Before tech, making a living in the arts was hardly a utopia

People in the arts and creative media have been bemoaning the impact of new Internet and digital technologies upon their careers and businesses. Many of the criticisms I agree with, and have covered elsewhere on this blog - see Google's news vision misses "boots on the ground" (2010) and Amazon cracking down on newsletter recommendation services? (2017).

But I take issue with statements like this, portraying the pre-1995 arts and media world as an unfettered opportunity to connect with audiences and build successful businesses:

... The cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.

This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?

As someone whose first job in media was working for an independent record label, wrote for a weekly newspaper arts section, worked as a movie theatre projectionist in Harvard Square, wrote music and performed as a musician, and now operate a profitable independent publishing company, I have a few thoughts to share.

In many areas of the arts in the 20th century, "the cultural infrastructure" was dominated by oligopolies: local broadcasters with allotted bandwidth, record distributors who only worked with certain labels, an insular book industry that favored certain types of literature and nonfiction and poetry, and magazines which promoted a "cultural conversation" but overwhelmingly favored artists who happened to live in or near New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo.

Some great art came out of that environment, but there was a lot of garbage that made its way past the gatekeepers because of broken incentives, bias, and outright bribery. 

The artist's "day job" is nothing new

Few artists made a living solely from their art in the 20th century. Almost everyone had a day job - Phillip Glass driving a taxi, Cormac McCarthy doing odd jobs, Gene Wolfe editing Plant Engineering magazine. And those are the ones who eventually hit escape velocity.

The interesting stuff was happening at the margins - the alternative weeklies, the independent presses, the music scenes in second and third tier cities, the artists in remote locales driven to do what they needed to do and hopefully could connect with audiences, albeit small ones. 

I was a participant in these scenes as a creator and a consumer. The photo at the top of this page was taken from the top of my apartment building in Kenmore Square, Boston, in 1990. Kenmore Square is a luxury dead zone now, but 35 years ago it was the center of Boston's underground music community with venues such as The Rat and record stores like Nuggets and Planet Records. 

 Later, I lived in London and Taipei. I can tell you making a living as a musician or indie publisher was extremely hard. Everyone had day jobs (hopefully in an arts-adjacent industry) and expected little or no remuneration for their creative activities. Recording an album or publishing a fanzine or operating a small music venue cost real money, too, and sales could hardly be expected to cover these costs. 

Why bother, if we couldn't make money? We did it for love ... of creation, of camaraderie, of community. Getting read or noticed was the immediate reward, creating something that influenced others was the gift that kept on giving, sometimes years or decades later.

As for the claim that literature has been captured by the University, I don't know what to say. For the most part, university presses (and university employment) are not reliable sources of funding for creative projects.

Moreover, despite the rapacious nature of Amazon, it does provide an opportunity to bypass the oligopolies of old. Every year, out of the millions of new books that are published on Amazon (or spewed out by AI), several thousand great new books by self-published authors rise to the top of Amazon's algorithm. It provides an opportunity for talented new authors to start careers or at least a promising side gig that might turn into something big. They don't need to be in New York, playing the game involving agents and slush piles and paying a PR agent to suck up to the books editor at the Village Voice.

Text and Images copyright ©️ Ian Lamont

The Price of Amish Butter

In rural areas across the country, Amish farmstands are a common sight. On recent visits to northern New York, where one branch of my family comes from, we’ve been able to find seasonal produce such as corn and beans and squash, as well as year-round items like raspberry preserves and eggs.

But not butter.

Last week, I asked our regular farmstand operators, the Zooks, if they had any. The teenaged daughter ran barefoot back to the house to ask her mom, but came back with the news that no, they don’t have butter because they sell all of their dairy to the local cooperative. “Try the Amish family that lives on Wharton Road,” the girl said. “They don’t sell to the association."

A boy at the first Amish farm on Wharton Road was playing with a homemade wooden crossbow in the front yard when I pulled up. A friendly border collie mix with burrs in its matted fur ran up to greet me.

I asked the boy if they had any butter. He went inside to ask. “My sister says no,” he reported. “But go down the road, you’ll pass two English houses, and then there is an Amish house on the left, they may have some.”

His parents weren’t home. They had gone with the ambulance that had just taken their youngest son, not yet three, to the hospital with a chest injury. A piece of furniture had fallen on him in his father’s woodshop. One of the other children had run to the nearest English neighbor to ask them to call 911. The local volunteer fire department quickly responded. 

There is a hard edge on these remote country roads, where the Amish subsist much as our ancestors did 200 years ago. Horses are not for riding or racing. They are beasts of burden, pulling antique plows or the black carriages the Amish use for trips into town. There are no phones or automobiles or refrigerators.

Life revolves around family, faith, and the rhythm of the farm. It starts early. Children help out on the farm beginning when they are 5. They attend their own schools through 8th grade. Full-time agricultural and household labor starts at age 14 or 15. A few summers back, two teenaged Amish boys came to take away some furniture and a cast iron stove that must have weighed at least 200 pounds. The Amish teens came with the biggest dray wagon I have ever seen, and handled the job without a word of complaint. 

Further up the road, I found the other Amish household. The farmstand was closed and no one was about, but I could see laundry hanging outside the clapboard house, rocking in the light breeze. The family dog on the front porch barked furiously. A pale face appeared in the window brightened by the fall sun. I waved and smiled. It was the wife, who opened the door and greeted me. Her name as Amanda. She seemed surprised when I asked for butter, but said she could sell me some.

“One of your neighbor’s daughter’s sent me here,” I explained. “The Zook’s daughter. She says you aren’t in the dairy cooperative, and might have butter to sell.”

“We used to belong,” Amanda said with a resigned sigh. “It seemed good at first, but the prices …”

“Not enough?” It’s well known that milk prices are falling. 

“No, not enough.” She went inside. Her teen daughter appeared and started to take laundry off the line. Nearby, a little boy of about three with a bowl cut and wearing blue overalls and a brimmed hat silently watched me. As the girl finished, she said something in German dialect to the boy. The only word I recognized was komm, “come.” The boy followed his older sister inside.

Amanda returned with a pound of butter, wrapped in plastic. 

“How much?”

“Oh, $2 or $3.”

I gave her $3. Later, when we tasted it, we knew it was the best butter we have had in years. 

 “What will you do now, if you can’t sell dairy to the cooperative?”

“Well, we sell eggs, and on Friday I make donuts to sell,” Amanda said. “My husband does carpentry, and he talks about making seat cushions for boats this winter, but his stitchwork is not that fine.” She grinned.

I thanked Amanda. We will be back in the spring.

Boston-area 1980s videos from the WGBH archives

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a quirky social media account operated by a public broadcaster in Boston, GBH Archives (aka WGBH Archives). It has proved to be a fountain of 1980s nostalgia.

The GBH Archives Twitter and Facebook accounts provided a daily dose of old videos from the vault, many from the 1980s. Street scenes (Facebook). Storms (Twitter). Shoppers (Twitter). High school students (Facebook). Snowstorms. Interviews with locals, from a “Celtics superfan” to our former governor, Michael Dukakis. Bettors at a chariot race (yes, this was a thing):

Much of the shared clips are B Roll - supplementary footage used to provide context or establish the background of a news story.

For instance, “Back seat drive along Memorial Drive and Mass Ave Bridge in April, 1984” shows the view from the back seat of a car driving around Cambridge and Boston while the driver fiddles with the radio.

It’s utterly mundane, and utterly delightful to watch. I’m clearly not the only one, as such clips typically garner hundreds or thousands of likes and shares.

Why do we feel nostalgic when looking at 1980s videos of street scenes, hairstyles, and automobiles? Because it reminds us of our youth. It shows us how cities and towns have changed, for better or for worse. We hear accents that have faded, and performers that are no longer with us. The footage brings to light the places and people and music and fashions and trends that made us who we are.

It’s fun to find these repositories. We salute the media archives, history societies, and museums that make an effort to preserve and share them. This often means resurrecting obsolete technology formats (see "Digital reality check: CD-ROM database of WW2 airmen can only be opened on Windows 98").

But they are constantly under threat, as the recent deactivation of the MTV News archive shows. Thousands of hours of interviews with artists and producers dating from the 1990s were taken offline as staff were laid off. Some of it may be stored on the Internet Archive, but much of it is gone forever.

Nostalgia can be a huge aid to genealogy research, whether the goal is to gather information or family stories.

 I was reminded of this when researching a maternal great-grandmother, and an old print archive turned up - the “Old Timer's” column in the March 1933 issue of the Canton Commercial Advertiser in Canton, New York, reminiscing about attending grade school where my great-grandmother was his teacher … in the 1880s!

The games we played as children: Relievio

It's now early September. Hearing the crickets at dusk takes me back to the warm late summer evenings of yesteryear, and the sounds of neighborhood kids playing outside. 

Growing up, what were the games you played with your neighbors or siblings? Hopscotch? Stickball? Jumprope? A list of children's games is endless. But I wanted to mention a special one: Relievio. 

From age around the age of 8 to 12, this was a favorite game in our neighborhood. Relievio was a simple game, a cross between hide and seek and capture the flag, but spanned all of the properties on the street, including back yards. You needed at least a half-dozen kids to play, who were divided into teams. There was also a "jail," but the captured kids could be freed by a teammate. There were special phrases and calls, including "Ollie Ollie in come free." 

We would play after school until it got dark or it was time for dinner. On a warm night, we would go home for supper, but then come out again to play until twilight or our parents called us in. The cries of the game and shouts of glee when someone was tagged echoed throughout the neighborhood and then faded as everyone drifted home. As darkness fell, the crickets started their own calls. The block fell silent until the next day. 

I always assumed that one of our cleverer or more social friends made up Relievio, or perhaps learned of it from other kids in our town. Recently I learned that Relievio actually has a long tradition, going back to the 1800s and spreading across at least two continents under various names. The origins are obscure, but it seems to have come from Britain. The game-ending phrase that I heard as a child - "Ollie Ollie In Come Free" - was likely "All ye, all ye, in come free" at some point. We had no idea! 

Nicole grew up on the other side of the world and never heard of Relievio. But growing up, she and her siblings and friends had their own games and traditions. Every group of children did, no matter where they lived, or when they lived, as this Breughel painting shows:

Remembering these games now brings a smile to our faces!

As for our own children, our teenage son never heard of Relievio. It's sad, but it's not the first gaming tradition to fade away. I remembering hearing about kick the can, and would find scuffed marbles in the school playground, but never played these games myself - they were the domain of an older generation of children.

But other games live on. Our son played some of the same games that we did 40 or 50 years ago, including touch football and run the bases. In the winter, he went sledding with his friends. Both of our kids were enthusiastic Halloween participants through middle school. These and other childhood traditions will live on ... or perhaps be replaced by something new.

Boom and Bust, 1800s edition

There's a story in our family dating to the late 1800s. At the time, a maternal branch living just south of the Canadian border was engaged in farming - specifically, the farming of hops, which is used to brew beer. My great-aunt takes up the story, in a hand-written written account that is now part of our family history:

“Raising hops was very profitable at one time in Northern New York which caused my grandfather to buy a farm and take up raising this crop. The farm was in Burke, New York. Unfortunately, there was one bad year. When the price of hops went so low that he was ruined. He had to go back to his original trade.”

I've heard variations of this tale that this hops-growing ancestor was a millionaire on paper one day, and completely broke the next. But it wasn't the end of the world. My great-great grandfather was able to fall back on his original trade - stonemasonry, which his Irish-born father had taught him. Life went on. 

 I bring up this tale because much of the world is currently headed toward a deep economic crisis. Inflation. Energy shortages. Stock market selloffs. Wild fluctuations in the supply of certain types of goods. Layoffs. 

Sure, it's worrying. But most people reading this can remember recessions, layoffs, gas shortages, and inflation that was even worse. Before the pandemic, I experienced 3 major downturns as an adult - the early 1990s recession, the 2000 dot-com crash, and the 2008 financial crisis. I have childhood memories of the 1970s oil embargoes. A few readers may even recall the darkest days of the Great Depression, when the unemployment rate hit nearly 25% and Social Security wasn't yet available. 

 We'll get through it this time, just as we did back then.