February 24, 2008
It is lumpy and expensive and made with love and it can save you.
I will always play music — but in the past, it was a record company’s job to make sure you heard that music. . . . How to sell music without them? I liken our situation to that of the family farmer’s — how can we keep from going under without going corporate?
¶ This is what I think: we specialize — we offer an organic product. It is lumpy and expensive and made with love and it can save you. It’s the right thing to do. It isn’t shiny or poisonous, which can be disconcerting to people who’ve been raised on shiny poison, but it’s natural, it’s high-end and we want you to eat it.
¶ To that end, I think I need to engage in a grassroots kind of capitalism, choosing principles over profits, values over image, ideals over marketing. I have to create a permeable membrane between artist and listener — I’m a craftsperson, after all. The church of the rock star that the music industry televangelists hawk has always been anathema to me anyway. This is about songs and sounds, nothing else.
—Kristin Hersh, Thoughts On Sustainability
I was going to write a short post about how you should go check out Kristin Hersh’s CASH Music songs, as well as her photo blog, but then I got sucked into her blog blog. For hours.
So, here’s my new pitch: Kristin Hersh is such a good writer that she can make even a tour diary beautiful. Imagine what she could accomplish if she could afford to spend more time writing songs!
You can subscribe to support her work. I did.
Some snippets from Kristin’s blog . . .
Nashville. Trina Shoemaker’s house. She lives in a barn with her little boy on 11 acres of mountain and meadow. I haven’t seen Trina in 2 years; I don’t think I realized how much I missed her until now.
She hasn’t changed, really. She still Windexes the dog and lives on coffee. But she’s softer now. She seems more comfortable. Her little boy is the happiest kid I’ve ever met. He has black eyes. Really, black ones.
The last time I saw him was in New Orleans, before the storm, and he was a little cube. A square infant. I pointed this out to her and she wrote a delightful song about “the little square man” that she sings to him to this day.
Ran out of gas on the way to Omaha. Felt stupid.
The gas gauge couldn’t work in this extreme cold, so we didn’t realize we were running out of gas until it was too late. Billy and Ryder ran across snowy fields and hopped barbed wire fences to get to the public works garage while a tow truck driver drove the two little boys and me. He called neighbors on the way, asking them not to “shoot” Billy and Ryder.
“Shoot?” I ask him when he hangs up.
He smiles, “No, I said don’t shoot.”
I thank him for this.
After an afternoon KEXP session, we drive around the city showing the kids places we used to go when we lived there. Ryder and Wyatt remember most of them, but Bo feels defensive about not having been born. “Before you guys were born?” he says, “I used to go scuba diving and also? My friends you don’t know would let me ride in their blimp. Yeah…it was great before you guys were born.”
I have contracted a gorgeous flu, the likes of which I have never before experienced. It seems to have attacked my lungs, trachea and bones. I try to keep this from the band so as to avoid becoming the tour pariah, but they catch me lying on the floor staring at an electrical outlet, something I don’t usually do. “Are you okay?” someone asks me.
“I don’t know,” I answer.
“What do you think you have?”
“Death.”
This is when things begin to go downhill.
In Berlin, we meet the lovely Didi, a kind of punk rock club chef who takes Bodhi under his wing and teaches him to cook for 12 people at a time. Bodhi wears an apron, stirs soup, sets the table — pretty much does nothing but cook and talk to Didi all day. He cries when we leave the club because he already misses Didi, so Billy runs back to take a picture of Didi with his cell phone.
Then Bodhi cries because he is “forgetting the sound of Didi’s voice”. This makes everyone in the Bus Family very sad. What a thing to identify. We all think of lost loved ones and take a minute to try and remember the sound of their voices.
Our friends in Reykjavik put us up in style. These are the first real beds any of us have seen in over a month. We take showers (with hot water!) and see our faces in mirrors again. Some of us have tiny fridges. Windows! Toilets! We are all high on this stuff.
There is a wooden bowl on the table in the little 3 bedroom apartment where my family lives for 3 days. We rush out to the store, buy a bag of apples (this costs about $15 in Iceland) and put them in the bowl. The four of us step back and look. “Beautiful,” we agree. “Like we live somewhere,” says Wyatt, heartbreakingly.
I do an interview on my cell phone for the Tucson show while the kids watch cops get driving lessons in Starsky and Hutch tactics. This is so wonderful to watch. The cop cars race through a huge, empty parking lot, screech their tires, skid across the wet pavement and spin around and around, then do it again. My children cheer. So do I. I keep interrupting the journalist to yell, “Yes!” and “Holy shit!”.
The best is when the cop loses his or her nerve, though, and just stops and sits while the driving instructor watches from afar. Sad cops.
In the morning . . . I look out the bus window and see that the swimming pool is full of mud, the parking lot is full of garbage and our bus is surrounded by the rotting carcasses of former vehicles. Pieces of dead cars, trucks and buses are stacked all around us; the effect is creepy. “What’s the matter?” Billy calls from the back bedroom, seeing me peering out the window suspiciously.
“This place looks stab-stab.” A stab-stab motel is one you’ll probably die in. We’ve stayed in lots of them, but we like to think we’ve outgrown them.
“Is there a body floating in the pool?” he asks.
“No.”
“Then it’s just shitty.”
“There could be a body in the pool; I just don’t think anything would float in there.”
comments
Leave a Reply
great post, India.
Thanks, Deron.
Whenever I get really excited about something and write a long post, nobody comments or, presumably, reads it. I need to stop doing that. Just one quote and a link seems to be what The People want. But I couldn’t narrow it down to just one quote; love is like that.
It has also occurred to me that others here may not have any clue who Kristin Hersh is. Hello? Throwing Muses? Anyone? I’ve been enjoying her music for twenty years, but I didn’t know anything about her until yesterday. Now I want to listen to the whole catalogue again.
I was talking to Amy about this last night. I don’t necessarily think a comment signifies a read. Others should jump in here if they want. And it gets us to a peculiar issue as with people who post beautiful work continually. Barry, Elizabeth, Mike Topp, come to mind. What is the proper etiquette with a beautiful post? Especially a beautiful series of posts. Is one compelled / obligated to say how beautiful it is each time? Does that become cumbersome / tiresome to the poster? I know from personal experience here there are posts that are interesting, beautiful, useful that inspire comment and posts that are interesting, beautiful, useful that inspire simple appreciation.
Sorry to hijack your comment thread, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while: the etiquette of comments.
No, I know comments don’t equal reads, as I read most of what gets posted here, though I comment on just a very small portion of even the posts I cherish. But it still makes me sad when nobody comments. I don’t think it’s an institutional issue; I’m just needy that way.
As far as commenting on consistently beautiful work, of which we have a number of practitioners here, my policy is to be sparing, so that when something really really blows me away, I have some praise left.
There’s a tendency nowadays—and I don’t mean this in the context of CF, but in the world at large—to give every performance a standing ovation. But then what do you do when you see a show that really rearranges your brain? Yell “Wooo!” and wave your lighter? It’s difficult to keep your responses calibrated in a useful way, especially since nobody wants to be the person sitting down when everybody else in the theater is standing up.
And I know that it depresses me when people praise something I’ve done that isn’t something I found exceptionally praiseworthy. It reduces the value of all their past and future praise—”Oh, they just have low standards.”
All that said, I am aware that I tend to run on when I’m interested in something, ignoring the usually obvious cues that my listeners are less interested. It’s a really graceless habit, and it definitely extends to blogging, which is why I brought it up here. Honestly, I tried to cut this post down; it was probably twice as long when I started. But after spending an hour or two on Kristin’s blog I wanted to see all her shows, pay her rent, bake her a cake, be her best friend. YMMV.
All good points. I’m glad we are talking about this. Another thing I was talking to Amy about what the issue of self-censorship / self-consciousness when posting on clusterflock. She tells me a few times I week, “I was wondering if I should post this”, etc.
In my mind, that’s part of exactly what clusterflock is about, the posting the thing you wonder if you should post. I know I want a post that will take me in a different direction. I know I want the site to be a jumble. I know I want to see the things that light a fire under someone’s ass, even if they don’t set a fire under my own.
To me, there should be very little self-censorship when posting here. If it interests you, post it. Of course, it may not light someone else’s curiosity, but it doesn’t matter (as far as I’m concerned). Like I said, I want cf to be a jumble.
Well, but you want CF to be a jumble that people other than the participants visit, no? I try to post only things that will redound to the site’s credit (whether I’m successful is up for debate). But I don’t consider that censorship; it’s editing. You do not want to read my brain dumps or see all the sites I wander to in the course of my day. Trust me.
I am interested in anything that lights a fire under anyone’s ass.
Should that go on the “about” page?
pro’lly.
Just so you know, I read your comments here. Kind of think it’s front page, but I’m at work and should pro’lly be invoicing something or otherwise trying to bring money in the door. Love you both.
It would just be too juvenile to have “snaps” or “props” we could click when we’ve read something we like without commenting. Wouldn’t it?
I tend to comment a lot, as y’all know–I’m sure many think I comment too much–but I try to comment only on things that I think my comment will not only compliment but complement in some way. That means that some of the posts I find most remarkable–such as Michael’s satires or Mike Topp’s tiny fictions–are too perfect on their own to be sullied by anything I might say.
Once I was at a reading that Daryl was giving at a university, and people clapped effusively after each story (too effusively, in some cases–the “standing ovation syndrome” India alludes to). But when he read a particularly moving story–”Wingtips”–the audience just sat there, stunned. That was a great compliment.
Cindy, perfectly said. And for the record, when you are unable to comment because you are predisposed, it makes me feel lonely.
Seriously.
Thank you, Deron–I’m deeply flattered!
I call ‘em like I see ‘em.
[...] Music — Totally off-topic, but as I mentioned over at Clusterflock, I am really in love with the writing of Kristin Hersh (of the bands Throwing Muses and 50FootWave, [...]