• Andrew Moon Bain
• Andrew Graham
• Devin Powers
• Emet Sosna

The Junta starts the party early. Before the masses show up for the gallery affair, we have the opportunity to discuss the works on display with the artists who created them. The open bar starts at 7pm with the discussion, and the full party and gallery opening begins at eight. Drinks are on the house, but if you are so compelled, donations to support the arts (and the booze) are welcome. No obligation.

Venue: Culturefix, 9 Clinton St, LES, Manhattan
Date: Friday the 13th of January, 2012
Time: 7pm sharp

Read on: John Cage: Searching for Silence

The Junta will convene Thursday, September 9th, at 7:30pm

Film screening followed by discussion. 80 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn (near Wythe Ave), in the media room. Please bring your own ___. All are welcome.

Cities must change, but how exactly does that happen? What steps are necessary to ensure the change is constructive and positive? And how can we even achieve consensus on what constitutes constructive and positive change?

Everybody complains about how expensive the city is. Our film offering Thursday night will look at real estate development in Manhattan, and ask if maybe there hasn’t been a concerted effort to build the city up as “The City” – that wonderful place of imagination, where dreams and fortunes can be claimed. Isn’t Manhattan just turning into a playground for the wealthy? Or is Patti Smith wrong?

I highly recommend that you watch the trailer of “The Vanishing City” to get a sense of it. In an interesting coincidence, Tim Noah’s Slate series just began looking at the widening inequality gap in this country, pointing out that the US now has a greater disparity between its rich and poor than do Venezuela and Nicaragua. And I’m surely the only Lapham’s Quarterly subscriber here, but their Fall issue is called “The City“…

It all adds up to a fascinating conversation. See you Thursday.

For more on Thursday’s topic, see the most recent posts in this thread.

“The Vanishing City” is an upcoming documentary about New York’s real estate market leading up to the Great Recession of Our Time, which “exposes the real politic behind the alarming disappearance of New York’s beloved neighborhoods, the truth about its finance-dominated economy, and the myth of ‘inevitable change.’” It argues that the change over the last 30 years has not been natural but has been driven by policies favoring commercial and luxury development at the expense of affordable housing. In the process of driving out the middle and working classes, New York has lost some of the dynamism and grit that defined its identity.

“Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York” is a blog with much the same theme (it’s not clear if the blogger is involved in the film, although the film links to the blog). The writer worries that things ain’t what they used to be, that the city loses its character as the rents go higher, that art and love are trampled by the pursuit of money and things. This was where we read about Patti Smith’s comments about New York, that young artists should try Detroit instead… or Poughkeepsie.

I wonder if the city is vanishing, or if we are just allowing other people to determine what changes will happen. How can we empower ourselves to control the future of our city?

How will musicians and writers, and other artists and tradesmen whose work is now primarily digital, make a living now that their product can be so easily and freely acquired?

Jeremy poses that the barriers to entry have been removed. Any musician with GaragePro can become world-famous: “The limits are only on ability, marketing savvy and drive.” He argues that the business model of the big labels is defunct, and I’ll grant that Big Music has lost its former sway, but can the model really be outdated if there are still commercial pop superstars making big money with the help of mega-amplified media attention?

But ok, bands don’t make much money from their albums anyway, it’s the record companies who take that home. The artist makes money on the tour, right?. That was true for a band like the Grateful Dead, who made all their money from touring and whose records sold poorly – but new, anonymous artists cannot conjure up legions of fans to follow them cross-country. According to EJ, who should know these things, the labels put the young artists out on tour and take most of the returns for themselves, leaving the artists with the merchandise take. “If you’re out on tour and you’re not selling merch, you’re not making money.”

It seems there’s no money to be made for anyone anymore selling CDs. Around the table, no man could remember the last time he’d bought one. Digital music purchases were also rare. All admitted to downloading free music, often illegally, though some said they had dialled back from the days when they could fill an entire hard drive in an afternoon. “I’ve got way more music than I could ever conceivably listen to.”

One participant brought up software downloads as a comparison. “I had a project for which I needed to have Adobe Dreamweaver. Well I looked it up and it’s four hundred bucks! But within minutes through a simple Google search, I was able to find the torrent, follow the crack instructions to load the software onto my machine and use it. Now, would I walk into a computer store and see this program for $400 on the shelf, put it under my coat and try to walk out? No fucking way! But I’m happy to do essentially the same thing over the internet, because it just doesn’t feel like stealing.” This sentiment was echoed around the table.

Despite the lack of legal, paid downloads happening, we were not hostile to the idea. But for most, it was the price. “Ten dollars for an album is still too much.” I asked what a good price would be, since I felt that $10 for an album is not so excessive. Five-dollar albums? Jeremy said yes, he’d buy albums at that price. But Don was obstinate, and said albums should be a dollar, because then he would just buy them on a whim. What didn’t occur to me at the time was that there could be a service that adjusted the price per album according to how much money each subscriber vowed to spend on a monthly or yearly basis. So I could sign up and guarantee that I’d spend $500 this year on music: at that level I could get albums for $2. Kind of like the BMG mail order service of my high school days, when I started my first collection (CDs) by becoming a member. (Join Now and Get 6 CDs FREE!)

Another noted the proliferation of auctioning sites like eBay and asked why there was not a platform for auctioning mp3 songs and albums, or tickets to movies. “Why is every movie the same price? Some movies are clearly worth more than others.”

What about cash donations? I related a recent story in which I had “otherwise acquired” an artist’s album and was so moved by it, and listened to it so often, that I decided it was absolutely criminal that I hadn’t paid this guy – I went online and bought the album I already owned, just on principle (and as a result, probably transferring about $0.89 to the artist in question). And it’s true that people support art they love with their dollars even when they don’t have to. But the argument that won the evening was, “altruism is not a business model.”

If not charity, what about “Artistic Freedom Vouchers” from the government? Each of us gets $100 from Uncle Sam to spend on art and art alone… I leave it to you, gentle reader, to pursue that thread or not.

***

As for the news, we discussed James Fallows’s recent piece on Google “saving the news”, and it seems that the best news for the journalism industry is that everyone inside Google assumes that “users” (“readers”) will once again pay for their newspapers and magazines – and pay willingly – it’s just a matter of how. The argument is sound, because it also depends on the news changing somewhat. No longer will newspapers and media be able to provide the same stories as everyone else. They will have to provide something unique.

“Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” [Krishna Bharat, the engineer who designed Google News] told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.” He didn’t mean that the publications were linking to one another or syndicating their stories. Rather, their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things. This could be reassuring, in indicating some consensus on what the “important” stories were. But Bharat said it also indicated a faddishness of coverage—when Michael Jackson dies, other things cease to matter—and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. “It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” he asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” He said this was not a purely theoretical question. “I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

I think that maxim could be applied equally to producers of art and media everywhere.

CaptainCrawl is THE music blog index, type in an artist name and check out what comes up, you should be able to find links to blogs with full albums to download.

Radiobutt was the best music blog around, dude put up all the newest indie albums, had a really good site. It was hit hard by the music industry cops, relaunched and then mysteriously went down again. If you click on the link for it you’ll can read the guy’s farewell, he doesn’t say anything about the industry, but I’d bet the constant threat of legal action finally put him off. This interview between radiobutt and captaincrawl is essential reading for Wednesday night, CC says so many things that mirror what I think.  radiobuttmusic-vs-captaincrawl

I also wanted to link to Patch, which is one of our people’s current gig, a local community news sources that I think is an example of one of the ways people are trying to make a buck off news in a creative way these days.

(From Rindy):

For ideas about the future of journalism, it’s worth reading some of the work of NYU media critic Jay Rosen. He writes often about the ills of the national press today, who believe in what he calls “the Church of the Savvy“:

To the savvy, the center is a holy place: political grace resides there. The profane is the ideological extremes. The adults converse in the pragmatic middle ground where insiders cut their deals. On the wings are the playgrounds for children.  But to argue directly for these propositions is out of the question: political reporters don’t conduct arguments, they tell us what’s happening!  Instead an argument is made by positioning the players a certain way while reporting the news and doing “analysis.”

Another lament of his is He Said, She Said Journalism, in which “balance” is created by reporting what both sides say about a dispute (there are always two sides, never three or four) without bothering to fact check the obvious clashes of truth in the arguments. It’s practices like this that have readers seeking out new outlets for journalism. Where the news has traditionally given us the View From Nowhere (the myth of objectivity), we’re more interested now in reading honest analysis from writers who are upfront about their own opinions and who document their work thoroughly for others to follow.

For a great example, read what Mac McClelland has been reporting on the oil spill, and the heinous way in which BP has been treating journalists.

Patti recalled coming to New York without money, when it was “down and out,” and you could get a cheap apartment and “build a whole community of transvestites,” artists or writers, or whatever.

Today, she said, “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie… New York City has been taken away from you… So my advice is: Find a new city.”

Patti’s words picked up steam when the Huffington Post ran it, but the original source was a blog called “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York“. In both places, the item stirred a number of reader comments:

This is true only if you consider downtown Manhattan to be the horizon line for “the city,” which would be unfortunate. #

To “build a whole community of transvestites or artists or writers” is to start the gentrification process. This can be accomplished in the South Bronx or other places in the “outer boroughs.” #

The need to be close to the art scene in New York to get noticed is negated by the internet. We’re talking actual freedom here, not just slightly cheaper rent. #

If you’re good and you have talent you can make it here, no problem. #

Between the Guliani [sic] effect (although crime stats were already down before his mayoralty), Sex and the City, and the real estate boom, the city has become extremely homogenized and lost most of its soul. The newbies brought too many cars with them, and think it’s weird to talk to strangers. #

As I was following the links last week, I became wrapped up in this blog Vanishing New York. Before I knew it, I’d spent most of the morning reading the archives. The writer focuses on what was just touched on in that last comment: gentrification and what he calls the “yunnie” phenomenon – Young Urban Narcissists. Think Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Have you seen or read it again lately? Though it was set in the 80s, it doesn’t seem dated at all. You can see Bateman-style condos for sale all over the city.

Check out some more Vanishing New York, this is a great blog:

• American Psychos
• Post-Crash Revisionism
• Park Slopers Want Geisha Girl