By Willee Roberts

Last Wednesday marked the 10th anniversary of operations at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Bush-era fear tactics rationalized the creation of the military prison despite its defiance of Geneva Convention protocol against torture. In Obama’s early days in office, he attempted to follow through on his campaign promise to close the camp and return terror suspects to US soil. Gitmo remains open, with 171 prisoners still confined to living in its inhumane conditions. Obama is not soft on terrorism.

Beware America: Osama is dead, but terror lives on. This time, it does not wear turbans or live in a cave. It wears 99% buttons and lives in a tent. But these new terrorists want the same thing as the old, to dismantle the structures that allow capitalism and “western values” to colonize and oppress.

Obama is not soft on terrorism. On the eve of the new year, 2012, our president signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 (NDAA), a piece of legislation which, among other things, grants the federal government the authority to indefinitely detain anyone suspected of terrorism.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, some charectaristics that warrant the official report of suspected terrorism include: those who have stored more then seven days of food, who are missing fingers, or who are texting covertly in a public place. This means that if your neighbor calls the DHS for a butchering accident a few years ago, the military can now knock down your door in the middle of the night and take you away forever without due process or a fair trial. Damn.

Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator that authored the bill said, “Homegrown terrorism is a real threat. There are a lot of people being radicalized on the Internet. So if someone goes to Pakistan as an American citizen, gets radicalized in a madrassa and comes back here and starts attacking Americans, I want to make sure they’re held for intelligence-gathering purposes and they’re not read their Miranda rights but they’re held by the military, the CIA, and the FBI to find out, ‘Is another attack coming?’”

Senator Feinstein included an amendment insisting that, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.” However, few days ago, the Enemy Expatration Act was introduced to the Senate to skirt Feinstein’s amendment. The new bill gives the government authority to strip American terror suspects of their citizenship, making them vulnerable to the standing provisions of the NDAA.

Our nation is at war, and you are the enemy. You, who questions their power. You who disobeys their authority. I’m headed to Mexico while I still have the chance.

Among other things, Willee has been a key leader in the Occupy Movement at UC Davis over the past few months. And, in addition to being able to absorb an obscene amount of pepper spray, Will’s eloquence, persistence and leadership have helped the movement gain the attention of a national audience, allowing for its participants to voice some of our generation’s most pressing concerns.

To learn more about the NDAA, check here and here.

I don’t listen to Norwegian black metal. Until about two hours ago, I couldn’t have told you anything about it, and after spending the better part of that time learning about it, I can’t say I’m rushing to find a download link. But Until the Light Takes Us is just a fascinating film, and for that hour and a half I was immersed in a subculture completely foreign to me. Released to mixed reviews in 2009, the film is the product of directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s vision, a documentary compiled through years of interviews and archival footage with some of Norwegian black metal‘s most controversial figures.

That most critiques of Until the Light center around the overly sympathetic, romanticizing tone it takes toward its subjects only makes sense. The story of black metal is, after all, primarily documented as a result of controversy– a series of church burnings, a handful of murders, and some grisly suicides, to be more specific. Beyond that though, the film explores the troubling ideology behind those actions, and behind a cultural phenomenon that captured the world’s attention at its peak in the mid-’90s. For those curious enough, it’s an experience, to say the least. Read on for the full movie.

Surely your web browsing experience has been hindered in some way today. Whether you’ve tried to research something on Wikipedia, or search on Google, you’ve probably come across the words SOPA or censorship somewhere along the way. While Will highlighted the main issues of the bill last month, a recent video on behalf of fightforthefuture.org sheds light on the potential risks we face if the Protect IP Act passes. With language that serves to elucidate the true intentions of the bill, this short video offers valuable insight into Protect IP Act and the battle for net neutrality. You can also join the petition to stop SOPA and PIPA here.

Last year, the world lost a true revolutionary. It seemed that only in the years leading up to his death, had greater pop culture begun to realize the true impact and importance Gil Scott-Heron had had on its own landscape. Though hip-hop and jazz historicists, vinyl collectors and political minds had been singing his praises for decades, it seemed that the last few years of his life saw that well-deserved reverence reaching an unprecedented level. The release of his final album, I’m New Here, a collaborative effort with XL Recordings founder Richard Russell, and the posthumous Jamie xx remix project, We’re New Here served to further cement his place as a luminary of modern music and culture.

Today saw the release of The Last Holiday, an autobiographical memoir written in the last years of Gil’s life. The memoir tells the stories of some of the more formative moments of his extraordinary life and career, using one particular story as a sort of centerpiece through which others are told. “The Last Holiday” refers to Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and more specifically to Gil’s experience touring alongside Stevie Wonder as a part of 1980′s Hotter Than July Tour, during which he and Stevie helped to campaign for MLK Day’s status as an official holiday, all to the tune of Stevie’s “Happy Birthday”. In the excerpt below, Gil writes beautifully and poetically about childhood memories, about his experience with Stevie, and about the tragedy of fallen heroes. In the wake of his own death, his insight seems all the more poignant now.

An excerpt from Gil Scott-Heron’s The Last Holiday: A Memoir:

I always doubt detailed recollections authors write about their childhoods. Maybe I am jealous that they retain such clarity of their long-agos while my own past seems only long gone. What helped me to retain some order was that by the age of 10 I was interested in writing. I wrote short stories. The problem was that I didn’t know much about anything. And I didn’t take photos or collect mementos. There were things I valued, but I thought they would always be there. And that I would.

There was Jackson, Tennessee. No matter where I went – to Chicago, New York, Alabama, Memphis, or even Puerto Rico in the summer of 1960 – I always knew I’d be coming back home to Jackson. It was where my grandmother and her husband had settled. It was where my mother and her brother and sisters were all born and grew up. It was where I was raised, in a house on South Cumberland Street that all of them called home, regardless of what they were doing and where they were doing it. They were the most important people in my life and this was their home. It was where I began to write, learned to play piano, and where I began to want to write songs.

Jackson was where I first heard music. It was what folks called “the blues”. It was on the radio. It was on the jukeboxes. It was the music of Shannon Street in “Fight’s Bottom” on Saturday night, when the music was loud and the bootleg whisky from Memphis flowed. The blues came from Memphis, too. Shannon Street was taboo at my house, something my grandmother didn’t even think about. We never played the blues at home.

Our house was next door to Stevenson and Shaw’s Funeral Home. The man who ran that business was Earl Shaw, one of the nicest men I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. His wife was a good friend of my mother, and our families were so close that I related to his children as cousins for years.

Evidently business at the funeral home was good because I remember clearly when Mr Shaw purchased another building in East Jackson and the movers came to take everything out of the place next door. And then the men from the junkyard came to put everything else in the back of an old truck. My grandmother knew the junk man and after a brief conversation with him he directed his two sons to bring an ancient and well-used upright piano into our front room and push it up against the wall. I was seven years old. Old enough to start learning to play. What she had in mind was that I learn some hymns I’d be able to play for her sewing-circle meetings. That’s how my music playing started.

There was no blues on the living-room radio. My grandmother had that one locked on the station that played her soap operas in the afternoon and her favourite radio programmes at night. When we got a second radio, it was quickly dubbed “the ballgame radio,” and, sure enough, when a ballgame was being broadcast I listened. But at other times I’d try to tune in WDIA in Memphis, the first Black radio station in the country, with on-air personalities like Rufus and Carla Thomas and BB King. Late at night I’d try to get Randy’s Record Show out of Nashville. I heard people talk about a music explosion in Memphis. I knew my favourite music, the blues, came from there, too. Memphis, Tennessee, was only 90 miles west of Jackson, my home. But Memphis was as far away as the North Pole in my mind. People in Jackson were always talking about somewhere else, mostly Memphis, because it was a close somewhere else and you could drink alcohol there, while Jackson was in a dry county. Some of my grandfather’s relatives were in Memphis and I had visited them, but what I remember about the trip was getting car-sick and throwing up.

The history that we were given about Memphis was done in light pencil that hopscotched its way to a semi-solid landing with Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show… The city matured from midway market to a major metropolis… [from] saloons and whorehouse tents, once soaked with the sweat of drunken sailors and reeking with the acid stench of swine, slime, sewage, and slaves [to be] better known for Graceland and the Grizzlies than for Beale Street and the blues. Its filthy foundation as a headquarters for whores and for humans sold to the highest bidder was obscured by the magic of musical melding.

Sun Records considered itself the fuse that lit the 1950s with Elvis and rock’n'roll. With Carla and Rufus Thomas and Otis Redding, Stax Records brought blues to the hit parade with hooks and horns and a solid beat, evolving into Al Green and Willie Mitchell. Memphis meant music.

And unless you stop to think for a minute, you might forget that it was in Memphis that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was shot and killed on a motel balcony on April 4, 1968.

Stevie Wonder did not forget.

In 1980, Stevie joined with the members of the Black Caucus in the United States Congress to speak out for the need to honour the day Dr King was born, to make his birthday a national holiday. The campaign began in earnest on Hallowe’en of 1980 in Houston, Texas, with Stevie’s national tour supporting a new LP called Hotter than July, featuring the song “Happy Birthday”, which advocated a holiday for Dr King. I arrived in Houston in the early afternoon to join the tour as the opening act. I was invited to do the first eight shows, covering two weeks, and I felt good about being there, about seeing Stevie and his crazy brother Calvin again.

I was tired already, sweaty and exhausted from a five-minute trudge uphill, learning as I trudged why this block-sized enclosure was called “the Summit”. I had just found a stage entrance for a venue I had never played. The places I had played in Texas on prior trips could fit into this sprawling hothouse about 10 times and still leave room for the Rockets to play their games without me getting in their way. It was an impressive sight. Choreographed chaos on a Roman scale. But suddenly somebody called my name. Well, not exactly my name, but somebody’s name for me, the name he always used, my astrological sign. So I knew who it was. It was somebody who shouldn’t have seen me come in. Howzat?

The call for me rang out again, echoing around in the cavernous hall: “Air-rees!”

I scanned the upper reaches of the place, looking for Stevie Wonder.

And there he was, in a seat near the top row in the bowl-shaped theatre. He was leaning forward in my direction from the sound booth. Alone. There was no mistaking him. His corn rows were surrounded with a soft suede cover. Large, dark sunglasses hid most of the top half of his face, and a huge, joker’s grin furnished the lower half. He had a wireless mike in his hand and, again with the grin, was saying, “Come on up here, Air-rees!”

I started for the stairs, still scanning. Now I could see there was an engineer-type person in the booth, but his back was turned to Stevie and I didn’t believe I knew the man anyway. Or that he had identified me.

He hadn’t. But since I hadn’t figured it out yet and Stevie was having such a good time messing with my head…

“How you been, man,” I said as I climbed. “If you saw me get outta that cab from the airport, you shoulda helped me pay for it.”

“We felt your vibes, Air-rees,” Stevie said, and he laughed out loud, shook his head, and held his hundred-watt smile.

I agreed to be on by 8.05 pm each night and to hit my last note no later than 9.05. That would give the humpers and stage muscle 25 to 30 minutes to change the sets for Stevie and [backing group] Wonderlove. Stevie’s set would run the clock out, but at 11.30 or so he would call for back-up to do his last two numbers: “Master Blaster”, the reggae-flavoured tune that included the line that was the title of his new LP, and “Happy Birthday”, his tribute to Dr King.

The people producing the shows [were] worrying about us starting and stopping on time. I thought that was funny as hell, knowing that Bob Marley and the Wailers were coming in after two weeks. “Them brothers don’t start rolling their show joints until they’re 10 minutes late,” I told [the stage manager]. “I’ll be around an hour in advance.”

I meant that. It lasted for about 24 hours.

Different dates on the tour were memorable for different reasons. Some days I took notes, though most of those notes seem to have been done as a joke, some kind of acrobatic way of pulling my own leg. There were either a few lines written before the show along with whatever expenses I needed to note, or, after the concert, in the early am, there was a separate page or two that described something that happened or that I felt during the day or evening. There was rarely both, rarely an occasion when I wrote something before and after a show. December 8, 1980 in Oakland was a before-and-after day. I still remember the after-feelings now.

I rarely missed things Stevie said to me. But when I saw him at the bottom of the backstage stairs at the arena in Oakland, I thought I must have misheard him. Maybe it was the shock at what he had said. Maybe I hadn’t missed what he said and just thought I did. It was something I didn’t want to hear.

But no, I must have mistaken Stevie for sure.

“What did you say?” I asked him, trying to get above the noise.

“I said some psycho, some crazy person, shot John Lennon!” Stevie said. “And I’m wondering how to handle it.”

I am not so silly or naive as to suspect that there is an ultimate evil. But the death of a good man, so rare as to be nearly extinct, is a thorough tragedy. And what do you say about it to 17,000 people who have come out to see you and enjoy themselves?

I got that same feeling I’d felt when I heard that Dr King or someone else was killed; that sense of a certain part of you being drained away, a loss of self. There were certain events in your life that had such historical significance that you were supposed to remember the circumstances under which you received the news for the rest of your life. That was probably what some section of humanity used to illustrate man’s superiority over other animals: “memories of miseries that memorialise.”

Having those memories was like turning down the corner of a page in your life’s book. But maybe animals turned down corners of pages, too. They might not choose the date of the death of John Lennon to see as a date of loss and mourning, they would be more likely to remember the date the Ringling Brothers died or the day the woman from Born Free was born.

I was sure they talked about important things. I didn’t have the dialogue down pat, but I could picture a conversation between two lions on a late-night walk across the savannah.

“Yeah, that’s where it was, man,” one of them says. “Right over there by the watering hole. A big mean-looking thing with sharp teeth and the strongest grip you ever heard of. The gorilla called it an animal trap. Man, that thing grabbed Freddy Leopard and held him for hours. The gorilla got Freddy loose but his leg was all fucked up and he’s still walking with a limp.”

Just exactly what did those recollections, those dog-eared pages, prove? That you were connected to the human race? It couldn’t be. Because if so, people born since then, who weren’t around then, couldn’t be connected. That’s why there were history books and parents and other folks to tell you what happened before you got here.

And why did you need to remember those things? Most of them were about someone being killed or assassinated. You could almost feel as though you needed an alibi: “Where were you the day that such-and-such a person was murdered?” They were pages in history books, however. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what it proved. That you were connected to the human race? They were usually the least human things you could imagine. Unnatural disasters.

I always knew where I’d been. I was in last period history class at DeWitt Clinton High School when the principal announced from the bottom of an empty barrel: “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that your president is dead.” He was talking about John Kennedy, shot to death by someone in Dallas.

I was in the little theatre at Lincoln when a guy everyone called “the Beast” had thrown open a rear door and shouted: “The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King has been shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee.”

I was in my bedroom on West 17th Street when man first reached the Moon and I had written a poem called “Whitey on the Moon” that very night (for which my mother had come up with the punch line: “We’re gonna send these doctor bills air-mail special to Whitey on the Moon”).

And now I would always remember the night John Lennon died. Yeah, because of who told me and where, but also because of the effect the news had on the crowd. It proved we had been right, Stevie and I, when we hastily decided that it would serve no purpose to make that announcement before he played.

“No, just wait until the end, before we play them songs,” I told him. “Hell, ain’t nothin’ they can do about it.”

And that had been soon enough. The effect of Stevie’s sombre announcement on the crowd was like a punch in the diaphragm, causing them to let out a spontaneous “whaaaa!”. Then there was a second of silence, a missing sound, as if someone had covered their mouths with plastic, so tight not even their breathing could be detected. I was standing at the back of the stage, outside of the cylinder of light that surrounded Stevie, next to Carlos Santana and Rodney Franklin, who were joining us for the closing tunes.

Stevie had more to say than just the mere announcement that John Lennon had been shot and killed. For the next five minutes he spoke spontaneously about his friendship with John Lennon: how they’d met, when and where, what they had enjoyed together, and what kind of a man he’d felt Lennon was. That last one was the key, because it drew a line between what had happened in New York that day and what had happened on that motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, a dozen years before. And it drew a circle around the kind of men who stood up for both peace and change. That circle looked suspiciously like a fucking bull’s-eye to me. It underlined the risks that such men took because of what all too often happened to them.

It was another stunning moment in an evening of already notable cold-water slaps, a raw reminder of how the world occasionally reached inside the cocoon that tours and studios and offices on West 57th Street provide. It stopped your heart for a beat and froze your lungs for a gasp; showing you how fragile your grip on life was and how many enemies you didn’t know you had.

It also gave Stevie Wonder’s tour and his quest for a national holiday for a man of peace more substance, more fundamental legitimacy. Not just to me. Everyone seemed to understand a little better where Stevie was coming from and what this campaign was all about:

Below, Stevie and Gil sing “Happy Birthday” in an excerpt from the 1981 BBC Documentary Hotter Than July. The documentary followed Stevie and company on their historic tour, culminating with the scene below, the 1981 rally in Washington in celebration of Dr. King. Several excerpts serve as companion pieces to the stories from Gil’s The Last Holiday.

I remember there was a kid in elementary school named Alex White. I know you remember him. He used to sit in class and doodle all day. Never really thought too much of it, until Twill passed along this TED Talk today. Deconstructing the negative perceptions that doodling has maintained over the centuries, doodling enthusiast Sunni Brown offers some insight into the value of doodling and why we should all put more pen to paper.

I feel like the results of this study might be a lot less shocking to some folks in my generation. As an ’88 baby, I feel like I must have just barely missed soaking up a lot of the Reagan-era stigma that used to be so pervasive. The longitudinal study in question, conducted by researchers at Cardiff University’s Centre for the Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions for Public Health Improvement tracked just over 7900 individuals, starting in 1970, and taking a broad survey of both men and women who had taken IQ tests at ages five and ten.

In addition to other questions, researchers polled the participants about adult drug use (marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and amphetamines, among other things), and found a consistently positive correlation between high IQ scores early in life, and drug use as teens and as adults. Naturally, words like “stimulation-seeking”, “openness” or “willingness to experiment” all figured into the researchers’ discussion, given the seemingly paradoxical results. With that said, yeah, there are still plenty of stupid people doing drugs, and plenty of intelligent people staying sober. But suffice to say, conventional wisdom isn’t always that wise.

Below is a brief summary of the study, from The Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health:

Abstract

Background

Recent reports have linked high childhood IQ scores with excess alcohol intake and alcohol dependency in adult life, but the relationship with illegal drug use in later life is relatively unknown.

Methods

The authors used data from a large population-based birth cohort (1970 British Cohort Study) with measures of lifetime cannabis and cocaine use, parental social class and psychological distress at 16 years; cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine, ecstasy and polydrug use (more than three drugs) in the past 12 months; and social class, educational attainment and gross monthly income at 30 years. All members of the cohort with IQ scores at 5 or 10 years were eligible to be included in the analyses.

Results

Of the 11,603 (at 5 years) and 11,397 (at 10 years) cohort members eligible, 7904 (68.1%) and 7946 (69.7%) were included in the analyses. IQ scores at 5 years were positively associated with cannabis (OR (bottom vs top tertile) =2.25, 95% CI 1.71 to 2.97) and cocaine use (OR 2.35, 95% CI 1.41 to 3.92) in women and with amphetamines (OR 1.46, 95% CI 1.03 to 2.06), ecstasy (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.15 to 2.36) and polydrug use (OR 1.57, 95% CI 1.09 to 2.26) in men at 30 years. IQ scores at 10 years were positively associated with cannabis, cocaine (only at 30 years), ecstasy, amphetamine and polydrug use. Associations were stronger in women than in men and were independent from psychological distress in adolescence and life-course socioeconomic position.

Conclusion

High childhood IQ may increase the risk of illegal drug use in adolescence and adulthood.

Here at Wine & Bowties, as is the case with a lot of sites who offer content like ours, we’ve always been aware that we operate in a sort of legal grey area. Among other things, we see ourselves as a vehicle for promoting the creative endeavors of others, and as facilitators of a particular experience for the folks around us. Part of that is sharing music, and sharing it in the way that we, as consumers of media ourselves, like it to be made available. Naturally though, not everyone’s in favor of music being made available, without the consumer paying first. It’s understandable. It’s a debate that’s been going on since Dre and Lars Ulrich brought on the downfall of Napster a decade ago.

The legislation, according to The New York Times, would allow the Attorney General to block traffic to any given site (from internet juggernauts to fledgling startups) from “Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial.” As you might expect, a sharp divide has formed regarding the proposed legislation, with the old guard (the Chamber of Commerce, the American Federation of Musicians, The Motion Picture Association of America) on on side, and the internet gods on the other (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter). Needless to say, this could have a severe impact on our ability to provide content, but more importantly, it sets what many see as a dangerous precedent in the limits it could put on freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship. But Congress, under pressure to take action against the theft of intellectual property, is considering misguided legislation that would strengthen China’s Great Firewall and even bring major features of it to America.

The legislation — the Protect IP Act, which has been introduced in the Senate, and a House version known as the Stop Online Piracy Act — have an impressive array of well-financed backers, including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Motion Picture Association of America, the American Federation of Musicians, the Directors Guild of America, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Screen Actors Guild. The bills aim not to censor political or religious speech as China does, but to protect American intellectual property. Alarm at the infringement of creative works through the Internet is justifiable. The solutions offered by the legislation, however, threaten to inflict collateral damage on democratic discourse and dissent both at home and around the world.

The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright — a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.

Abuses under existing American law serve as troubling predictors for the kinds of abuse by private actors that the House bill would make possible. Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters that Diebold, a maker of voting machines, sent in 2003, demanding that Internet service providers shut down Web sites that had published internal company e-mails about problems with the company’s voting machines. The letter cited copyright violations, and most of the service providers took down the content without question, despite the strong case to be made that the material was speech protected under the First Amendment.

The House bill would also emulate China’s system of corporate “self-discipline,” making companies liable for users’ actions. The burden would be on the Web site operator to prove that the site was not being used for copyright infringement. The effect on user-generated sites like YouTube would be chilling.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have played an important role in political movements from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. At present, social networking services are protected by a “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content as soon as rights-holders point it out to them. The House bill would destroy that immunity, putting the onus on YouTube to vet videos in advance or risk legal action. It would put Twitter in a similar position to that of its Chinese cousin, Weibo, which reportedly employs around 1,000 people to monitor and censor user content and keep the company in good standing with authorities.

Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted. This in turn would create daunting financial burdens and legal risks for start-up companies, making it much harder for brilliant young entrepreneurs with limited resources to create small and innovative Internet companies that empower citizens and change the world.

Adding to the threat to free speech, recent academic research on global Internet censorship has found that in countries where heavy legal liability is imposed on companies, employees tasked with day-to-day censorship jobs have a strong incentive to play it safe and over-censor — even in the case of content whose legality might stand a good chance of holding up in a court of law. Why invite legal hassle when you can just hit “delete”?

The potential for abuse of power through digital networks — upon which we as citizens now depend for nearly everything, including our politics — is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age. We live in a time of tremendous political polarization. Public trust in both government and corporations is low, and deservedly so. This is no time for politicians and industry lobbyists in Washington to be devising new Internet censorship mechanisms, adding new opportunities for abuse of corporate and government power over online speech. While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.

Ever heard the Louis C.K. standup routine about how everything is amazing, and everybody’s miserable? In it, he’s talking about being on one of the first flights ever to feature wireless internet. Accessing the internet while torpedoing across the country at 500 miles an hour, he explains, is a pretty insane luxury to have, particularly when it comes as a pleasant surprise. Eventually though, the internet cuts off, prompting the guy next to Louis to freak out. “This is bullshit!” the dude announces. How in the world, Louis wondered, did this guy think the universe owed him something that he didn’t even know existed half an hour before? I guess that’s kind of how I feel about Spotify.

The reality of it is though, that there’s never been a better time to be a music listener, and basically, we’re all spoiled. Since Napster, the bottom line is that people will get their hands on the music they want, and unless the band is literally in front of their faces, they’ll want it for free. The big question, as with most of these technologies that increase access then, is what it’s like to be an artist, and how money is changing hands as a result of your free streaming. It’s a hopelessly convoluted picture, but thanks to Greg and Rolling Stone, I’m starting to piece it together.

In the old days, it was much easier for pop stars to keep up with how much they were getting paid. Somebody would buy a CD at a Tower Records for $15 and a few dollars would appear months later on the star’s royalty sheet. Then iTunes took over the record business, and it was even easier (if not more profitable) – every time somebody bought a 99-cent track, a few pennies went into the artist’s bank account.

Those were such simple times. Today, music fans play free music videos on YouTube, stream songs for free on Spotify, MOG or Rdio, customize Internet radio stations on Pandora or Slacker and consume music a zillion different ways. The fractions of pennies artists make for each of these services are nearly impossible to track – at least for now. “People like to simplify this and say, ‘There’s no money in it,’” says Jeff Price, founder of TuneCore, which charges artists to place songs directly into iTunes, Spotify and others. “But it’s complex, it’s complicated and it’s still being worked out.”

So you’re Adele, the year’s biggest pop star. Your songs stream on Spotify – or MOG, Rdio, Pandora or YouTube. You still sell downloads through iTunes and Amazon, and you still sell old-fashioned CDs in old-fashioned record stores. How much do you get paid?

Rolling Stone talked to several sources in the music business and got several different answers.

Spotify, MOG, Rdio and other subscription services are either free (with ads) or charge users monthly fees for unlimited streaming music. The quick calculation, according to one band manager: If a song gets streamed 60 times, the songwriter receives 9.1 cents in mechanical royalty payments. And the performing artist gets 38 cents (or splits that money, half and half, with a record label, per contract).

(UPDATE: A music-business source contacted us after this article appeared to clarify that these numbers were estimates based on one manager’s royalty statements. They are not an actual formula Spotify and music publishers use to calculate their songwriting royalty payments. This manager’s royalties could change as Spotify’s subscriber numbers change, and they vary depending on the streaming popularity for each artist. This source explained to us, again, the actual formula used for determining artist royalties from streaming services – as Price says, it is too ridiculously complicated to reproduce here.)

Maybe you don’t want to know the non-quick formula. “It is beyond complicated. It took me literally three months to understand this thing,” says Jeff Price, founder of TuneCore, which charges artists $10 (for a single) and $50 (album) to place music in online stores such as iTunes and Amazon, as well as subscription services like Spotify and MOG.

Generally speaking, songwriters make about 10.5 percent of Spotify or MOG revenue. “However, each service has to run literally five formulas each month — on calculation number one, they have Subsection Number One and Subsection Number Two,” Price says. “They throw out the higher of those and then compare that one against the other three. After that, they have to run this formula five different times.”

Because the formulae are so byzantine, and the royalty payments that show up on audit sheets are still so tiny, very few artist lawyers and managers truly understand how much they could make – one day – from Spotify, MOG, Rdio or the other relatively new streaming services.

But Price makes the point that Spotify and the others encourage music fans to explore, listening to songs they might not have purchased. Even if it’s not a rock-star payday, it’s something. “Is it big money? I think it could be! I really do,” says Jim Guerinot, manager of Nine Inch Nails and No Doubt.

Adele, who is signed to Sony Music, sells “Rolling in the Deep” for $1.29. Apple, as the retailer, keeps 30 percent, or roughly 40 cents. The rest, 90 cents, goes to Sony. From that, the major record label must deduct 9.1 cents as a “mechanical royalty,” paid to Adele and her co-writer, Paul Epworth (although they might split it with their respective publishing companies). That leaves about 81 cents.

Typical record contracts give artists 12 to 20 percent of sales, depending on the hugeness of the star, so let’s split the difference and say Adele’s percent is 16. That comes out of the original $1.29 price – so the artist’s cut for sale of the master recording is about 20 cents. (This is assuming Adele has made enough to “recoup” the expenses for her album – otherwise, it just contributes to paying off her debt to her record company.) And the remainder, a grand total of 60 cents, goes to Sony to pay for marketing, publicity, videos, executive salaries and obviously, profit.

Of course, many artists don’t want to share nearly half of their revenues with a major label like Sony, which is essentially a middleman. Before the Internet, and stuff like ProTools, an artist had to sign with a label even to be heard. That’s obviously no longer true. Today, an artist can pay a service like TuneCore to be included in the iTunes Store. At that point, after Apple takes its cut, the entire 90 cents goes to the artist.

“When we released the first Puscifer record, we went to a major distributor,” says Maynard James Keenan, frontman for Tool, A Perfect Circle and indie band Puscifer, which put out Conditions of My Parole on its own earlier this week. “There was still this groaning dinosaur, grasping at straws, trying to get out of the tar pits. They were still doing things the old-school way, throwing my money at things that really didn’t matter. And there are always these little extra fees when you try to go through channels – distribution fees, hidden costs. All these things really add up. It doesn’t seem like you can really make a living off that. I pulled out of that this time. It just makes more sense.”

Over the past couple of years, YouTube has grown into a lucrative machine for record labels. Popular videos – those that generate hits in the millions – can be festooned with ads, and YouTube shares that revenue with the copyright holders. And it can be just as lucrative for goofy, homemade videos that use popular songs as it is for stars’ original videos. For the homemade stuff, the system works like this: JK Wedding Entrance Dance, in which Chris Brown’s “Forever” is the soundtrack, has racked up more than 70 million views since its debut in July 2009.

After the video was becoming a huge hit, YouTube’s content identification people and employees of Brown’s record label, Sony, had a conversation. The label had two options: Because YouTube isn’t a piracy service, like Kazaa or LimeWire, it could take down the video immediately – or it could sell ads against it. According to music-business sources, a top artist might make $1 per 1,000 video plays — so Sony has received, by our rough estimates, $70,000 for the JK Wedding Entrance Dance. (Vevo can draw five or 10 times that amount.) And artists get a fraction of that based on the percentages in their contracts. Which did Sony choose? Well, check out the multitude of ads, inside and outside the video box, throughout JK Wedding Dance.

Of course, truly independent artists – like video kings OK Go, who recently split with their longtime label EMI – are in a much better position in this scenario. “I know individual artists who make tens of thousands of dollars a month on YouTube,” says Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne.com, which measures online metrics such as illegal file-sharing numbers and sells the data back to labels. “And I know of individual artists who make more money on an individual basis from YouTube than they do from iTunes.”

After years of fighting over pennies, Internet radio services reached an agreement with artists, music publishers and record labels a few years ago on royalty payments. The rates go up every year, but the broad formula is that big “pure play” companies, such as Pandora and Slacker, pay either 25 percent of their total revenue per year, or a little more than $.001 per song — whichever is greater. These payments go to a music-business collection agency known as SoundExchange, which then pays 50 percent of it to the copyright owner (usually a record label like Warner or Sony), 45 percent to the artist and 5 percent to non-featured performers. Smaller Internet radio companies pay slightly lower rates.

Anu Kirk, product lead for MOG, said at the recent Digital Music Forum in Los Angeles that Pandora winds up paying out much less than that – about a tenth of a penny per play. “It sucks that right now that artists are getting paid so little money by subscription services, but it sucks that artists are getting paid so little money by everyone,” Kirk said.

David Hyman, CEO of MOG, won’t divulge his subscriber numbers, but he offers broad royalty estimates that apply to both Pandora-style radio and MOG-style subscriptions. “Let’s say MOG has 1 million subscribers and everyone’s paying $10 per month. And let’s say the labels got 60 percent of that. Now, each label gets their piece of 60 percent based on frequency of plays. So if Warner [Music, a major label] was 30 percent of all plays in a given month, then Warner gets 30 percent of that 60 percent,” he says. “Then they get a wad of money. Once they get that wad of money, how do they distribute it internally? I have no idea.”

Speaking of wads of money, CDs were intensely profitable for artists and (especially) record labels for more than two decades, until the Internet, MP3s, piracy, Napster, iTunes, YouTube and Spotify kicked in over the past 10 years. The formula for artist payment is roughly the same as the iTunes model – only labels have traditionally removed hefty percentages for mysterious deductions.

Josh Grier, veteran music-business attorney for Wilco, Ryan Adams and others, walks us through the math. The retailer takes out about 30 percent of the suggested $17.98 price, or $5.40. From what’s left, the songwriter and publishing company remove another 9.1 cents per song – or say, 91 cents for 10 songs. That leaves $11.67. (Often, producers take a cut as well.) From that, the artist receives 12 to 20 percent – let’s use 16 to split the difference.

But Grier points out that labels have been cutting into artist royalties for years with deductions marked “free goods” (usually 10 percent of the artist’s royalty) and “packaging” (usually 25 percent) — dropping the royalty rate from roughly 16 to 11. (These old-school deductions for physical CDs and LPs don’t apply to digital sales.)

In the end, in very broad terms, that leaves about $1.93 per sale in profit for the artist and $9.74 for the label. (We’re assuming, once again, that the artist in question has recouped expenses, meaning he or she no longer has to pay back a record label for videos, tour support and so forth.) Of course, both need to remove their own expenses from that.

A decade ago, this disparity in payments was a huge point of contention between artists and the labels they worked for. That’s still true today, but artists are far more likely to throw up their hands and say, “Who gives a crap? Let’s just make a pile from touring.” Says Grier: “The questions you’re having are not all that relevant to the band. ‘How many records are we going to sell? Pfpfpfpft. We just want to play the songs.’”

Who knows whether this tumult of triangles inscribed in stone, first brought about by nature and then by art, does not contain one of the secret cyphers of the universe? Sometimes contemplating one artifact or idea about nature can go a long way. For French literary critic and philosopher Roger Caillois, it was the “writing of stones”, the patterns inscribed into ancient stones and minerals, and revealed by polishing their surfaces, that got him going.

Strange and sometimes convoluted, Caillois’ writing still manages to be engrossing and thought-provoking, exploring what the book describes as “the impact these configurations have had upon the human imagination throughout history”. Aside from that though, the images are gorgeous, providing a close up look at the natural beauty of stones. Below are a few selections.

“There are impossible scribblings in nature, written neither by men nor by devils”

“I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.”

“Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.”

“Obscure distillations generate juices, salivas, yeasts. Like mists or dews, brief yet patient jellies come forth momentarily and with difficulty from a substance lately imperturbable: they are evanescent pharmacies, doomed victims of the elements, about to melt or dry up, leaving behind only a savor or a stain.”

“Meanwhile the tree of life goes on putting out branches. A multitude of new inscriptions is added to the writing in stones. Images of fishes swim among dendrites of manganese as though among clumps of moss. A sea lily sways on its stem in the heart of a piece of slate. A phantom shrimp can no longer feel the air with its broken antennae. The scrolls and laces of ferns are imprinted in coal. Ammonites of all sizes, from a lentil to a millwheel, flaunt their cosmic spirals everywhere. A fossil trunk, turned jasper and opal like a frozen fire, clothes itself in scarlet, purple, violet. Dinosaurs’ bones change their petit-point tapestries into ivory, gleaming pink or blue like sugared almonds.”

Sometimes, I wonder what it’s really like to lose your mind. Even the phrase lose your mind is a strange one. It’s not like it’s really gone — I mean something is going on up there. Just, not exactly what’s going on in everyone else’s mind. In Ethiopia, the problem of mental illness is a widespread phenomenon, with an estimated 15% of all adults affected, or just over 12 million folks. Due to the lack of psychiatric care facilities however, most of these people live on the street. Referred to, perhaps endearingly and perhaps pejoratively, as the Sweet Crazies, Ethiopia’s mentally ill fascinated photographer Jan Hoek, so much so, that they became the focus of his latest portrait project, and a resulting gallery exhibition in Amsterdam.

Rather than simply documenting the Sweet Crazies in the streets though, Hoek decided to pose their portraits against a backdrop of thrones, pillars and colorful backgrounds — typically the scene of Ethiopian wedding portraits. Along with the portraits, Hoek includes a few anecdotes, recounting his experiences in Addis Ababa, and the colorful personalities he encountered along the way. Troubling as their broader context may be, the shots are practically iconic, approaching a difficult and strange reality in an original way.

Jan Hoek on The Sweet Crazies:

The first metally ill person I saw in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, was having an animated chat with the sky in the middle of a roundabout. He had cigarettes in both of his nostrils, wore aviator sunglasses, and his outfit was a hodgepodge of frayed, worn-out, wonderfully matching pieces of clothing. He looked like a mythical figure, and when I approached him he threw a rock at my head. During the rest of my trip I saw hundreds of others like him, all dressed better than any model on any catwalk. They wore bottles, homemade hats, or entirely leatherette outfits. The phenomenon is so widespread in Ethiopia they even have a name for this group of people: Sweet Crazies. It doesn’t sound very PC, but it is a very affectionate term.

When I got home from my trip I couldn’t get the Sweet Crazies out of my mind, so I decided to go back to Ethiopia to do a photo project on the stylish insane. According to the World Health Organization, 15 percent of Ethiopian adults (12 million people) suffer from mental illness. Yet there is only one psychiatric clinic in the whole country.

I went to visit the clinic, but the clinic’s spokesperson would only talk to me on the condition that I not mention his name or the name of the center. It was a miserable place. The Sweet Crazies were wandering the corridors sadly, with their heads shaved and their festive outfits exchanged for boring pyjamas.

“Whenever someone is suffering from a mental disorder, people frequently think that evil spirits have taken over his or her body,” said the anonymous spokesman. “Out of fear families end up kicking their own kids onto the streets. Furthermore, the people who are aware of their problems often don’t know how to treat them. Many consider a holy water treatment to be the only possible solution.” The holy water treatment takes place in a church, where a priest in a black robe splashes water on the mentally ill with a gardening hose. According to the spokesman more people should be treated scientifically. He hates the term Sweet Crazy and told me, “These people are patients who suffer from a disease. By giving them such a name you automatically stigmatize them. It implies that they cannot help but being crazy.”

Out of respect for the Sweet Crazies I decided not to photograph them in the littered streets. Instead, I shot them in typical Ethiopian photo studios filled with Roman pillars and golden thrones. These are the kind of places newlyweds go to look wealthy in ivory suits.

Together with my Ethiopian pal Solomon, I spent a month trying to make friends with the Sweet Crazies in order to get them to participate in the project.

Many Sweet Crazies were flattered by the idea and would kiss and cuddle me after shoots. Some of them turned out to be pretty edgy. One guy completely lost it when another client made a cruel joke, and we were chased out of the studio by a gang of guards with sticks. When I ran into the guy on the street the next day he seemed to have forgotten about the whole ordeal and, as if nothing had happened, cheerfully waved at me.

Surely I’m not the only one who’s fallen in love with South Park over their illustrious fifteen season run. I still remember trying to stay awake to watch Kyle drop the famous line, “Oh my god, they killed Kenny!” For many of us South Park has left an indelible mark on our transitional years, continuously killing shit while providing their one of a kind commentary on society at large. Recently, creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker surprised a freshman class of NYU film students on their first day, offering insight into the way they construct a story amongst other things. Dropping serious knowledge on how to be successful in the writing game, this one’s important for anyone who’s interested in writing or just looking to tell a good story.

Over the last four decades or so, it’s easy to see why Steve Jobs’ name has become synonymous with innovation. In some form or another, reminders of his enduring brilliance and foresight are everywhere — on our desks, in our backpacks or quite literally in our pockets. Even if you’ve never used a single Apple product, the innovations Jobs helped to bring to the forefront of our culture have probably changed the way you lived, from the way we listen to music to the way we share ideas. Jobs took an esoteric, expert-oriented niche product and turned it into something personal, and something accessible. In all likelihood, you’re reading this off something that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him. It’s no wonder that today, on the day of his death, some of us feel almost as if he was someone we knew personally.

As impressive as Steve Jobs is for his ingenuity, he’s known just as much for his ability to communicate. The ideas were usually great, but the presentation was always flawless. From one masterful speech to the next, it seemed like every year brought around a press conference showcasing the latest gadget from Apple that would revolutionize some aspect of our lives, and send the competition rushing back to the drawing board. Rather than letting gimmicks speak for the brand, Jobs fostered a culture of straightforward, no-bullshit advertising. He spoke to us. He showed us what these things could do, and why they mattered. In 2006, in one of his most impressive displays of communication to date, Jobs spoke at Stanford’s commencement, reflecting on his extraordinary journey, what he’s learned from his own mortality, and the importance of following your heart. We’ve posted it before, but today, it seems more poignant than ever.

Photos By Max Gibson

What’s your typical day like?

Get up, take a shower at 7:30, I dry off, I go downstairs and get coffee out of the machine, and then I come out and go to work. That’s my typical day.

Going to work is being out here?

Yes, in the street. That’s everyday.

How long have you been doing that for?

30 years.

On the street?

On the street.

What have you learned from your time on the street?

That people can be very cruel.

Cruel in what way?

Raping women. Stealing, robbing from me.

Those things have happened to you?

I got robbed for two dollars. I had just made two dollars, down on Main street. And I was getting ready to put it in my pocket, and this woman came along and said, “Give me all your money.” I worked all day for that two dollars, and I wasn’t gonna give it up without a fight. So we were tussling back and forth, but she finally won out. I couldn’t tussle anymore. Because I hadn’t ate all day.

Do you have a place where you live now?

Yeah.

A shelter?

Yeah.

But you’ve lived on the street as well?

Yeah.

What is it like to live on the street?

It’s terrifying. Really terrifying.

In what way?

You never know if you’re going to get raped or murdered. They’re setting homeless people on fire. Did you hear about that?

No, I didn’t hear about that.

They set two men on fire.

In Los Angeles?

In a cardboard box. They were sleeping, and they set the cardboard box on fire.

Geez…

Yeah, in Los Angeles. Downtown, on Main Street.

Why do you think there’s so much cruelty directed towards people on the street?

I can’t say.

Where did you grow up?

Laguna Beach.

What was that like?

It was nice. I got to go to the beach everyday. Go in the water. Surfboard.

Oh you used to surf, nice. I boogey board sometimes.

I loved it.

Were those some of your fondest memories?

Before my mom and dad died, going to the park everyday. Going to the zoo, going to the circus.

All fun things.

Some people say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

That’s right.

I used to argue a lot with my mom. She said she wished she never would’ve adopted me. I was adopted.

Really? So am I.

And I don’t know my real parents. She said she wished she never adopted me. I was more trouble than what I was worth.

She said that to you?

I used to run away from home a lot. I used to give her a lot of problems. I was a brat.

Why did you run away?

Because I couldn’t stand it at home.

How was it growing up in the 60’s?

Man, they were jumpin! It was fun. Well, it was fun back then. It’s not fun now. We got loaded, stay loaded. Dropped acid, all that kind of good stuff. (Laughs)

What makes you happy?

What makes me happy? My husband.

What makes you sad?

My mom dying and my dad dying. I’ve never gotten over that. On the holidays it’s really tough. Really tough.

How’d you meet your husband?

I was in a cardboard box in front of his hotel. And he brought me in. I was crying. I had gotten beaten up real bad. My eye was black, my other eye was black. Had bruises all over my body. And he brought me in his room.

Was it love at first sight?

Yup.

How did you know?

I just knew. I’ve been with him 29 years. We’re coming up on our 30th wedding anniversary February 5th.

Congratulations!

Thank you.

December 25th is when we met. Christmas Eve.

Oh you met on Christmas Eve?

Yeah he said I was his present.

You said it was love at first site?

Yup.

What is your definition of true love?

Understanding and respect for one another. Don’t cheat on each other. Don’t lie to one another, and that’s how a relationship will work. Be friends first.

Be friends first?

Yeah.

And then it can become romantic?

Right.

Not the other way around?

No.

Why not?

You have to be friends first.

How come?

Cuz, it just doesn’t work without being friends.

Who was your favorite artist you listened to growing up?

Michael Jackson

Yes! I love Michael Jackson too.

He died too young. Way too young.

What was it like when he was in his prime?

Oh it was wonderful. He wasn’t on drugs. He wasn’t on anything. A free spirit. He was a spirit. And he could dance and sing. Oh man…

Where were you when you were 24.

Down here. In a cardboard box.

What have you learned from your experiences?

You take the good with the bad. Never give up on life.

Why not?

Because it’s worth living.

I met Dolores on the corner of 5th Avenue and Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles. She is there Monday through Friday. If you see her and have any cash to spare she would appreciate it. Married for the past 29 years, she married her husband five days after they met and has been in love ever since.

How hard is it to take that leap? To consciously venture into the unknown, unaware of where or how you might land. How hard is it for your mind to get your body to do it? Sometimes nearly impossible. It seems like we face cliffs throughout the day. Whether it be asking a girl out, or telling your boss how you really feel, a lot of times we have the chance to act without knowing how shit’s gonna turn out. It can be scary. But how often do we take those chances? Probably not enough. Some say it’s better to play it safe. But here’s the catch, every time you do take that chance you grow a little stronger, a little more confident and a little more assured, no matter what the outcome is. I’m not saying if everyone’s jumping off a cliff, for you to do it too, but simply put, take chances, especially the ones where you have more to gain than to lose.