STRIKE ONE (WEEK)

In today’s LA CityBeat, I expressed some of my doubts about the writer’s strike…

“While I won’t lower the red flag or hang-up my IWW T-shirt, I confess to mixed emotions about the strike by the Writers Guild of America. The problem might just be timing: Can the writers in TV and movies afford a walk-out over back-end money when a rapidly fragmenting mass culture is nose-diving into a bottomless abyss of Saw movies and American Idol? Or maybe it’s just old fashioned jealousy. When they’re working, writers for both TV and film are paid vastly more that novelists, poets, or journalists for work that is often so substandard it could cause an old time pulp hack to weep into his Smith Corona.” (Click for the rest)

But my mixed feelings have turned into a kind labor relations scrapbook. I mean, I wholly agree with this comment on Huffpo. Except just being a bloody writer doesn’t make you one of the good guys. (Hitler, Coulter, Hobbes)

“If the creative people of america won over the monstrously imperious corporations it would create an extra hour of daylight in this country (to paraphrase Spike Milligan, writing and performing genius) Keep them coming. Other Americans will get that this is bigger than the perceived bunch of lucky white guys making silly amounts of money. If the corporations, already in tune with the Neo-Con agenda, could eliminate writers, they could control content. Support your writers America.”

And who could argue with Howard Zinn and Woody Guthrie? On the other hand, I am not overly impressed by the street theatre of writers from The Daily Show. But sympathy then does an abrupt 180 while watching the media mogul fatcats smugly justifying their hideous greed. And after all this indecision I can only leave it to Billy Bragg.

Except I have another separate piece in CityBeat today on my own writing and why I do it. And, believe me, it ain’t for the digital backmoney.

AND ALL OF YOU IN LA, DON’T FORGET I’M PLAYING OUT TONIGHT WITH ANDY AND TOM, SCROLL BACK TO TUESDAY FOR DETAILS.