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Optimism, Intelligence, and Imagination.

August 9, 2009 in Blog, Community | No comments

When I was a kid in the 80s in Ontario, the environmental movement took hold of the mainstream.  By that, I mean people start talking about it over the dinner table, on the nightly news, teaching about it in public school classrooms.  David Suzuki become a household name.   It became commodified; you could buy products that had slogans about saving the Earth silkscreened on them.  There was a burst of enthusiasm; composters became commonplace, and a recycling program began in my little village.

There were two very clear messages I took with me from that time; the first and most solid was the white men in suits who said, over and over until I believed that it was true, that alternative energy sources would never be anything more than a novelty act.  That you couldn’t draw serious energy from the sun, wind, anything.  We could recycle all we wanted, but our dependence on fossil fuels was forever.  Even to an 8-year-old, that sounded horrible, futile, depressing.  To know that I was so dependent on a resource that was finite and depleting fast meant my future was compromised; the horror of dystopian sci-fi seemed like true prophesy.

The second message was that Lyn Kelsey, my third-grade teacher and by leaps and bounds one of the most interesting, intelligent, and inspiring people in my young life, believed in the green movement.  Probably the only teacher who taught me a damned thing in Elementary school, Mr. K was a guy with a passion for history, for stories, for reading, and for individuality.  As I grew up, I realized that his historical perspective was what inspired his interest in the environment; he taught us that we had a place in time and space, and that we weren’t the centre, but we could influence the whole.  He could imagine a future where things that didn’t currently exist had been implemented, where our future was hopeful because we had the ingenuity to learn from the past and move forward in an unexpected direction, because he knew it had happened in the past. Read the rest of this entry »

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Rage against the folk.

July 27, 2009 in Advice for Musicians, Blog, Music, art and ideas | No comments

I’m always surprised by the level of vitriol that the festival engenders lately.

I mean, the general public have very little criticism; last year I could barely move ten feet without being slapped on the back and told that it was the best PFF ever. The only post-festival complaint I heard was that the t-shirts didn’t have the year on them (we’re remedying that this year!).

But the whole summer had been a barrage of anger from ex-Board members, who hated that we were adding a beer tent and hated that we were moving the festival to Saturday. I couldn’t understand it at the time – I mean, some of these people had campaigned for a beer tent when they were on the Board, and the change of day just seemed like common sense, from a promotions standpoint.

This year I’m getting a lot of anger from musicians who didn’t get booked; like, a really disproportionate amount of anger. We don’t pay all that well (I do my best with the funds I have), we’re not super high-profile. We’re one of the smallest-budget festivals in Ontario. Our audience is almost entirely drawn from people in this County. I was having a hard time piecing together where the rage was coming from.

Some claim that they’re angry because I’m not booking enough local acts, but a glance at my lineup this year reveals, if anything, too many local acts, or acts with local ties (it’s awesome though – seriously – but I might be in trouble with one of my funders if I’m not careful). I generally book about 50% local, but this year it’s a lot higher.
I’ve also had a few out-of-towners rage at me.

But, in thinking about it, and talking to people about it, it seems pretty clear that the anger, the vitriol, are all coming out of the success of the festival. It’s artistically better, more beautiful, better-attended, better organized, more fun, and higher-profile than ever before. I’ve worked on the festival for a long time, and I’ve never heard anything more than the occasional grumble from bands who didn’t get booked until the last couple of years. Nothing like this.

But then, you don’t get angry about not getting booked for an okay, mediocre or shitty gig. We’ve made the festival a good thing, and as a result, people get pissed off when they don’t get in.

So, crazy as it is, I’m going to take every bitchy thing that’s said about me or the Board or the festival by a musician as a testimony to our success. Because if they didn’t care about whether or not they got in, I wouldn’t be doing my job.

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TV is good art.

July 16, 2009 in Blog, Dance, art and ideas | No comments

Tonight I was watching a little of So You Think You Can Dance, which is a pretty good reality show as far as reality shows go.  By which I mean, don’t mock me for watching reality shows; you totally do too (even you jerks who “don’t even own a tv!”).  Anyway, that’s not what this post is about.

While watching a bunch of well-built shirtless men stomp and flail fairly brilliantly around (while the lighting guys went madly off in all directions with the strobe), I was thinking more about the audience reaction than anything else.  Here are 5 guys doing an African dance routine, and here’s an audience of teens and young people pretty much going crazy over it.  It made me think about what tv is doing for artists.

So we have a long history of art for an audience; plays and music and dance have been performed for millennium for paying and interested audiences.  It wasn’t an elitist thing; it was general entertainment.  Sophocles, Shakespeare, the ballet, the opera; they were all popular entertainment in their time.  For the masses.  For the rabble.

The things of our parents’ or grandparents’ time often seem fussy and dull to later generations.  It’s a pretty straightforward progress from cutting edge to cool to mainsteam to yesterday’s news, and some things make the unlucky step from yesterday’s news to elitist fare.   Once they make that final step, it’s unlikely that the edgy hipsters will ever rediscover it.  Live theatre and live dance, and to a lesser extend live music, have become things that are somewhat elitist to go out to.   It’s been like that for decades, so don’t go blaming the internet or tv, those perennial scapegoats in the debate over what gets to be called culture and what gets to be called entertainment.

Oh, that dirty word, entertainment!  God forbid that we should entertain; serious artists not only suffer for their work, but make their audiences suffer too.  We should be bored and baffled by real art.  We should approach an evening of theatre or dance as a trial to endure, almost a matter of pride or a reaction to a particularly stinging dare.  Can you sit through the whole thing? Can you understand it?  And can you talk about it later as if you understood it and the unbelievable genius it took to create it?
In fact, I’m pretty sure that the Canadian publishing and film industries are solidly built on the foundation of that idea.
Anyway.

I think this is all ass-backwards.  Art can enlighten us if it feels like it, but it doesn’t have to and I don’t necessarily think it should.  Art isn’t laughable just because it entertains; and it isn’t laudable just because it fails to.  And more than anything, art is for people – all people, not just phDs or initiates or the rich.

Dance is an excellent example.  Even a hundred years ago, there were no dance schools – very young kids would be taken to the theatre and would work their tails off in the chorus.  If they were diligent and had talent, they’d move up the ranks in a sort-of apprenticeship system.  Rich kids had dancing masters.  People in villages and towns and cities taught each other new dances.  Dancing was a trade to some, and amusement for others, but it was something for everyone.  In more recent times, there’ve been schools upon schools established, formal levels and grades to attain.  It’s meant producing some really rarefied, gifted, and disciplined dancers, but it’s also meant that dance is the province of the very well-to-do, and people who can’t afford dance lessons and competitions are left out. And even worse, dance is now seen as something so elitist (and boring, and baffling) that very few people would even consider going to see a live dance performance.

Shows like So You Think You Can Dance turn some of that around.  We still have a lot of the rarefied, child-of-privilege dancers, but the audience is  drawn from many demographics, very few of them traditional live dance supporters.  Dance is starting to look like fun again, something people can learn to do.  Dance is starting to excite people, to be relevant in a way that it hasn’t been in decades.  It’s even drawing people out of their homes and into live performance venues.

No art can really be successful if it alienates it’s audience.  Art is communication, and while I don’t believe that all art has to reach the masses, it does have to engage in a dialogue with them sometimes in order to stay relevant.  Those jerks that I’m referring to who brag about not owning a tv are usually the same people who churn out stale ideas and cliquey in-jokes instead of vibrant, relevant works of art. Because they’ve shut themselves off; they’re out of touch.  The shared dialogue has moved forward (in N. America, at least) mostly through tv.  A lot of really breathtaking writing and acting is happening on tv right now, and some really exciting dance.

This is the golden age of television (and comedy, I’d argue), and I don’t think it will last as technologies and economies change.  But while we’re here we should stop and appreciate that huge numbers of regular people across the continent  are excitedly cheering African dance, tango, ballet – something that ten years ago would have been so unlikely to not even cross your mind.

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I hate your art because you asked me to hate it.

June 25, 2009 in Blog, art and ideas | No comments

I was talking about Dave Eggers with some friends the other day.

“I hate people who hate Dave Eggers,” said the woman.
“I hate Dave Eggers!” I said.
“Well, I don’t hate you. But it’s so trendy to hate Dave Eggers now.”
“Hmm, if it’s trendy to hate Dave Eggers I may have to start liking him. But I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I was just like, ‘Fuck you, Dave.’ I really hated him.”
“He writes himself as pretty unlikeable,” said the guy.
“And I oblige him by hating him. I follow his lead. If Dave Eggers asks me to hate him, I’m happy to do so.”

They laughed, and we talked about other things. But I’ve been thinking about  art, and how willing I am to take the artist at their action. If you make some arty film where you focus on just say, the actor’s hands for forty seconds, or close-ups of their mouth, if you use colour schemes that make people uncomfortable, I will oblige you by being annoyed and fidgety and eventually angry.   If I figure that you’ve done this to make some point (or to use the emotions you’re generating) then I’ll accept it, but if not?  I will not shout your brilliance to the hills because I’m intimidated and afraid of looking gauche; I will talk about how your project sucks in some detail and at length, because you will have led me to be aggravated by foisting garbage on me that you know will aggravate. The conventions of a polite society demand, in fact, that I pretty much hate Dave Eggers (well, that one book, anyway) and a lot of other artists’ work, just to oblige them for trying so damned hard to elicit that reaction from me.

Sometimes it’s just incompetence, which I’ll dislike, but a lot of the time artists do it on purpose to be “edgy,” which is Artworld Patois for “I don’t have any ideas but I really want to get laid.”

On the other end of the spectrum, I have the same reaction with formulaic artmaking. “Oh look,” my brain will say “there’s that same standard editing sequence for the fortieth time in this film. Zzzzzz.” And after hearing all 6 chords that the lead guitarist can play in many standard variations, my brain grows weary.   Repeated patterns are great for wallpaper, not so great for art.  I understand that new artists need practice, and that some of that practice has to take place in a public forum where there are people watching.  But I’ve done my time listening to bands who don’t remember to tune and watching films no one bothered to light.   I leave it in the capable hands of the uncritical or the easily amused.  Or the artists’ girlfriends.

In some ways I’m the ideal audience, for artists that want to move forward; I’ve an unbridled contempt for bafflingly arty crap, and a certainty that if I didn’t get it, there probably wasn’t anything to get. I mean, of course I’ve walked away from movies feeling like I’ve been hit by a bomb, dazed and spinning, but taking your time to come to grips with some ideas is a completely different thing than finding it un-relatable or obtuse.   I like to be challenged and stretched and surprised, and some filmmakers can take those conventionally aggravating things and make them speak a language that their audience can find meaning in.  Some can take those familiar 4 chords and turn out some breathtaking piece of music.  That’s experience, that’s knowing your medium and your tools.   But if you’re toying with me, or throwing things together just for the sake of reaction and provocation instead of something with a little more weight and depth (not to mention skill), I’ll file you under ‘jerkface’ with the rest of the artists who ask me to hate their work.

But if I hate something and you ask, especially if you ask over a drink, I’ll tell you in detail why the thing I just watched or heard didn’t work, and what the artist did that screwed it. And I’m willing to admit that sometimes I just don’t like a thing, and there was nothing really wrong with it except that it didn’t appeal to me.

Merlin Mann exhorts us to go ahead and make things, rather than worrying about waiting until conditions are perfect; I agree with him, but I go a step further and say that you should go ahead and make things when you’re not ready, when you’re imperfect, when you’re going to make a lot of mistakes and fail.  But while you’re failing, ask the people who react most strongly why it’s failing – I promise a more useful answer than all the supportive best friends in the whole world.  Because the most useful action you can take as an artist – and the one I am most likely to judge you for – is the action of soliciting (or avoiding) honest feedback.  I know it’s the hardest thing, and I’m rubbish at it myself, but I’m trying.

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10 Things I Want Musicians to Know

April 21, 2009 in Advice for Musicians, Blog, Music | 19 comments

This is part of a sort-of series of rants and guides for musicians that I file under ‘helpful.’  You can check out the rest (updated as I add more) on my Resources for Musicians page.

Read on for things you can do to avoid being that jerk I use as an example and never book again (or in the first place).

1. Many talent buyers are also artists.

Very few children grow up thinking “When I’m older, I want to be a Talent Buyer!”  In fact, the talent buyers I know are also musicians, graphic designers, musicians, photographers, musicians, painters, musicians, and  hackers.  Don’t come at them with the attitude that they don’t understand what you do or that you, as the ‘talent,’ are somehow superior to them.  It’s better if you behave as though you’re dealing with a peer, no matter what your general assumptions about talent buyers are.

2.  One phone call, one email.

If you find yourself calling again without a reply to your previous call to pitch yourself, it’s because I get a lot of these calls/email and I don’t have time to repond.  It’s not because I missed your message or email.  I get tonnes of messages every week, and people who email/phone repeatedly to hassle me for gigs compound the problem.  When I want to book you, I’ll get in touch.

3.  Rejection doesn’t mean that you suck.

I can’t say this enough: 850 submissions this year, 25 slots.  My short list was 150.  The final decision can be a painful process of whittling away very good acts I really want based on who I’ve already got, and when it gets down to the final choices, it’s a matter of very excellent band vs. very excellent band.  Not getting booked may come down to a million factors that have nothing to do with your talent.

4.  I pay what I can pay, and my budget is largely out of my control.

Whether I’ve been booking for a bar or the festival, the money I’ve got is all I’ve got.  I’m not trying to cheat bands out of money, and I don’t have a secret reserve hidden away somewhere.  Last year after booking the festival, I came in $50 under budget, which went to something else we needed to spend money on.  I also run a free festival, and don’t have to worry about ticket sales, so I’m not blowing half the budget on one headliner; everyone gets paid within a reasonable range of each other.

5.  It’s a business, and if you don’t like business, you don’t have to be in it.

I hear people complain all the time that they don’t like writing bios, selling themselves, etc. – the whole ‘I just wanna be an artist, man!’ schtick.  And that’s cool.  If you want to play music in your mom’s basement for your cat and your significant other, go ahead.  People who want to get paid for gigs have to work at the business side, and spend as much or more time on that than on rehearsing and playing and writing and recording.

6.  I didn’t just fall off of a potato truck.

In fact, I’ve been doing this longer than many of you have been in bands.  So any line you feed me I’ve heard about a million times, and any tactic you take I’ve seen played as many.    Be calm, be polite, and be professional.  And for chrissakes, don’t be ‘cool.’  The respect of a peer plays better  than what comes across as the disdain of an idiot.

7.  I book acts, not buddies or boyfriends.

I’m not Paris Hilton; this is not a competition to be my BFF.  Becoming my new best friend at a conference or a bar (or god knows, on Facebook) doesn’t mean I’m going to hire your band.  And it doesn’t matter how cute you are.
If you’re a friend and I don’t book you, it’s not necessarily because you suck.   See point #3.  Most of my friends are musicians, and I can’t very well book all of you, because then I’d be one of those nepotistic jerks.

8. No one is entitled to a gig.

Played in this community for twenty years?  Been booked by every promoter in town except me?  The most brilliant genius of our time? Spent a year caring for lepers?  Help old ladies across the street?  Good for you.  I don’t care.  If you aren’t what I’m looking for musically, I’m not going to book you.  I have a responsibility to my audiences, my staff, my venues and my funders to book appropriately, and I’ve got my professional reputation to consider as well.  If every other promoter jumps off a bridge, I’m not going to follow. Also, see point #3.

9.  Always be nice/polite/respectful to staff and volunteers.

When you walk into a venue for the first time, you have no idea what the dynamic is or who people are.  Be respectful; the woman in the pushup bra working merch might also be the promoter, and the frazzled guy with the ripped jeans might be the AD. And if you’re a jerk to any of my volunteers or staff (seriously, that kind of behaviour enrages me), you’re not coming back, and everyone I know is going to hear about it.  I know you don’t think being nice is very rock’n'roll, but word gets ’round.

10.  If you want to know why I didn’t book you, guess or make something up.  Don’t phone/email.

I don’t have time to tell every one of the 825 bands I rejected this year why they didn’t make the cut.  I get a lot of passive-aggressive and sulky messages from artists or their agents every year when I hit ‘Not Accepted;’ don’t make yourself memorable because you were a sore loser.  It’s not going to recommend you for next year.

Ah, and here’s a bonus:

11.  If you know me, and you’re thinking of sending a jokey email or something about how you do some of these things, stop yourself.

There’s y’know, no point.  If I like you, it’s going to make me uncomfortable, and if I dislike you, it’s not going to help.

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How Meeting Jordan Knight Changed My Life

April 8, 2009 in Blog, Music | 1 comment

On January 9, 2006, not long after I had put together my first rough design of Confessions of a Pop Culture Addict, I posted this sentence in my journal: Jordan Knight, of the New Kids on the Block, is playing The Red Dog in Peterborough on January 31. Tickets are $20. No, this isn’t a joke. I am so totally there.

When I was 13 or so, miserable, the least-cool kid in the village where I grew up, I was a super-huge fan of Jordan Knight and the New Kids on the Block.  I had the requisite t-shirt, the wall covered with photos carefully ripped from the pages of Tiger Beat, and the Barbie Doll.  I knew every word to every song.  I had the Hangin’ Tough: Live in LA video, and we used to spend hours in the living room watching it and mimicking the dance moves.   My sisters and I can probably still pull some of it off.  In high school it became completely lame to like the New Kids, and I had pretty much worn out my ears on them, so while I still in theory liked them, I moved on with everyone else I knew to Pearl Jam and Cat Stevens (I went to an arts high school, so Cat Stevens was mandatory).

But going back to 13-year-old me, I want to highlight something.  I wanted to meet Jordan Knight so badly.  I had never wanted anything so badly, and possibly have never spent as many years wanting anything so much in my life.  Even though I knew if I met him I’d probably be paralyzed with nerves and have absolutely nothing to say, I still wanted it with a desire that was beyond my power to understand or control.  It wasn’t a sexual thing, though I did have a big crush on him.  It was just a longing that informed much of who I was for a couple of years, a focused intensity.

Jordan Knight at the Trash (photo Sam Tweedle)

Jordan Knight at the Trash (photo Sam Tweedle)

So there I am, 15 years later, working as an arts administrator in Peterborough, an established artist and music professional in my own right, and the promoter tells me that Jordan Knight’s coming to town.  And for all of my practiced calm, my cool collectedness, there was a flutter in my heart that I tried hard to tamp down.  I told myself that I was excited ironically, like the cool kids, and that $20 was a small price to pay for that most delicious of mockable delights: the has-been.

I also asked the promoter if he was in his right mind;  I mean, Christ, the Red Dog?  Don’t get me wrong; I’ve spent loads of evenings at the Red Dog, and before my time it was a seminal Peterborough venue, but right now it looks more like a country bar than anything else, and some of the sound equipment had a distinct ‘too many beers have been dropped on this gear’ sound.  I couldn’t imagine this former pop prince hopping and strutting around on the Red Dog stage.  In the weeks prior to the show, there was some malarkey and both the venue and the promoter changed: we were heading to the Trash.

On the evening of the show, Sam and I headed over to the bar.  Sam had gotten a hold of Jordan’s people, and though he was still in the early-days nervousness of being a professional writer and interviewer, he’d secured their permission for a short interview after the show.  We were both giddy.  The room started to fill; there were ten guys and about 200 girls, lots of NKOTB t-shirts, lots of of pretending we were here because we thought it was funny and not because OMG JORDAN KNIGHT!!11!!

The opener was some light hip-hop act, good-looking but completely forgettable, and then Jordan Knight came onstage, and the whole place went slightly bananas.  Everyone there knew every lyric (often better than Jordan did); everyone was transported back to that time, when we were all kids and all in love with NKOTB.  Jordan… well, he was alright.  He was off-key a fair amount, and was singing mostly to backup tracks with a DJ occasionally pumping up the crowd a little bit.  He had relatively little charisma, seemed lost without a script, and his dancing was probably not as good as our living-room mimicry.  Somehow it didn’t matter.  None of us really thought that Jordan Knight was a particularly singular talent; it was a time in our lives that he symbolized more than anything.

When the show was over, Sam talked to his people, and we bypassed the line of fans waiting for their $50 autograph and 60 seconds of face-time, walked into the Blue Room and found ourselves sitting on bar stools with Jordan Knight.

Sam did his interview (read Part I, Part II); I made a couple of comments about my school-girl fandom (“Don’t call it a Barbie Doll.” he said with a laugh), and we took some photos, and then it was over and we walked out into the crisp night air on a giddy high.

Dudes! I am totally standing next to Jordan Knight!

Dudes! I am totally standing next to Jordan Knight!

What was said and who he is or isn’t wasn’t important to me then, nor is it now: I didn’t get an autograph, and wouldn’t even have a picture if it wasn’t for Sam.  But over the coming weeks it began to occur to me that when I was 13, seeing the New Kids in concert was as likely as going to the moon, nevermind meeting Jordan Knight or him playing Peterborough or getting to sit down and talk to him.  And I realized that if that could happen, so could anything, and that in fact everything I’d ever wanted could be on a slow journey towards me, taking its time because the greater the distance between myself and the things wished for, the more time it’d take to get them to me.  If it took 15 years for fate to bring Jordan Knight to a bar 15 minutes from my house, then the job or the partner or the project I’d been longing for could be right around the corner, or at the very least on its way.

Yeah, it’s a small thing, and maybe a silly one, but the great revelations of our lives don’t always come in a solitary canoe on a still lake, or in the expectant hush of a great cathedral.  Sometimes they come because a fallen pop idol and a grown-up former fan cross paths in a slightly seedy student bar.  And my mind keeps returning to this moment, especially in times when I need hope that all the hard (and sometimes thankless) work will pay off and the goals I’m striving for are worthwhile and reachable, and I think about the distance between an American pop star at the height of his career and a 13-year-old in an Ontario village, and I believe that really, anything’s possible.

The key, I suppose, is to recognize your goals when you reach them and to still want them when you get there.  And I think I’ve got that part down.

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