle bringing Holmes back in 1901 in the serialized novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. What’s not pointed out is the story in Holmes time takes place before the incident at the falls in “Problem.” And that Holmes doesn’t “officially” return until two real years later in “The Adventure of the Empty House” where he explains faking his death at Reichenbach Falls. This nuanced information I got from Sherlockian scholar Les Klinger, author of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.
Of course, supposed facts in book entries can be bogus or incomplete, reflecting a history written from the point of view of the victors. So really, there’s always been a remix of history.
Anatole Broyard
This then takes us back to the big death of the week that was, Michael Jackson. For more than other entertainer who’s used hair plugs, plastic surgeries, metabolic chambers (okay, maybe only M-Jack went that far), crazy diets, and prescription medication to fight the clock, Jackson seemingly used those methods to also escape his black man in the mirror. He was Norma Desmond-like is in his self-imposed isolation from much of reality, while outdoing literary critic Anatole Broyard in crossing the color line. Broyard was a light-skinned, straight-haired Creole who hid his blackness from his white wife and mixed-race children.
But what Broyard had as a result of the toss-up of genes, Jackson had to manufacture for his remix. From the various nose and lip jobs, skin whitening, to raising blonde children, at least two of them sired from a white mother and white sperm donor (the contributor hand-picked by Jackson, according to Diane Diamond on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown), he moonwalked into a world that could only exist in his head.
But I ain’t mad at you, Mike. You said it yourself, “In a crowd, I’m afraid. Onstage, I feel safe.”
This past week I remembered the massive impact of Jackson’s Thriller album, produced by Quincy Jones, and how among his statues Jackson had one of him in a Batman costume and was even in talks to buy Marvel Comics once upon a time; Charles Bronson on The Tonight Show waxing nostalgic with ex-marine flight instructor McMahon about how he worked for McMahon’s dad selling geegaws on the Boardwalk; Farrah Fawcett fighting her image in seeking rugged roles; the other Argentine hottie to bring down an elected, Fanne Foxe, the Tidal Basin Bombshell who had a thing with Congressman Wilbur Mills; while the beat goes on in Iran to the Man in the Mirror lyrics:
I'm Gonna Make A Change
For Once In My Life
It's Gonna Feel Real Good
Gonna Make A Difference
Gonna Make It Right.
To read an excerpt from his WWII novel Freedom’s Fight, click here.
gary@fourstory.org | www.gdphillips.com
Comments
I’ve been on the road, so missed some of this. A great way to catch up. Keep remixing!
2009-07-03 by John Shannon“Ripped right from the (recent) headlines” & remixed to create a very enjoyable read. Thanks!
2009-07-04 by MJHHello Gary,
Millie Heur asked me to drop a note since I recently inquired with her as to the origins of your enjoyable and insightful recap of the week of June 22.
Best Regards,
Chris S.
A rich reflection of recent events...and as noted in these final words of our most prized, postmodern, pop-star Peter Pan, it all starts with a reflection. Great Remix!
2009-07-02 by Danny D