Drive-by: Desert
A week in California’s Mojave Desert: Barstow, Bishop, Daggett, Trona, Bristol Lake, Ludlow, Tehachapi, Amboy, Keeler… the usual suspects.
Note: for reasons discussed below, this video may not be playable (or even visible) in some countries or on some (mostly portable) devices, and may be plagued with ads if you can watch it. In fact, it’s really that non-playability that’s the topic of this article….
I wanted to do this video for years — all the bizarre and unsettling forms of human settlement in the Californian deserts (a topic I touched on obliquely using still photos in This Land Is Your Land) as seen from a car driving (very slowly) past it all. All those places I’ve been familiar with for years — Barstow, Baker, Ludlow, Dagget, Trona, Mojave, etc. — I wanted to show their strangeness, their steely toughness, their vulnerability, their shiny decrepitude. You know, Pretentious (or, perhaps, Portentous) Art School Motives variant number 7a (there’s a lot of this around). Except I’m no artist, and never went to art school (I’m an engineer by training and profession).
I had the overall architecture of the video in my mind for a long time, and by about 2010 the technology to do it became affordable for people like me. And so I went out and did it, over a couple of longer trips into the desert, using a variety of DSLR and other video cameras hanging off my car using jerry-built mounts that only just kept the cameras from smashing to the ground on the rougher roads. I kinda like the end result — and it’s pretty close to what I’d envisioned all those years ago — but it’s already showing its age.
But it includes a soundtrack I took from a commercial recording, the first song (movement) of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. That soundtrack was in my mind from the start of the project — what better accompaniment to desert decrepitude and the American West’s endless struggle with entropy than a deliriously-overripe piece of Western Art Music? (Song Of The Earth is actually one of my all-time fave vocal music pieces, but never mind, it’s also over-the-top in ways that just cry out for a little snark — “Dark is life, dark is death!”, indeed). It also happened to be pretty much exactly the right length for the video, and had the right dynamics in the right places. It turned out to be easy to edit to as-is, which is unusual.
Sadly, the video can’t be embedded in a bunch of contexts, and it can’t even be seen in some countries, because I used that soundtrack without getting the rights (generally, the sync rights) to it, and I don’t have the resources to get those rights for even just the US (let alone globally). No one in my position has the resources to get them — they’re effectively out of reach of someone like me, even though I’d be happy paying something reasonable for them. Those rights are difficult to get without a lot of lawyering and research, and typically cost in the four or five figure range (the whole system is set up mostly for large-scale movies and such). No loss to anyone except me, of course, but it’s still annoying.
But — again — the point is that I’d happily pay some reasonable amount of money for the use of the soundtrack — an upfront fee and something like a per-view fee on top of that (note the “reasonable” there — this is not a commercial video, and it’s never going to make me any money whatsoever, and nor was it ever intended to). But there’s really no way to do that. There’s no efficient central clearing house for this; everything about it is set up for the big guys looking to use soundtracks in commercial or indie movies and who have the lawyers to do the legwork. And even if you do seem to get the sync rights, it’s not clear that you really have those rights clear even with a signed agreement — someone else may claim them down the line.
So who wins here? Predictably, pretty much no one except the lawyers.
Note: Youtube’s automatic content flagging algorithm has, probably inevitably, flagged the video’s music incorrectly — it’s got entirely the wrong performance and recording. Surprise!! Let sleeping dogs lie, and all that, though.
