Matthew Wayne Selznick

Hm… I sometimes take silly quizzes. This one comes in pretty accurate:

My theological leanings:
1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Neo-Pagan (94%)
3. Liberal Quakers (93%)
4. Secular Humanism (93%)
5. New Age (84%)
6. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (84%)
7. Mahayana Buddhism (79%)
8. Nontheist (71%)
9. Reform Judaism (69%)
10. Taoism (67%)
11. Theravada Buddhism (67%)
12. New Thought (61%)
13. Bah?’? Faith (58%)
14. Scientology (57%)
15. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (49%)
16. Orthodox Quaker (47%)
17. Sikhism (45%)
18. Orthodox Judaism (37%)
19. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (32%)
20. Hinduism (32%)
21. Islam (31%)
22. Jainism (31%)
23. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (26%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (18%)
25. Roman Catholic (18%)
26. Seventh Day Adventist (13%)
27. Jehovah’s Witness (5%)

Now you?

It’s all over the blogsphere today: Infinity Broadcasting, owned by Viacom, is going to change the format of an underperforming AM radio station in the San Francisco area to all podcasts.

They’re calling it “Open Source Radio.”

Don’t you believe it. From their Terms of Service:

You also grant the Site, its owner and operator, parent company(s), affiliates, successors and assigns, the royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right (including any moral rights) and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, retransmit, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, communicate to the public, publicly perform or display such content (in whole or in part), and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, for so long as any rights exist in such content.

Translation: they can use whatever you upload to their site (like podcasts!) in any way they chose, whenever, forever, and you won’t get paid for it.

And no, you won’t get paid for your podcast being broadcast on their AM station, or on their webcast. Not a dime for helping fill twenty four hours of airtime every single day.

But they will have advertising!

Nice one, Infinity / Viacom: prey upon the eager egos of podcasters large and small by offering them a new way to get heard… on the real radio! But don’t give them a dime, even though your parent company owns Paramount Pictures, CBS Television, over fifteen cable networks including Comedy Central, MTV, and Showtime, Simon & Schuster publishers, and more. Don’t pay the artist for their creation, even though you’re generating revenue through advertising.

And think of this: radio stations change their formats like Michael Jackson changes lawyers. When this “Open Source” format fails to make enough money, it will become something else. And Viacom will still have the right to do whatever it wants with all those uploaded podcasts. Can you see, for example, a big budget movie about a young married couple who have a potty-mouthed podcast? Can you see Dawn & Drew not earning a cent when the movie comes out through Paramount?

Bullshit. It’s the old “you’ll get exposure” lie of compensation, and I urge everyone to stay the hell away from this scam.

(cross-posted at MWS Media)

So, I don’t know if it’s much of a secret, how I feel about Ray Bradbury. His “R Is For Rocket” is among the first books I remember reading in my life… and “Dandelion Wine,” “S is For Space,” “The Illustrated Man,” and “The Martian Chronicles” are in that primordeal reading list, too, along with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Isaac Asimov.

I’ve referred to Ray Bradbury as my “story father” in some places, and here’s what I mean: I don’t write like him, so much… I have my own voice, such as it is. But he’s one of the biggest reasons I started writing in the first place. He’s the first author who gave me a sense of wonder.

I’ve met him a couple of times, in the early nineties, when he was only in his seventies, and while I’ve had other opportunities, I keep those two meetings in my heart with a kind of iconic fondness, if that’s the right way to say it.

“Brave Men Run” is for him, among others.

Lest you think this is some kind of eulogy before the fact, it’s not — but when that sad, sad day comes, you can bet I’ll have a lot to say.

No, I mention this because of a gift I just received from my wife.

She’s been working the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books — working her ass off, really, and dealing with a lot of logistical grief that made the last four days of her life very taxing. It’s left her exhausted.

In that time, though, through all the chaos and the demands put upon her, she managed to get me several books by Ray Bradbury, all signed, many that I don’t own signed or not, and one first edition.

Memory fades, but this is probably the finest gift I’ve ever received. Not just because these are signed editions. More for the fact that she was pulled in so many different directions this weekend, answering the demands of so many people, and she still found time to go out of her way to find these books for me. More for the fact that Ray Bradbury is so important to me as an inspiration and an influence… something I need very much these days… and she knows it.

Yeah, I got tears in my eyes.

Best gift ever. Best wife in the world.

Today, the last day of a quasi-vacation I took from my Cursed Day Job, I was fairly productive on non-MWS Media stuff!

First of all: I’ve started messing around with Sonar, in the eventual hope that I’ll start laying down some tracks. I discovered a couple of things:

1) I haven’t played bass, guitar, or sung in some time, and it shows.
2) I don’t suck as bad at those three things as I thought I would after all this time. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve performed anywhere in public!

I do need to work at understanding the recording process (again.) Whatever I learned so many years ago is pretty much gone out of my head.

Also, I’m lazy about it. This explains why most of my recorded work is either live or very, very lo-fi…

I also got some writing in today — almost 2,000 words on Brave Men Run, which is a re-write / completion of the old Sovereign Serials tale of “The Cat.” I’m about 3/4 of the way through rewriting what I’d originally written, and the word count has surpassed the original work by about 15,000 words.

There’s a lot of fleshing out going on, you see. Adding scenes that develop the characters, expanding scenes that I could gloss through when I had the whole Sovereign Serials infrastructure in place. This book will stand on its own, when it’s done.

When will it be done? Well, it’s already late… it needs to be printed and in my hands (and the hands of the people who pre-ordered it) before September of this year, because I intend to join in with National Novel Writing Month in November, and that’s going to be a whole other project!

Finally, after living up here in the High Desert for, what, three years? I finally drove down a road I’d never been before, and visited a small town I’d only known through street signs. The town itself barely had street signs, but there were lots of SUVs, pickup trucks, and rusted out wrecks. There were also plenty of churches, “No Trespassing” signs, and saloons.

Hm… not all that different from where I live!

Anyway, it was a nice drive in the late afternoon in the “wilderness,” listening to podcasts of Whole Wheat Radio and Morning Coffee Notes I’d burned on a CDR. (I don’t have an IPOD or anything similar. Wanna get me one?)

So now I’m back home, and I reckon I’ll milk these last hours of my last day of vacation into the wee hours of the morning, working on MWS Media stuff, and another web-based project that’s on the back burner.

It feels good to blog again!

Okay, the mattselznick.com site has been slightly re-vamped and had some attention paid to it by yours truly. It’s going to be a vehicle for my blogging, mostly, plus some background and personal information for those who want it.

I plan on blogging regularly in this space — on whatever comes into my head. Chances are this will be on similar subjects as over at MWS Media — DIY, music, writing, indie stuff, and the like. But I’ll also try to document my own creative endeavors as they develop, too. And, of course, there’ll be the inevitable ocassional rants and raves, too.

I hope you read it. I hope you link to it, and tell others.

Here we go!