Rude assholes

[vostoklake]

Google "serendip LLC" to see how hard-assed my personal musical heroine, the original synth herself, Wendy Carlos, is about enforcing her copyrights, taking her stuff down off YouTube etc. One can argue whether this is counterproductive and Canute-like in the current era. One cannot argue that she has the legal right to do so.

Interestingly enough, they've also gone around interfering with eBay and other online second-hand sales from people who get her name wrong. Now you might think that the more Wendy does this the more it will provoke the trolls and insensitive gobshites out there, and that a better idea might be just to ignore that bullshit. But what is not tolerable is that the response of the broader intarwebz to this is to start deliberately getting her name wrong and unleash the most disgusting transphobic nonsense. I had to stop reading the documentation myself because it was triggering me pretty freakin' badly.

Some dude on Facebook was surprised the other day when I pointed out that it's extremely rude to be using Wendy's birth name. You know, I thought it was accepted in this day and age that that's just common courtesy - but then, when some people get pissed off, they think they have the right to hit their opponent anywhere that they think it'll hurt.

The other issue is that East Side Digital appears no longer to be selling Wendy's CDs so there is currently no legal way to get her hands on her stuff new. So you have all these guys selling her stuff second-hand - and many of them get her name wrong, perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps out of sheer dickishness. Perhaps that's why Wendy hasn't updated her website in the last couple of years - she's trying to sort that out. But maybe the anger and meanness leaking out of this whole bullshit is the more cogent reason.

Comments

[maellenkleth]

Aaagh. I was once introduced to her at a party in Manhattan, and came away with the impression that she seemed very 'brittle' and not particularly interested about anyone else's feelings. I do understand that our life circumstances shaped us all, but in that that interaction I was so very switched-off that I gave up on any notion of music-geek conversation with her. Darn shame; in many ways she was also somewhat of a personal heroine.

'Anger and meanness': oh yes, that does seem to be the usual current of discourse.

[vostoklake]

To be absolutely frank, I've never met someone with Wendy's type of interesting personal history who didn't have a kind of animal-like fear of human beings, with some justification. Some are better at dealing with it than others, and I wouldn't wish going through all that in the world of 40 years ago on my worst enemy.

[maellenkleth]

To generalise, humans are dangerous. To themselves, it's bad enough. When they begin to suspect that someone is not of their sort, then their perceptual progression seems to rapidly escalate from 'noting difference' to 'fearing difference' to 'active hatred'. Knowing when to get out of Dodge City, or when to wear plain-coloured clothing and stand quite still, is pro-survival.

I'll go one step further, and observe that she might by then (this was a long time ago) have already come to deeply regret having given a candid interview to a popular magazine. Ye gawds, but the Internet nowadays is even worse.

We did retain a friend in common, who was rather bemused at her ongoing role as musical go-between. W's one of the better exponents of hocket, a musical form which I quite enjoy and which I use in my own compositions and vocal performances. The latter, incidentally, is rather lysive to the singers' voices if not approached carefully. I'd go so far as to say that for one throat to attempt to sing all parts is rather risky; I know the pain of going too far in that direction.

Forgive me my obliquity: I am averse to being Googled and must choose more subtle words in an unfiltered setting.

[edit to add, better reponse]: 'some deal better than others', indeed. Perhaps in the intervening decades there's been somewhat of a greater risk to being visible, insofar as the proverbial man on the No.9 tram now knows that such passages are possible. I blame the gutter press for some of this increased awareness -- it does not always enure to the benefit of those who simply desire to be left in peace to practice their art, whatever it may be.