Imagine a world in which you’ve decided to become an accountant. It’s a great job, and further more, you know you were meant to work with numbers.

So you go to school and you get a degree in business with your concentration being accountancy. When you get out of school you take any odd job you have to, but your dream is to someday be an accountant. So you practice accountancy any way you can. You meet with other people who want to be accountants, too and you submit accounts to each other for critique. Or maybe you take classes and workshops in accounting techniques. You know people who break in through doing other people’s taxes. You know people who build up a clientelle of local businesses. And while you admire these people, you want the top, the dream. So you keep working and working and eventually your submissions impress some of the minor national firms and you get a couple of contract jobs from them until one day, you break through, and get work with Deloitte. And they pay you $40,000 a year. But by God, you’re an accountant.

Which just goes to show that being a writer or a painter or a musician or an actor is very weird. Substitute ‘writer’ or ‘painter’ for ‘accountant’ and ‘local galleries’ or ’second tier magazines’ for some of the details, and ‘New York galleries’ or ‘New York publishers’ for ‘Deloitte.’ And there you are. Our idea of a career path.

I have trouble with the word ‘artist’. It makes me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable when someone like Walt Whitman says things like “I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul…’ I used to think that my trouble with the word ‘artist’ was like my trouble with the word ‘doctor.’ Sure, a PhD can call themselves Dr. So-and-so but at cocktail parties, people will forever be asking them to look at this mole they have on their calf that looks kind of weird. When someone is introduced to us as a doctor, we think medical. When someone is introduced to us an artist, I think painter or sculptor, although I consider writing an art and think of myself as an artist in that sense. But that’s not my real unease. I don’t think that Whitman is “…the poet of the woman the same as the man.” I don’t believe that art is mystical, deep or meaningful. I don’t believe that the artist is more alive to the world or transcendent than everyone else. I don’t believe that the artist is special.
Read More »

I’m no musician (well, I play classical piano and Ragtime…but not in front of other people; count your blessings…) but other members of this blog are, and I’m betting some of our readers are, too. So here is a gem I came across — this excellent tribute to James Brown by Roy at alicublog.

JB’s music is full of hairpin turns and dead-stops — you better be on top of things if you’re playing it. But those tight boundaries just make the grooves groovier. The funk has got to be loose, but the turnarounds have got to be snare-head tight. It’s only when those rivets are snug that the pocket can get deep.

No one talks about JB as a songwriter. In a way, that’s unfair. Some of his songs are excellent on their own terms. Check out Eartha Kitt’s strangely compelling cover of “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” to get a taste of how far that supposedly macho lyric can be stretched. Or just look at it plain, especially at the end: “He’s lost, lost in the wilderness … he’s lost, lost in the loneliness…” That ain’t triumph. That ain’t even soul-man baby-please-don’t-go pleading with a promise in its pocket. That’s despair. She ain’t coming back. Ain’t no one coming back. That’s the end, the sad, stinking, canned-heat end of a ladies’ man who’s run out of game. It gives cold-water-flat chills.

But for the most part, JB was less a songwriter than a funkmeister. His joints are designed to wake joy and shake ass. He used modern songwriting techniques — verbal and musical riffs — to make that happen, but once he achieved launch velocity, he didn’t feel the need to elaborate. Stay on the scene, like a sex machine. I feel nice, like-a sugar and spice. I got soul, I’m super bad. Well, damn, what else do you need?

There’s also some revealing stuff about drummers (and a link to some eviiiil drummer jokes), which made me wonder if there’s a side of Brad some of us haven’t seen. Heh.

(Click on the picture above to go play some drumbeats.)