On tickets and scalpers

Driving around today we listened to an old Fresh Air podcast (convicted NPR nerd. Sue me) that had an interview about the evils and frailties of concert tickets, scalping and the heinous duopoly Ticketmaster / Live Nation. Not much that I didn't know about, but the piece was really good, putting the bits and pieces together to show a compelling picture of general assholiness by evil corporations and devious scalpers.

We know how it goes. Hot act has a concert, and sets prices for a venue. Ticketmaster has the tickets, adds outrageous fees and you buy them. The fees are high because they are a de facto monopoly; no one else sells tickets for the new hot band, so you can bitch and moan all you want, they will crush you anyway with an iron fist. On top of that, you have the pack of scalpers getting in and reselling for outrageous prices, making a killing because the shitty Ticketmaster servers crashed on you.

I am not going to waste much time on Ticketmaster; it is pretty obvious by now that they are an evil, despicable corporation that is making a mockery of antitrust laws. If you give a shit about music, call your Senator and Congressman and ask them to go nuts on them as soon as they can. I bet Obama will love to crush that evil corp. I will focus more on the scalpers, and how they are not actually a bad thing - in fact, they are a sign that the artist is a moron.

The problem, however, is that we are not using the correct pricing model for concert tickets - the model is just broken. Bear with me, but it is all a matter of economics: a concert is an event that has a supply of tickets, and a certain level of demand. The supply is fixed (the size of the venue), the demand depends on the price. Each person is willing to spend a certain amount of money to go to a concert; I would go to see Daughtry for free, I would pay real money for first row tickets for Radiohead, and you would have to pay me a heft sum if you want me to go to a Nickelback concert.

When a band is popular, this means you have a good amount of people willing to pay for the seats; probably more that the amount available. If the price is low, pretty much every fan will accept it and try to get in - you will have unmet demand (people with no tickets) that will be willing to pay an extra to get in. Here is when you have scalpers: when the face value of the tickets is too low. The opposite can also happen, as the empty seats in Yankee Stadium this season show; no one wants to buy seats, so you can get to see the Yankees paying less than face value to some idiot that tried to make a killing in the secondary ("second hand") market.

If prices are too low, the artist is leaving money on the table, and some random dude is reselling tickets and making money on their backs. Not too fair. How we can make the ticket system better? One simple idea: auctions.

Let the fans bid for the tickets - simple as that. Have a three to five day window open where you can call your price in a bling auction; if the venue has 3,000 seats, the 3,000 top bids get tickets, paying whatever they called. Seats are assigned from top to bottom; those who paid the most get the best seats, and then we go down from there. Big artists would make a killing; smaller ones would be able to fill smaller venues with certain ease, as mildly interested people would be able to call a low price. If the venue needs a certain revenue, you can add reserve prices (minimum bids). And if you feel like a cool dude, you can always set aside a limited amount of tickets at a low price, to be assigned by lottery, and requiring to show ID to get in to avoid scalping.

This way the artists would get more money, venues will be easier to fill and scalpers would be deeply, deeply screwed, as people will be able to offer the outrageous prices themselves. If you want to further piss them off, have a last minute batch of tickets for auction right before the concert, to make sure that the artist can always get the money.

Would this leave the fans screaming that the artist sold out? Yes, no doubt. So what? Musicians need money. They deserve it. They don't see much from CD sales (yay for rampant piracy and evil labels), so they should milk their wealthy fans if they can. This model, in addition, will be great for cult bands with a rabid fanbase; the crazier your followers, the more they will pay for your tickets.

Still, to make this work, we first need to kill, maim and mutilate Ticketmaster and their iron grip on live music. Call your politicians and yell at them. It is higly satisfying.

Beware of Fake IMAX

I was having my morning breakfast, watching GMA and reading my tweetdeck when I noticed that Aziz Ansari (star of Parks and Recreation) is starting a boycott of IMAX, Regal Cinemas (my movie viewing joint) and AMC Theaters. Turns out, Regal and AMC have been building slightly bigger than normal screens and IMAX has been allowing them to use their name and charge an extra $5.oo per ticket for the "IMAX" experience, despite the fact that it is no where near the size and sound of true IMAX. Even Ain't It Cool is getting in on the action.

Total rip off. Shame on you IMAX.

Into the dark void: the case against Zellweger

We know there is evil in this world. We know there is lame. Today we reveal the last source of terror, despair and loss of all hope in this world. Today we reveal the true face of Zellweger, the darkest vortex of suck in the known universe.

Zellweger is the missing link in the universe. Zellweger is the reason scientist can not explain why the universe is expanding. Zellweger is the biggest, most dangerous agent known to man. Zellweger is the damp, empty night of the soul; the maelstrom that attracts and sinks all; the darkest, bleakest, most terrible gravity wheel man can imagine.

Zellwegger sucks talent. Feeds on the talent of others. Leeches on the grace, charisma, brilliance of anyone around, and drains it, completely, making anyone in her presence a zombified, empty shell of a man or woman. A ghost. A Wraith. A Ghoul. A shambling, moaning, undead entity.

The entity know as Zellweger basically walks into movies, and destroys them. She makes anyone around her completely moronic, a pale caricature of themselves. She turns any actor into a boring pile of rubish, any script into a pathetic recitation of a shopping list, any song into a pathetic rendition of a High School Musical number performed by a fat kid with parents that force him to sing in front of his friends because the mom wanted to be a Broadway star.

Remember Jim Carrey? He used to be funny. He married Zellweger. Remember Cold Mountain? Not only Zellweger turned the whole academy into idiots that gave her the oscar, but she was able to drain any charm or hope from both Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, wrecking their careers forever. She ruined Appalosa, made Cinderella Man an exercise of pain (and destroyed Russell Crowe in the process), butchered Down with Love (eviscerating Ewan McGregor, who left so traumatized that went on to commit The Island) and managed to make both John Krasisnki and George Clooney boring in Leatherheads.

She destroys careers, ruins every single scene she is in and basically sucks all the talent out of the room. On top of that, she is both prone to be in terrible movies from the start (even her "big break", Jerry McGuire, is a piece of trash) and to atract people that definetely should know better due to her massive, terrifying gravitional pool. She does not discriminate, she destroys everything around her, probably because she really doesn´t have eyes; she guides herself by smelling souls to predate from.

The universe is not really expanding. The universe is running away from Zellweger.

From the depths of lame, I summon thee: the case against Ron Howard

Some artists have the very special talent of raising a weak material and turning it into something much better. Behold the pretty bland Godfather novel and how Coppola made a freaking masterpiece out of it.

Some artists have the opposite talent: they can have the best, most delicious ingredients, the best kitchen, the sharpest tools, the shiniest pans and produce a pathetic, tasteless turd out of them. Among those pathetic hacks you find people like yours truly in a kitchen, besides other failed individuals, but the king of lame, the master of bad cooking, the demon god of mediocrity is one director. He is ugly, he is bald, he keeps making movies and oh boy, is he lame: Ron Fucking Howard is his name.

Ron Howard is as his most damaging lamest when he has a stellar cast, and great plot with tons of potential, a killer budget and plenty of time to plot his pathetic, sad movies. No matter the source material, no matter the available talent, he will manage to turdify anything into a blabbering, pointless, bland, tasteless pile of crap.

His filmography is a long list of missed opportunities, wasted potential and by the numbers oscar baiting lameness. From the painful, unforgivable use of Steve Guttenberg (another source of evil that will be carefully examined soon) in Cocoon to the absolutely devoid of charm fantasy world of Willow; from the agressively pointless and mindnumblingly boring tale of a Mathematician (sexy!) in a Beautiful mind to the decrepid clone of the brilliant Truman Show that is EdTV, Howard able to consistenly make anything lame.

This is the man that turned the once edgy, brilliant, agressive, creative career of Rusell Crowe into a pathetic pile of mild mannered burgeois turds. This is the man that made Tom Hanks (Tom Hanks!) wear a fucking mullet. This is the man that though that adapting a book as awful as the Da Vinci Code was a good idea. This is the man that turned an intelligent theatre play about an interview into a moralistic display that treats the viewers as idiots. This is the man that made a boxing movie (boxing!) into some sort of sugar coated, glossy looking fairie tale of how awesome was to be poor in the great depression. This guy is so awful that he hired Renee Zellweger, for fuck's sake.

The worst crime of Ron Howard, however, is his blatant Oscar-baiting, and how the academy falls for it. He is the go-to fake autheur of painless, risk free, completely devoid of any passion or edginess adult serious movies. He is able to produce one lame turd reasuring enough for those academy members that are too stupid to appreciate anything that has a hint of modernity. And they fall for it, every fucking time.

The worst part? I suspect the fucker does it on purpose. When no one is watching (and really, no one did watch) he is able to produce wonderfully demented shows like Arrested Development. Most of the time, however, he prefers to perform the dark arts of lame and create his usual bland, completely pointless, hugely popular drivel to torture us all.

Shame on you, Ron Howard. Shame on you, King of the Lame.

The source of all evil: Phil Collins

There is an evil force in music. It has always been there. It has many, many faces. It is the eternal, fearsome, diabolic, insane source of all that sucks.

Evil is wise, and has many incarnations. The Evil God of Suck has lived since the dawn of times. It was there in Vienna, with a Salieri sucking the life out of Mozart. It was there during the Middle Ages, with an evil nosy troubadour annoying the shit out of Brave Sir Robin. And it is here, now, terrible, destructive, lurking in the shadows, destroying everything that is good and holy in music.

I have seen the evil of our times, and I know his name. The source of all evil in music, the black hole that sucks all talent, is here, and his name is Phil Collins.

Consider some of his crimes. This dude managed to make Peter Gabriel run away from Genesis. This master of the dark arts corrupted untold amounts of ears and scarred them forever when he commited Sussussusudio. He made people homeless by telling everyone that they lived in paradise. He then proceeded to perform jazz covers of his own work (and the sad remains of Genesis) for the hell of it. He destroyed Disney by singing in the soundtrack of Tarzan.

Worse of all, he influenced hundreds of individuals that went on to create even shittier music, spawning creatures like Michael Bolton, Jimmy Buffet, Peter Cetera, Josh Groban, every single annoying asshole that has been in American Idol and -Oh Lord- Kenny Fucking G. He is the creator of a whole category of garbage music characterized by the relentless shittification of any formerly glorious musical genre. It was Collins who inspired Vainilla Ice to launch his career, moved four crappy tennors to piss on the grave of opera by forming Il Divo, and generally launched the ever growing trend of eviscerating good music by draining all the talent out of the recording.

His powers of evil are so wide, so complete, so destructive that from the wreckage of the Tarzan soundtrack he made the corrupted corpse of Disney come back to live as a Demon Wraith from music hell: they launched the music channel, vomiting Britney, Hannah Montana, High School Musical and the Jonas Brothers to the world. Collins is so malignant, so poisonous, that he is essentially unkillable; his evil has spread and is procreating, multiplying, spreading, taking over the world.

Only in the internets, a small band of bloggers resist the advance of chaos and musical sucktitude, by revealing and unmasking all that is evil in the world. Will they win? The Collins is strong in this planet...