You gotta hand it to the mentally ill, because sometimes, they can create real-life situations that are every bit the equal of their only-imagined illusions. For think about it: this woman, in the process of spinning her deceits, makes a sworn enemy of a successful Hollywood scriptwriter AND ends up the subject of a widely read alt-weekly.

Really, guys, there are some things you just can't make up.

It’s sort of hard for me to say this, as a fellow burner and former music journalist who actually saw Erik opine intelligently, if somewhat unoriginally, on the Scientology/Parsons/OTO nexus and Burning Man corporate sponsorship at the Viking Youth camp this year. You want to show your support. But Erik, this is both your bad and your evil, however unintended that it was, and it shows a great insensitivity to the plight of indie labels in a very precarious time for musicians and businesspeople that try to help them.

Believe me, I know how hectic things can get preparing for the playa. Hell, in my early burning days, I used to gift ancient promos out there. (not the easiest thing in the world to do, actually.) But these are different days, and it’s fuckups like this that give record labels greater reason to shrug us off as the anachronistic remnants of another era that we now are.

Quite frankly, who needs us anymore? Do you honestly need to follow a Lester Bangs wannabe to tell you what’s cool when the entirety of music history is immediately available on Myspace, Wikipedia and your average MP3 blog? The ONLY role we play in a record’s release is as pawns in a big marketing plan at this point. And Ben Goldberg doesn’t hold the copyrights to massive back catalogs like the Beatles or the Beach Boys. He’s living from release to release, and a screwup like this can cost him his job, so it’s better for him to get something, ANYTHING out of what just happened to him than to just hemorrhage silently for your sake, Erik. Hiding behind the aegis of “righteous publications like Arthur” is a rather shallow defense for what you unwittingly did to his business.

I’ve often maintained that the burden should be on the music industry to devise a system that stops treating its artists like slaves and its consumers like criminals, considering the evils they’ve enacted on both. But that doesn’t let music journalists off the hook either. We can be just as corrupt and careless as well. So I’d say Erik got off pretty easy at this point. He’s a part of the industry too whether he likes it or not, and as such, he needs to understand the rules of engagement a little bit better next time.