"Yes, We Can"

Well, we’re only hours from the first California primary I can recall that ever meant anything, and boy is it close! Obama has apparently closed the gap nationwide – he and Hillary will be duking it out, neck to neck in state after state tomorrow. If this isn’t healthy for Democracy, I don’t know what is.

Everyone seems to be pretty inspired this go around - the stale Kerrys and Gores have stayed home, thank goodness. The enthusiasm is manifesting itself in some interesting ways. Like this:



The Yes We Can Song
by will.i.am

I was sitting in my recording studio watching the debates...
Torn between the candidates

I was never really big on politics...
and actually I’m still not big on politics...
but 4 years ago, me and the black eyed peas supported Kerry...
And we supported Kerry with all our might...
We performed and performed and performed for the DNC...
doing all we could do to get the youth involved...

The outcome of the last 2 elections has saddened me...
on how unfair, backwards, upside down, unbalanced, untruthful,
corrupt, and just simply, how wrong the world and "politics" are...

So this year i wanted to get involved and do all i could early...

And i found myself torn...
because this time it’s not that simple...
our choices aren’t as clear as the last elections ...
last time it was so obvious...
Bush and war
vs
no Bush and no war...

But this time it’s not that simple...
and there are a lot of people that are torn just like i am...

So for awhile I put it off and i was going to wait until it was decided for me...

And then came New Hampshire...

And i was captivated...

Inspired...

I reflected on my life...
and the blessings I have...
and the people who fought for me to have these rights and blessings...

and I’m not talking about a "black thing"
I’m talking about a "human thing" me as a "person"
an American...

That speech made me think of Martin Luther King...
Kennedy...
and Lincoln...
and all the others that have fought for what we have today...

what America is "supposed" to be...

freedom...
equality...
and truth...

and thats not what we have today...
we think we are free...
but in reality terror and fear controls our decisions...

this is not the America that our pioneers and leaders fought and
died for...

and then there was New Hampshire

it was that speech...
like many great speeches...
that one moved me...
because words and ideas are powerful...

It made me think...
and realize that today we have "very few" leaders...
maybe none...

but that speech...

it inspired me...
it inspired me to look inside myself and outwards towards the world...
it inspired me to want to change myself to better the world...
and take a "leap" towards change...
and hope that others become inspired to do the same...
change themselves..
change their greed...
change their fears...
and if we "change that"
"then hey"..
we got something right...???...

1 week later after the speech settled in me...
I began making this song...
I came up with the idea to turn his speech into a song...
because that speech effected and touched my inner core like nothing in a very long time...

it spoke to me...

because words and ideas are powerful...

I just wanted to add a melody to those words...
I wanted the inspiration that was bubbling inside me to take over...

so i let it..

I wasn't afraid to stand for something...
to stand for "change"...
I wasn't afraid of "fear"...
it was pure inspiration...

so I called my friends...
and they called their friends...
in a matter of 2 days...
We made the song and video...

Usually this process would take months...
a bunch of record company people figuring out strategies and release dates...
interviews...
all that stuff...
but this time i took it in my own hands...
so i called my friends sarah pantera, mike jurkovac, fred goldring, and jesse dylan to help make it happen...
and they called their friends..
and we did it together in 48 hours...
and instead of putting it in the hands of profit we put it in the hands of inspiration...

then we put it on the net for the world to feel...

When you are truly inspired..
magic happens...
incredible things happen...
love happens..
(and with that combination)

"love, and inspiration"

change happens...

"change for the better"
Inspiration breeds change...

"Positive change"...

no one on this planet is truly experienced to handle the obstacles we face today...
Terror, fear, lies, agendas, politics, money, all the above...
It’s all scary...

Martin Luther King didn't have experience to lead...
Kennedy didn't have experience to lead...
Susan B. Anthony...
Nelson Mandella...
Rosa Parks...
Gandhi...
Anne Frank...
and everyone else who has had a hand in molding the freedoms we have and take for granted today...

no one truly has experience to deal with the world today...

they just need "desire, strength, courage ability, and passion" to change...
and to stand for something even when people say it's not possible...

America would not be here "today" if we didn’t stand and fight for
change "yesterday"...
Everything we have as a "people" is because of the "people" who fought for
change...
and whoever is the President has to realize we have a lot of changing to do

I'm not trying to convince people to see things how i do...
I produced this song to share my new found inspiration and how I've been moved...
I hope this song will make you feel...
love...
and think...
and be inspired just like the speech inspired me...

that’s all...


Let's all come together like America is supposed to...
Like Japan did after Hiroshima...

that was less than 65 years ago...
and look at Japan now...

they did it together...
they did it...

"We can't?...

Are you serious..?..

WE CAN!!!

Yes we can...
A United "America"
Democrats, Republicans and Independents together...
Building a new America

We can do it...
"TOGETHER"

Please visit www.yeswecansong.com

Thank you for reading and listening...
will.i.am

What a Difference a Day Makes

Before:

After:

There Will Be Genius

Well, I called it back in August - P.T. Anderson's film There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, is a tour de force. I think it's one of the most incredible films I've ever seen. From the moment it begins, you are aware that this pic is different than others, and that you will be wholly unable to escape it's tight grasp until its very last minute onscreen.

Day-Lewis, as the turn-of-the-century oil-thirsty entrepeneur Daniel Plainvew, sinks a mile deep into his character, but when doesn't he? Paul Dano (of Little Miss Sunshine) is his counterpoint, his nemesis - an upstart preacher who desperately battles Plainview for the the hearts and minds of those innocent bystanders caught between these two prophets. His performance is equally as moving.

Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead delivers a score as powerful and eerie as any I've ever heard, evoking the likes of Kubrick's 'The Shining', TV's 'Lost' and the works of Philip Glass. The music is presented very high in the mix, and takes hold of the film like a full character, changing and coloring every scene.

If there is one pic you see this winter among the strong list of artsy films out right now, make it this one. You will not be disappointed.

Best of 2007

It's that time of the year again. So, without further ado, I present to you my favorite music from the past 12 months...

MY TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2007:
1. Radiohead - In Rainbows
2. The Bird & the Bee - The Bird & the Bee
3. Blonde Redhead - 23
4. Tegan & Sara - The Con
5. Mark Ronson - Version
6. Brandi Carlile - The Story
7. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Underworld - Oblivion with Bells
9. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
10. James Morrison - Undiscovered

EXCELLENT, BUT INELIGBLE FOR MY TOP 10:

The Shins - Wincing the Night Away (leaked last year)

Lily Allen - Alright, Still (released via the UK last year)

Metric - Grow Up and Blow Away (originally recorded in 1999)

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Stars - In Our Bedroom After the War
The Good, the Bad & the Queen - The Good, the Bad & the Queen

The Chemical Brothers - We Are the Night
Rilo Kiley - Under the Blacklight
The New Pornographers - Challengers
Battles - Mirrored
Field Music - Tones of Town

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENTS:
Air - Pocket Symphony
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Smashing Pumpkins - Zeitgeist
Kaiser Chiefs - Yours Truly, Angry Mob
Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Bjork - Volta
The Go! Team - Proof of Youth

BEST LIVE SHOWS:
Smashing Pumpkins - The Fillmore (SF)
Arcade Fire - Greek Theatre (Hollywood)
John Mayer / Ben Folds - Hollywood Bowl
DMB / Steven Marley - Hollywood Bowl
Bird & the Bee - The Derby
Daft Punk - Greek Theatre (Berkeley)
Stars - The Orpheum

The Beatles Doing Stairway to Heaven...Almost

This blows me away. It’s apparently from an Australian parody show in the early 90s called "The Money or the Gun", and the Beatnix are an Aussie Beatles tribute band.

Happy & Healthy to You and Yours

Run, Don't Walk

If attacked by a gang of sword wielding samurai, would the world's fastest speed walker walk or run away? The Japanese, having solved all the world's other problems, are there to find out.


Would He Run? - Watch more free videos

One Bourbon Too Many

One of my favorite authors of all-time died this week. I had the immense fortune to see him speak in person a couple of times over the years, most recently just several months ago. Although clearly diminished, his mind was still one of the most colorful and engaging you could hope to encounter.

Here's The Economist with a fitting farewell:

Norman Mailer

Nov 15th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Norman Mailer, pugilist of American letters, died on November 10th, aged 84

IT WAS on the Dick Cavett show in 1971 that Mailer (always “Mailer” in his writings; “Mister” was needless polish and priming), three-tumblers drunk, angry, little eyes blue as a touchpaper, was needled by Gore Vidal into saying this:

In Hemingway's time there were great writers...Our time has been much more complicated and there hasn't been that many really extraordinary writers around, and I have presumed with all my extraordinary arrogance and loutishness and crudeness to step forth and say, “I'm going to be the champ until one of you knocks me off.” Well, fine, but, you know, they don't knock you off because they're too damned simply yellow, and they kick me in the nuts, and I don't like it.

He had only half got going, but then the commercial came in. Much more could have been said. How Mailer had written what George Orwell called the best-ever book about the second world war, “The Naked and the Dead”. How he had won a Pulitzer for “The Armies of the Night”, the story of the 1968 anti-war march on the Pentagon, and every other book prize going except the Nobel. How, despite the critical bile spewed over much of his fiction, he still had germinating in him the Great American Novel that would out-Tolstoy Tolstoy and out-Dickens Dickens. How he had invented, with a nod to Truman Capote, the non-fiction novel and the novelised news report, through both of which strolled his best character, Mailer, with his crinkly electrified hair and his maudlin writer's hang-ups, continually “in an intimate dialogue, a veritable dialectic with the swoops, spooks, starts, the masks and snarls, the calm lucid abilities of sin...his tonic, his jailer, his horse, his sword”.

Mailer was brave. That was his virtue of virtues. In the 1950s he disdained “the stench of fear that has come out of every pore of American life...a collective failure of nerve”. He smelled fear in the dark, rotting jungle mud where he had fought as a soldier in the Philippines, in the blood, shit and slobber of the Chicago stockyards, but also at Washington parties, among his own stupid bouts of tongue-tiedness and circumlocution, as “the hard gemlike flame of bourbon” burned through him. At such points he would be rescued by the wild man Mailer, a creature “who would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast”.

Gristle and gravel

He talked and wrote of fighting more than he did it. Short and stocky, he was liable to be upended pretty fast. But he boxed a bit, and proudly jogged once with Muhammad Ali until his breath gave out. Instinctively, he put up his fists. In 1957, in an essay called “The White Negro”, he recommended that white Americans should live like inner-city blacks, hip and cool as cats on the edge of violence, rather than fall into the deadness of post-war conformity.

The shock tactics sometimes misfired badly. He stuck a kitchen knife (or a pair of scissors, or a “three-inch dirty penknife”) into the neck of his second wife, the second of six, all of whom loved and forgave him as long as their alimony was paid. He acted as literary sponsor to a talented murderer, Jack Abbott, who murdered again when Mailer had helped to get him out of jail. He revelled in gross, boastful or mechanical descriptions of sex (“a hard punishing session with pulley weights, stationary bicycle and ten breath-seared laps round the track”), not least because this outraged the women's libbers with whom, in the 1970s, he was permanently at war. Once Mailer, with a sparkle in his eye that was maybe aggression, maybe fun, acting his usual part of the hollering Jewish leprechaun, proclaimed that all women should be locked in cages.

On form (as in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago”, about the 1968 political conventions, or “Of a Fire on the Moon”, about the first moon landing) he was a gloriously evocative, generous, sprawling writer, worthy of the scale of his country and his subjects. But Mailer dismissed these books as journalism, that ceaseless scavenging for “tidbits, gristle, gravel, garbage cans, charlotte russe, old rubber tyres, T-bone steaks” that went to feed “that old American goat, our newspapers”. Despite his founder-role on the radical Village Voice, he took little pride in that craft. The Great Novel was his quest: a quest that became weirder and more abstruse over time, taking him to Pharaoic Egypt and the corridors of the CIA and inserting Mailer (sometimes the very Son of God, sometimes the Devil) into the made-up lives of Jesus and Hitler.

By general consent, though not by Mailer's, his best book was “The Executioner's Song” of 1979. It won him his second Pulitzer. In it he told the story of Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed after the ending of the moratorium on the death penalty, in sentences as spare and unadorned as the Utah desert in which it was set. The style was almost reminiscent of his great hero, Hemingway. Those short, declarative sentences, he wrote once, had a suicide's dread in their silences: dread that “at any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back again into the agonising demands of his courage.” Mailer's short sentences carried a more pugnacious message: he was the champ, and would be until someone braver and better knocked him off.

Time's Up for Jack and Other Poor H'wood Blokes

Amid the ever-more-debilitating WGA strike (thousands should find themselves unemployed within the next few weeks), and news that audience favs such as '24' are being put on immediate hiatus, writer-producer Marshall Herskovitz chimes in with his take on the creative nose-dive that is television in the post-government regulation era of broadcasting:

Are the corporate suits ruining TV?

Network control and media consolidation are wringing the creativity out of entertainment.

By Marshall Herskovitz
November 7, 2007
LA Times

Marshall Herskovitz is a TV and movie producer whose credits include "Blood Diamond," "thirtysomething" and the upcoming "quarterlife." He is president of the Producers Guild of America (which is not affiliated with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, currently being struck by the Writers Guild of America).

After 20 years and five series, including "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life," my partner, Ed Zwick, and I have -- for the time being at least -- stopped producing television programs.

It's not personal. I count as friends many of the executives who work at the networks. We had a deal at one network, ABC, for all of those 20 years, and, in spite of many regime changes, we were always treated with great respect. This is not about how we were treated but rather something much larger: How a confluence of government policy and corporate strategy is literally poisoning the TV business.

It started in 1995 when the Federal Communications Commission abolished its long-standing "finsyn" rules (that's financial interest and syndication, for those unfamiliar with the term), allowing networks for the first time to own the programs they broadcast. Before that, under classic antitrust definitions, the networks had been confined to the role of broadcaster, paying a license fee to production companies for the right to broadcast programs just two times. The production companies owned all subsequent rights. In the mid-1990s there were 40 independent production companies making television shows. If a particular network didn't like a show -- as famously happened with "The Cosby Show" many years ago -- the production company could take it to another network.

But not after 1995. The abolition of the old rules set in motion an ineluctable process, one that has negatively affected every creative person I know in television. Today there are zero independent production companies making scripted television. They were all forced out of business by the networks' insistence -- following the FCC's fin-syn ruling -- on owning part or all of every program they broadcast.

The most profound change resulting from that ruling is the way networks go about the business of creating programming. Networks today exert a level of creative control unprecedented in the history of the medium. The stories my friends tell me would make me laugh if the situation weren't so self-defeating. Network executives routinely tell producers to change the color of the walls on sets; routinely decide on the proper wardrobe for actors; routinely have "tone" meetings with directors on upcoming pilots; routinely give notes on every page of a script. (When we did "thirtysomething" in the late '80s, we never received network notes.) And by the way, they have every right to do these things. As owners, they have a responsibility to satisfy themselves that their product is competitive and successful.

The problem, of course, is that these executives often have little background or qualification for making creative decisions. They are guided by market research and -- they want to believe -- a learned intuition about what the public wants. This season's new shows have been a good indicator of how successful that strategy is: Even before the current writer's strike, virtually every new show was struggling.

But the changes have gone further. Over the last few years -- during a time when network profits have been increasing -- salaries and profit participation for the writer-producers who create the shows have been slashed. Fees were cut by one-third to one-half, and profit participation in many cases was effectively eliminated. It's a curious (and peculiarly American) fact that many of the great artistic talents in the history of film and TV also have been entrepreneurs: Chaplin, Capra, Serling, Pakula, Lucas, Spielberg -- the list goes on. For reasons that are probably more psychological than anything else, creative and financial independence seem to go hand in hand.

Yet what we have now is a complete absence of either in the world of television. Your TV may receive 200 channels, but virtually every one of them is owned by one of six big companies -- NBC Universal, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom/Paramount, Sony and News Corp. And each channel has a brand identity dictated by those companies to which each program must adhere. Producers are now employees, not creators. If you were foolish enough to independently produce a TV pilot today, when you took it to the network, you would give up at least half of your ownership and all of your control, even though the network wouldn't pay any more than it used to pay as that old license fee.

Is there significance to this, outside the narrow concerns of Hollywood and the lost earning power of producers? I think so. Besides any esoteric discussion of the value of storytelling in a culture -- which I believe is immense -- this trend is part of a larger problem caused by the FCC in all areas of media. The relaxation of the Fairness Doctrine (which required the networks to present the news in a balanced way), the lapse of any oversight of networks' civic responsibility, the commoditization of network news -- these are all parts of a troubling move toward the aggregation of control of information in an ever-shrinking number of entities.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government. And if you doubt that's happening, just watch Bill Moyers' recent expose on the networks' passive collusion with government in selling the Iraq war.

Because the business of television has become an exclusive club, closed to new members, some producers are turning to the Internet to have a voice. And, of course, the Big Six are doing everything they can to own and control that as well. Already, it's impossible to make an "overall deal" -- the time-honored arrangement in which producers are kept on retainer to develop shows for a particular network -- without agreeing to be exclusive to the network on the Internet as well as television. The logic of this defies all laws of economics; producers pledge fealty to networks because they (the producers) don't have the millions it takes to shoot, distribute and broadcast their own programs on television. Producing for the Internet, on the other hand, costs as little as $30,000 an hour, and "broadcasting" costs much less. Virtually anyone can do it.

So what value do the networks provide that makes it worthwhile for producers to agree to that exclusivity? You tell me, because I can't figure it out. Less polite folks might call it extortion.

Zwick and I have joined that migration to the Internet. We've created a project called "quarterlife" -- a series and a social network -- that we own and control, and we had to give up our TV deal in order to do it. The series will premiere Sunday on MySpace and then on our site, quarterlife.com, the next night. We've worked very hard, and spent a great deal of our own money, to make it as good as anything we've ever done on television. And we've gotten calls from every guild and virtually every producer we know, all of whom are curious to see if this little experiment can succeed. Because if it does, it will prove that there's a way to independently produce, finance and distribute ambitious content on the Internet. And if we can do it, others can do it. To be sure, there's every possibility this series will end up on television after it's established on the Internet, but only if we still own it and control it creatively, which would make it unique in today's landscape.

The problems of network ownership and creative control are not directly at issue in the current strike by the Writers Guild of America. What's at stake is how writers will be compensated, given the control everyone assumes the big companies will exert over new methods of delivery.

But make no mistake -- deep resentment in the entire creative community over the absolute power now wielded by these companies is the fuel that feeds the strike. The public is also fed up, turning out in droves and sending millions of e-mails whenever the FCC holds hearings on the subject. And yet the large corporations move forward, seemingly unaware that they are strangling the creative engine that might save them.

Within five years there won't be a significant distinction between TV and broadband. As of now, the Internet is just too big for any company to get its hands around, and that's good for all of us. If the large companies -- and the FCC -- cannot come to comprehend the paradox that too much control is destructive to their own ends, they may bring about their own downfall, losing their audience and their workers at the same time. Like carriage makers at the dawn of the auto age.