Scott Timberg's Blog, page 14

Neoliberal Economics vs. Democracy

THIS may seen far afield from a site devoted the arts, but anyone who’s read CultureCrash the blog, or the book that inspired it, knows that economics and our values are central to my concerns. They also exert a major force on how culture does and doesn’t work. Our economic assumptions give us a sense of what is — and isn’t — possible in our society.

So I’m pleased to find this excellent interview — “Neoliberalism poisons everything” — with UC Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown, whose new book is called “Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.” The conversation is mostly about the origins and effects of radical market worship, specifically as they apply to high school and higher education. I’ll point out the obvious: The dismantling of arts education in U.S. public schools was done in part on neoliberal grounds, and the undercutting of humanities majors at universities uses similar reasoning — that these schools are there to train cogs for the workforce.

I do wish Brown had discussed the roots of neolib in Hayek, Ayn Rand (right) and others.

Here’s Brown about how it takes over our minds, and every other part of us:

…I argue that there is something else about neoliberalism that we really need to attend to, which is the way it operates as a whole form of reason. By that, I mean that it is an understanding of the world and of the human beings within it as nothing but markets — and an understanding of human beings as fully reducible to market actors. Everything we do and everything we are, we are simply acting as market creatures. This is what is really novel about neoliberalism, because classic economic liberalism understood us as behaving as market actors in markets but then going off and behaving differently in domains of ethics or politics or religion or family life and so on.

Looking forward to seeing this book.

Where to Start with Ornette Coleman

THE great Texas-born jazz musician, who died last week, worked in a number of genres — free jazz, symphonic music, funk — and it can be hard for newcomers to get a sense of him.

Here’s how I began my Salon piece on Coleman:

Miles Davis said he must be “all screwed up inside” to play that way he did. Max Roach punched him in the mouth after he saw him play. But Ornette Coleman, who died today off cardiac arrest at 85, lived longer than almost any jazz great, he made important and challenging music for decades.

How to get into Coleman’s music, which drove so many people crazy, influenced musicians in jazz, funk and dance music, and became known even among admirers (a group that included not just fellow jazzheads, but Jackson Pollock and James Baldwin) for being difficult and driven by an arcane theory?

RIP to a great, at times frustrating, always challenging artist.

 

What Silicon Valley means For Culture

RECENTLY your humble blogger was able to connect the current situation in the world of technology — the money, the power, the self-deception — with the history of the arts. Specifically, I’m talking about cultural patronage, and I take it back to Haydn, Moneverdi and Velazquez.

This piece of mine from Salon may interest Arts Journal readers. 

Will try to keep posting my pieces that touch on visual art, classical music, theater, cultural history and so on.

 

The Shallowness of “Mad Men”

HERE at CultureCrash, we are split on the advertising chronicle Mad Men. Mostly, I think the early seasons were among the best television ever, even if recent seasons have become mere Age of Aquarius soap operas. Our guest columnist Lawrence Christon has no love for the show, early or late. Here is his response to the program’s farewell, and to its read of a complex era of American history.

“Mad Mania: A Postmortem”

By Lawrence Christon

During “Mad Men” season, Monday morning postings on smart websites like Slate, Salon, The New York Times and the more trendy than smart Huffington Post brought such eager, exhaustive commentary and analysis of the show that I was often compelled to check it out lest I miss the latest pile-on in the chatterati’s topical discourse. And each time I did, I’d wonder what the fuss was all about.

This week was no exception, and once the communal play-by-play spilled over into national obsession, the kind of episodic media paroxysm that thrashes around Baby Jessica in the drainpipe or Bruce Jenner’s sex change before pausing to wait for The Next Big Thing, I wondered even more. Was Mark Greif right when, in reviewing the culture’s fixation on “Mad Men” for The London Review of Books, he concluded, “We’re doomed”? On the other hand, some intelligent people have gone all in on this show, and written sensitively and keenly about it.

It really doesn’t matter any more that, from the point of view of dramatic structure, or dramaturgy, “Mad Men” wasn’t very good. It had  moments. There were just enough coy signifiers sprinkled through its vacuous expanse to encourage people to read in a profundity that most of the time wasn’t there. Scenes were posed rather than played; the actors were throttled with period attitude and the sense that every moment had been carefully set up to make a point. It was a writers’ and designers’ show rather than an actors’ and director’s show (ideally it should blend these all), but the writing was soap-opera thin and the design static, so that it had all the scenic dynamism of those bourgeois gents grouped on the Dutch Masters cigar box.

At the center was Jon Hamm’s mostly monochromatic performance as Don Draper, a man reinvented but still not satisfied with the result. Hamm is a good-looking guy of the tall, dark and handsome school, and I’ve wondered if his casting wasn’t intended in part to echo an American Sean Connery (whom he resembles); narratively speaking, a corporate Bond with a back story. Like Bond, he bedded women without much liking them. Unlike Bond, he had no glint in his eye. Neither did the show.

The biggest turnoff for me was its insularity from the age it purported to reflect. Robin Williams famously said that anyone who remembers the ‘60s wasn’t there. “Mad Men” tried to remember, but it wasn’t there either. There were tangential inclusions, but there was no way for anyone around at the time to shut out the sound and the fury of the most lurid decade in American history, where the baby boomers, prepared to marshal their idealistic energies behind a glamorous young president, tipped into rage and the grief of abandonment after his assassination.

It was an age of assassination: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy. It was an age of violence: riots and protests, black nationalism and Bloody Sunday in Selma, mayhem in Chicago, fire in Detroit and L.A. There were sit-ins, be-ins, die-ins. Weed and LSD supplanted booze and cigarettes. The soundscape radically changed, from Perry Como and Elvis to The Grateful Dead and the lead guitar licks of Jimi Hendrix that cut through the haze over Woodstock nation like the shriek of a jet engine. Generations barricaded themselves against each other. Hard hats snarled at hippies. The color scheme brightened into tie-dye rags as the Boomers regressed into barefoot chant, but at Kent State saw that the reactionary forces of the country had the guns and meant business. By the end, when early accounts of the horrible Manson family murders couldn’t determine the body count, Joan Didion remembered that it almost didn’t matter; no one was surprised.

Through it all seeped the acrid smell of the war in Vietnam, where priapic American technology dropped its fiery load on a rural country populated with a mostly mild people engaged in their own nationalist conflict. The Boomers eventually withdrew into the BMW showroom display of the Me decade, and left the field to the Reaganauts and buccaneer capitalism. America still hasn’t recovered.

There’s been speculation, partly fueled by show-runner Matthew Weiner, that “Mad Men” was about Gen X-ers trying to crack the code of their parents’ guarded hearts. Some have thought it struck a nostalgic fondness for an era of greater Rat Pack freedoms (booze, butts, broads) now considered sexist, unhealthy and uncool. (Toots Shor: “We died younger then, but we had a lot more fun.”) Some have declared it a definitive women-in –the-workplace saga.  And then there’s the classic corporate America theme, sounded in the ‘70s musical “A Chorus Line” and mirrored in Hamm’s dour expression: “Who am I anyway? Am I my resume?”

For me, the last episode really did sum up “Mad Men’s” popular run: Don Draper ohm-ing in an ashram, finding inner peace and the blissful energy to go back into the world and make a nutritionally useless bottle of soda a product-placed symbol of universal love and harmony in voices raised on high. (Am I the only one who thought it dubious for a fictional character to imply credit for a real cultural phenomenon?)

In short, a successful return to genteel hustling.

That ending defines “Mad Men’s” exaggerated importance: The first principle of the hustle is that you can’t be had unless you first enjoy it. Judging by the response, a great many have.

The Dangers of Classical Literature

Let me catch my breath a second and direct CultureCrash readers to my Salon piece on trigger warnings on university “trigger warnings,” the poetry of Ovid, and my fears about Fox News.

Of my recent Salon work, this seems like the one most relevant to ArtsJournal readers. Bottom line is, How do we regard the violence, rape, heartlessness and overall nastiness in Green, Roman and Old Testament sources. One thing I did not have time or room to mention is that classical culture (and other early myths, legends and folklore like those in early Norse  and Celtic literature, the Germanic tales recounted by the Brothers Grimm, etc.) drives not only what we’ve come to call “high culture” but all kinds of genre fiction (detective writer Ross Macdonald, science-fiction scribes like Robert Silverberg) and postmodern meldings (the stories and novels of Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link.)

Of course, trying to document all the places myth and folklore lead is foolish — they’re the basis of so much.

 

When Humor Misfires: Warren Buffett Edition

Gang, I’ve been AWOL from the blog lately because of my new job at Salon and a trip last week to Toronto for Canadian Music Week, where I spoke on artists’ rights.

I expect to have some fresh, uh, content for CultureCrash one of these days. For now, here is new piece by our steady guest columnist, who like me writes about the places where culture, politics and money tangle together. Enjoy.

“A Funny Thing Didn’t Happen on the Way”

By Lawrence Christon

What was that about?

That’s all I could think at the end of Charlie Rose’s Thursday night (May 7) telecast, which began with Sports Illustrated’s Peter King discussing Tom Brady’s putative link with underinflated footballs, and David McCullough’s soulful description of what the Wright brothers wrought, before we saw this: A CBS news flash, with correspondent Rose at the desk, announcing that Warren Buffett—yes, that Warren Buffet, homespun billionaire octogenarian—had declared his intent to dethrone Floyd Mayweather Jr. in a live televised bout at Las Vegas’ M-G-M Grand, ten days after Mayweather had dispatched Manny Pacquiao.  

A film clip followed. Actually, a cartoon clip followed, in which animated Buffett ordered his secretary to hold all calls while he flicked on Showtime feature film style coverage of the casino venue (Steve Wynn calls a sports book for a piece of the action), and the run-up to the fight.

A snarling Buffett, heading a phalanx of white homies, barges in to the Mayweather training facility with his challenge. Handlers restrain them from going at each other on the spot, hurling obscenities at each other (Warren, is that you?).  We see Buffett getting into shape, riding an exercycle so vigorously that the wheel belt catches fire. For hand speed, he works an old-fashioned manual adding machine. Faster, faster! Fight night arrives. Long shot of the venue, where diamond lights sweep the darkened arena like the opening of a rock concert. Camera pans to ringside celebrities, including Jack Nicholson. Buffett, in sweats, and Mayweather enter the ring. Jimmy Lennon Jr. announces the particulars. Sexy gal stuffs chocolates into Buffet’s mouth in lieu of a mouthpiece. Somebody asks if he’s going to keep his glasses on for the fight.

Bell rings. Fighters advance. Static voids the screen picture. Cartoon Buffett, back at his desk, rings his secretary.

“Did we pay our cable bill this month?”

If this segment had anyone else in it other than Very Famous People, let’s say a comedy club headliner pitching the same spoof with other comics to a studio exec or powerful agent, you’d wager the response to be, “That’s it? That’s the bit?” and later stake a round for everyone at the bar.

But since it was Very Famous People appearing in real footage of a fake event, the segment has more bothersome implications than a dumb comedy stunt that’s fallen flat. Let’s put aside the first rule of successful satire, which is that, whether it’s Moliere depicting a hypocritical cleric or Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin, the fit is so close to reality you can never look at its object the same way again. Despite first-rate production values (John Landis directed) the segment comes off as a goof broadly concocted by a group who, like giddy New Year’s Eve revelers, thought it was a good idea at the time.

It wasn’t, but so what?  The sun still rises, the axis of the Earth hasn’t shattered. But a couple of misgivings stuck with me. How easily Rose used his credibility, and that of the CBS logo and newsdesk setting, to indulge a theater of the absurd whim and further conflate news and entertainment, as if the distinction weren’t already so obscure as to merit specialist scrutiny on Antiques Roadshow.

It struck me too that this is what plutocrat humor must be like. I thought of the 1996 movie “The Game,” in which megabuck expense and slick corporate chicanery are used to try and crush Michael Douglas in a towering blue chip world. The unremarked level of privilege and indulgence were obscene. It was a product of its time.

So was this segment a product of 2015. Charlie Rose mainly deals with the rich and famous, and powerful. That media-celebrated world is wrapped in a peculiar set of values, rules and protections so that, for example, Rose can sit across from a mass murderer like Syrian president Bashar Assad and not aggressively call him on his use of chemical weapons against his own people. (Imagine how Mike Wallace would have handled that interview). You can mention it, as Don Corleone advised. Don’t press it. That would be impolite, and bad manners is the capital offense in Charlie’s world, where nightly he competes with the best talent on the planet to prove, often at garrulous length, that he’s as smart as they are.

No one ever seems to want to take him on. The only time I’ve seen it alluded to was in “This is Spinal Tap,” when no one at the interview table could get a word in except the host. Maybe that happens for the same reason that outrage against the predations of the superrich hasn’t taken deep popular root—everyone in his heart of hearts hopes to join them somehow. So it is with the Charlie Rose show. To get on is to join the magic circle, the ring of the fabled and the fabulous. It’s better than making a bundle.

If there’s any moral to this story, it has to be that humor is the first victim of those who take themselves too seriously.

 

 

What I Have in Common With Andrew Sullivan

OVER the last few years, as the traditional print media has fallen into a tailspin, a number of observers — including very smart, canny ones — have predicted that blogs would replace print as well as the more established websites. Andrew Sullivan, whose site The Dish was updated often and drew an enormous readership, was often mentioned as the model. In January, the indefatigable Sullivan admitted that he was fatigued.

…I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me.

While I’m glad to say that some of Sullivan’s other explanations for quitting blogging — he worked himself to the point, it sounds, of significant health problems — don’t resemble anything I’m dealing with, I certainly know what he means.

And it’s a good time for me, as well, to step down as a more-or-less daily blogger. Attentive readers have probably noticed my falling down on the job, and becoming less consistent, over the last month or two. CultureCrash will continue, but I will now post once, maybe twice, a week, and will track breaking news about the economics of culture and issues of creative destruction less attentively. CultureCrash has been up for 15 months, it’s drawn more than 100,000 hits (chicken feed by Sullivan’s standards), and the book it is named for and build around has been out for just over three months.

Sullivan’s Dish logo

The reasons are twofold. First, I don’t make a dime from this blog, and as a hard-working freelance writer, author, and father it’s been tough to keep this going as a pro bono experience. The blog, like the book, has been a blast, but neither has made my finances — still bruised by my layoff — any better. I just paid a month of bills, barely, and I simply can’t keep doing this. 

(For all the faults of the print media, which has been roundly criticized by both left and right, it led to editors and scribes getting paid, which for those of us who need to make a living is pretty important. The blogosphere, and the web in general, mostly — so far — does not.)

Second, on Monday I begin a full-time writing/ranting job at Salon. I’ll be their staff culture writer, and will be writing about a wide range of things, with, probably far more attention to popular culture than the fine- or performing arts. I hope you’ll follow me over there. The first week or two will be extremely busy, and CultureCrash may go fallow for a while; I can’t tell.

So goodbye for now. This blog will continue in some form, and I hope it continues to speak to people and provoke discussion. It’s been fun, and thanks to everyone who’s been part of it.

“Sleeping Through a Revolution”: Technology and Culture

ONE of the clearest and most powerful descriptions I’ve seen about the place where technology, culture and economic forces meet is in a lecture USC’s Jonathan Taplin gave not long ago. He’s transposed the speech into a piece for Medium called “Sleeping Through a Revolution.”

Taplin is especially good on the big picture, and on the way Silicon Valley — built largely through public funding — would eventually be taken over by safety-net-shredding libertarians of the PayPal mafia.

This is from the opening:

Because I spent the first 30 years of my life producing music, movies and TV, this question matters to me and I think it should matter to you. So I want to explore the idea that the last twenty years of technological progress — the digital revolution — have somehow devalued the role of the creative artist in our society. I undertake this question with both optimism and humility. Optimism because I believe in the power of rock and roll or movies to change lives.

Taplin is an interesting guy who produced Scorsese’s Mean Streets and worked with Dylan and The Band in another life.

I’ve got an overdue review to write today so will have to leave it here for now.   

Louis C.K. and the War Against Smugness

HOW do you respond when someone handsome and callow cuts you off? Our guest columnist Lawrence Christon goes on a tear here about how we’ve gone wrong. With no further ado.

A FEW THINGS I WISH HE’D SAID

By Lawrence Christon

Though spoken in a TV show, it’s one of those crystalline moments, like “Rosebud,” or “I’ll have what she’s having,” that could go down in screen history as the memorable line that plays over and over again for the perfection of its utterance, timing and implication.

It happened in Thursday’s fifth season opener of the FX comedy series “Louie.” In it, Louie (Louis C.K.) wants to look at some merchandise in a store, but the hour is near closing time and the young salesclerk doesn’t want to help him. They get into a discussion.

“Do you know why you’re uncomfortable around people like me?” she asks (I paraphrase, but it’s close).

“No.”

   “Because we’re the future, and you don’t belong in it.”

The woman is only slightly more pedestrian than chic, but still attractive, stylish, self-assured, and impeccably smug. What is her vaulting claim for such unarguable sense of place, her grand accomplishment in the universal scheme of things?

“I own a store,” she tells him.

Let’s put aside for a moment the notion that Napoleon’s comment about a nation of shopkeepers, made in reference to Great Britain, was hardly intended as a ringing compliment, or that the woman looks so far to have been spared serious disappointment, if not betrayal, and hasn’t yet had to pull back from the abyss of despair so harrowing that the image of a grave suggests optional comfort. Such experiences return a scarred caution, if not humility. Her arrogance is breathtaking. Yet there’s just enough challenge in her remarks, as when she implies that the ills of her generational world have been inherited from his, to beg reply of some kind, if not retort.

So you wait. Come on, Louie. Say something. Make a case. Give the team some minutes. What’ll happen twenty or thirty years down the line, when she’s his age and someone comes up to tell her the same thing she’s told him? How will she feel then? Being twentysomething, is that all there is? Are we all so locked down in the precepts of generational identity that we don’t see their drywall hollowness?

There are universals that transcend age, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, the whole categorical checklist that’s plunged society and culture into squabbling irrelevance and recriminating censorship. There are young minds in old bodies; there are 19-year-old fuds. To age is to wonder about roads not taken and feel the looming shadow of mortality, to question it all again. A certain amount of stupidity and recklessness is a virtual requirement of youth where, as Lawrence Durrell wrote, “I move through many negatives to who I am.” We’re more defined by our mistakes than our successes because we tend to think success has followed an immutable plan, when in fact a lot of it is greased with dumb luck.

What does the girl know? What’s she done? Where’s she been? What makes her notable? What’s she giving back? What’s the there there?

Let’s jack it up a notch. What does she have to say about her part, however miniscule, in the long run of buccaneer capitalism that’s corrupted our political systems, enslaved people to the ethos and the fact of the almighty buck, and poisoned the planet? What does she have to say about our Huxleyan brave new world, where nearly every development of technological gadgetry brings us one step closer to mind control via the unlimited assault of commercial advertising and the atomization of private, inner space through constant interruption of our attention span? Any thoughts, opinions?

We needn’t be so grand. Who cares about you when you’re down and out? Or if you’re broke and need a root canal? Or a bank loan to get back on your feet? What if you can’t pony up the price of a McMansion to get a decent education, which really isn’t about knowledge, history, culture, thought, language, ideas, and fields related to yours, but scoring a certificate for a better job? How long can you get through a day without binging on screen time and copiously punctuating every text message with OMG! and WTF? And okay, miss, or ms., how good a salesperson are you if you don’t just antagonize a customer but send him away feeling like a piece of toilet paper stuck to society’s industrious heel?

Just asking.

The woman is of course a fictional projection of the male fears of Louis C.K., who wrote and directed the show. Improbable in some ways, real in others. Still, You wish Louie had said something, anything really. If it’s closing time, how about a latte to talk things over, maybe forge an interesting bond? Learn from each other. But Louie is a schlub. Things happen, life happens, absurdly, weirdly, just in its everyday self. Larry David would rant. Saul Goodman would find an angle to get around her. Louie just more or less takes it. But artfully enough for us to do the rest.

Most things we laugh at aren’t really funny; they’re turned into humor so we can live with them. But how do you wake complacency from its slumber?

That’s a tough room.

 

The Craftsman: Musician Matt Keating

HERE at CultureCrash, we’ve been admirers of Matt Keating’s music since we saw him play at a barbecue at South by Southwest in the ’90s. I’m especially fond of his music from that period — the Candy Valentine EP is an essential document that I don’t think could be improved — but he’s been remarkably consistent in his pursuit of the perfect pop song. His twangy record from 2006, Summer Tonight, is full of good stuff (“Never Stop Cryin'”), and I’m digging his new The Perfect Crime.

He’s an example of the many artists across the fields — poetry, the short story, jazz, etc — doing strong work without nearly enough attention.

By an odd coincidence, Keating and I were in California’s high desert — Gram Parsons country — at the same time about a week ago and met at Pappy and Harriet’s for a few beers and bottles of sarsaparilla. I tossed the New York-based Keating some questions about his work — I urge fans of indie rock, alt-country and the post-Dylan singer-songwriter tradition to check out his work.

Tell us a little about your songwriting. How do you approach it, who are some of your model/inspirations, and how do you know when you are done?

I try to follow the old Picasso quote, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working” and so I really devote some part of every day to “writing” just to keep me in the game. With that said, my best songs come when I’m not working and usually when I should be somewhere else. The good ones come when I’m late for some very “important” meeting or something and should have been out the door 10 minutes before and have to leave “right now”…it just keeps inching out and making me later. My muse is high maintenance that way. When I write a song from that space it’s clear when the song is done because it’s writing itself. The other ones can take years. I read somewhere that Dylan said he writes a song a day because that improves his odds of writing good ones. There was a time I did that but since becoming a father it’s more like 1 a week.

Most of your music sounds to me like “classical” songcraft, not because it resembles Brahms but because you’re very grounded in pop history – Beatles, Byrds, Big Star and so on. What are some songs by others that you consider perfect or close to it – tunes you wish you’d written?

There are so many perfect songs out there I wouldn’t even know where to begin. A really good “story” song like Pancho and Lefty by Townes Van Zandt usually is enough to humble me real good. It’s usually a lyric like that or a classic tune like “King of the Road” by Roger Miller that shows me what a real standard is. I don’t thing songwriting can be judged like sports—that there’s some “perfect score” you can get on an objective range. There’s an effortlessness to perfect songs that can’t be achieved usually through traditional “hard work”. I think it’s more like there’s a “zone” certain songwriters get in where they can access all the songs that have already been written in some Platonic song world. I love the story of how Lennon/McCartney initially didn’t believe you could buy or sell the rights to a song. They felt that songs came from the air and that you couldn’t really own them in the way the Native Americans who sold Manhattan for $26 thought the idea of land ownership was ridiculous. They all found out the hard way how naïve they were, though I do believe that naivete is somehow connected to the ability to access the song. I really don’t wish I’d written songs by other people…I’m satisfied with the ones I’ve been blessed to access.

Your new album, The Perfect Crime, came out in February. (iTunes has it listed as “Americana.”) What were you aiming for with this one, and did you think of it as a change of course at all?

Ha. That’s funny because the Orchard who are distributing it first told me I could have two genres but then told me it was only one. I initially put singer/songwriter I think because I don’t really think of that as a “genre” per se…I mean, even Ozzy Osborne is a singer/songwriter by strict definition. But then I realized that things are so divided by genre now that though I don’t necessarily think of myself as Americana, that’s probably what it sounds like to most uninformed music listeners. I have to admit I come at “American music” by way of English bands like the Beatles and so it’s not really just American. Though I am American and when I’m touring in Europe I can feel a twang in what I do that’s not present over there.

I also have to admit that my only goal in making a record is to include only recordings of songs that have at one point made me feel happy and proud to have made them. I can even change my mind and hate a song eventually, but if there was once a strong feeling that I “got it” then I stick with it. Then I weed it down to the ones of those that other people tend to like. Then I try to put them in some kind of order that tells some kind of musical or lyrical story and feels like some kind of journey. This one took a long time, mostly of just leaving it alone, and letting the cream rise to the top.

The indie-rock and record-industry worlds have changed enormously since you started recording in the early ‘90s. Is there a clear and succinct way to make sense of what’s happened to people like you in the ensuing years?

I think most of the people who try to cash in on a trend drop away when it becomes clear there’s gonna be no real payday. Then there are those of us who feel a life mission to find these songs in the ether and share them with the world, even if that world is only a few hundred or thousand hard core fans and listeners. I mean, in the words of Dr. Seuss in Horton Hears A Who: ”A person’s a person, no matter how small.” I think that extends to fan bases too.