by Christopher R. Weingarten, Writer, Rolling Stone
A week before James Hetfield and Co. are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the metal icons’ Guitar Hero: Metallica videogame hits stores, on March 29. The new addition to the GH franchise boasts 28 controller-shredding songs taken from Metallica’s voluminous catalog as well as band-approved acts including Motorhead, Slayer and Mastodon….Rolling Stone sat down with frontman James Hetfield at SXSW a few hours before Metallica’s epic “surprise” show to find out how he likes his pixellated persona, whether he thinks Death Magnetic sounds better on videogame or record and if he believes encouraging kids to pick up plastic instruments is hurting their chances of learning real ones.
The hurricane is coming. You have 20 minutes to grab the objects in your house that are most important to you. What do you reach for first?
That’s a question asked by Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for The New York Times, at the very end of Objectified, director Gary Hustwit’s brilliant documentary about industrial design. The film, which premiered here at South by Southwest to a packed house Saturday, is an examination of the objects that surround us — the gadgets, furniture, cars, appliances and everyday things that we collect, consume and, ultimately, throw away.
Michael Eisner gave an interview at SXSW on Tuesday and at one point he was asked about copyright issues. He responded with a strongly pro-copyright statement:
“I have a long history, obviously, of believing in copyright. I think basically what separated this country from the rest of the world was patents and copyrights. President Lincoln introduced a lot of this, fought for (the idea that) to pay people for their intellectual work was no different than paying them for their physical work. And nobody would think twice about paying someone for their physical work.”
Eisner has been repeating this bizarre and near totally incorrect claim about Lincoln for years. In fact, in 2002 he wrote an editorial for the Financial Times with the bizarre claim that Abraham Lincoln would hate file sharing. Then, last year, in another interview he talked about how important intellectual property was in the U.S. since the time of Lincoln. It certainly would appear that he has Lincoln on the brain when it comes to intellectual property. There are just a few problems with this, with the first one being that Lincoln had almost nothing to do with intellectual property laws in this country.
I agree with the popular take on Sarah Lacy’s Mark Zuckerberg interview at SXSW to this degree: The audience was revolting. Lacy threw an unbecomingly petulant tantrum on stage. But the Twitter reaction was equally self-indulgent. The debates over her performance obscured the man who should have been under the microscope: Zuckerberg. As a speaker, Facebook’s CEO is trying to model himself after Steve Jobs. He’s gotten help from Bill Clinton’s former speaking coach. But so far, all he’s learned is the fine art of saying nothing.
So I’m still in shock at what happened a few hours ago at SXSW during the Sarah Lacy interview of Mark Zuckerberg. I’d like to be nice about it and I feel for Sarah, but to be brutally honest I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a complete and utter train wreck of an interview before.
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