Monthly Archives: June 2004

Pennies from heaven

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Jim Munroe of No Media Kings makes a case for arts grants: Don’t think of them as free money, think of them as the R&D budget for our cultural future.

I explain it this way: arts grants fund the R&D wing of our cultural operations. Just like research and development in the scientific community, this allows for new methodologies and new strategies to be investigated without having to turn a profit. But in science, experimentation is a valued part of the process. When an artist is called “experimental,” it’s often derogatory. There’s this idea that if it’s not understandable to a mass audience or a layperson, it’s fraudulent.

But mass culture doesn’t spring from a vacuum. The arts and the sciences are both communal activities — everyone’s building on and reacting to the stuff around them. So that neat camerawork in a blockbuster summer movie was inspired by some more obscure film the director saw, which in turn was inspired by an underground photo exhibit, which in turn was inspired by something else… but only the person at the end of the chain of inspiration gets paid — the guy at the head of the line is the only one who isn’t invisible.

Grants address this blind spot of pure market capitalism. As much as economists like to present it as a force of nature, capitalism is a construct we made, a robot that can’t tell the difference between things that we feel are priceless and things that are valueless unless we step in. Clean air, for instance, has less inherent market value than a can of Coke. Grants are a little like speculation. By supporting projects and propagating ideas that are currently too far ahead of the curve to make money, we’re investing in an artistic legacy that we all benefit from.

But what does it have to do with the album?

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The Wrapped Up in Books gameis surprisingly diverting, given its low-tech style.

I like the idea of using a game to promote a music single, as Belle & Sebastian are doing. But couldn’t they have come up with a game that ties into the music better? Actually, I’m not a B&S fan, so maybe I’m not predisposed to see the tie-in. The game is still fun though.

(Link via TMN.)

Let the golden age begin

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Have you been reading the missives at The Morning News from Gary Benchley, Rock Star, regarding his move to New York to start a band and change the world of rock as we know it?

Before my stepdad dropped me off at Carl’s place in the East Village I was thinking about what brought me here. It has been a tired summer in Albany. How many times can you go stand in the back of Valentine’s and watch Monkey Gone Mad play “The Bb Song”? Or Sirsy rock out with “Uncomfortable”? Not many times if you want to keep your sanity.

I am not only a vocalist, guitarist, and drummer, but also a liberated man, and I am glad that mom has finally found some loin-heat. But all right. It’s three weeks ago, and they’re in there making noises, and the walls in this house are thin. I am glad for her, but I don’t need to hear all that.

So I’m pounding the skins, drowning out the animal noises from the other room. Trying not to think about how my mom gets much, much more than I do, albeit from a man who sells Snap-On Tools. And right as I’m in that part of “What Is The Light” where the shit kicks in, my mom comes to the door, all sweaty, and asks if I could just do something quiet for a little while because Jad and her are trying to have a conversation. Close up that nightgown, zip that zipper, a conversation. It is time to leave Albany.

That was from part one. He’s now on part seven. Rock on.

Year of Glad

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Let this be a warning to marketing reserach groups that run focus groups, and to the companies that hire them: the people you target are onto you:

In one group for Johnnie Walker Black, it was obvious the marketers wanted us to consider their beverage upscale, for special occasions. Recognizing this, I made up a story about learning my best friend was engaged and telling him, “It’s Johnnie Walker time!” The interviewer looked like he wanted to hug me.

Not surprisingly, after the piece referenced above was published, many market research companies expressed alarm. More precisely, they began screaming that all good things in the world are coming to an end:

“It is critical to the survey and opinion research profession that legitimate respondents be utilized in the research process,” said MRA Executive Director, Larry Hadcock. “Billions of dollars are expended annually based upon the outcome of survey and opinion research. To suggest ways to sabotage this process puts countless businesses that are critical to the US economy in jeopardy.”

Note to Mr. Hadcock and to all marketing research firms: It doesn’t help to shoot the messenger.

Related reading: “Mr. Squishy,” the first story in David Foster Wallace’s new collection, Oblivion. (The story was first published under a pseudonym in McSweeney’s #5. I’m still wondering about that: Why should DFW publish a story under another name? It was so obviously his story, so clearly written in his style, that it had to be him. Actually, it is so much in his style that it’s almost a parody of a DFW story. Accordingly, one can know before even reading the first sentence whether one will like it.)

(Thanks to Lindsayism for the article links.)

A gleaming little gem of a museum

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The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today offers a nice overview of the new museum in town, Butler’s Maridon Museum, founded by Mary Hulton Phillips.

The institution she willed into being is a gleaming little gem of a museum, a gift to its street, its city and its region. Here or anywhere there is nothing quite like it, offering an idiosyncratic introduction to Chinese and Japanese art through the eyes of an American collector.

About half of the museum’s collection is on view in four galleries; most of the rest is in a study gallery for scholars and will be rotated into exhibits.
The wide-ranging Asian collection comprises more than 400 jade and ivory sculptures, tapestries, furniture, landscape paintings, scrolls and artifacts. The museum also houses more than 300 pieces of Meissen porcelain, one of the largest private collections in the country, with several pieces dating to the earliest days of production in the 18th century. The theme that unites these disparate objects and cultures is the human figure, to which Phillips was consistently attracted.

“They tell stories,” she said. “The Meissen pieces are very humorous, and that attracted me.”

Although the museum lies on my regular jogging route, I haven’t yet visited. But I’m interested particularly by the reported quirkiness of the collection. And I have thought all along that the little window that houses Mrs. Phillips’s first collected piece looks very like a drive-through window.

Learn to handle chaw and spit through your teeth

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Robert Coover, distinguished author and Brown University professor, is is interviewed in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

[C]reative-writing workshops have absolutely nothing to do with our nation’s literature, though writers sometimes, more or less by chance, turn up in them, looking for an agent or romance or someone to start a new magazine with them. Creative-writing workshops mostly have to do with creating other creative-writing workshops. And this is all right, I suppose, because writing is good for people, or at least not seriously harmful. It teaches them to read, for one thing. We don’t need more writers, but we do need more readers. We need creative-reading workshops. Students would still have to write in them, but for nobler ends. And the self-proliferation of creative-reading workshops would be a less onerous thing. You asked me if teaching has enhanced my writing in any way, and I’d say mainly it has got in the way of it; might have made me a better reader, though.

Drink of the week: Tachyon

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I have recently discoverd the “In My Bar” feature of Webtender.com, which lists all the drinks one can make with the ingredients one has on hand.* This handy tool brings us this week’s drink:

Tachyon

Ingredients:
1 oz Pernod
1 oz Tequila
Dash Lemon juice

Mixing instructions:
Stir over ice. Either strain in a cocktail glass or on the rocks in a highball glass. Serve with curl of lemon peel.

* The site tells me I can make 113 drinks without leaving the house, plus another 868 if I can get someone to pick up just one extra ingredient for me. The numbers aren’t trustworthy: some drinks are just renamed copies of others, and sometimes the one missing ingredient is troublesome, like wormwood. But all the same, I’m delighted to know that my current bar can provide such a range of possibility.

And to answer the obvious question, here’s the drink I can make that uses the most ingredients:

Vampire’s Kiss

Ingredients:
2 oz Vodka
1/2 oz dry Gin
1/2 oz Dry Vermouth
1 tblsp Tequila
1 pinch Salt
2 oz Tomato juice

Mixing instructions:
Shake with ice. Strain over ice in an old fashioned glass.