Roland Barthes, the French literary scholar, contended that once a writer's text crosses the line between private manuscript and published work, his/her ability to dictate his/her intent is lost. In other words, as soon as something is published it will be read, and the reader is immediately and totally free to interpret the meaning of the work without respect to author's intent. The text assumes a life of its own, conveying a meaning of its own, interpretable on its own merits. Had the writer not created the work, such interpretations would not be possible, but the words themselves have power not necessarily related to anything the author had in mind. The same is true with any communication medium--intent can be twisted beyond recognition, and the communicator has little or no power to stop it, beyond attempting to be as clear as possible. Of course, ambiguity is what gives much of cultural communication its value and aesthetic worth--if an artist's intent is clear beyond misinterpretation, is the work even a work of art?

Thus, when Bobby McFerrin released "Don't Worry, Be Happy," his horror at the appropriation of the phrase by Reaganite Republicans might have been justified, but there wasn't a darned thing he could do about it. After Darwin published his treatise on natural selection, he could reasonably argue that "Social Darwinism" was a distortion of his theories (and in fact based upon an extrapolated assertion he never actually made), but he could not get the shit back in the goose--"survival of the fittest" may not have been a phrase which ever passed his lips, but his work contributed to its propagation as surely as a pebble thrown into a glassy smooth pond contributes to the propagation of waves.

The political/cultural winds are constantly being shifted based on the media phenomenon known as "the echo chamber," which is similar to "telephone game," where a message is transmitted from one person to another and another in turn, until at the end of the train the meaning may have been distorted into something totally unrelated or even diametrically opposed to the original intent. In the case of the press and electronic media, the simple fact that the story is repeated (even if the message is in no way changed), and the choice, by a larger or smaller number of media outlets, to repeat certain things and not others can have a significant effect on "The Conversation," as does the audience's choice which idea to attend and which to ignore.

Theoretically, dissemination (and sale or purchase) of art works works in a similar fashion--if there's avaiable fuel, the fire will spread--if the wind blows, Burbank may burn down--if it doesn't, the fire may go out and the news cameras will all move to Bangor, Maine to cover the Lobster Festival.

If we continue down this metaphorical path, the "culture industry" is analogous to an arson ring, attempting to control and direct the actions of a force of nature toward a particular result. And like arson, regardless of your skills as a "torch," the act can produce unintended consequences. Tons of money (accelerant) can be poured into a complete flop, or a random spark from a hubcap hitting a curb in Akron could barbecue the entire Eastern Seaboard.

Art is like that, despite the "best intentions" of those who would prefer to remove all risk from their investment activities. Statistical analysis can affect the odds, and the tendencies of Hollywood, Nashville, New York and LA to reverberate whatever trend is hottest for as long as money is to be made DOES tend to homogenize thought (and make it more difficult for new ideas to break through) but new thought, whether recombinant or "original," can no more be stifled than it can be artificially manufactured. Art has a life of its own, beyond any industry's designs, any artist's intentions, or any culture's fickleness or stubbornness.

We like what we know, right up until we know something different that we like better, and that's just on an individual basis. Now multiply by 6 billion. There's no such thing as a mirror-smooth cultural pool upon which to cast a stone--you're always casting it into a raging river, or at least a babbling brook. The current will take the waves whichever way it chooses, and none among us can predict that outcome. They don't make math equations that big.

There are no original works and there are no rip-offs. When a singer sings a song into a microphone, millions of copies can be made (all of which will sound essentially the same) but the same singer can never exactly replicate that performance--it happens once, and that's it. You can haul amplifiers, speaker stacks, lights, guitars and drums to the same cornfield, even feature some of the same bands playing the same tunes--you can even call it by the same name, but you can't re-create Woodstock. Woodstock happened once, was an experience shared only by those who attended, and despite the ripples it made, you can't bottle it--you were either there or you weren't. No two snowflakes will ever be alike--your high school class of '83, big as it was, is the only group that will ever know what graduating in '83 from your high school was like, and it'll never happen again.

Culture works in patterns, but the patterns never replicate themselves exactly--it's a constant metamorphosis, a continuum beyond predictability, and no amount of human control, including the fining or jailing of people who illegally distribute intellectual property for profit, can stop ideas, recordings, images, or text from propagating new waves, generating new ideas, and changing the tenor of the human Conversation.

It's chaos, with an annoying tendency toward identifiable patterns that makes us all, as creators, wish we could capture a thought and amplify it so loudly that everyone in the world would stop and listen for a second. I think that drives most people who create--the vague idea that we might say something that catches fire and changes people--permanently, we hope.

But it's pretty windy out there, and shit keeps banging into other shit, heavy trucks keep rolling by and obliterating our pianissimo German augmented 6th string quartet voicings, and grotesque, prurient images keep bumping our subtle still life photographs from the screen. Just when you thought all news networks would cover Lacy Peterson and only Lacy Peterson for the next decade, a big wave swept away half of Sri Lanka and Indonesia, killing so many thousands in the space of a few short hours that it literally took our breath away. Today it's Bill Bennett making a crack about aborting all black babies (and "lowering the crime rate"), tomorrow 2 Live Crew will be sued for plagiarising Roy Orbison (or was that yesterday?...it's all so confusing).

So we keep tinkering, using the tools at our disposal, trying to make a ripple or a splash or at least piss into Niagra Falls, trying to let somebody, anybody, or hell, at least "gawd," aware that the particular space we occupy with our own individual recombinant lump of protoplasm had some significance, breathed air, loved something, and maybe scratched some sort of mark into the trunk of that burr oak next to the big rock over by the stop sign with the bullet holes left by that hillbilly who's always hanging out at the bus station around suppertime.

In 4 billion years, the Earth will be a ball of ice (or incinerated, however that works) and all traces of human existence from Michelangelo to Einstein to the lump of snot Billy Stevens left under desk 3C in Miss Halloway's class in 1963 will be obliterated forever from existence, without the slightest trace.

I think by then our petty squabbles over "intellectual property" will seem pretty fucking stupid.

There's nothing to lose--dream, create, re-combine, originate, hope, live, make love, drink beer, and sit on the front stoop listening to Mahler or 50 Cent or Lithuanian language records 'til dawn, and savor the rush of oxygen that happens when you breathe in.