Words that are merely “little balloons of bright sound”

Although I love good writing and think that it is better to learn by studying a model than from a set of explicit rules, I’m not very good at taking a model and extracting a useful lesson from it—mostly I’m left in wondering admiration.

So it’s a precious thing to find a well-written passage that not only spells out something about good writing but demonstrates the way out of the problem it identifies. A good place to go in search of such passages is Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Here’s one example I found quoted in a recent article:

The world of criticism has a modest pouch of special words (luminous, taut), whose only virtue is that they are exceptionally nimble and can escape from the garden of meaning over the wall. Of these critical words, Wolcott Gibbs once wrote: ‘…they are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons.’ The young writer should learn to spot them — words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.

What I like about this passage is that it is itself filled with delicious, bright-sounding words, but every one of those words is carefully placed and doing important work.

The article itself is worth reading, a discussion of book reviews and the little balloons of bright sound that regularly appear in them. I found it linked on Alan Jacobs’s Text Patterns blog, a reliable source of well written commentary.

Down to Earth, by Ted Steinberg

Worldviews are good because they help us filter, organize, and comprehend the relentless flood of information that threatens to drown us. (Sometimes I wonder if pre-modern man was able to do without a worldview, simply because his world was narrow and local and the information available to him was limited.)

Worldviews are bad because they enable us to filter out, misfile, mischaracterize, misunderstand, and selectively ignore those parts of the information flow that are inconsistent with our worldview. Douglas Wilson is currently reading through Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book I have also read—but as I read his notes on it I wonder sometimes if we read the same book. For example, in his post “Let Us Not Inquire About the Chitlins” he simply dismisses Pollan’s portrayal of the cattle feedlot system as an unhealthy, inhumane, unnatural mechanism for putting cheap meat on American tables by saying this [emphasis added]:

The bulk of this chapter depends on a truth that has nothing to do with the advent of industrial farming. The manufacture and preparation of food can be . . . well, unappetizing. I can easily imagine following my food chain back upstream in 13th century Milan, 19th century New York, or 10th century Rome, and discovering at some point that I was not nearly as hungry as I was before. As Bismarck famously put it, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." It is probably wise to not inquire too closely into how chitlins come to be either.

Now, to someone like Wilson who has a strong conviction that modern living is fundamentally good and has adequate safeguards in place to insure his well-being, there is actually little to be gained from inquiring closely into such things; why spend time reconciling difficult facts to a conclusion that is already embraced? But to those who are less confident that private vices really do combine to create public virtues, who worry instead that food purveyors are all too adept at evading the safeguards that cut into their profits, then a close inquiry into the unappetizing details of how a pound of supermarket beef is produced will have a profound effect in shaping their own worldview.

I’ve suffered plenty from the complacency that a strongly held worldview can induce, and in recent years I’ve tried to be diligent about examining my assumptions and discarding those which don’t fit comfortably with everyday reality. I’ve also cultivated a reluctance to replace discarded assumptions with new ones, no matter how much explanatory power they seem to contain; once bitten, twice shy. And, strangely enough, it’s not all that difficult to get along in life without strong convictions about how to fix the economy, or health care, or the family, or the church, or the weather. And it turns out that the lack of strong convictions on a topic make it much, much easier to notice important things that would have otherwise been quickly filtered out or explained away.

Of all the things I have completely missed seeing over the years, the biggest one is probably the role of nature in history. I don’t feel too awfully stupid about this, because it is a topic that has largely gone unexamined. But I do clearly recall several times when I ran across a Big Important Fact that pointed to the topic, and proceeded to ignore it. For example, years ago I was reading the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, which has a chapter on the settling of the Texas Hill Country where Johnson was raised (and where I lived at the time). Caro noted that since the first settlers came it had been subject to a boom-and-bust cycle that was tied to the weather.

That part of Texas is just on the edge of being arid; a hundred miles to the east the land is lush, while a hundred miles to the west the land is desert. The average rainfall is just barely enough to allow for crops. However, that average is actually the centerpoint of a fifteen-year cycle, where during the seven fat years there is more than enough rain to sustain crops while during the seven lean ones crops will not grow. The settlers came in during the wet years, planted with abandon, thrived for awhile but then were destroyed when the dry years came. Seven years later the cycles began again, both for the rain and for the settlers.

That fact impressed me when I first read it, and I’ve told it to many others over the years, but mostly as a curiosity that explains something about why the Hill Country is how it is. And I’ve read similar things over the years, but somehow they always remained one-off curiosities in my mind and never led me to the deeper realization that weather is not simply a static backdrop to the activities of man but in fact an active and continually present factor. Fortunately I’ve come across several books recently that have broken new ground in explaining how nature (climate, topography, fertility, resources) has had a significant and ongoing role in shaping civilization.

Ted Steinberg’s Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History is a fine, fine book. It is a work of geography, or maybe ecological history, very much like two other excellent books that I discovered recently, Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Decay and William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. The books by Brechin and Cronon are probably better, being efforts to thoroughly understand the history of a particular place. Steinberg’s book sacrifices detail and subtlety, but makes up for it sevenfold in breadth of vision. By tackling American history, he is able to look at the interactions of man and nature over the course of four hundred years during which society evolved at a rapid pace, in a context where patterns for those interactions were being freshly developed. The overall story gives a fairly clear picture of both the extents and the limits of man’s ability to subdue the natural world.

Steinberg’s writing is clear, and the ground he uncovers is so unfamiliar that the rapid pace at which he surveys American history never seems superficial. He assumes that his reader is familiar with the political history of the country, and focuses on episodes which highlight the fact that various political developments did not spring fully formed from the minds of men, but were often a direct response to ecological circumstances that are generally ignored by conventional histories. Each chapter confronts the reader with many, many neglected facts which are simple and obvious but at the same time quite difficult to integrate into the conventional man-centered view of social progress.

The tales told in this book are entertaining as well as informative, and it is tempting to quote passage after passage. But I’ll resist, and try to convey the flavor of Steinberg’s presentation by looking at a single short section, an example of how New England colonists first went about taming the region, which begins with this paragraph:

Long before water became a commodity for powering New England’s factories, before the dams and canals produced energy, farmers relied on rivers and streams to provide food for the family economy. In the spring, when winter stores ran low, the colonists went fishing for shade, alewives, and salmon, species of fish that return from the ocean to freshwater streams to reproduce. Salon were so plentiful during the colonial period that as late as 1700 they sold for only one cent a pound. Shad were even more copious, so much so that some felt embarrassed to be caught eating them. As one observer recalled, “it was discreditable for those who had a competency to eat shad.” One New Hampshire farmer visited a fishing place on the Merrimack River for six straight days in June 1772 and returned with a remarkable 551 shad for his efforts. The spring profusion of fish brought farmers descending on the region’s rivers, turning the most productive fishing spots into veritable carnivals, replete with drinking and card playing. Securing an important supply of dietary protein at precisely the point in the seasonal cycle when they needed it most, farmers may have also turned to fishing to relieve feelings of loneliness brought on by a long, hard winter.

It’s hard to imagine now that only two hundred years ago that a large portion of one’s wealth could consist of a natural bounty that was free to anyone for the work of harvesting it—and that such an arrangement could be stable. But two things put an end to that circumstance. The first was the advent of mills run by water power, which required dams and produced turbulence, both of which put an end to the annual upstream migration of the fish. But not just the presence of mills—grain mills had long existed on the rivers, and happily co-existed because they operated during the fall harvest months and were able to leave the river undisturbed during the spring spawning season. What put an end to the arrangement was the use of water to power textile factories, a year-round operation.

Was this one of those episodes where the effects of a well-meant technological innovation went undetected until it was too late? Not at all. Farmers and mill operators both knew full well from the beginning that the mills were depleting the rivers of fish, and farmers tried (unsuccessfully) to assert that their rights to the fish were being infringed upon. Even more, the laws as they existed tended to side with the farmers against the mill operators. But, unsurprisingly, mill owners arranged for the laws to be changed.

The second factor, not so important in the case of New England fishing but increasingly important as the settlement of America proceeded, was the new understanding of natural resources as commodities that could be bought and sold. Steinberg explains this in an early chapter, which concludes:

The passenger pigeon’s decline [due to being hunted to extinction for commercial sale] was simply one example of the power of industrial capitalism to systematically rearrange the components of an ecosystem, packaging them up and delivering them to where demand was greatest. In the process, resources such as common cloth, pigeon meat, and lumber lost binding ties with their place of origin and the human and natural processes responsible for their existence. When the cotton cloth produced at Lowell found its way into a shirt, who, aside from perhaps a mill agent or disgusted fisherman, would ever think to inquire about the true costs of the energy that went into the item, the water that was literally drained away from farmers in one state and made to flow according to a production schedule dreamed up by industrialists in another? Who would possibly see in a roofing shingle the complex set of processes—the federal government’s land subsidies, the fires that plagued the land—bound up in this small but essential piece of wood?

Conceiving of things as commodities allowed people to reduce all that was complex and unique, whether pigeon meat, lumber, apples, or oranges, to a single common denominator: price. In a world moving toward such a state, where something as elusive as water could be owned and sold, where grain did not even exist yet could be purchased, where so many aspects of the natural world were being rendered equal before the almighty dollar, it was easy to overlook what separated one thing from another. Commodities have a special ability to hide from view not just the work, the sweat and blood that went into making them, but also the natural capital, the soil, water, and trees, without which they would not exist. Money, to quote nineteenth-century German sociologist Georg Simmel, had become the “frightful leveler,” reducing the uniqueness and incomparability of objects to a state of “unconditional interchangeability.”

The development of America is critically bound up with the question not only of who owns what, but the question of to what extent an owner can exploit what he owns. For example, hydraulic mining in the California hills devastated the rivers that flowed from those hills, and the farming that depended on those rivers, raising their beds sixteen feet (!) in some places, before legal action finally brought the mining to a halt (but without requiring restitution).

How do we judge this particular episode? Did the system bring about a just resolution? Were the mine owners unfairly inhibited in exploiting their land? Should they have been allowed to proceed as long as they compensated those downstream? Should such activity simply have been prohibited in the first place? Practical considerations give us very little guidance in how to proceed, and the modern church is a long way from being able to make even tentative comments on what is right and wrong here.

My own suspicion is that early on we mistook rapaciousness for industry, proceeded to build a society that catered to rapaciousness, and have finally come to a place where we are proud for having stripped the landscape bare. When Chris was reading Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, he would read me portions of the story of Easter Island, whose society collapsed due to the overexploitation of natural resources. He was particularly struck by the idea that the island was completely deforested, and wondered what that fellow was thinking as he chopped down the island’s last tree. I told him it was something along the lines of “I’m glad I got here before that fellow coming over the hill.” And I suppose if he was a dominion-taking Christian he probably thought “I can’t wait to see in what marvelous new ways God will be providing for our needs!”

I should point out here that, even though there are hints of a viewpoint in the above two paragraphs (“industrial capitalism,” “almighty dollar”), this is about as close as Steinberg comes to advocacy—and it is pretty tame. Mostly Steinberg lets circumstances speak for themselves, and even occasionally takes the opportunity to counter some lazy assumptions the reader might make about an ecologically-centered history—there is a chapter which looks at the conservation movement which began in the early 1900s, spurred on by Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, and Steinberg ends up taking a dismal view of it all.

Although I enthusiastically recommend Down to Earth, it’s hard for me to judge how others will react to it, particularly those who are comfortable with modern industrial society. I loved the book because it covered a lot of material I had already encountered, tied it together by applying some important basic concepts (e.g. commodification), and then showed how those ideas explained many, many other episodes in American history. I was ready for Steinberg’s interpretation of events, but only because I had already been questioning the official party line in these areas.

Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew Crawford

I finished this book a couple of months ago, but put off writing a review. Then a week or so ago I began to read through it again in preparation for reviewing it, and decided that it would be better if I didn’t try to summarize its contents. What Crawford attempts to do with this book is to defend the manual arts as a worthy and even intellectually rich pursuit—and his clinching argument for me is a implicit one, namely that a manual artist such as Crawford was able to write such a deeply philosophical book as this one.

Crawford is no dilettante. He worked as an electrician while still a young teenager, then moved on to an auto mechanic shop before finally entering college to train as a “knowledge worker.” But after only a few months at a job in a Washington think tank, he decided that such work wasn’t for him, and he opened a small motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, where he continues to work (I think). This was not a rejection of deep and reflective thinking, though, but only a shift away from employing those skills in the service of intangibles and towards applying them to tangible physical tasks with a clear result.

The most valuable aspect of Crawford’s presentation is that he does not fall into the trap of celebrating craft. Craft is certainly worth celebrating, and it is possible to make the same arguments using a craftsman as an example—it’s been done, many times—but that approach tends to veer off into a mystical romanticism that intellectuals find acceptable. One might admire the work of an artisanal breadmaker, say, but mostly based on a shared appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of the bread that results, not the manual skills of mixing or kneading or baking that produced it.

Crawford recognizes that such romanticism is distracting, softening the hard edges of the case he wants to make, and so he emphasizes that he will be focusing not on the work of the craftsman but the tradesman, the distinction being that a craftsman makes things while a tradesman deals with things that already exist, i.e. fixes other people’s stuff. Reflecting his work repairing and modifying motorcycles, he proceeds to show how such work not only demands deep intellectual engagement but touches on many more important aspects of a fully lived life than does the ghostly word-shuffling we’ve been trained to see as superior.

One excellent example involves being asked to restore a motorcycle that objectively isn’t worth restoring. It is an undistinguished machine known to suffer from certain defects that require extensive and sometimes imaginative work to correct. The owner would be better off putting the money towards a good machine. But, unlike the craftsman, the tradesman is not in the position to make such a decision, and in fact is limited in the advice he can give. Who knows what sort of attachment the owner has for the machine, or how much the money means to him? Crawford accepts the job, and then goes on to puzzle over how much effort (which must be charged for) to put into fixing different problems, whether or not certain kinds of effort should be charged for at all, and so on. These puzzles are a constant companion of the tradesman, and struggling with them is an important part of forming the person he becomes.

I would strongly encourage homeschooling Christians of all persuasions to read this book, and to ponder its portrayal of the tradesman. There are practical reasons—most Christian homeschoolers are committed to equipping their children to live a thoughtful and reflective life, and yet the careers we tend to see as being most compatible with that are ones that are very likely to evaporate during the difficult times ahead. (Crawford also argues that those careers are often not compatible with the life of the mind but antithetical to it.)

But, more importantly, Christians are uniquely positioned to examine the issue and come up with some concrete answers. Crawford approaches the matter from a humanist’s point of view, and can only do so because he is a very unusual humanist, the rest of them haunting the halls of universities and think tanks. But struggling with the issue of how to live a full and righteous life in a fallen world is the stock and trade of Christians of all varieties, or ought to be. Schooling is one area of life where at least some Christians have rejected conventional wisdom, re-examined their assumptions about its purpose, and charted alternate courses whose strengths and weaknesses they have demonstrated through years of practice. I think we could bless ourselves and the world at large by reflecting and acting on the matter of how to go about living a full life while providing for one’s family.

Notes on Meaning of the City: Cain

I’m reading through Jacques Ellul’s Meaning of the City for the second time. The first time through it was powerful stuff, but almost overwhelming. I came away with the basic point, namely that, with the exception of the New Jerusalem, the Bible consistently uses the city to represent man’s effort to live without God. But the details of Ellul’s case are myriad, and well worth pondering individually, so I thought it would be good to go through the book again and make careful note of the ones that catch my attention.

What follows are only notes, and fragmentary ones. I’m not yet up to summarizing Ellul’s case in any useful way. But I hope some readers will find them helpful, or at least intriguing.

When Cain murders Abel, he receives this curse from God: When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.

“Until now, only God’s protection has enabled life to go on, and this protection is seen in a certain stability, a certain familiarity, between man and nature. Cain has shattered this serenity. He has introduced insecurity, the taste for blood, for vengeance. And the condemnation pronounced by God is only the inevitable result of Cain’s act. Cain has broken the relationship between man and the world, and so he will necessarily be a fugitive and a wanderer. He will no longer have natural protection …”

Cain said to the LORD, "My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."

My observation: Cain is right about the basics of his fate, but he assumes far too much, e.g. that God has driven him away, that His face will be hidden, that God will no longer protect him.

Then the LORD said to him, "Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold." And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.

“God is standing before a man who is in open revolt and who in the normal course of events will cease believing in God. What chance is there that such a man will take God’s word seriously? Can receives a sign of God’s protection, but of what import is that sign? He would prefer a more obvious security, such as the one he destroyed by his crime—family security, a relationship with animals and things, a familiarity with men and places.”

My observation: This last sentence of Ellul’s is a good example of how he achieves depth in reading scripture. The implication—that Cain has through his act no longer has the security of family, or a relationship with animals and things, or a familiarity with men and places, is too much to draw from this passage. But it is possible to draw it from a complete survey of how scripture portrays the city—the survey he proceeds with in the book—and the implication is quite consistent with this particular passage, and in fact resonates with the reader’s own experience—city dwellers are observably prone to all these qualities. [See also last two paragraphs on page 8.]

Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

Cain is in fact under God’s protection, but Cain is not willing to believe this; the protection is God’s promise, which is useless to a man without faith. Instead, he chooses to leave the presence of the Lord.

“Cain has no way of knowing that the mark (which he cannot see) will suffice to protect him, even in the depth of his sin, from his disobedience, from his separation from God. And now Cain will spend his life trying to find security, struggling against hostile forces, dominating men and nature, taking guarantees that are within his reach, guarantees that appear to him to be genuine but which in fact protect him from nothing.”

Cain is thus the father of those who choose to live as if they are independent of God.

“The land of Nod is a literal translation of the Hebrew ‘the land of wandering’ (but why make into a proper name what is not?). … The seed of all man’s questings is to be found in Cain’s life in the land of wandering, always searching for a place where his need for security might be satisfied. But the only place he finds is that very country characterized by being uninhabitable.”

Opening of St. Augustine’s Confessions: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord.”

“It was after he had gone far from God’s presence that Cain began his life in the land of wandering. How can we not associate the two notions when the text does so? It is God’s absence which is the never-ending sting planted in his heart.”

“And now he tries something else, something that will disturb his situation and make it even worse. Cain is completely dissatisfied with the security granted to him by God, and so he searches out his own security. However, this search is no different from his first desire for God’s presence, and his security can only be found in God. It is only when he believes in God that he will be able to believe that the mark placed on him (and in fact on every one of us?) is an effectual guarantee, because it is an integral part of God’s word (his pledge). But of course Cain does not understand it the way God does. And as for his security, he will find another way to procure it. And another way to satisfy his desire for eternity. He will try to take care of his own needs in these areas. He is about to take the wrong road, where every step leads further from God. But is it possible to be further from God than Cain? No, the road does not really lead further from God, it leads to the mirages of man’s heart because it leads to temporary satisfactions of the thirst for eternity and rest.”

Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.

“The first builder of a city thinks of his action as a response to his situation, an effort to satisfy his deepest desires. He will satisfy his desire for eternity by producing children. He will satisfy his desire for security by creating a place belonging to him, a city. The direct relationship between the two acts is revealed in the identity of name given to the city and the child.”

“Cain has built a city. For God’s Eden he substitutes his own, for the goal given to his life by God, he substitutes a goal chosen by himself—just as he substituted his own security for God’s. Such is the act by which Cain takes his destiny on his own shoulders, refusing the hand of God in his life.”

The name Enoch means “initiation” or “inauguration.” The city Enoch is thus Cain’s substitute for God’s creation; Cain cannot create, but he can begin again.

“There was a solution for [Cain’s] situation, but the solution was in God’s hands, and that is what he could absolutely not tolerate. He wants to find alone the remedy for a situation he created, but which he cannot himself repair because it is a situation dependent on God’s grace. And cain accumulates remedies, each one a new disobedience, each one a new offense. Each remedy which seems to be a response to a need in Cain’s situation, in fact sinks him even deeper in woe, into a situation ever more inextricable.”

“Cain takes possession of the world and uses it as he wishes. Cain creates the art of craftsmanship. He carves stones and thereby makes them impure, unfit for use in an altar for God. It is man’s high-handed piracy of creation that makes creation incapable of giving glory to God. Cain bends all of creation to his will. He knows full well that by God’s order he has received dominion over creation, and he assumes control. He forces creation to follow his destiny, his destiny of slavery and sin, and his revolt to escape from it. From this taking possession, from this revolution, the city is born.”

“Before going on, we must lay to rest a possible misunderstanding. City versus country. We are in no way putting the city on trial, or making an apology for the country. Our only intention is to discover what the Bible reveals concerning the city. Nothing else.”

“All of man’s history is not limited to the history of the city and its progress. But they have nevertheless intermingled, and neither can be understood alone. The two realities are realities for God, and only in Him can we know exactly what they are. But the problem becomes serious when the city kills the country, when Cain kills Abel. When that happens, man and history are so thrown out of kilter that nothing can modify the new situation. But—and here is what is important—it can be no other way. Cain could not stop being himself. From the beginning he had to kill Abel. The city, so mediocre, so puerile with its scanty population still rustic in nature—the city was, from the day of its creation, incapable, because of the motives behind its construction, of any other destiny than that of killing the country, where God put man to enable him to live his life as best he could.”

Next up: Nimrod.

What makes us think we’ve finally gotten it right?

I’ve just finished reading most of Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages, by Frances and Joseph Gies; about one-third of the book was devoted to life among the nobility, and so I skipped past those chapters. But the rest is very good, especially because it takes the time to set the stage by describing the marriage and family patterns among the groups that fed into medieval society, mainly Greeks and Romans and Germans and Christians.

It turns out that those pre-medieval patterns of marriage were very much different from what we see as normal today, and that many of the important shifts came during the Middle Ages, usually in response to shifting economic circumstances. For example, the decision to marry became more of a private and individual matter because the parties involved could afford it—as peace and prosperity increased, the need to use marriage as a tool for extending the family decreased. Similarly, family life turned inward because prosperity allowed for more independence from the community.

What disturbs me about the historical understanding of marriage that I’ve gotten from the Gies and from Stephanie Coontz is the same thing that always disturbs me when I study social patterns in history: why has there been so much variation over the years in what were seen as Christian standards? With marriage, for example, the church as an institution only began to intrude toward the end of the first millennium, and it was nearly three hundred years from the time that the church asserted a role in marrying people to the time when that role was accepted among the people.

In this book I found that many things we see today as biblical standards for a marriage were in fact cut from whole cloth one thousand years after the canon of scripture was closed, usually by some church thinker who waited hundreds of years for the church to be able to partially impose only some of his conclusions about what scripture dictated. And each time I have to wonder: if this fellow was right, then why did God see fit to let His people wander for a thousand years in ignorance before finally using this fellow to enlighten them?

Anyway, next time you read or hear some Christian teacher who lays out what he claims is a biblical pattern for marriage or the family, I encourage you to not simply accept the pattern at face value but to spend some time looking at patterns that have actually existed in history. Most Christians in most of history have followed different standards than the ones we are being exhorted to embrace today, and we ought to at least think about why that might be so.

Ticket sales in a down economy

Mish Shedlock’s readers often supply him with solid and detailed anecdotal evidence about what is going on out in the real world. Here’s an email he received from one:

I don’t care what the media says, the economy is getting worse and I can see it in ticket sales and even questions about tickets.

Last February, most of my ticket sales were requesting "Best available" and big concerts sold out within days or weeks, typically a month or more before the concert. Concerts sold out from the front (highest ticket price) to the back.
By mid summer, I began to notice that the buying was changing. Concerts sold from the front and from the back but the middle seats were selling last. I have only voices to gauge age but it seems to me that the 40-55 crowd had begun to disappear.

By early fall, the cheap seats were selling out first. This pattern started first in Chicago, spread throughout the midwest, then over to the Carolinas, south to Florida and across to Arizona.

Since December, the most often question that I get is "If I buy at the venue, do I have to pay the service charge?"

Ticket agents charge a ticket fee of 10-15% on each ticket and a year ago I never had a single complaint or a question about the ticket fee.

If you are buying 6 tickets with a $12 fee each, I can see it making better sense to spend an hour and go to the venue, but if you are buying 2 tickets and having to drive for a hour, park and stand in line, is it really worth it?
Throughout all this, the college crowd consistently bought without complaint. That has changed since Christmas. Now, the college kids are trying to beat the $6-8 ticket fees.

Concert sales in the Northeast and California almost always sold out, but now California is beginning to soften, especially with the younger crowd. The deterioration has been slow, but constant for a year and I don’t see any signs of improvement.

Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly did a show at Westbury in January. So did Bill Maher. Westbury is on Long Island and the theatre is small, perhaps 3000 seats. It is theatre in the round and sometimes they run it as half round.
The Beck/O’reilly show started out 1/2 round and sold out in minutes. People called for hours wanting tickets. Then Westbury decided to go full round the next day and the rest sold out within an hour. People called for weeks wanting tickets.

On the other hand, the Bill Maher show only sold about 70% of the 1/2 round at Westbury. The show sold so poorly that they closed the back seats and moved people forward to make it look better.

I sell Westbury all the time. Most of the people that call me are older, retired, and almost all have American Express cards and AOL e-mail addresses.

I would have thought that the results would have been that Bill Maher would have sold out and the Beck/O’Reilly concert not sold out. I was just amazed.

New weblog, sort of

At the encouragement of a musician friend, I have created a new weblog and copied over all the music-related posts that I’ve made in the past eight years, both here and on the Simpler Living website. Although I won’t delete those posts from their original locations, I think that all future posts about music will be made only there.

Looking over those nearly 500 posts, I realize that they constitute an as-it-happens account of two musicians trying to establish themselves as performers, an unusual resource that might be valuable to others who are banging around on the lower rungs of the music business. I think it is good to separate them from the others, so as not to burden readers who are interested only in that part of our adventure, and those who are not interested at all.

If you are interested, please keep up with the latest news by checking the Ridgewood Chronicles, or subscribing to its RSS feed.

Talent contest: Prairie Home Companion

I’m at liberty now to say that the talent contest mentioned in this earlier post is the annual Prairie Home Companion competition. This year their theme is “Battle of the Bands,” where the aim of the music is to get people up and dancing. Here’s a link to the contest guidelines.

And, again, here’s the recording that we will be submitting. We’re pretty pleased with it.

Knowing where to tap

I love jokes that encapsulate an important bit of knowledge. My family is all too aware of this, since it means that I bore them repeatedly by making a point with some anecdote they’ve heard many times before. But they’re kind enough to put up with it.

This morning I was reminded that a given task requires not only doing it but being prepared to do it, and sometimes the time and effort needed to prepare vastly outweighs the time needed to execute. I have a joke for that, of course. But curious to see if someone on the internet had told the same joke better, I poked around and stumbled on some variations that not only were pretty good, but got to their destination differently.

Here’s one that has a punchline close to the joke that I tell.

I’ve worked with a fabulous voiceover actor. I watched him go into the booth and nail a commercial in five minutes. When the client balked at his fee saying, "But it only took you five minutes." My friend replied, "No, it took me 20 years. You only saw the last five minutes."

But the joke I tell involves a tourist who encounters someone in a park doing sketches. Here’s one that covers that angle, with a slightly different punchline.

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him. “It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

Here’s one I hadn’t heard, that gets at the same point differently.

A famous French hatmaker is sitting in a cafe when a woman approaches and begs him to make her a hat. He assents and takes some pins and some felt out of his satchel. With a whirl of hands he creates a magnificient chapeau.

The woman is charmed. The hatmaker says, "That will be 5,000 francs."

The woman is aghast. "Five thousand, francs!? But it only took you a few moments."

The man then takes the hat, removes all the pins, smooths out the felt and returns it to her saying, "The materials are free."

Here’s one that is better known but makes roughly the same point and brings out the difference between preparation and execution.

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine.

Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

"What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!"

So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill."

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer………………….. $ 2.00
Knowing where to tap…………………….. $ 9,998.00

In this same vein, I am old enough to remember cameras that used disposable flash bulbs. When those were first introduced, there was a significant amount of resistance to them because the cost of the bulb was far higher than the bit of film that it exposed. It took some time to make people understand that what was important was whether it was worth the cost of both the film and the bulb to have the picture, i.e. no bulb, no picture.

Talent contest entry

With the help of our friend Kevin Amburgey on mandolin, Chris and I recorded a song that we hope to submit for a talent contest which is billed as a Battle of the Bands, where a “band” has at least three members and the music is designed to get people up and dancing.

It’s a bit outside our normal kind of performing, but we had a few songs we thought would make good dance tunes, and after running through them with Kevin we settled on this one. We recorded it this afternoon in one take, in Kevin’s living room.

Does it make you want to dance?