Informant38

{we're working on a screed. about the copyright thing again. the lines of force seem to be magnetized around the same old selfish ya-ya. the vested interests, including the freestyle kids at the end of the pipe, and the anarchist/Trotskyists, the freedom lovers who want some kind of transitional socialist paycheck to stay with the open source transaction.
but I am of course too dithyrambically unfocused for those topics.
what I want to explore, maybe tomorrow, is the place in human life (which for all its vagueness I feel more and more every day to be a thing, in the sense of you can point to it, like a hummingbird, like hummingbirdness, humanness, roseness, starness, wombatness) the place in what it is to be human, the place in human life that storytelling and music have.
this is not 'entertainment'. which has connotations of Onanism and other forms of solitary hedonistic indulgence.
'entertainment' is trivially non-essential, readily abandoned for truer, more meaningful, more noble activities.
but children need storytelling, it is absolutely vital to them.
and yet the entire storytelling process, the stories and the telling of them have been taken from us and somehow given to this thing called 'Hollywood', or for that remnant literary minority, whatever euphemism stands in for the corporate monoliths that run the book industry these days. .
and can you see how the inclusiveness is missing from the definition 'entertainment'?
where once the act and the actor and the audience were all part of one symbiotic organism, now it's the 'end-user' and the 'producer', a linear relationship, a mercantile relationship.
there's nothing in that definition that acknowledges the necessity for, the primacy of, an 'us'.
we. the thing we make together when we come together in these activities.
music, and storytelling, (which is what movies and sit-coms are, stories) are essential to our being human.
it's as though some scammer got ahold of the technology of language itself and slapped a meter on it and choked it down to the market-will-bear point.

so that's the gist of it. storytelling is not an elective, it's nutritional, basic. and music is as vitally necessary as sex.
and they've been turned into commodities with the legal status of a cupcake.}