No Hidden Membership Fees

I note this week its hard to tell the ads from the news on the radio. Sitting at the kitchen table at 5:00 a.m. listening for whether its going to rain, the next thing you know, an announcer is going on about the FX-21 Jet Fighter equipped with a GHS-19-XX Immersion Prolific Missile Armory System. Am I a potential customer for this? Do they sell them on the train platform like umbrellas?

For reasons unaccounted for, I'm drawn to read the less voluntarily full page spreads of oil companies in the national news weeklys touting their conservation records. I suppose it's a matter of wanting to believe, like granting the benefit of the doubt to a friend. Sometimes things fall apart no matter how hard your friend tries. When two Ecuadorians won the Goldman Environmental Prize recently, Oscars for conservationists, for demanding Chevron, the "People Do" company compensate peasants for polluting villages with billions of gallons of toxic waste, the corporation rented a room in the same hotel at the same time as the ceremony to denounce their erstwhile allies.

This is nothing new. In a 1946 letter to Arthur Sulzberger, chief of the NY Times, AJ Leibling complains an anti-union piece, falsely alleging an impending national strike, is underwritten by a representative of the National Association of Manufacturers. The reply received, "the problem you raise is indeed a difficult one and we're keeping at it," doesn't inspire confidence anything will be rectified soon.

In fact, more than sixty years later, after demonstrating to Google that an outfit was deliberately misleading those in search of something else, their reply, "We recognize your concern, but there is nothing Google can do to remove the offending content without the cooperation of the site's webmaster," has the same scant effect.

Back on the radio, driving to town the other day to return books-on-tape, I'm listening off and on to an interview with singer, Marie Digby, who says, "it's important to be young in the music business today; I'm not willing to spend five years on the road playing to live audiences; I want success quicker than that." I subsequently learn Ms. Digby gained fame posting an acoustic cover version of Rihanna's hit "Umbrella" on YouTube.

In contrast, Eric Clapton says in a 1985 interview in Rolling Stone, "Every Friday night, there would be a meeting at someone's house and people would turn up with the lastest imported records from the States. And shortly, someone showed up with that Chess album, The Best of Muddy Waters, and somthing by Howling Wolf. Then I sort of took a step back, discovered Robert Johnson, and made the connection to Muddy. For me, it was serious what I heard. And I began to realize that I could only listen to this music with people who were equally serious about it."

Clapton identifies the danger of a more in-depth approach: "I think what happens to an artist is, when he feels the mood swings that all suffer from if we're creative, instead of facing the reality that this is an opportunity to create, he will turn to something that will stop that mood. He won't want to face that creative urge, because he knows the self-exploration that must be undertaken, the pain that must be faced."

The Digby/Clapton difference is one I've pondered previously in these pages when considering homeschooling. There are those who disdain the practice by uniformly touting the benefits of socialization. Many of us look back upon School days as hell. Might we be far less scarred today for not undergoing such socialization?

Does Digby's unwillingness to earn her chops by embracing the Behind the Scenes Clapton-like rock ritual of personal near self-destruction eradicate her credibility as an artist? Or is she smarter and healthier than those who gone before? Friend Lisa says if YouTube was available to Hendrix/Joplin/Morrison, they'd have gone down that road too.

In an essay on Thomas Mann, Cyril Connolly writes of "influences that derive from the Flaubertian conception of art and the artist. Writing is a high calling exercising great labor and patience and a certain self-sacrifice from those who profess it. One can't expect to make much money, and one must be content to remain an observer of life and of one's own life, often deprived of the experiences which render more rounded and full those of other human beings. The artist is a being naturally isolated who cannot or should not seek admission to the organized body of society, he is an aristocratic ivory-towering hermit vowed from the his birth to sensibility, austerity, loneliness, and fame."

An isolated cyber-world, yet simultaneously accessible by the world, allows an artist the distance Connolly advocates while overturning his expectation of poverty. Somehow, isn't it Clapton, rather than Digby, though, who's more likely to channel experiences, harmful and otherwise, through art, authenticating the creation with a depth and credibility not possible from membership fees unpaid?