Arts & Culture, Book Reviews, Essays, Slow News that Doesn't Break
In October, NBC News reported that after a meeting at which Trump called for a tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Tillerson referred to him as a “moron” in a conversation with other officials. One of the NBC reporters would clarify that Tillerson used the term “fucking moron.”
UPDATE: 2/2024: This Azabache CD published in 2000 had over 2 million streams and digital transactions in 2023. Each stream payed out 0.000758311565 US$ minus the 24% for taxes (7 hundredth of a penny). So the album is actually being paid more per stream than a few years ago. We are not sure why. The services were YouTube Music, Spotify, TikTok, Pandora Premium, Facebook, Tidal and others. One of the fascinating questions is what does YouTube Music and others pay for taxes in this arrangement?
Between July, 2021, and June, 2022, YouTube paid more than six billion dollars to rights holders globally.
The New Yorker – Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments
If YouTube paid the same taxes as the artists (24%), this would amount to one billion four hundred forty million (6 billion * .24). I highly doubt anyone is keeping track of this.
UPDATE: 10/2023: This CD now streams at about $900 per 1 million views. For those keeping score. However, the streaming services and providers are now taking out about 24% for taxes off the top.
How much do artists get paid for YouTube videos? The other night I was going over some fascinating numbers for the 2000 Azabache CD that a few years ago we started selling on CD Baby which then registered the album on all the digital streaming services and affiliates – Amazon, iTunes, Deezer, Spotify… the list goes on. This article is a look, for those who are curious – and I am sure there are many, at what the accounting looks like from just YouTube when you get paid “royalties” though their Content ID system. Do let it be known that the payout to artists entering the program is 30% while YouTube gets 70%.
Below are the plays just on YouTube which for 2017 came to 2,561,994 – that is two and a half million plays for just one year of a CD that is now eighteen years old!
On that CD I co-wrote one of the songs and most of the arrangements. I had a feeling at the time that the music would resonate with people as everyone on the project was in the zone. I choose to not be paid as “work for hire” on this project but wrote up copyright agreements instead. Below are the YouTube royalty statistics for 2017.
| SONG | PAYMENT | NUMBER OF PLAYS |
|---|---|---|
| Cinco a Diez | $9.48 | 72,473.00 |
| This Moment | $51.04 | 213,489.00 |
| Luna Cha-Cha-Cha | $0.01 | 42.00 |
| Simplemente Complicada | $0.63 | 2,523.00 |
| Surrender | $0.00 | 5.00 |
| Montuno Street | $19.71 | 257,237.00 |
| Batman and Spiderman | $70.44 | 1,982,296.00 |
| Besitos de Coco | $10.74 | 33,216.00 |
| Thanks for the Mambo | $0.47 | 713.00 |
| $162.52 | 2,561,994.00 Plays |
So if you were ever wondering how much the artist gets paid (if anything) when you listen to a song on YouTube it is $0.00006343496 – or around six thousandths of a cent.
1 view pays $0.00006343496
It takes 157 views to make 1 penny
1 dollar is made after 15,764 views
If each time a YouTube video was played it paid the artist a penny it would a different story 2,561,994 * .01 = $25,619.94. When was the last time you bent down to pick up a penny. I do it all the time now.
I do not know the whole story about the woman who stormed YouTube with a gun a few months back but I did hear that it had to do with the meager payouts. Perhaps the general population should be more informed as to these business arrangements as I often am amazed at how little people know about publishing and royalty payments in general – especially in the digital age.
So how did we get to this situation? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 which I believe is against the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.
[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
– Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution.
The reason that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is so flawed is that it is impossible to have your music NOT on a platform. Meaning there is only an opt-in but no opt-out as the DMCA created a “safe harbor” which should now be obvious to anyone was a gift to the tech industry. If Azabache decided to leave the YouTube program there would be no way to make it so our music would be off the YouTube platform. In what way does that qualify as the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries? There is nothing exclusive in terms of copyright when dealing with YouTube. Perhaps this is one of the many reasons for the huge income disparities in our society.
So each year we split up our meager earnings from this project. Create other works of art and music. Play our gigs. Teach. Do our day jobs. Bring truth and beauty into the world and keep the spirit whole. Just like before the internet when music publishers screwed over the artists, the artists keep it real and bring the joy.
Below is an extended sample of a song called “This Moment.” I usually do not care for Latin music in English, but love this song and Manny Martinez’s lyrics and rhythm just work.
This Moment
J.M Martinez/ (5:54)
Arr. Paul Lyons
You can no longer purchase the CD online however there is now a vinyl version that was created in Colombia.
The full original sheet music arrangements for many of the songs are available at Paul Lyons Music.
It never ceases to amaze me how many truly phenomenal musicians call New Orleans home. Most of these musicians are unknown to the jazz world and the rest of the world. I heard Michael Watson play trombone and sing in April 2018 at the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans and was blown away. An incredible trombonist and an extraordinary singer, it is truly odd that more people do not know of this amazing talent.
We heard him play with Bill Summers and his band Jazalsa. Ben Casey on bass, and one of the many great Batiste family drummers on drums. The entire band was outstanding.
To get an idea of the breadth of Michael Watson’s musicianship and talent, here are two videos. At the show I heard, his trombone playing was both explosive and extremely sophisticated all at the same time.
I do not understand why these videos have so few views. I must have strange tastes in music.
Called into jury duty after deferring once. I took the Mission 14x bus to 6th and Bryant Street. On the first day the vague details and outline of the case was explained. On 6th Street and Market in front of the Baltmore Hotel a murder had taken place in 2012. A man with a gun shot another man and there was an accomplice. Both defendants were African American males around the age of 25. Both were large, dressed in button down shirts and ties. One of the defendants seemed to have at one point been beaten as one of his eyes was at an unnatural skew.
The middle aged Asian judge was a rather playful fellow who talked incessantly about food and providing a lunch of sticky buns for all the chosen jurors and that “wasn’t it great we were not at the dentist!” He tried hard to make jokes but the humour fell a bit flat. Good thing he is a judge and not a comic. He then proceeded to demonstrate his prowess in three Chinese dialects and said that if you were Chinese American and did not understand English it was not an easy way out.
During the jury selection one of the defendants lawyers went to great lengths to try to find if people had implicit bias. It was interesting to hear from the diverse potential jurists and their takes on implicit bias which lead to the discussion of racial profiling. Concepts of data and metadata as relating to phone calls was brought up and interestingly the prosecutor seemed quite naive about such concepts. Let us explain. The actual call is the data. The time, date and location of the call, which the phone company surely knows, is the metadata. There surely is more to data and metadata in this case but that is the basics.Two younger folk in the technology industry were released. A few others were released due to past histories.
A few people called as potential jurors seemed quite intelligent. A few lawyers, a retired Professor named Brown who had written a book about police conduct in Los Angeles filled the room with interesting observations. A few people related to police officers in the case were dismissed. A funny old Latina grandmother a bit hard of hearing and maybe with a screw starting to come loose upstairs admitted that because years ago her purse was snatched by an African American see could not trust “those blacks.” At one point people laughed and she shushed them which made it even funnier. She was dismissed.
We are down to the final jurors and the alternates and the judge states that juror selection is coming to an end. It is looking like the 80 or so people left in the room will not be on the jury. I am starting to relax and thinking how cool the whole process has been – how interesting the conversations were and how nice it was going to be to be in a building that actually had ventilation. For some reason the entire wing in this part of the Hall of Justice had no air. It was hot and the air was stale – a bit sufficting really. And just when I started to think how the poor ventilation systems probably made for some interesting escape attempts from the county jail I heard “Paul Lyons” and then there I was – “In the box.” Out of all the people in the room, I was the last juror called. I picked up my bag and took my seat.
Of course there is a list of questions on the board that I had to answer – occupation, family and years in San Francisco. The first defense attorney read my answers to the questionnaire that I had filled out a week earlier.
“I find it odd that the judge seems compelled to bribe the potential jurors with promises of food. I think that jurors should be paid a fair wage for their service.”
That is all that I had written thinking that I would never be called. The room burst into laughter. I did not realize that I had used the words “bribe” and “judge” in the same sentence – not exactly prudent.
Next, the second defense attorney started grilling me to which the prosecuting attorney for the first time actually objected to a question – “Objection Your Honor!” – that I do not now recollect. Everything started moving very fast. I do not remember my exact answers to the next questions at that point but I remember stating that “the jury process, while not perfect is a good thing and the best that we have. I played my cards very close to my chest.”
Other recent seated jurors were asked similar questions. Due to the questionnaire we had filled out a week prior, one of the questions was about the ability to be comfortable with seeing photos blood and of gruesome scenes. Paradoxically the rather tattooed and pierced woman sitting next to me stated that she was “uneasy about looking at gruesome photos of blood” but in the end confessed that she would get over it and be a willing juror and could handle it.
A few minutes later the three lawyers and the judge dismissed themselves to the chamber in back and came out soon after to swear in the three alternates none of which were me. In other words, I was dismissed.
A truly strange, interesting but edifying experience. Time to write the judge an apology letter and thank him for his service. I will mail it to him in May, long after this trial is done.
PROLOGUE
The two men in the trial were convicted of murder. Let it be known that the jury was quite diverse. There were three black people on the jury – one a black woman over 65. An Asian man. People of all ages. The evidence must have been clear. I read online that the San Francisco district attorney expressed that both of the men would “spend the rest of there days in jail.”
The whole thing is a sad story. Two boys born into a society where the cards were stacked against them. A stupid series of decisions. A culture of poverty, probably struggling schools, violence and revenge. I cannot help but think that the real crime goes much deeper. It is a crime against humanity – a failure of humanity.
“This one little car ride instantly redeemed us and rejuvenated us, offering an almost irrational hope for what lay ahead down the road. This I realized was the real magic of hitchhiking: not how it supposedly affirmed your faith in the goodness of humanity, but how it could make and break the faith, over and over again, often multiple times in a single day.”
From The World’s Best Hitchhiker on the Secrets of His Success – The New York Times – 3/22/2018
Hitchhiking
The Sunday New York Times Magazine has been producing some very entertaining issues. In the travel issue was an article about a crazed Polish man, Aleksander Doba who obsesses about kayaking to the point where he has kayaked across the Atlantic three times by himself.
In the same issues is the story about “The World’s Best Hitchhiker on the Secrets of His Success,” quoted above. It is 2018. Rarely do we ever see someone hitchhike in the United States on America. There probably is an app for that, or perhaps just craigslist, of this thing called facebook. It is unfortunate that hitchhiking has died out as hitchhiking is ultimately a way to challenge people’s beliefs, perceptions of reality and has the potential to have people from very different walks of life and classes interact. It is a way of taking a true chance on strangers and humanity and in the end it can be profound. In the least, for the hitchhiker it can be a test of patience and a realization of how often it is more beautiful on the side of the road on an empty stretch of highway than in a car. How liberating it can be to throw off the shackles of time and schedules. “We’ll get there when we get there.”
Just about everyone over forty has a tale of hitchhiking. The cross country trip out West. The trip that got derailed in a rainstorm. The trip from New York to Key West Florida and the amazing sunrises in Georgia. The ride down the Snake River Canyon in the back of a pickup. So many tales. All of them true.
In the current fashion of personal narratives I will indulge the reader with my own experiences with thumb exposed. It started in earnest with a cross-state trip of about 150 miles to visit my older brothers who were attending a pottery camp in Iowa. I was just fourteen years old. My parents did not seem at all worried and basically said, “Sure, have a good time. Need a ride to the highway?” What different times we live in now.
I left early in the morning with a map, a backpack, some sandwiches and a few dollars for sure. I do not remember every ride but in the end it took over ten rides. I remember being picked up by farmers heading a just a few miles down the road. Truck drivers were always good as the ride tended to be longer and the chatter on the CB radio was always cryptic yet entertaining. One ride, out in that territory, maybe not on that maiden voyage, was perhaps my most dangerous. A large rusted-out Oldsmobile sedan stopped. Three people were in the car. I got in the back seat with one of the riders and soon discovered that everyone in the car was completely plastered out on a bender. In the backseat was a case of beer and I was immediately offered a beer which being fourteen I politely turned down. We then proceeded to drive away at breakneck speed, flying over the rolling farmland hills of southern Wisconsin. After about fifteen miles of so and going over 100 miles per hour we came to a crossing and the driver stopped, to which I departed the car and thanked them for the ride. I never heard later if they ended up driving off the side of the road or not as we had no internets at the time back then to scour the movements of other humans, but they probably made it home fine and ate brats and kraut for dinner… washed down with five more beers.
To be honest, I was not an epic hitchhiker by any means but I do remember some beautiful hitchhiking with an ex-girlfriend out West in Montana. I remember hitching from Bozeman Montana to Salt Lake City Utah. Somewhere along the way we were picked up by a fancy black BMW sedan. After about 5 minutes the driver’s “fuzz buster” made a sound and we slowed down to avoid the highway patrol and a speeding ticket. We had been moving so fast that when we slowed down It literally felt like we were going twenty miles per hour when we were now going sixty. In a few minutes we returned to the normal 120 miles per hour. Sort of the Montana autobahn perhaps. Rides in the backs of pickups were always a joy with the mountains and open skies, the padding of your backpack, which you used as pillow providing comfort. I remember a ride down the length of Wisconsin from Upper Michigan. We were picked up by a pastor who worked with Native Americans and he seemed like he needed someone to talk to to make the ride easier and perhaps clear his conscience. All of these rides courtesy of “the kindness of strangers.”
The last hitchhiker that I picked up was about twenty years ago. You simply do not see many hitchhikers today. It was some youngsters heading down the coast on Highway 1. I was checking out the surf at Ocean Beach in San Francisco and had a hunch that the waves were better down in Pacifica. The two people in their early twenties had a sign that said “L.A. Bound” and after telling them that I was not going but fifteen miles down the coast they said that it would suit them just fine. I let them off at Linda Mar Beach and by the time I got my wetsuit on I noticed that they were headed south, looking for a good spot to continue the journey. Free spirits on the road.
Hitchhiking. A way to connect with every walk of life and find commonality in the human condition. Way safer than the internets.
There have been many requests for the Pelican Café to have a privacy policy posted and I think somewhere there is a law that states that we must. For crying out loud, we are only a little café! If you want privacy, stay home or crawl into a hole somewhere!!
Pelican Café Privacy Policy
Effective March 22, 2018
Above is the Pelican Café Privacy Policy. We reserve the right to change any part at any time depending on whether it is to our advantage SO THERE!
“ Mr. Fintiklis, 39, declined to comment, but he has made several notable — and provocative — appearances at the hotel in recent days. On one evening, following a verbal confrontation with Trump employees, he and his entourage of about a dozen people retired to the lobby and had pizza delivered from a restaurant on the property. Then Mr. Fintiklis played music from “Zorba the Greek” on the lobby’s baby grand piano while his friends sang along.”
From N.Y. Times – Thugs, Leeches, Shouting and Shoving at Trump Hotel in Panama (March 3, 2018)
This story in the Sunday N.Y. Times seems like the perfect material for either a documentary or a piece of historical fiction. We are at a point where in the world of politics, reality is stranger than fiction. Imagine Mr. Orestes Fintiklis, a young millionaire in a tussle with Trump and he uses art (playing a song in the hotel lobby) as a way to state his position. If this was a proposed screenplay it would never make the cut – too unbelievable. I like the fact that this really rich guy takes pleasure in playing the piano and singing songs from the mid-twentieth century. Imagine the party eating probably Dominoes pizza in the lobby hanging around the piano singing songs while the security in military garb and armed with AK 47s stood guard. What a bizarre scene.
Perhaps the movie would be called Orestes the Cypriate.
…after George Carlin’s death there was an opening in the public performance space- let’s call it the “obscenity vacuum,” in the American psychic for a vile crude entertainer. Americans love a sick joke and now we have one as president.
I miss George Carlin. It is too bad that he died, but he had it coming, what with all the jokes about and probably participation in hedonistic binge drug use and extreme risk taking. But George died way too young. George Carlin, the crude, brill÷iant philosophical comic left a cultural void in our society that perhaps was usurped by our current president. In no way am I saying that the present buffoon of a commander in chief is anywhere near as intelligent or brilliant as George Carlin, I only mean that after George Carlin’s death there was an opening in the public performance space – let’s call it the “obscenity vacuum,” in the American psychic for a vile crude entertainer. Americans love a sick joke and now we have one as president.
George Carlin was a brilliant observer of human behavior but also of language. He could riff for hours it seemed on how we take certain phrases and words for granted without really thinking about what we are saying. He stated the obvious with such directness it was both deep and funny all at once.
George Carlin hated Republicans with such a passion that often he would begin his show with rants about their stupidity and contradictions. Today comics have it easy with the current batch of Republicans. Everyday there is a ton of material. What routines would George have developed in 2018? We can only imagine.
There is a large period swell hitting the West Coast of California this week. The Mavericks Surf Contest may take place on Thursday (1/18/2018) but that does not mean people aren’t surfing all week. The photo above is from Monday morning. If you want to see the waves get a Surfline subscription or head on down to Half Moon Bay with some binoculars. Afterwards, I recommend the Princeton Harbor Public House and Grill.
http://www.surfline.com/surf-report/mavericks-northern-california_4152/
“According to Merriam-Webster’s “feminism” was the most searched-for word in its online dictionary, up seventy percent from 2016. But who in 2017 needed to be told what “feminism” means? Upon searching, these people would have learned from Merriam-Webster that “feminism” is “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” Some number of them where probably relieved to learn that it is still just a theory.”
From The New Yorker – Jan 8th, 2018 – Talk of the Town – Words of the Year (Louis Minead)
There are some words that are confusing by their very sound and came to life in a way that in the end does not serve humans or the word well. “Feminism” is one. “Net neutrality” is another. Wordsmiths and politicians conjure up others. Citizens United, the law that allows corporations to be treated as citizens is another and should really be called Corporations United to Screw You Over. But once a word takes life it is hard to undo the confusion and damage.
The reason why people were probably looking up “feminism” is because for many it conjures up an image of the feminine – perhaps lipstick and high-heels, but originally it was not meant to mean that at all, but I digress and am “mansplaining” – a word that is quite good and accurate – way better than “feminism.” But I hope the people who looked up the word “feminism” are satisfied with the Merriam-Webster’s definition. That is how I have always had it defined in my head. Equality. Maybe it should be “equalitism,” but that almost sounds like a mathematical theory.
It is strange that the UCLA feminist magazine and website Fem is staffed entirely by woman. https://femmagazine.com/about/staff-2015-2016/. I think it may have to do with the confusion about the word “feminism” and perhaps a feeling by men that they are not welcome. Surely nothing could be further from the truth. One of my friend’s kids that is off to college joined the school’s Latin Dancing Club and is loving it. Very few men and a lot of woman who are eagerly looking for dancing partners. Smart guy.
Anyway, this little essay ,Words of the Year, is extremely well written and also pretty funny. I have been exposed to the New Yorker since I was young. When I was a little kid, I would eat my bowl of cereal and page through the single pane cartoons and never get a single joke. Now I look at the cartoons and marvel at how they came up with such great ideas. Usually the Talk of the Town is all about the dreary state of politics. It is good that they mix it up from time to time.
The end of 2017 has seen some very clean but small surf. Usually by December most days are double overhead. This year we have a high pressure system over the Pacific Ocean, what they are now calling the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge. This is the weather pattern that we had for many years starting in around 2013 and the years of drought. There is not too much snow up in the Sierra and it looks to be pretty much a dry year.
Drought years are almost always good surf years. The surf becomes tamer, chest to head high, and without all the storms there are more days to surf. Below are some shots from one of my favorite places along Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The crowds on good days get a bit too much but there is a lot of joy out there in the water. There is also a mystery spot gallery down the coast.
[CLICK ON IMAGES +]
November 5, 2017
November 18 and 19, 2017
December 2, 2017 – Mystery Spot
December 7, 2017
December 10, 2017
Over five years ago I wrote a piece for this publication called THE VAPID STATE OF AFFAIRS – FACEBOOK AND THE NEW NARCISSISM (MAY 26, 2012). In it I mused over the Facebook IPO and whether it would survive as the revenue model was all in advertising and market share. I have never clicked on a Facebook ad in my life and I do not even remember what they are about except recently they have become a bit more aggressive as I am suppose to go to Kelly Slater’s surf camp next summer. Yeah right. I was wrong. Subliminal messaging is a gold mine. The new narcissism has now elected a narcissist buffoon as president of the United States of America. As a nation we are becoming less intelligent and self-absorbed by the second.
I have always been skeptical of Facebook and it’s privacy policy, the algorithm that determines my feed and just the weird way that Facebook has made it so it is actually more difficult to contact your “friends.” In this post, I will outline the features of Facebook that really suck. No one talks about this much but it is time to shine some light on this strange company, actually a monopoly, that has crept into the private lives of so many people.
7 REASONS FACEBOOK REALLY SUCKS
Benevolent player for the betterment of humankind? I think not. Just the same old greedy capitalist. Giving money to public institutions should not make it so your name goes on the front of the building. Photos of the all the signs they had to change coming soon.
Now I could post this little piece on Facebook but it would be gone in a few days – dragged off in handcuffs to the great Facebook digital trashcan.″