The night started off odd as around nine o’clock, when the open mic at 37th and Zen usually starts, the club was empty. And I don’t mean empty like sparse, I mean there were literally four comics, four employees, and 1 customer. Two of the comics left, understandably so, leaving just me and the host, Tim “The Big 44″ Loulies. It was looking like we weren’t going to get to do any comedy, since there’s not much point playing to an empty room. We hung out for a little while and a group of about ten of my friends and friends of other friends showed up, along with some other random folks and comedian Derek Williams. Since we now had an audience, we decided we’d put on a show. Of course, then we couldn’t get the microphone to work and had to get Traylor, the only employee who knows how to work the audio stuff well, and just generally a cool dude, to come and set it up. We started around 10:30, a full hour and a half after when the show is supposed to start.

Because of the late start, lack of comics, and generally loose atmosphere, rules were kind of off for the night and everyone was allowed to do their material for as long as they wanted, or until they ran out. 44 started things off great as usual, but lost everyone a little with his political humor, which is a shame because his political stuff is incredibly funny. I think people are just dumb. (Which is mean to say since most of the crowd was made up of my friends, but come on guys, that stuff was great.) Next he let a guy named DeWayne go up and sort of talk extemporaneously about not having a left leg anymore. The guy was kind of funny in the way that drunks amputees are sometimes. I didn’t realize it until today, but later in the evening when I tried out a newer bit about a woman with no arms asking for a fork nobody laughed because that guy had gone up and was still at the club. I get it, but that’s stupid because I know the stuff is funny. Again, people are just uptight.

After that guy 44 forced my good buddy Travis Jones to go up and I’m glad he did. I first started doing stand-up because Travis said he’d do it with me, but he’s only gone up three or four times. He was very, very funny, especially his material about dating and strip clubs.

It didn’t happen much during Travis’ set, but at some point during the guy with one leg’s time, a couple of guys sitting at a table in the back of the room started talking loudly, interrupting the show. Mostly the bigger of the two, a guy who was about 6′3″ 250 plus pounds, was the one being disruptive, constantly repeating “Oh baby” as the people on stage were saying things. After Travis Derek Williams, who had already performed once that night at a different venue, came up and went into his stuff. The guys in the back became more bold and started directly addressing Derek. You could tell it was throwing him off his game a little, but he did a great job of keeping his composure, talking back with them a little, but mostly ignoring them. At some point during Derek’s set 44 went over and issued a challenge to the loudmouths: If you think you’re so funny get on stage. It’s a common challenge to hecklers, because most of them are cowards who just want to piss all over a show from the back and would never get on stage, but these two actually accepted his challenge. Unfortunately, this did nothing to quiet them and they did their best to disrupt Derek’s set.

Once Derek finished his material, 44 invited Christian, the bigger of the hecklers onto the stage. About a minute after he started talking I realized, not only was he drunk, but he was probably also on cocaine. Other people have guessed he was high on Red Bull since he mentioned it several times, but I’m pretty sure it was Columbian gold. He proceeded to flutter about the stage in a non-stop salvo of nonsense, basically muttering to himself as we all watched him with dead silence. About halfway through Travis told me to start recording it, so I have some of this fool’s time on stage that you can watch:

It’s worse than it looks because that went on about twice as long. It’s also worth mentioning that early in the set he was pulling out the contents of his pockets in the worst attempt at prop comedy ever. At one point he pulled out a couple of bullets and placed them on the table on stage. It was pointed out later that this should have been the cue to usher the guy out of the club, but really nobody could have been expected to think he was anything more than some drunk idiot with a few bullets and a phone charger in his pocket.

After he got off the stage 44 let his little buddy, who couldn’t have been more than 5′2″ tall, go up. I recorded his set too, but it’s not even worth watching. All he really said was “Norfolk sucks,” which is not only untrue, but also not funny. After him, 44 let a drunk girl, who apparently was the guy without a leg’s girlfriend, go up with her friend Deaf Nate, who is, yes, deaf. The hecklers started up again with their “Oh baby”s but it didn’t phase her since she was just drunkenly rambling.

So this is what I get to go up after, about half an hour’s worth of coked up drunks and a ventriloquist show with a drunk girl and a deaf dude. Needless to say, the room is not primed for comedy at this point. I made my first mistake with how I started the set; I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I can remember everything I said, but basically I commented on how fucked the night had gotten and how much it sucked that I had to follow the coked up dudes from Night at the Roxbury. I think I would have been fine right there, but then I kept going and asked if they didn’t have a drug deal to get to and leave us all alone. That’s when the big guy started yelling stuff at me. I can’t even tell you what. I know he kept saying I was fat, which was dumb because not only was he as fat as me, or fatter, but the beginning of one of my jokes was “I’m fat” and he kept talking about my shirt, which had an x-ray of a dog with a bunch of school supplies inside of him (the dog ate my homework…). Oddly, earlier in the evening when I had walked by him he seemed to love my shirt.

He stopped jawing at me for a little while and I got to do some jokes, most of which were going really well. I was throwing out every one of my jokes I could remember and a few new ones, which went over really well. But, douchebaggery always wins out in the end and the guy had to start talking again. This time I just put the mic down by my side and let him talk for a while before going back to my material. I won’t lie, that shit was distracting and it was pissing me off and from that point on I really wasn’t doing well. And, like I said, I tried to do amputee jokes whith an amputee in the room, which will probably never work out well. 44 got the guy to settle down for a little while and even though I wasn’t feeling it anymore I had to keep going since the audience was basically all there for me. And when else am I going to get unlimited time for stand-up?

There’s something I’ve noticed about drunk people: You can say something to them at one point in the night that will roll off of them at the time, but hours and hours later, for no reason whatsoever, it will suddenly piss them off and they want to fight you over it. Well, I think that’s what happened with Christian. Out of nowhere in the middle of a joke he jumped up out of his chair and started yelling at me. He was calling me all kinds of names, I can’t remember what specifically but I’m sure they were really intelligent and poignant, and telling me if I had such a problem with him I should come fight him. Again, I just dropped the mic and let him talk, which must have pissed him off more because he proceeded to stalk angrily toward the stage, informing me that he was a greenbelt in some form of martial art nobody has ever heard of and that his cousin was Somebody Van Halen. Not Eddie Van Halen, the one you’ve heard of, but some other Van Halen. Not that it would matter if it was Eddie Van Halen, cause that had nothing to do with him acting ridiculous at a bar.

So he runs up to the front of the bar and keeps yelling at me, telling me to get off the stage and fight him. Honestly, I wanted to fight him. Even more honestly, at about three different points in trying to do my set all I wanted to do was set down the microphone, run to the back of the room, and kick his ass. But, I’m an adult. Adults don’t get into fights. If adults do get into fights they go to jail, or at the very least have a bunch of annoying paperwork to fill out.

Now, at this point, nobody had moved. This guy was right up at the edge up the stage yelling up at me and everybody is just watching him. A few of my best friends in the world are sitting a few feet away happily watching as a crazy man stalked toward me and confronted me. Thanks, guys. Christian makes an attempt to grab the microphone out of my hand, to say what is anyone’s guess, but I easily swiped it out of his reach. This caused him to make a fellatio gesture toward my crotch, which was right at his eye level, and say, “I’ll talk into your microphone.” I could spend the rest of my life pondering it and I’d never figure out how he thought threatening to suck my dick was an aggressive gesture.

Now is when 44, Traylor, who is built like a mac truck, and Bradford, the club’s manager, who is built like the opposite of a mac truck, jumped in front of Christian and corralled him away from the stage. This other guy, who I’d never met, and later found out was named Keith, jumped up on stage with me, looked at me and said, “I got your back.” I kind of dumbly nodded, but in my head I was thinking, “Who are you? …I love you…Don’t leave me.”

The intervention only pissed Christian off more and he decided that everything wrong with the world was my doing. As the group pushed him out, with little Bradford in the front doing most of the pushing as he yelled for the bartender to call the cops, he continued to salvo me with insults and baseless challenges. While they were getting him and his friend to leave I wandered over, put the mic back on its stand, and took a seat on the stool at the back of the stage, watching the action and shaking my head.

When they came back, without Christian and his little coked up friend, the crowd cheered for me, with Traylor loudly shouting my name to egg them on. It was very flattering but all I wanted to do was get off stage. They wanted me to keep going, so I did a horrible rendition of my Helper Monkey joke, which is one of my favorites and usually fun to do, before basically running off stage.

So I went from never being heckled to having a guy try to fight me on stage. It’s like losing your virginity to Megan Fox; it’s way too much to handle for your first time. 44 later asked me if I was scared, and I had to honestly tell him that I was nervous because the situation was uncomfortable, but I wasn’t scared, because I knew the guy wasn’t going to hit me. If someone is going to hit you, they do it, they don’t talk about it or tell you to hit them. That’s what coked up pussies do.

This story has become a little bit of a local legend in the last week, but I’m sure once something else more interesting happens nobody will really remember it but the folks who were there. Of course, there were very few people there, so maybe it won’t be remember at all. And anything worth doing requires that you keep doing it, so I got right back on the horse the next night at Cozzy’s and killed, while talking a little about this experience:

When I was up there I thought I was doing terribly; I was uncomfortable, didn’t know my material that well, and didn’t feel like the audience was really responding. But, only two-thirds of that is true. I didn’t know my material that well, which made me uncomfortable and unsure of myself and led to me giving up. Sure, the audience wasn’t responding exactly how I’d want, but that’s all part of the stand-up; if you’re funny enough, if you’re on your game, if you know your shit and are delivering it well, they’ll laugh how and when you want them to. The reason I sucked in this set, and the reason I sucked in the other set a week and a half ago at New Belmont, is I gave up on the set and let myself suck.

I don’t know how long I’m gonna keep giving stand-up a try; I’m not sure I see it as a long-term thing that I want to keep doing, I don’t know that I’ll ever feel very comfortable doing it. But, I do think it’s something that I can be good at, I’m funny and smart and there’s no reason I can’t be both on stage and make folks laugh, so there’s no reason for me not to do the best I can at it in the time that I’m doing it. So this was a good lesson and one I’m going to take to heart. It’s hard to keep plugging away up there when people aren’t reacting the way you want because it really is all cyclical, you feel better and funnier and everything flows better when people are with you and laughing. But, in classic catch-22 style, it all starts with you being comfortable and funny. If I get off stage and feel like I sucked I want it to be because I didn’t make people laugh, not because I was unprepared or unsure of myself or because I gave up.

And, as always, I have to talk about how awesome the other comics are. They’re ridiculously supportive and they really want everyone to come out and do a good job. You can see in the video when I wasn’t doing well some of the other comics were trying to help me out and when I gave up and left several of them made sure to tell me I did better than I thought and not to give up. All this makes it so much easier to get up and try at something that’s incredibly hard and I can’t begin to say how much I appreciate it.

Neither the name of the buyer nor the seller were revealed, but apparently both are well known and respected in the rare comic collecting world. In fact, the buyer had previously bought another copy of Action Comics #1, but for a lesser price because it was graded at a lower number. The grading process, on a scale from 0 to 10, is used for all kinds of collectibles, from comic books to baseball cards, and takes into account the quality of the item, it’s wear and tear and how it has held up over the years. The book sold yesterday was an 8, which is extremely rare for a book that old. Comics back then were produced in much smaller number and rarely taken care of, so to find on in what is considered “very fine” condition after eighty-two years is nearly impossible. And to have one go on sale is just as rare, which is likely why the buyer was so willing to pay such a steep price, in fact, the highest price ever paid for a comic book.

When I started writing this I almost called Action Comics #1 one of the rarest comics, but that’s not true at all. Off the top of my head I don’t know of more rare ones, but it would only makes sense that there are. Like I said, fewer comics were produced back then and they were rarely taken care of by their owners. The only reason a book like this one ends up in any kind of shape today is because it has Superman in it. I’m sure there were all kinds of comics with completely forgettable stories and characters, basically anything without super heroes, that, if found at an 8 grade today, would be much more rare than Action Comics #1, because there wouldn’t have been much interest in keeping them in good condition. More rare, but not more valuable though, because who really cares about some detective story or horror story compared to the first appearance of Superman?

No, what makes Action Comics #1 so valuable is that it introduced the world to the super hero. There were several attempts at making heroes that we would today consider super heroes, including The Phantom, one of the few from that era that lasted at all, but none came close to breaking the kind of boundaries that Superman did. He was the son of another world, truly unlike anything anyone had seen before, with more powers than he knew what to do with, and he completely changed the hero archetype. A year later Batman appeared in Detective Comics #27 and the super hero age was in full swing, as slews of heroes debuted one week after another.

While I do think that owning a copy of Action Comics #1 would be cool, it’s not the kind of thing I’d ever pay big bucks, or even small bucks, for. That’s just not how I like collecting. I collect baseball cards, but I only care about getting the ones that I can get signed. I’m simply not going to pay more than a dollar for any card, because it’s not worth it. I want to get the card to have it signed, not to just keep and look at. I guess to somebody who doesn’t collect, there’s not really any difference, but when you get a card signed you have an experience with it, you get to meet the player and have an interaction, something that doesn’t happen when you just own something. Even when I collected comics, from when I was 9 until about 15, I didn’t care about having or getting anything valuable, I just liked the stories. The reason I’m a writer now is because I loved reading comics, I liked how the stories worked and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Kind of ironic since I’ve never even attempted to write a comic book.

As someone who still has all the comics he ever bought, and still has them in outstanding, if not mint, condition, this story about a comic selling for an huge amount only frustrates me, because I know I’ll never be able to get anything for my collection. Yes, I loved reading them when I did, but now, well, I’ve read them and they just take up space, so I’d love to be able to get rid of them and get something out of them. Unfortunately, that’s just not possible. For the last 20 years people have believed that things like comics are valuable, so they’ve made a point to take care of them, to keep them pristine and thus more valuable. Of course, this is in opposition to the reality of why an old book like Action Comics #1 is valuable. It’s only worth a lot because so few of them were maintained in good condition. So if all modern comics are taken care of, they’re basically all worthless. This is made even worse by the fact that the comics companies produces millions and millions of each comic, making the likelihood that any of them will become rare even more remote.

A few years ago, when we were about to make our first failed effort at making a movie, I looked into selling my comic collection, hoping to be able to fund things. I collected for six or seven years, mostly X-Men and all the various X books, and I have some huge runs of various books, including the first 75 or so issues of the newer run of X-Men that started in 1991, with all the various cover permutations and all. But still, when I looked around a little, I found folks who had my entire collection and more, usually older, better stuff, who couldn’t sell what they had, even at prices that I thought were ridiculously low. The reality is, none of us are getting rich off our comic boos unless Doc Brown shows up in his Delorian and takes us back to the late 30s.

As sad as this is, I don’t feel cheated by my comic collecting days, mostly because I never really believed they’d be worth anything monetarily. I was reading to read, and I still get comics, though mostly only in graphic novel form, to read them, because I love the medium. Frankly, investments of any kind have always struck me as being a foolish prayer and I’ve always thought that if you can find immediate enjoyment out of the things your ostensibly collecting you’re much better off than the folks who are hoping for the day when all that pop culture junk is one day valuable. So if you’ve got some old comics sitting around in mylar bags, open them up and read them, if you’ve got some Starting Lineup figures still in the box, open them up and place them on your window sill, and if you’ve got some original Star Wars figures still in the package…well, some things are actually valuable.

First, we’re back to the fairly poor video quality again. This time my friend Liz taped it for me and I guess she didn’t get a good focus from the start. It didn’t help either that my other friend Ashley was in front of her and the camera was auto-focusing on several things the whole time. But, as I always say, it’s not her camera and she was awesome enough to video it for me so she’s under no obligation to make it perfect. You can hear me and you can see me well enough to get the performance, so if that’s not good enough, well, you’re kind of a jerk.

I’m definitely getting more comfortable on stage; I still feel like I want to throw up before I go on, but that’s getting a little better and at least now when I’m on the stage I feel somewhat comfortable. Anyway, I don’t feel my legs shaking as bad. The last two thirds of this set were mostly what I did on Sunday so it was nice to see they actually are funny and it was the situation on Sunday that hurt me. This is the first time I’ve done something a second time on stage and I definitely see why people do the same jokes again, you get better by doing them repeatedly. Still, I want to make sure I’m doing mostly new stuff as much as I can, if only because it’s forcing me to write and to try to be as fresh and funny as possible. My friend Stephanie, who works at 37th actually thanked me for doing different stuff each week; she said she’s gotten a little tired of hearing the same stuff from the same comedians each week.

And again, as far as the other comedians, those guys are awesome. They’re so inviting and open and supportive and it really makes you want to come back and keep trying.

It’s also worth noting that Travis went up and performed both on Sunday and last night. On Sunday, well, there’s no other way to say it, he was not good. And it wasn’t as much a function of the setting as it was of him forgetting to actually tell any jokes. He did the same stuff last night and actually remembered to tell jokes and it went a lot better. I took a video of his stuff but he’s too much of a wuss to let me put it up. Maybe one day.

Apparently MTV has just know figured out what the rest of us have known for the last decade, and possibly longer: that they don’t show music videos any more. In fact, they have almost no programming whatsoever devoted to anything even remotely related to music. I guess by removing the “Music Television” from their logo MTV is saying they’re through the lie that they’ve become and they’re going to fully embrace themselves as the purveyors of, mostly, reality television. Yes, the horrible trend that started in the 90s with The Real World and Road Rules, continued to be blight on the world with The Osbournes and The Hills, and finally jumped the shark with the inexplicably popular Jersey Shore, has finally taken over the network that was once the most cutting edge thing available on popular TV.

For me, this is the ending to what has been a sad transformation. I gave up on MTV a long time ago, but it’s still sad to see something that was so vital to my teenage experience morph into an unrecognizable mess. MTV was beyond innovative, and what made it so likable was that they did something nobody else did, played music videos. As a kid, the great thing about MTV was that they played videos literally all day long, so you could just put it on and have it playing while you were doing whatever it was you were doing that day to entertain yourself. It didn’t matter if the video currently playing wasn’t something you liked, because you knew that in a few minutes something you would like would be coming on. I was watching the first time they showed the Thriller video, in its original eleven minute long version; it’s not only the greatest music video ever made, but, despite the fact that he transformed into a degenerate pervert, it featured the coolest person on the planet, Michael Jackson.

With this new MTV format great things like that will never happen again. The channel used to have shows devoted entirely to genres of music, and none was better than 120 Minutes. Every Sunday night you could sit and watch videos of up and coming rock/alternative bands and know about the next big thing before anyone else (or so was the thought, really you’d know about them roughly the same time as the other million or so viewers). Every huge name band from the late 80s and early to mid 90s was shown to the world for the first time on 120 Minutes. I’ll be honest, without a show like that, I know I miss out on a ton of great music. Sure, it’s all out there in the world for me to find, but I’m just not that savvy, I need a little help.

Not only is it sad that there haven’t been any videos on MTV for years, but the stuff they’ve been replaced with is awful. I’d rather have someone poke my eye with their finger for six hours than have to watch a half hour’s worth of current MTV programming. The stuff is just terrible; it’s a collection of assholes, bitches, crybabies, spoiled brats, and, well, assholes and bitches. They never show anyone likable, intelligent, funny, or interesting, and they never show anything that has even the slightest bit of redeeming value. Now, I’m sure that there was plenty of crap on back when I was a more than regular watcher of MTV (pretty sure I already mentioned The Real World and Road Rules), and I know it reeks of errant nostalgia to say “things were better in my day”, but the fact is, it’s true, MTV not only had it made with all the videos, but they had truly original, often brilliant programming as well.

There were a number of live action shows that were great, including the admittedly awful but undeniably enjoyable Undressed, but the cream of the crop was the sketch comedy show The State. Not as well remembered or beloved as The Kids In The Hall, though often just as irreverent and hilarious, The State was one of the most innovative and, frankly, weird sketch shows ever and it launched the careers of a number of comedians who would later create such shows and movies as Reno 911, Role Models, Stella, The Baxter, and, surprisingly enough, Night At The Museum. The show had the kind of talent and entertainment and complete lack of regard for convention that is just absent from current television. Here’s a great example of the show.

But where MTV really used to shine with original programming in the old days was with their animated shows. Long before Cartoon Network came up with their Adult Swim concept MTV was perfecting adult oriented animated content with series like Liquid Television and Bevis and Butthead. Aeon Flux is one of the most visually stunning cartoons ever created and as a viewer in my early teens the subject matter was so far ahead of my knowledge that it was nearly incomprehensible. It’s a show I’d love to watch again and see if I could understand because I’m fairly positive that the content was as intricate as the artwork. Here’s the opening credits, with the super cool fly in the eyelashes thing:

Another cartoon that was visually amazing, it changed animation style depending on the naratorial perspective, and ridiculously ahead of my time was The Maxx. As a fourteen year old watching this show I barely had a clue what was going on, but I was positive it was worth watching. I always had the sense there was a lot going on in the show that was never explained and it turns out (as I learned through some research) that that was the case. There were all kind of subtextual issues that might have been explained if there had been a second season. Still, The Maxx was an fantastic show and, like Aeon Flux, one I’d love to watch now as an adult. Just the preview for the show if fairly stunning:

This change of focus for MTV is sad, but it’s also sort of a non story, since the network’s ability to create interesting programming faded out over a decade ago. It hate to be the old fogey dousing everyone with nostalgia, but any time you’re forced to examine the demise of something that was an integral part of your personal experience, that’s just bound to happen. I guess now that I’ve gotten all this off my chest it’s time to wonder what exactly the ‘M’ in ‘MTV’ stands for now.

It’s crazy, when you’re a kid, they teach you stealing is wrong, and it’s not just wrong because it’s wrong (which is the weakest kind of wrong), it’s wrong because it hurts others (which is the worst kind of wrong), and we all essentially understand that. Sure, there are people who still go out and steal, but even those people generally understand that what they are doing is wrong. I guess that’s the most baffling part of the rampant digital theft in our society, that the people who do it, and do it frequently, not only don’t see illegally downloading things off the internet as wrong, they don’t even see the act as stealing.

A few weeks ago, a guy I know was telling me about how he get photographs of athletes off a website that sells them. The site is basically a subscriber site, with different price tiers that allow the subscribers different amounts of downloads. A friend of his bought the cheapest subscription, figured out some kind of work-around to get by the download limit (don’t ask me how, I’m honest so I wouldn’t know anything about stuff like that) and sold the code the website gave him to as many people as he could, not only recouping what he paid for the access but turning a profit. The people he sold it to, including the guy I was talking with, used the access to download as many pictures as they could, without the website being paid for their access. As far as I know, this is still going on. This same guy told me about getting a complimentary gift card from an online company for purchasing a certain amount. By playing with the serial numbers on the back of the gift card he was able to figure out the numbers of a bunch of other gift cards, eventually ending up with over six hundred dollars worth of unauthorized free money to use at the web site.

This guy has a decent job, a house, a wife, and a baby; from all outward appearances he’s a perfectly upstanding person, but there he was, casually telling me about hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars worth of theft that he had committed, all without leaving the comfort of his living room.

One of my good friends is just about the most polite, nice person I know. He’s very concerned with doing and acting right and being a good person. Yet, his iTunes library is filled with thousands upon thousands of illegally downloaded songs taken through file sharing sites like LimeWire, which while not illegal in and of themselves, basically exist to facilitate illegal downloading. They’re the online equivalent of a store next to a bank that sells ski masks, guns, and getaway cars. My friend would never, in a million years, walk into a music store and just grab some CDs and walk out, but he has absolutely no problem doing the exact same action through his computer with music, movies, and whatever other kind of digital material he can get for free.

What’s even worse than the fact that most people don’t consider digital theft to be theft are the reasonings that people give me to argue that it’s perfectly Ok, and not wrong in the least. One of the weakest arguments is that if the content is so easy to acquire, it must be alright to take it. Well shit, I could probably take a ton of produce right out of the super market, or pretty much anything I could fit in a pocked out of Wal Mart (if I can’t find an employee I damn sure won’t be able to find any security guards), but does that make it alright for me to do it? No, and the same rule applies to digital content. Another classic is that all the stuff they’re downloading is too expensive to buy. Tough shit, man. Lamborghinis are expensive too, but I can’t just go and take one because I’d rather not pay for it. The unfortunate nature of things is that if you can’t afford it, you don’t get to have it. It’s not your place to put a personal judgment on the price that someone chooses to place upon their product; if you don’t like the price, you don’t buy it, and you definitely don’t just go and take it without paying later. The furthering of the too expensive argument is the one that states that it’s Ok for someone to illegally download the content because somebody paid for it originally. Sorry, but that one is bullshit too. Is it Ok if one person pays to go to a movie then goes and opens the back door and lets in their friends? No, it’s not, and in the case of downloading things it’s more like letting in a few million of their friends. Just because a few people paid for something before you doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to piggyback their transaction and get the same product. If you don’t pay for something that has a price, that’s stealing.

The last refuge for people hopelessly arguing that illegal downloading is acceptable is the personal attack, which is pretty much the last refuge for any failed argument. “You’ve never downloaded a song without paying for it?” No, actually, I haven’t, I pay for the songs I want, which causes me to be more selective. “You’ve never copied a CD or made a mix tape?” Alright, yes, of course I have. Back in the day I copied a ton of cassettes and I’ve copied some CDs in my day as well. Really, I’ve loaned out more CDs to be copied by friends than I’ve copied for myself. So yes, I have to admit, this is wrong, and it is essentially the same thing as the illegal downloading. The difference is, I’ll fully admit that it’s wrong. I’m giving someone something for free that they should pay for, which is just as good as stealing it for them myself. But, I would argue that there’s a huge difference between giving a CD to a friend to copy for his or her own personal use and putting a CD on a website so that an infinite number of people can have access to it. The guy who stole six hundred dollars worth of gift cards tried to argue that I was just as bad as anyone who downloaded anything without paying for it because I had burned and allowed others to burn CDs, and in one sense he’s right. Both are wrong, but, on the spectrum of wrong, I’m a lot closer to right. Basically, you have to move past the argument over what’s right and wrong, it’s all wrong, and argue which is worse. Going out of your way to take thousands of dollars worth of digital content is much worse than occasionally copying or allowing someone to copy a CD that was directly paid for, and anyone who could argue that it isn’t, well, they’ll probably end up making a personal attack because that’s a futile argument.

What’s more troubling to me than just the general blase attitude toward theft is what kind of effect it has on the moral compass of a society. If we decide that digital theft is Ok, what’s next? When it becomes acceptable to take from others things can only snowball from there. One of the basic ideas of our society is that of the individual, that we have the right to our person and our property and what this attitude toward illegal downloading is saying is basically that there’s nothing wrong with taking someone else’s property. If this acceptance of ephemeral personal theft becomes an ingrained part of the societal psyche then it’s only a matter of time before physical theft becomes acceptable. And once the sanctity of the person and his or her right to property is degraded, the outlook on the person him or herself is degraded. It’s not a far cry from devaluing a person’s property to devaluing a person.

That was on Monday, and Palin directly called for Emanuel’s firing through her Facebook page (apparently she’s very into Facebook; honestly, I liked it better when you had to be in college to use it). On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh, who’s no stranger to controversy, basically said he didn’t see anything wrong with what Emanuel said. In fact, he went further, marking it not only as a freedom of speech issue, but taking it a step further and deciding to used “retard” offensively as well, “Our political correct society is acting like some giant insults taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards.” He also said that in order to answer Palin’s complaint, “There’s going to be a retard summit at the White House”. Keep in mind that the “bunch of people who are retards” that he’s referring to there are liberals.

Honestly, both Emanuel and Limbaugh used “retard” in an offensive way. Both used it in the course of their job, so if their employers decide that the use of a derogatory term is enough to fire them, they should be fired. Both used it to refer to the same group of people, liberals, though Emanuel’s comment was limited to a select group of liberals. But, one big difference between what they did is that Emanuel made his utterance in a closed door, private meeting in front of a limited number of people, whereas Limbaugh made his comments, on his national radio show which gets roughly ten million listeners a week. From that perspective alone Limbaugh’s use of the word was far more devastating in its negative effect than Emanuel’s (though it shouldn’t be forgotten that both uses were offensive), so it would seem obvious that Palin, who is so adamant about the subject because she is the mother of a child with Down’s Syndrome, would also call for Limbaugh to be fired.

But, Palin was conspicuously silent on the issue for the majority of the week. While she literally ran to her Facebook page to call for Emanuel’s job, the only communique from Palin in regard to Limbaugh’s comments was a terse one-liner passed through one of her spokespeople, “Governor Palin believes crude and demeaning name calling at the expense of others is disrespectful.” That’s hardly the harsh words she had for Emanuel. Hell, she doesn’t even refer to Limbaugh by name. And, Sunday night, we saw why. Speaking directly for the first time about the subject, she said two very different things; first, about Emanuel, she said, “I think he should step down,” then, about Limbaugh, she said, “He was hysterical in that…(Liberals) are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh.”

It’s kind of amazing to me that someone can be that hypocritical and not have their head explode or something. What we’re essentially left with is that Palin doesn’t honestly care about how the derogatory use of “retard” might affect both those with special needs and their family members, but how the derogatory use or “retard” by someone who doesn’t share her political beliefs can be used for her political benefit. When it was somebody she disagreed with politically she was all about calling for his job, but as soon as Rush Limbaugh, one of the few “popular” figures I can think of who’s even more radically right wing than Palin herself, she had no desire to call for his job. In fact, she said that “Rush Limbaugh was using satire” when he referred to liberals as “retards”. I guess it shouldn’t shock me that someone who’s that comfortable with being so openly hypocritical on a national stage doesn’t understand the meaning of satire. I think of the vast majority of politics as a detestable live-action theater that’s main function is to keep the people so pre-occupied with nonsense that they’re unable to wade through the bullshit to figure out what’s really going on, but I have to admit, in a sick sort of way, this was all very fascinating.

What gets me even more than Palin’s continued ridiculousness, is the fact that every article I looked up on the subject had “retard” right there in plain sight. You’ll notice that when I mentioned the comparison to the “N-word” I wrote ‘the “N-word”‘ and not the actual word. That’s because it’s become accepted in academic and journalistic circles that you’re not supposed to write out that word, but to use the “N-word” instead. But, if that’s the case, if that offensive word is to be censored, why is it acceptable to write out all the other offensive words? Why, in an article about how “retard” is offensive, is it Ok to write out “retard”? Why is it every time I read an article about offensive racial slurs toward Latinos or Asians or any other ethnicity they clearly write out the offending words, but when an article talks about offensive words aimed at black people, they never write out the “N-word”? In no way am I trying to trivialize this, or downplay the offensiveness of the “N-word”, I’m merely trying to understand why it’s Ok to write one word and not the other. Why (and how) do newspapers determine that one word is more offensive than the other? If they’re all offensive, wouldn’t it make sense to just not have any of them in there, to censor them all? This is just one of those things that’s never made sense to me.

But, despite the movie’s worldwide acclaim, whenever somebody mentions it, all I can think is, “Fuck Avatar.” Frankly, it’s not a very good movie. I should start by saying that no movie has ever made better use of 3D technology. James Cameron revolutionized the way people will look at utilizing 3D in the future because instead of using it to get a cheap reaction out of his audience (let’s face it, pretty much every 3D movie in history has those spots where somebody has a stick or a spear or something that they point at the audience just to make folks lean back in their seat; there’s no real reason for the shot other than to have the 3D effect [I'm looking at you, Beowulf]) and instead used it to create a realistic level of depth and presence that just hasn’t been available on screen before. So, if only for that, I am glad the movie exists.

Unfortunately, that’s about the only positive thing I can say about the movie. It’s pretty awful. It’s nearly three hours long, with huge periods of boring dead space in the middle. There’s about 45 minutes of the main character training in the middle of the movie that honestly provide nothing to the story that couldn’t have been summed up in a five minute montage. 80s skiing movies knew this, why didn’t James Cameron? The acting is also just bad. Giovanni Ribisi, who I really liked about a decade ago, is beyond awful as the businessman in charge of the humans; his lines are forced and overblown and the movie also hints that he’s reluctant to be doing what he is, but they never explore that. Guess they couldn’t fit in in the three hours, maybe it’ll be on the DVD extended cut. As much as I hate to say it, Sigourney Weaver was pretty bad too, but that probably as much a function of her completely one dimensional character as anything she did. She was there to be some kind of badass mentor but ended up just kind of being an angry bitch who smoked. Joel Moore, whose acting chops amount basically to being nerdy, wasn’t so much the problem as his character, who initially loves Sully, the main character, then hates him, then loves him, all in the span of about fifteen minutes and for no real reason. And I don’t know who decided that Sam Worthington would be a star, but they need to be shot. This guy was just awful in Terminator: Salvation, which was even worse than Avatar, and he continues the suck in this movie. He’s wooden and robotic and I was happy every time he became the avatar because the computer animated version of him was far more lifelike. Worst of all, the only actor who was actually compelling was Zoe Saldana, who didn’t even get to really be in the movie since she was one of the natives and thus just an elaborate computer animation.

Worse than the acting was the story, which was basically a bunch of rhetoric amounting to saying that Manifest Destiny is a bad idea and we should be eco-friendly. The film is so blatant and obvious in its message that it becomes a little offensive, like we’re all idiots that need these ideals spoon fed to us. Ultimately it ends up looking like these guys:

being put in this movie:

and then replacing the humans in that movie with the Marines from Aliens:

Ironically enough, in the midst of trying to get across this great message, the movie ends up being a bit racist, as the blue natives end up as a stereotypical representation of Native Americans, or Africans depending on the scene. By the end of the movie I found myself fairly offended by the representation, and not only by the natives, but by their human attackers, who were essentially a referendum against the white man and his greedy nature. Essentially, they boiled everyone down to a stereotype and pitted them against each other. Again, you’d think three hours would have been enough to really delve deeply into some issues, but I guess twenty minute scenes where Sully tries to tame a horse or a bird were more important.

As bad as all that was, nothing was worse than the name they gave to the material that caused the humans to invade in the first place: unobtainium. You know, because you can’t obtain it. It’s unobtainable. Yeah, that’s ridiculous.

Apparently James Cameron had been working on making this movie for fifteen to twenty years, so you’d have thought that in all that time he could have really fine-tuned the script and made it excellent, but I guess he was busy working on the 3D technology. He got that par right, but I would have preferred a good movie in 2D. I mean, this is the guy who wrote (and directed) The Terminator, Terminator 2 (which is the best action movie of all time), The Abyss, True Lies, and Titanic, some fairly classic movies, as well as the respectable TV shows Dark Angel and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I just don’t get how someone who’d done that much great work could make something as mediocre as Avatar. Of course, Cameron’s work history is a little strange; between 1984 and 1997 he made all of those movies I listed, with one coming out every two or three years, then did nothing (well, he did a few things, most notably several documentaries about the environment) until Avatar came out. I’m wondering if there isn’t a bit of what’s happened to George Lucas, where he’s become so isolated he has no concept of the criticism of his work, going on here. That would be fitting since Cameron said his goal with Avatar was to make the new Star Wars. If that isn’t the most arrogant thing I’ve ever heard then I don’t know what is.