02010-08-11 | LAVA
This evening I sat zazen as the sun began its slow descend. If you want to take photographs in Santa Fe, do it in the Evening, when the sun lingers for a long time. In the Morning the sun rises so quickly that it appears as if somebody switched it on… Then I celebrated this lovely August day with a walk to Santacafe, where I hadn’t been all year. I sat at the bar, like I used to, ordered the same three small appetizers I would have ordered two decades ago, plus a glass of Super Tuscan wine, and talked to the bartender who had worked there for seventeen years, about the rains that graced our town this Summer – like they used to twenty years ago, before the weather had changed.
After dinner I strolled through town – I can’t bring myself to call it a city – past the library, past the Anasazi Hotel, where we shot interview footage for my first Epic Records press kit in 1992, past the Frank Howell gallery on the corner of the plaza, past the Plaza Bakery, filled with people and once, and maybe still, the highest grossing Häagen Dazs store in the world. I took a left down towards Pasqual’s, and made a mental note to make a reservation there as I haven’t eaten there in nearly a decade – we ate there often while recording “Lava” – followed by a right onto Water Street.
I could swear the bike locked to one of the meters was Michael’s Dahon, and for a moment I listened intently, to find out whether I could hear live music somewhere. But maybe he was downtown to eat, enjoying the warm mid-summer evening.
As I moved on I noticed that Foreign Traders, a store on the corner of Water and Galisteo, had closed and my favorite bookstore in town had moved into the space and added a cafe. I continued on Water street, past the dark backside of a building, where I had more than once climbed up a fire escape to my girlfriend’s window on the second floor. I rounded the parking garage and headed back towards the plaza, thinking about riding a Harley along West San Francisco in the early Nineties.
The band had stopped playing on the plaza a while ago, and the crew had nearly packed everything away, but somebody was still playing percussion and singing, while a crowd kept clapping in rhythm. Left on Lincoln street, then right on Marcy Street. There were still people waiting to get a table in the tiny tapas restaurant La Boca. Diagonally across the street from La Boca used to be La Traviata. The Santacafe bartender and I had talked about that place. Until it closed it was our favorite restaurant in town. I must have gone there for lunch at least two, three times a week in the early Nineties. What was the name of the chef and owner? He was the chef at Santacafe until it burned in 1986. When it re-opened the position was given to Michael Fennelly and X then worked at Carriage Trade, which was where Geronimo is now, before opening La Traviata. I met him at Carriage Trade, where I played guitar three nights a week in the summer of 1987.
I crossed the street, walked past the library, past whatever took the space of the old Video Library, and headed home.
02010-08-11 | Uncategorized
Marginal Revolution: Spontaneous order on the road
Here’s a video of a small town in Britain that turned its traffic lights off. Order ensued.
I updated the photoblog with new images.
Charles Lloyd recently sent me this link to a video for his new album, which will drop next month. I met Charles in Paris and Tokyo with Yohji Yamamoto in 1991. The new album sounds great!
Gerry on August 11th, 2010 at 03:32
‘For a while I thought that Creative Commons licensing was actually a good idea, but no longer.’
Could you explain a little more? Do you have any advice for musicians/ songwriters about protecting their work? I’ve been thinking about using an indepenent agent such as ‘protect my work’ who charge an annual fee around $50 but don’t know if it’s money well spent.
LAH – that stands for “laughing all hard”, which is the New Mexican version of LOL… I have a hard time believing that you will get much more than a few automated searches for the $50 annualy. Well, plus maybe they’ll send a form letter when they find that somebody is using or sharing your work. Copyright is automatic and you can send CDs to the Library of Congress or ask somebody, who’s done that before, to do it for you. I haven’t dealt with that in a couple of decades, as our publishing administrator takes care of this, but I remember doing this in the Eighties. I am sure you can find instructions somewhere on the internet.
Here are a few thoughts:
– what are you looking for: do you want to perform your music or sell recordings or both?
– do you want to use your recorded music to procure gigs?
– the value of your work increases with its popularity
– the value of your work may also increase because of its rareness (((e.g. clothing from the German fashion label Acronym is only available from a few retailers around the world. Acronym produce a limited amount which is highly sought after and sells out before market saturation)))
– your music is safest if you don’t let anybody hear it (((like keeping a painting in a vault, never showing it)))
– if nobody hears your music, it can’t become popular
– licensing of your music will only occur if the music is heard
– your music will be licensed if it is popular or fresh, or both
– at present protecting one’s music is a bit like trying to hold water in one hand
– do you want to spend most of your time creating music, or chasing after pirates?
– too much protection lowers the chance of the music being widely heard
– too little protection means that everyone already downloaded the music – why should they buy it?
I don’t know whether that helps. The truth is that I don’t have answers, and in fact nobody has answers. Some people (((cough Chris Anderson from Wired cough cough))) have made money from writing about the longtail and from giving talks about it, but I am afraid they are the only ones who have made money from that idea. We are all collectively stumbling about, looking for a way. Culture is moving down a tunnel, blindfolded, trying to determine what might work. In the opinion of many, popular music has never been worse… perhaps and perhaps not.
Last words: some people might suggest giving your music away, so that it might be heard and you gain a certain number of fans. Then you might be able to move to charging for the music or hope that these new fans buy tickets for one of your performances. However, those fans you gained will be fans of your free music and it would remain to be seen whether they would be willing to pay for the same music.
Ha! See, I am not helping at all… now you have likely more questions. Welcome to the rubber raft that musicians are currently in, after that ship that was supposedly iceberg-proof started leaking and went under.
That’s a funny headline… and the article is quite good, too:
Epicenter | Wired.com
Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey (UPDATED)
