Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to DCBCauchi,
Looks like Gio took you out of context. You said you could look after yourselves, but you weren't meaning financially, you surely meant that you don't need a bureaucrat telling you how to do your art.
That's the same exact complaint my sister often gives, who is always applying for grants for her choreography work, that the fine line of helpful input is most often crossed into patronizing meddling and requests to make the art considerably more superficial, because the people controlling the grant money are so often not literate in the art they are supervising. Indeed, some of them even act like hateful welfare case managers, with criticism that roves into every life choice. Quite galling to get that from people who don't even make art.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to DCBCauchi,
You play them a band they like, and next time you see them they know more about them than you do. It's wearying.
Awww, dude, get a groove on! It's exciting that kids are so god-damned wired, something I could only dream of myself as a kid. I know it inverts the natural order when a kid knows way more than you about something, but the answer is not to feel embittered, it's to feel proud of your species. And try to learn something from the kids - there's still lots of things to teach them - information is not all, as Gio said. There's elements of character and certain kinds of discipline that kids are still in awe of in most older people, and could greatly benefit from good role models. If they liked a band you liked, that a compliment, says you can connect with them on taste. If you make art, there's not many kids who would see you doing it and think it was lame, or not wish they had those skills. Which they can't get just by looking up art on Wikipedia.
I know what you mean, though. Kids just have so much energy, so when they enthuse about something you like, it's quite daunting. Also, it can be more than a little annoying when you know about something from long painstaking training and practice, to a deep level, and then have someone disagreeing with you because Wikipedia says so. However, the ensuing argument can be fruitful both ways. So often, they're not actually reading the wiki correctly due to that lack of background. Also, your own opinions could be controversial, or contextualized in a way that makes them really only apply to your situation, and it helps to be reminded of that (even if it also hurts - it's like brain training. You come away sore, but each time you can lift more).
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Seriously, though, when's the last time you heard a piece of music that made you think this is really new, as opposed to this is really good?
Not that often, but when you compare the music collections of my grandma, which was scores only, and the family played piano and sang, to my parents, who had hundreds of vinyls and tapes, and now CDs, to me who has tens of thousands of mp3s in my pocket at all times, it's no wonder I have more exacting tastes than them on what it is that is new. Elvis sounded pretty new and cool back then because people didn't really have a chance to hear the things that influenced him so much. Now, I'm streaming internet radio every night to listen to continuously created content in any of thousands of different genres, all the latest pop is on multiple TV channels and youtube etc, and if I care to search there's more torrentable stuff than our whole community could listen to in a hundred lifetimes.
So when I hear some deth-metal fused with hip-hop that sounds quite new and good, being a thousand times more musically literate than my grandma (despite being unable to play an instrument or sing), of course I can identify most of the influences. That doesn't mean it's not new, what they're doing. They're like Elvis too, just can't dominate an entire industry, because we have incredibly exacting standards.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
Strict genre divisions have always been more important in the US industry anyway, as a way of dividing audiences for commercial purposes.
Yes! That's how it felt to me, that I could never really wear my musical choices like a badge because they were so damned eclectic. Nowadays I feel much more comfortable because eclecticism is normal when everyone is a DJ.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Lanier is not saying that there aren't any big, paradigm shifting genres. He's saying that there aren't any new genres, period.
Yes, he repeats the point over and over and I simply disagree. It's like saying there aren't new kinds of books in the library because the Dewey Decimal system has been stable for a long time. Yes, when you refuse to accept anything as a new classification, then there are no new classifications, just subclassifications. But that's just a fact about the way he organizes music in his mind, nothing to do with the actual originality of what is being made. I have a habit of lumping rock all into one bag, but it's such a big bag that you could quite legitimately consider it to be a dozen or more genres, and many with blurred boundaries caused by influences from other schools, the various fusions that have a unique taste and devoted followings.
If I agree with him in any way it's that I don't see major trends seizing such a large share of public listening so much. Which could mean that people are getting the music they wanted, rather than following the trend, is all. Maybe this will change again, but I have to say it wasn't something that I ever thought was especially righteous, that popular attention had such limited focus. We're just not going to see Elvis-like popularity again, because there's too many people as good as Elvis, scattered across so many disparate genres.
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I don't think there aren't new genres. It's just that there are so many, that none of them seem so titanic as they used to. It's rather like how there don't seem to have been any scientific breakthroughs like what seemed to be happening when Einstein was around. The truth is that there's more science happening than ever before and our expectations have shifted. Also, that body of knowledge is so mature that making a titanic shift involves a titanic effort now. Similarly with music, it seems like every conceivable sound has been turned into music, and every genre has 10 times as many artists as it used to. To seize a huge piece of that requires a revolution much larger than anything that's ever happened before.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
But the message that it's good to work on your own thing -- having a specialist subject is good -- rather than just trudging up the standard workplace path is a good one.
I'd agree, caveated with "for some people", and also "at certain times of life". Living on $5,000 pounds per year might seem admirable to him, but if you're putting your family through that, it's a whole lot less noble. Security is sought by people for a reason, because it's not the feeling of insecurity they're worried about (although that can be unpleasant), it's the actual disasters that a total lack of finances can make 100 times worse. He's very quick to write off the actual pleasures that go with secure well paid remuneration, which are obviously substantial.
But for young people that have an ambition of the heart, it's good advice. In fact, any advice telling people to educate themselves about exactly it is they want to do, to seek contact and inspiration directly from people doing just that, and to do a lot of self-analysis about whether the path fits, is sound. It's the basic premise of "What color is your parachute?", the famously successful job-hunting bible. It's considerably harder than letting someone else make the decisions, but it will find you want you want a lot faster. If you don't do it, you're not really even looking for what you want, you're waiting for it to fall in your lap.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Andy Pickering,
This was written 11 years ago. But it contains some excellent advice for anyone considering a career in journalism.
http://www.monbiot.com/2000/06/09/choose-life/Wow, that's pretty heavy. How to write off 90% of the workforce as "the living dead". Not without truth, though, I felt like a lowly demon in a lower circle of Hell last time I was deeply ensconced in a large corporation. It's not called the Rat Race for nothing. That said, the work most of my colleagues did did not seem to take a heavy toll, because they never gave it a moment's thought outside of office hours. Also, highly technical work is perhaps not quite so soul destroying when the projects are dictated by a corporate machine, as they would be in a more heart-driven field (like "true" journalism) seems to be. You get to work on big projects, learn various skills, etc...but of course you're forged into a corporate tool pretty quickly. Dissent becomes extremely difficult. I remember that even on the day I left, with a thousand things I wanted to say about how fucked up the management of their IT was, I found I could not say any of it during the formal exit interview, for 2 reasons - I did not want to harm any of the people I'd left behind that I liked, nor did I want to burn any bridges, potentially tossing away the CV references for 4 years of my life.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Emma Hart,
The terrifying thing about this scenario is its plausibility.
The famous trick for remembering where lost things are is to try to remember the last time you used it, in graphic detail, bringing to mind every tiny aspect. Standing in the place and walking through steps helps. Mostly this fails because remembering the last time it was used is the whole problem. But in this case, it could work, unless, of course, you're using those cuffs all the time...but even if it doesn't work, I imagine it's going to be a lot more fun than trying to remember where you put the baby wipes.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Mark Stewart,
My partner is currently trying to hire a senior hair stylist, and is finding there is a ridiculous shortage. I would have thought that might have been one of the more "sexy", or at least glamorous-looking, occupations for a number of school-leavers.
Yes, it's especially noticeable in the enormous prices that tradies can charge - they are all booked out until next year, and yet it's seldom seen as something to encourage your kids into, unless they've shown no academic tendencies. I suspect a very deep snobbery is costing us dearly. We don't need a knowledge economy, we need people with skills that are in short supply, and right now, at the moment, that actually turns out to be people who can fix broken water pipes.
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