SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE KINDLE

Recently, my publisher and agent have been looking into licensing the rights to publish my books for Amazon's Kindle. Several writer friends now have Kindles and have carried on enthusiastically about them. I'm not so sure.

One writer friend is currently reading a new book on a Kindle. The book was bought for less than the price of the hardback, or a trade paperback and there is every chance that the author received a much lower royalty on that sale than he would have on a traditional book sale. (And, if his contract is anything like mine, he probably only got half of the royalty (minus his agent's 15% of course), while the book's traditional publisher got the other half.) Good for my friend who saved money on the book and loves the Kindle. Good for Amazon who made most of the money. Good for the publisher who got half the royalty at virtually no cost to itself. Not so good for the author.

I've got some questions:

• What are the royalties on Kindle sales? How often are statements issued? How often are they paid?

• Is there any sort of advance payment?

• Is Amazon’s right to publish for the Kindle, exclusive? Is there a limit, time or otherwise, to that exclusivity? Kindle is a proprietary technology, so if they get exclusive rights to a book, it is very much as if we licensed the right to sell a book only to Barnes & Noble and not to Borders or any other bookstores. That seems like a bad idea. At the moment there isn’t much competition for Kindle – although Sony makes an e-book reader – but in the future there will be.

• If we, or our agent, upload the book ourselves (in essence, make the sale ourselves), how is that affected by the existing contract with our traditional publisher – the one that says they get 50% of e-book sale proceeds - but, presumably only if they make that sale, because the contract only gives them “non-exclusive” rights to license subsidiary rights.

• On the other hand, if we (my agent and I) are uploading the version of my books that my traditional publisher worked on – editing, formatting, cover art, etc. – then they probably are entitled to some percentage, even if they didn’t make the “sale.” But, probably it should be less than 50% since they aren’t having to produce and distribute an actual book, and we’re doing the work to upload the book, or the manuscript or whatever. If that is the case, what percent are they entitled to?

A lot of these issues are similar to those that led the screenwriters to go on strike last year. But, we book authors don't have the same sort of clout - very few of us have networks, advertisers and viewers dependent on our output.

At the moment, sales of e-books for the Kindle - and for Sony's reader - are pretty small. But they're growing. And as the technology improves, as more reading machines come on the market, as more books are available at lower prices, that market is going to grow - fast. And unless writers' contracts reflect these technological and market changes, writers are going to be on the losing end.

My standing instructions to the lawyer who reviews my contracts are: "As a writer, I realize that I'm going to get screwed. Just make sure that they use enough lube." The Kindle is going to require an additional application of grease to my contracts before I’m happy with it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMMA & THE U.S.

Yesterday, June 27, Emma Goldman was 139 years old. So long as there is anyone left alive who loves freedom and who loves the U.S. for the real reasons that it is great, she lives on. It is fitting that the celebration of her birth should come close to July Fourth, Independence Day.

Here's what she had to say about the U.S. while she was on trial for speaking out against the draft during the First World War - another "war for democracy." (I think I may have blogged about this before, but it bears repeating, especially during an election year.)

"Who is the real patriot, or rather what is the kind of patriotism that we represent? The kind of patriotism we represent is the kind of patriotism which loves America with open eyes. Our relation towards America is the same as the relation of a man who loves a woman, who is enchanted by her beauty and yet who cannot be blind to her defects. And so I wish to state here, in my own behalf and in behalf of hundreds of thousands whom you decry and state to be antipatriotic, that we love America, we love her beauty, we love her riches, we love her mountains and her forests, and above all we love the people who have produced her wealth and riches, who have created all her beauty, we love the dreamers and the philosophers and the thinkers who are giving America liberty. But that must not make us blind to the social faults of America. That cannot compel us to be inarticulate to the terrible wrongs committed in the name of the country.
"We simply insist, regardless of all protests to the contrary, that this war is not a war for democracy. If it were a war for the purpose of making democracy safe for the world, we would say that democracy must first be safe for America before it can be safe for the world."

Emma Goldman came here from Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. My family showed up about twenty-five years later from Poland, the Ukraine and Romania. And like pretty much everyone else who shows up here, they all came looking for something better; for freedom, opportunity, elbow-room, to live in a society where they could be largely left alone to be themselves. And for the most part, with some terrible exceptions, they found all that.

And they also found each other. Last weekend, here in Los Angeles, I went to a free music festival in Pasadena. There were bands from Mexico, Cambodia, Africa, South America, even places as exotic and foreign as Europe and New York. Earlier in the day I'd had an Armenian lunch. That night my friends and I had a Chinese dinner. And that is not an atypical weekend for many people in America's big cities.

At its greatest, the U.S. isn't a melting pot, it's a stew in which you can taste and savor all of the individual ingredients while also getting the strong flavor of the whole.

And I'm pretty sure that's one of the things that Emma Goldman loved about this country. And one of the things that she understood it takes open eyes and vigilance and tolerance and agitation and speaking up to protect.

On Independence Day we can best celebrate the U.S. both by our willingness to fight for the many things that are right about this country, and against those that are wrong.

By the way: To celebrate both Emma and the U.S.'s birthdays, I made a donation to the Emma Goldman Papers Project at UC Berkeley. The project is laboring to publish a comprehensive four-volume set of Emma Goldman's papers: speeches, letters, articles, pamphlets. This is a treasure that should not be lost. If you're interested in learning more about Emma Goldman, and about the Papers Project, (or in making a donation of your own), you can click here.

BOOK EXHIBITIONISM & UNALIENABLE RIGHTS AND WRONGS

Book Expo America was in Los Angeles this year. My publisher, Bleak House Books, was there and so was I. It was astounding, a reminder that despite all the creativity involved, I'm part of an industry. What I do is not really all that different than someone who stamps and molds widgets that are then sold to hardware stores. Not deep down at the heart of the matter, in any event.

A couple of complaints:

I, and a lot of other authors at BEA, gave away advanced reading copies (ARCs) of our upcoming books. There was a gigantic autograph area specifically for that purpose. People lined up to get them. Some of those lined up were used and collectible booksellers who wanted nothing more than to get some free stock for their stores. They have no intention of carrying the final product, the one that my publisher sells and that I get royalties for. When those people asked me for a signed ARC, I politely and cheerfully gave them one. But inside I felt like slapping them silly.

Kindles, or something like them, are probably the wave of the future; one of them at least. The tsunami of the future more like. But I'm suspicious. My most recent publishing contract says that I split the proceeds from the sale of electronic rights 50-50 with my publisher. (My agent gets 15 percent of my part of that, too.) When an actual paper copy of one of my books sells, I get a percentage of the cover price from every sale. Electronic rights are usually a one time deal, having nothing to do with how many individual books are sold. (Even if they were calculated on each sale, e-books generally sell for less than half the price of "real" books.) I ran into a few fellow authors who seemed very enthusiastic about Kindles. There is no doubt that the growth of e-publishing is inevitable and I am not one to stand in the way of "progress." Still, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that this is just another way that us authors are going to get fucked.

But, despite my complaints, I had a grand old time at BEA. There are too many pictures to post here, so you can go to my set of them at Flickr.

NOW FOR SOME POLITICAL PONTIFICATION

Are there any legal limits on how the constitution, of the U.S. or California, can be amended? This is an important question.

If an amendment is passed by congress, a state legislature or referendum (in the case of California) and then ratified as required, by definition what it pertains to becomes "constitutional."

Recently, the California Supreme Court overturned the state ban on gay marriage as unconstitutional. They could do that because the ban was a mere law, it wasn't part of the state's constitution. So, opponents of gay marriage now want to pass a constitutional amendment that could not be overturned by the (state) court.

This brings up the question of, can you pass a constitutional amendment about anything? Are there no “unalienable” rights?

What if Congress passed a constitutional amendment, and two-thirds of the states ratified it, that revoked the 14th and 19th amendments, disenfranchising everyone other than white males? There's nothing unconstitutional about that.

Far fetched? Maybe. Prohibition was passed, then repealed. Germany in the 1920s and early '30s was chaotic but democratic. Hitler was elected, then amended the German constitution to create a legal foundation for everything he did.

The initial founding document of the United States, preceding the Constitution by a little over 11 years, is the Declaration of Independence. In its second paragraph it states: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness..."

Here's a question: does the Declaration of Independence have any actual legal standing? If so, does that mean that some rights are "unalienable"; meaning that they can't be taken away, not even by amending the constitution? And does it also really mean that all "men" (the modern interpretation of which would be "people") share in those unalienable rights?

Is marriage, and its attendant package of legal and financial protections and responsibilities, one of those rights? In spite of divorce rates and a few couples I know, doesn't marriage have something to do with the "pursuit of happiness?"

If indeed all people share rights (and responsibilities) equally, can even a constitutional amendment apportion those rights unequally? Is there some higher, legal power, or basis, than even the Constitution?

I hope so.

ME AND OBAMA'S MAMA

The other night I was talking with a friend about what we'd like to do if we weren't writers. There isn't much. I love what I do.

But I did mention that I used to know someone in Indonesia who had the greatest job that I ever heard of.

I met Ann Sutoro when I was working for Asian Business magazine and interviewing people for a cover story on what the private sector can do to help alleviate poverty. She was an economic anthropologist working for Bank Rakyat Indonesia, the rural development bank of the country. She was in charge of the bank's microfinance program.

From her office in Jakarta, Ann would pick out an impoverished village somewhere in the country. She'd travel there, spend several weeks getting to know the place, getting to know the movers and shakers in the village, who had the brightest entrepreneurial spirit, the best ideas. About 95% of the time the people she came up with were women. Then she'd go back to Jakarta and write up a report.

Loaning this woman US$70 would enable her to get a small refrigerator for her food stall, and among other things she could then stock medicine for curing river blindness in kids. Another woman could use 40 bucks to buy some equipment to better husk rice, so there'd be less waste and she could build up her business. For 65, yet another woman could get a second loom for weaving cloth and expand her business. It was all little loans, but it meant big improvements in the lives of whole villages. (And the default rates on the loans was much lower than it was on the big loans other banks made to corporations or wealthy individuals.)

Ann would write up her report, get the money from the bank, then return to the village to dispense the loans. She got to play fairy godmother to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And best of all it wasn't charity. She was simply helping them to help themselves.

I liked her, a lot, the moment I met her. We became friendly and for several years, whenever I was in Jakarta I'd give her a call. We'd have a drink, a meal, hang out talking in her beautiful house in Jakarta. She had a great, quirky, sense of humor, was kind and decent to a fault and was just plain whip smart, one of the sharpest people I've ever known. I envied her her job, admired her tremendously and always looked forward to seeing her.

She died of cancer in 1995 and it was a tremendous loss. I've thought of her often over the years. Whenever the subject of great things to do with one's life comes up, I always trot out the story of Ann Sutoro. Because of her, if I ever went back to school, it would be to study economic anthropology. (Easy to say, though, not much real risk of that.)

Today, I was trying to think up a subject for this blog entry and I was thinking about my conversation of the other night. I thought I'd write about a few of the world's best jobs, so Ann immediately popped into my head. Just for the hell of it, I googled her, not really expecting to find much, if anything. What I found out is that she was Barack Obama's mother.

There's much that I like and admire about Obama. But, as with all politicians, there is also much about him that makes me suspicious and nervous. But I do know one thing for sure. He comes from a very good family. At least on his mother's side.

"DESIRE TO LAUGH*" - ALBERT HOFFMANN 1906-2008 - AND THE LATEST ON TACO TRUCKS BELOW

Albert Hoffmann, the scientist who discovered / invented / synthesized LSD, died recently at the age of 102. That has given me the occasion to pause and reflect, fondly, upon my own history with LSD.

And that's right, I wrote "fondly." LSD was good for me. It made my life better. I have not taken it since 1970, but I took an awful lot of it before I stopped and I'm glad I did.

Now there are those of you out there reading this who are probably thinking: "I hope he doesn't have children." Well, not to worry, I don't. If I did, I wouldn't suggest to them that they ought to drop acid. But I'd have a tough time discouraging them.

There are others of you out there reading this who are probably thinking: "That stuff must have scrambled his brains." And I suppose you're right. It did. But I like the way my brains have been scrambled and I'm doing just fine with them mixed-up that way.

The first time I took LSD was in September 1966 (I was fourteen), about two weeks before it became illegal in California. I had traded a UCLA professor a bag of mediocre Mexican pot for a dosed sugar cube. Over the next three and a half or so years, I probably took acid between two and three hundred times. It was easy to lose track.

Now I'm not about to say that LSD will work wonders for everybody, or anybody. There is every chance that I was simply lucky not to have wound up a screaming, drooling, non-functional maniac. Some of my friends did, at least temporarily. A couple of them, near as I can tell, have never fully recovered.

When I dropped acid with friends I was always assigned the job of "maintenance foreman." That meant I took care of us. If there were tickets to be bought for something, activities to be organized, shopping to get done, talking to "the man" if "the man" showed up, driving; that's what I did. I even learned to drive a stick shift when I was stoned on acid and a friend needed to go somewhere and had forgot how to drive.

So, here's what LSD did for me.

It made me, mentally, stronger. I guess in the Nietzschean sense of "what doesn't kill me, makes me stronger." I don't fully believe that. Some of the things that don't kill you, can maim you. But still, in some of my most formative years I dealt with a lot of really strange and challenging stuff in a wide variety of circumstances. No matter how bizarre the world around me got, or at least the world as I was seeing it, I learned to cope with it. To this day I am very difficult to freak out. I tend to stay calm under stress. Sure, I have little explosions every now and then when things aren't going my way. But I tend to settle back into equilibrium pretty quick.

It helped give me a great deal of tolerance for things that might otherwise strike me as weird, strange, abnormal. I hardly think of anything as abnormal or normal anymore. When something seems weird or strange, I find it more interesting than threatening. That helps my powers of observation.

It taught me to see colors better than I might have otherwise. One of the things that LSD does is to enhance your sensitivity to color, kind of like boosting the saturation setting in Photoshop. I do take pretty good pictures, if I do say so myself, and I think LSD is partly responsible for that.

Same with patterns. Under the influence of acid I never hallucinated anything that wasn't actually there. I tried, and it never worked. (I've had to depend on the occasional high fever attending a recurrent episode of malaria for that.) But I did perceive complex patterns where none, probably, really existed. Part of my approach to photography, and much of my writing for that matter, is to find some kind of order, structure, pattern in the chaos that makes up the real world.

Who knows if I killed off a bunch of brain cells or not? Maybe I could have been smarter or saner. I don't know and I don't care. I'm smart and sane enough as I've ever needed to be. Either that or deluded enough to think that I am. And so far at least, I've escaped the attention of the nice men in the white coats.

So in my case, I want to celebrate the memory of Albert Hoffmann. And give a nod of thanks to Augustus Owsley Stanley III who certainly did more than his fair share to help psychedelicize my adolescence.

* According to the recent obituary in The Economist, "desire to laugh," were the last words Hoffmann was able to write in his lab journal after he first, deliberately, took a dose of LSD.

TACO TRUCK UPDATE
At midnight last night, the new, onerous LA County Taco Truck ordinance came into being. A brave group of taqueros has banded together to resist. Once more I ventured into East L.A. with pals - the toothsome Christa Faust and Bill Krauss, a fine fellow taco lover. Here's the poster for the event we attended, followed by some photographic evidence:


Tacos El Galuzo


Channel 34 was there

Cabeza - YUM!

Taco truck fine diners

THE FIRST EVER RUNNING OF THE TACOS - OR WHY I'VE GOT A CRUSH ON CHRISTA FAUST

I've always admired Christa's writing (www.christafaust.com). HOODTOWN is one of the best, quirkiest, most fully-realized novels I've read in a long time. The other two books I've read by her ain't no slouches neither. The woman can write.

But boy howdy can she also eat:

Last night was Taco Truck Night here in Los Angeles. The misguided L.A. County Board of Supervisors, egged on by developers and restaurateurs, passed a law that would put hundreds, perhaps thousands, of taco trucks out of business. Even the L.A. Times has editorialized against the law. A whole lot of people depend on the trucks for cheap, tasty food, and few of the trucks are in real competition with brick and mortar restaurants. Even if they were in competition, isn't that what our economic system is supposed to be about?

To quote the L.A. Times editorial of today, May 2: "If providing cheap, tasty food that puts competitors out of business were a crime, the late McDonald's mogul Ray Kroc would have died in prison." Okay, so I disagree with the word "tasty" in that sentence. But still, you get the idea.

So last night, Christa, who is always up for an adventure, culinary or otherwise, unchained herself from her deadline burdened computer; brought along another writer pal, Nathan Long, and the three of us headed to East L.A. in my car to do our part to support taco trucks on their special night.

I was thinking to hit two, perhaps three of my favorite trucks and carts, eat a taco at each and retire happily sated from the field of battle. But Christa, whose slight but muscular, nicely illustrated frame belies her remarkable gustatory gusto, was having none of that.

Our first truck was La Korita, parked in a gas station two blocks east of Soto on Olympic. Nathan and I had carne asada, Christa the carnitas. For me, the real highlight of La Korita is its freshly made tortillas. The carne asada is also among the best in town. (The photographic evidence is above.)

Then we cruised up Soto in search of a place called La Estrella, but were distracted by the paintings of the Blessed Virgin, Jesus and a taquero with his al pastor wheel on the side of Tacos El Pecas, parked at a car wash. The tacos al pastor were good, not spectacular, but I have encountered few taco truck tacos that aren't at least good. Here's the evidence (Christa slurping an horchata):

From there we cruised north on Soto to Whittier Blvd. and turned east. There are often illegal taco carts along the sidewalk just west of the cemetery on Whittier. We were not disappointed. We stopped at the first one we saw - I don't recall seeing a name on the cart. It was on the north side of the street near Mott St. It was excellent al pastor.

We then passed a number of inviting carts, trucks and a chicken grill as we headed further east, past the 710 freeway, past the old Huggy Boy radio studio which is now a church of some sort. We were taking a break to simply cruise and take in the sights, sounds and smells of East L.A. - one of the great pleasures of life, especially on a hot summer night. Last night wasn't one of those, but it was close enough.

I was taking us to my favorite taco cart. At night, the southwest corner of Cesar Chavez and Hicks - a few blocks west of Gage - is home to what is, in my humble opinion, the finest al pastor to be had north of the border. Christa and Nathan seemed to agree. And they know their al pastor.

After that we were beginning to think we were filling up, so we thought to head toward Eagle Rock and Glassell Park where the fellows who organized Taco Truck Night have their home truck - La Estrella on York Ave. around Avenue 54.

But once again we were distracted. I was pointing out Los Cinco Puntos - a carniceria at the triangular corner of Cesar Chavez, Lorena and Indiana, where one can find the best carnitas and handmade tortillas in the city - when we noticed Cemitas Tepeaca and its colorful neon exclaiming "Cemitas, Tacos y Burritos." Better yet, it was parked in front of what looked like an interesting mural. (East L.A. walls are covered with great art, some of it truly great art. Just driving around and paying attention is as good as a visit to a museum or several great galleries.)

I don't know if Cemitas Tepeaca makes its own carnitas or gets it from Cinco Puntos, but they were superb tacos. While the al pastor place we went to just before it is the taco cart I'd most like to be stranded on a desert island with, this was the most interesting, colorful, and still extremely tasty stop of the night.



Finally we made it to La Estrella on York. It was, being an increasingly gentrifying neighborhood, and home to the organizers of the event, the only taco truck at which we saw any sort of large crowd of hipsters and foodies. And Spanish language news radio and TV reporters as well, of course. It was a fun scene, good to see that at least some people had come out for the event. But the carne asada tacos were the most disappointing fare of the night. They weren't bad, but they weren't all that good either. Still, a very big thank you is called for to the guys who organized the night, the petition and are working hard in the fight for taco trucks. You can find their website here: http://saveourtacotrucks.org/

After those, our sixth tacos (actually seven for Nathan who had two at the start of the trek), we decided to head home. But along the way we had to pass my favorite taco cart in Christa and my neighborhood (Silverlake) - the al pastor wheel at Fletcher and Larga, across from the U-Haul. It wasn't in us to simply drive by. So we finished off the night there, with excellent al pastor and what might be my favorite salsa roja in town - a bit thinner than most, but with a good, solid bite and a nice tickle of vinegar.

My car was low on its rims on the drive home. The three of us were groaning, belching, way too full but plenty content. Little more got done last night. It didn't need to. I don't know that we saved the taco trucks. But it was a splendid effort.

THANK YOU, BILL

Here's some quotes from a speech that Bill Clinton gave a couple of days ago in West Virginia:

"If a politician doesn't wanna get beat up, he shouldn't run for office...Let's just saddle up and have an argument. What's the matter with that? That's what America's about, right?"

He's right. At least that's what this country's supposed to be about. People have a bunch of different ideas, they get together and argue about them - sometimes the arguments even get a bit heated - and then they vote on it and the argument that has been most persuasive wins.

That's how democracy is supposed to work. Sure, it's not very efficient. Sometimes it's not even very civil. Undoubtedly some good ideas get voted down and some bad ones are enacted. Most of the time we end up voting for someone who's imperfect. (Can you imagine that; an imperfect politician? Gosh.) But so far it does seem to be the only way in which a government can manage to please a whole lot of people, a lot of the time.

Problem is that we've come to believe that this idea or that one is absolutely right or wrong, so argument with it is irrational. That's what the Bush Administration has been trying to do; make us all shut up and not argue because they're right and that's all there is to it.

Well, as a vast majority of people in this country now know, that's not all there is to it.

But the kind of right-wrong, black-white thinking that the administration has crammed down our throats, and in which the media has been complicit, has screwed us up in all sorts of ways.

Increasingly I have been hearing Obama and Hillary supporters say that they won't vote for the other one if their candidate isn't nominated. Are they nuts? They seem to think there's something wrong with the two candidates arguing and duking it out for the nomination.

But that's how it's supposed to work. Even when they insult each other, that's how it's supposed to work. And when your candidate doesn't get the nomination, what you're supposed to do is shrug your shoulders, say "maybe next time," and vote for the better of the choices that you've ended up with.

The thing about all this fighting and up and down and talk of right and wrong is that it's just a natural part of the process of things settling down into somewhere in the comfortable middle. You can talk all you want about change, but the great genius of democracy isn't radical change, it's the leveling affect that it has. When it works, it allows for measured, rational, slow but sure change; the sort that in the long run does the most real good and is the longest lasting. Too many of us, however, have become too impatient for that.

We've also got our heads deeply embedded up our asses over the economy. We catastrophize nearly everything. But a stable economy has its ups and downs. That, as in politics, is how it finds its smooth running middle.

The least stable economy is one that doesn't go through the occasional wild mood swing. Inflation, recession, expanding bubbles, bursting bubbles, are all natural in a growing, healthy economy.

I spent a while on the phone last week trying to convince a friend that they hadn't really "lost" several hundred thousand dollars in the stock and property markets.

"Have you sold any stocks or property at a loss?"

"No."

"Are you going to have to? Do you have a subprime loan or any upcoming payments for something that are going to require you to sell something at a loss? Or do you need to borrow some money against your portfolio?"

"No."

"So you haven't really lost any money, have you?"

"Well, my portfolio is down 15 percent and I can't sell my house for what I could have last year, and and and..."

All I can say is, you haven't lost any money, you've lost your common sense.

There are plenty of people who do have subprime mortgages and who do have payments they need to cash out some investments to make and other such things. And yes, those people are going to lose money. But most people, aren't. Just like any roller coaster, if you sit there and hang on, the track's going to eventually smooth out. If you try to bail out on a big hill or curve, you're probably going to get hurt.

Americans are so busy thinking that everything is supposed to be perfect - and that they have some sort of inalienable right to a free lunch - that they go into a huge tailspin when things aren't just the way they want them to be.

Well, nothing's ever going to be exactly the way you want it to be. Get over it. You're just making things worse for yourself and everybody else when you overreact.

Meanwhile, here's some pretty pictures from a recent excursion out to the California State Poppy Reserve near Lancaster in the far northeast corner of Los Angeles County: