Thanks and reviews

[rivkat]

catdancerz , sol_se , realpestilence , rejeneration , laceymcbain , bexless ,ingridmatthews, ciian , flesh , sprat , grlnamedlucifer , suzvoy , pinkfinity (Cthuluclaus!), gblvr (another Cthuluclaus!), and anonymous givers: thanks so much for the virtual gifts! You are sweet and I feel terribly guilty about being out of the loop right now. I go through feast and famine with stories; hopefully more feasts are on the way, with my Eight Crazy Nights about to start.

Richard L. Schur, Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law: Despite some annoying errors of law, both general and case-specific, this is a thought-provoking look at the ways in which intellectual property law has reinforced and interacted with the subordination of African-Americans. Schur connects real property with intellectual property as grounds of conflict between groups, so that there’s a direct connection between property in one’s person (freedom from slavery) and commodification as a strategy to survive and maybe even profit from American culture. Schur still doesn’t quite seem to embrace the idea that stronger IP rights would be a good idea, in terms of racial justice. And indeed, strong IP rights within a system that’s still racially biased won’t be much help to artists forced to contract away their rights. He argues that hip-hop aesthetics, full of sampling and irony and unfixed/multiple meanings, fails to be recognized as legitimate by current IP law, and that this is both a mistake and a raced mistake.

Alison Young, Judging the Image: Chapters start out on the theme of the interaction between art and law—attempts to suppress a photographer who photographs nude women in public spaces, and the disjunction between the meaning the law gives to those photos (even when protecting them) and the process of production from the point of view of the participants; attempts to suppress or destroy blasphemous art like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ or an enormous portrait of Myra Hindley done with impressions in the shape of children’s handprints. Each was interesting, but I lost the plot—the connection between the artistic works and the law—in later chapters, which included discussion of the debate over what sort of architecture should replace the Twin Towers. Her description of Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord (I am awake in the place where women die) was so powerful I could barely stand it, based almost entirely on the words; I can’t imagine how it would be to actually enter the installation and see/interact with the art.

Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster: Luxury products have democratized greatly, but only at great cost: lower quality, massive outsourcing (Thomas details that EU law governing source disclosure is much laxer than US law, so sellers can import goods from China, rip off the “Made in China” labels, and add “Made in Italy” with only small manipulations), and a pervasive materialism/consumerism that is connected to the massive overspending of the past few decades. Thomas is nostalgic for true luxury, available only to the wealthiest of the wealthy, not signalled by huge trademarks but by being “in the know.” It’s an interesting book, marred by Thomas’s uncritical acceptance of the industry’s idea that counterfeiting is a big source of terrorist income and sweatshop/slave labor, without ever comparing counterfeit goods to the equally cheap noncounterfeit goods made in the same factories and sold at Wal-Mart. I am much more persuaded that cheap is the problem. And the luxury brands, by buying into the corporate culture that demands 5% growth every quarter, helped spur the very consumerism/brand consciousness/bargain-hunting by both producers and consumers that drives counterfeiting. This is the world they made. Isn’t it wonderful?

Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex, ed. David Henry Sterry: Lots of short pieces, some great and some not, from both happy and devastated sex workers; there’s a lot of correlation between race/class and happiness here, which strikes me as unlikely to be unique to sex work but still to be important in sex work particularly. Here’s a bit I liked a lot, from Sadie Lune:

On the online domination boards, no one can stop talking about power. Where power comes from, which dominatrices wield “natural power,” what a domme’s powerful self has “made” a proud man do, blah blah power-strength blah. But what we talk about, often off the Internet and out of leather, is the power of money. We discuss the fallacy of the “ultimate control” we’re attributed that in reality depends on the humiliation sluts for tuition and childcare payments. More often than not the money tops the scene. Money says it’s strap-on time when we are tired of looking at asses. Money demands slow heavy bondage when all we feel like is smacking a grateful subject around. Money wants to be humiliated in a way that runs contrary to our well-crafted sex-positive communication skills. Money forces us to bring out our diaper-changing mommy personas when we have run dry of emotional presence and support for our friends. … And then, sometimes, we love it. And often we put in the energy and the time and we get well compensated and have a little fun and it’s just about right for a good job. But the biggest trick is really coming to terms with the fact that money is the boss’s boss ….

Comments

[on_verra]

This is the world they made. Isn’t it wonderful?

*headdesk*

I really want to read that book now. In fact, all 4 of these sound really interesting. Why can there not be more hours in a day?