Earlier this week an essay appeared on the Huffington Post which accused Heritage Action of plagiarism with regards to some Internet spots they are currently running starring Clint Howard.  As the writer for the Heritage Action ads in question, let me address the charge of plagiarism directly.  First of all, I can give you my word of honor as a gentleman* that until yesterday morning I had never seen or even heard of the SEIU ads I am accused of plagiarizing.  I have heard of Lee Camp, as I peruse the Huffington Post regularly for joke premises, and I have even sampled a couple of Mr. Camp’s alleged comedy offerings.  Not being a fan of his work, however, there would be no reason for me to seek out additional examples of it.  I would be more than happy to undergo a polygraph examination to corroborate my claims of innocence on the condition that Mr. Camp undergo a polygraph test to corroborate his claims of being a comedy writer which I have been unable to document elsewhere. 

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Moreover, even if I had seen the SEIU ads, Mr. Camp’s claim that I plagiarized his work is preposterous.  As any legitimate comedy writer knows–  no, as anyone who owns and operates a television set knows–  the boardroom “pitch meeting” featuring an ill-tempered, out-of-touch boss surrounded by yes-men and women alternately sucking up to him and pitching lame ideas, is one of advertising’s most durable, time-honored scenarios.  [For a lengthier discussion of this phenomenon, go here.] It is the joke-teller’s equivalent of “a priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar”**; the screenwriter’s equivalent of “boy meets girl”***.  Saying I plagiarized his work is like saying that E.R. plagiarized St. Elsewhere because they were both shows about hospitals.  

After acknowledging that not a single word of his deathless prose was actually lifted from the SEIU ad (the usual definition of plagiarism), Mr. Camp claims that I copied the “mannerisms, style, and feel” of his piece.  In the sense that both spots were shot with a hand-held camera and featured actors speaking to one another in English, I take his point.  But if that’s Mr. Camp’s idea of plagiarism, I suggest he get himself a good lawyer because he’s got a lot of TV, movie and advertising writers to sue.   He could start with this list of companies that have created humorous TV ad campaigns using the classic corporate boardroom pitch meeting as a premise:  (more…)

“Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.” — Joni Mitchell, Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2010 

Caterwauling Canuck “folk singer” Joni Mitchell got just about everybody riled up with that sweet morsel of self-serving insight, but the real shock is not that Mitchell is absolutely correct but that someone finally came out and said it. After decades of carefully manicured deification by Columbia Records, brain-dead rock critics and the slimy elite institution that elevated such barely able snake-oil salesmen as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to celestial heights, it’s high time to flout indoctrination and examine Dylan’s track record as a Grade-A phony. 

Most Dylan fans would be stunned to realize that his vocal style (for lack of a better term) was high-jacked, in its entirety, from long-dead bluegrass-country singer Carter Stanley. We’re not talking about an influence, like Lefty Frizzell for Merle Haggard, but a total appropriation of  Stanley’s highly idiosyncratic approach. A counterfeit from the get-go, once Dylan realized what an advantage his audience’s innate ignorance was, he’s exploited it ever since. 

Just type “Bob Dylan plagiarism” into your friendly search engine, and a plethora of questionable circumstances pop up, enrobing the singer almost as completely as his years of reflexive media fawning have. Documented from his teenage start, when he submitted a hand written, thinly revised version of country star Hank Snow’s “Little Buddy” for publication as an original poem, to his 1963 pilferage of Irish poet Dominic Behan’s “Patriot Game”’s melody for the similarly slanted Dylan tune “With God on Our Side” to songwriter James Damiano’s ongoing multimillion dollar copyright infringement suit (alleging Dylan’s Grammy-nominated “Dignity” is nothing but an altered version of Damiano’s “Steel Guitars”) to the naked “Red Sails in the Sunset” melody heist for the song “Beyond The Horizon” on his Modern Times album, up through the recent Confessions of a Yakuza-Love & Theft plagiarism charges (Love & Theft? Calling Dr. Freud!), the Timrod controversy, even the numerous passages of Proust and Jack London that (re) appear in the text of Dylan’s autobiography, it’s a deep, dark thicket of thoroughly damning and apparently chronic bootlegging. Naturally, Dylan has said nothing publicly about any of these, but he already spent over three million dollars defending himself against one-time affiliate Damiano–the classic delay-to-destroy court room technique.  (more…)

**UPDATE 11/5** Obama drops painting, throws Alma Thomas under the bus.

Want to know the Obama Administration’s idea of what constitutes art?  There’s no better place to look than the newly-reconstituted White House art collection.  So what’s there?  How about this gem:

Yes, it is boring and banal.  It does look like your three-year-old’s recent construction paper cut-out from pre-school – the one she made with the rounded scissors.  It’s Watusi (Hard Edge), by black painter Alma Thomas.

Now here’s Henri Matisse’s The Snail (1953).

Notice any similarities?  How about now: (more…)