UPDATES (AND A PUBLISHING IDEA)...

QUICK UPDATES: No on the Falls City job—at least, not right away—so I’m moving back to Garibaldi as soon as the Squirrel House is done (a few more days). Collapse of the mega-insurance company AIG took one of my retirement funds with it—the one I was going to tap for college tuition; yes, the Federal Reserve is bailing them out, but I still don’t (and probably can’t) have my money. Having the new kitchen faucet in the Squirrel House spring a leak was just adding insult to injury.

No word from the Harvest Festival. Since that’s coming up fast, I assume they don’t want me. I’ll send one more e-mail and then drop it. (It would be nice to know why they don’t want me. I’m not used to being rejected as a performer.)

PROJECTS: There are quite a few, actually, because I keep adding more in an attempt to feel creative. A poet I know in southern Oregon (he’s very good, probably the best poet I know) wrote a new piece that just sang when I read it, so I offered to set it to music. I’ve got two songs to re-record, “Rotten Candy” (me) and “Distraction” (Diane Ewing), that I want to pitch to a girl artist looking for uptempo country songs; the songs need to be speeded up a bit (they could use it) and get that “trademark” Southern Pigfish bass. Four songs by other people to do music for; it’s probably good that I’ve gotten able to do these mostly in one take.

And all the publicity over Madonna adopting an African baby because it was “trendy” prompted the question, “But who’s adopting the starving Roumanian vampire babies?” That’s probably fodder for another Norwegian Black/Death Metal song—it’s got vampires in it, after all—once I do another long drive in the car. The price of gas and the shortage of money are going to limit long drives for a while, though.

WHITBY SHORES FORUM: I got given my own “forum” on the Whitby Shores Website, which I suggested we use to talk about publishing, since people had questions about it some weeks back. Right now, we’re just doing a bunch of free-ranging questions and answers, but it’s generating a fair amount of activiity, which I’m sure Len Amsterdam, the Canadian DJ who started Whitby Shores, appreciates. It’s hard starting up a new Website, particularly one that’s trying to be a haven for musicians without all the “social networking” garbage that comes with MySpace. You need activity to hold their attention. For my part, I just want to get all these people talking to each other, and then hopefully working together. These musicians, for the most part, are capable of being a much greater “whole” than they could ever be separately.

Another item to add to the project list—it’s time, I think, for Danny the dog to do another radio interview, and he should interview Len Amsterdam this time. The “Danny innerviews” try to focus on people who are doing cutting-edge stuff in the music field, as independent artists and writers attempt to use 21st-century technology to carve themselves out a niche in an appallingly concentrated (and generally unfriendly) industry. And Len’s been one of the leaders in that effort. I’ve asked around for ideas for questions to ask Len, but got virtually no response; Danny and I will have to think of stuff on “our” own.

PUBLISHING CLASS: And in my spare time (yeah, right), I’ve been working off and on on a “syllabus” for the Publishing 101 class. My first “lecture” was likening what a publisher does to what a real estate agent does (I was one of those once, too)—they’re both marketing a property, and absorbing all the marketing costs themselves, in the expectation of a percentage later, when it sells. Publishers are forced, I think, to be so selective because the “pool” of available properties is so mind-numbingly large, and the market buying them is so small and so concentrated. (It may be enough to simply say that.)

That’s why I suggested the idea of ignoring the big Boys and pitching instead to the regionally famous instead; there are more of them, they’re easier to reach, and they don’t have what Joni Mitchell called “the star-maker machinery” generating material for them. I’m not sure anybody’s writing for those folks, and maybe somebody should.

Of course, I can do this with my stuff—I’m the author, and the publisher, and I can do anything I want. And of course I’ll be paying the upfront costs of marketing my stuff, because it’s my stuff; if I want to know who’s paying for it, I just have to look in the mirror. Marketing other people’s material may be a stretch, because I don’t have the resources to absorb the upfront costs, and I can’t ask the authors to cover those costs because legitimate publishers don’t do that—only the “song sharks” do.

Maybe a publishing co-operative—or something that looks and acts like a co-operative—is the way to go for those folks. There is an historical precedent. Back in the 1870s, a bunch of farmers in the Midwest, convinced they were being screwed by the Big Corporations of the day, organized a bunch of co-operatives to provide services to themselves on a non-profit basis that they didn’t want to pay the people they were convinced were screwing them to do. Insurance, for instance, and grain elevators and scales. A lot of those were done under the “umbrella” of the Grange, the lobbying group they formed to fight for the rights of farmers.

Is it time for history to repeat itself?

Joe