THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

What better way to celebrate 200 posts than by giving you the work of someone else? :-) I've been a fan of the writer Bob Lefsetz ever since I got on his mailing list at the recommendation of Tom T. Ball, and while I don't always agree with everything he says, he hits the mark more often than not.  Today, he posted another variation of one of his big ideas -- navigating the 21st Century entertainment field -- which I wanted to share without any edits.  What follows is Bob's rules on "making it" in the music biz today, but I would argue that it's also about a general creative urge and the market for that creativity.  Makes me wish I had talent.  Here's Bob's ten rules to remember: 1. No one is waiting for your album.  2. Social networking is not about driving momentary sales but creating a relationship. That's your new role. To be available and in touch with your audience each and every day. To be a land mine that someone can step on if they s...

For some reason, I don't have any record of any concerts in the first quarter of 2009.  Granted, it's most likely due to the winter season making travel a bit of a pain in the ass, but it's still surprising.  Looks like I made up for it later in the year, however.  This year had some of the biggest travels in my life; at different times during the year, I was in St. Petersburg & St. Pete's Beach (Florida), Oakland & Los Angeles & Indio (California), New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, and lots of Detroit and Grand Rapids.  Sometimes, I miss all the journeys...and then I remember the solitude and I miss it lots less.  At least there were these shows to pass the time: The Faint / Ladytron [Metro, Chicago 4.4] Coachella Music & Arts Festival [Empire Polo field, Indio 4.17/4.18/4.19] Franz Ferdinand / Born Ruffians [Clutch Cargo’s, Pontiac 5.3] Holy Fuck / Crocodiles [Magic Stick, Detroit 5.29] The Tragically Hip [The F...

Sometimes, I wonder why I bother.  I always tell the Intro Psych kids that the most frustrating thing about psychology is when a raft of valid and reliable research tells us to turn left, and we instead turn right with zeal and enthusiasm.  And based on that research, I have an idea as to why it happens -- our decision-making processes are a brief dance between relatively rational executive thinking and more emotional impulses from various parts of the forebrain, with the emotions winning out when the executive tosses in the metaphorical towel after trying and failing to untangle the knots of perceived choice and chance.  It's what pushes people towards the margins of the mainstream, where Obama is a Kenyan socialist and 9/11 was an inside job and "they" are coming to take our guns and our jobs and our freedom.  The persistence of that marginal existence even in the fact of facts is stunning, yet sadly predictable and inexorable. Every now and again, I attempt to e...

For once, I'd love to see an unscripted Presidential debate -- where the topics and questions are not vetted beforehand -- with a substantial focus on the fundamental problem of human existence in the 21st Century: too many damn people on Earth.  One of the nice things about the Affordable Care Act is that it established free birth control to those who previously had the barrier of cost; multiple studies have shown the positive effect of free birth control, from a dramatic reduction of teen pregnancy to a decrease in the number of abortions.  Sure, condom use would offer some of those benefits, but placing power in the hands of women is a good thing. 7BillionAndCounting.org is also advocating condom usage to combat overpopulation.  Some of their numbers on population are stunning -- the global population has doubled since the year of my birth (3.5B in 1970 to over 7B today) and 85M people are added to the planet per year, with the global projections at 9B by 2050 -- bu...

I had "owned" automobiles before, of course -- the cars of my teens, handed down by family members and driven until they died of terminal illness and/or operator error; the cars of my twenties, the Geo and the Corsica, both much loved and much missed -- but I had never walked onto a car lot with $17K or so in my pocket, ready to buy, until the tail end of 2000, when I bought a 2000 Toyota Camry with 15,468 miles on it.  A fairly new and reliable car for under twenty grand sounded like a deal.  If I only knew how reliable, I wouldn't have believed it. Yesterday, I signed over the Camry to my sister, so that either my niece or my sister could have an extra car for the complicated logistics of teenage driving, with games and school and jobs and friends and dreams of sanctuary and escape.  After nearly twelve years of ownership, driving to New York (once) and Chicago (many times) and Detroit (so many more times) and Grand Rapids (sooooooo many more times), the odomet...