Singing For Your Supper

Here is a comment I made on The Grauniad’s Cif site about the recording industry becoming redundant.

My comment:

Technology changes and new industries come into being – like the record industry in the 20^th century. Then technology changes and industries fade away and some die. The record companies existed to get a physical thing – the record, cassette, 8-track, CD DVD - out into the mass market. That is no longer necessary as the physical object nowadays - the CD or DVD - is no longer needed to transport its contents from producer to customer. Therefore, the record companies are no longer necessary – despite what they claim. The only real possible claim they can have against ‘pirates’ anyway, is against those that make and *sell* the actual physical object – only then are they actually losing a genuine sale as a downloaded ‘illegal’ copy is only a tenuously theoretical possible loss, if that.

The question now is what the makers of the tunes want to do with their stuff, nobody really wants to pay for stuff off the web and once the tune exists in digital form, extra copies of it are virtually costless.

So, that’s it really. If people want to buy a physical object professionally produced with a cover, case and so forth the band (or whoever) should sell it to them. These sort of threads always seem to have loads of people who want that. Otherwise, the raw tracks should be free, out there for people to do with what they will. They could look upon the recorded stuff as adverts, publicity, PR – what you will. The bands will eventually not even have to pay the server cost of hosting the files as they roam free.

Quite simply, the cost of making recoded music is now negligible – as compared to days of yore – and the costs of getting it out into the world are now virtually non-existent. So the only question remains as to whether the artists should be paid for making the recording, but if they look at it as a form of PR, advertising and so forth for their live gigs or whatever, then they will get some return on their time spent making it.

It may mean the days of limos, mansions and groupies are over, but there may be enough for a reasonable living, after all nobody is forcing them to do what they do, are they? So ANY reward at all is a bonus, after all we are often told that the world doesn’t owe anyone a living.

Balcony

She looks out from her balcony and sees the sun-bleached buildings - mostly white - climbing back up the hillside, crowded together seemingly without reason or order. She thinks about the buildings back home, dark, drab, damp with rain and cold. She sighs.

She had always thought of herself as a summer person, bursting into bloom whenever the sun warmed her skin. Now, to her surprise, she found herself nostalgic for the shiver when she crawled reluctantly out of bed on a dark, cold, wet and windy February morning. A time when it seemed as though summer, or even ordinary sunshine, would never be seen again. She could now understand those ancient pagan rituals that begged for the return of spring at such times, and why the early Christians had been so eager to appropriate them.

The Stars

I remember it all so well, the dark clear nights and so, so many stars. There they were, all up there and waiting, waiting patiently for us. We were on our way, too. There were men actually walking on the moon as I stood there, looking up at it. So, I, we, thought, it would not take long, not very long at all. Soon mankind would reach the planets and then, then it would be on to the stars.

But, we, mankind, stopped, turned back, lost interest. When the planets, the stars, were there - waiting for us - we turned our backs on them. Instead, we turned on more lights at night, so that the stars could no longer compete. We no longer looked up, but looked across at our neighbours and the things they were buying. We no longer reached for the stars; we only reached for what was on display in the shops.

We gave up on dreaming, of looking for something higher, something greater. It al became unreal. We lost that belief, that optimism, that desire. It all became petty, shallow and meaningless.

I do not go out much at night now. I suppose the stars are still there, but I do not look up that often. The disappointment is hard to bear. I stay inside and watch television instead.

Religion

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof - Henry David Thoreau

To my grandmother – a staunch Methodist – religion was vital to her life because it gave her the answers to all those questions about life and what it was for, and so on, that she – probably unconsciously – realised that she did not have the equipment – either mentally or temperamentally – to discover for herself. While – to me – that was the very reason – probably the reason above all others – to despise religion, because it had the temerity to attempt to give answers to questions that I felt – and still do feel – can only be discovered by the individual through individual effort.

People often say that all human societies have religion. That is - as far as I know – true, but what does it really mean? People speculate about things - it is what we do, we have brains and we use them. We make up stories to cover the gaps in what we know. Some of those stories become myths, become religion.

Just as from the Greeks onward, knowledge was a subsection of philosophy which as over time developed and became the separate branches of knowledge like biology, physics, chemistry, psychology and so on, the same has happened to theological ideas. People would be religious in earlier ages, or in less developed societies, because there was no other word, no other concept, for them to use to describe that particular branch of their experience. But, as we have learnt more, understood more, the theological has become replaced as it has become irrelevant.

Of course, it is a wild generalisation, but religious people - to me - always seems to have a missing… dimension, seem incomplete, as though they have refused to take that necessary step towards full self-definition. Often they have the look of people who have remained living in the parental home long after they should have left. Perhaps it is that fear of parental admonishment; long after it should have been nullified, that gives them that vague, distracted, haunted look, an aura of intellectual naivety, timidity and blandness.

Management

Whenever I think of family holidays from when I was a child I always seem to recall the rainy days. Holidays would not be the same without rainy days. It is an essential part of the experience of a holiday. Going abroad to places with more consistent 'better' weather has robbed the British holiday of one of its most significant aspects. The disappointment, the sense of being trapped within a small area with limited resources is akin to those exercises for trainee army officers that management-types appropriated for those courses they like to send each other on. However, such courses seems to have more to do with an attempt to change the image of the office worker from that of pampered wimp into macho dynamic professional.

These paramilitary style courses are not really that necessary - except in the image sense as above. All they really needed to do - if they were serious about their charges actually learning something useful - is to put a new clause into all their office workers' contracts. A clause that states that the workers are obliged to spend two weeks every year on a caravan holiday in Wales with a young family. That would sort out the thrusting go-ahead achievers from the time-servers. That is if any of them survived.

However, it is more likely that it would be the go-ahead thrusting dynamic sort that would fall apart when faced with real problems. But that wouldn't really matter as business these days is more about image than anything else, if it was ever otherwise. Whatever happens, the thrusting dynamic youngster in the expensive suit is going to appear far more dynamic than the balding, middle-aged bloke in the jam-stained cardigan.

Nevertheless they would do wise to remember that in the Bond films it is the old, faintly ludicrous Q that comes up with all the useful devices, Bond is just a tool.

A Handful Of Stars

These things we think of, now and then. On waking suddenly in the coldest, darkest heart of the night I could speak of those things, but not now. They are all gone, lost on the wind that sweeps through the mind, purging it of all its night time thoughts.

The day begins slowly with the night sliding reluctant from the mind like some creature of the dark shadow-places retreating before the hesitant dawn.

Those things look different in the light of the day. The darkness of the night gives credence and plausibility to those things that would seem to be so absurd in the daylight.

Later, as the day draws to a close, when darkness falls and distances stumble to a few steps either side of you and shadows grow wide and tall enough to contain and conceal a whole world beyond you, it is then you look deep into the fire. Then, without taking your gaze from the dancing flames, you talk of those things that seemed foolish in the warm soft light of the day, realising these things need more light than a solitary fire and a handful of stars.

New Post Label

A new label for blog postings may not seem a bit enough deal for a posting of its own, but I think I may have come up with something new (for here anyway), which may increase the rate of new posts appearing here.

In various folders on this computer, and in various files on my shelves, I have quite a lot of what I am going to label here as Fragments. These are also going to be labelled as Fragment-Poetry and Fragment-Prose – which will be further divided into Fragment-Fiction and Fragment-Non-Fiction.

They are, as the label indicates, various unfinished pieces of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that have not – as yet – grown beyond a paragraph, stanza, idea or two. Consequently, as they are Fragments, I make no claim for them to be anything other than what they are, nothing more, nothing less.

Of course, I do want to continue with the blessays (blog essays) idea I stole from Stephen Fry, and what you might call fuller-length blog postings, but - by their very nature - such longer pieces will be less frequent than these shorter pieces.

It is possible that I will return to some of these fragments and expand them out into full poems, stories, essays or whathaveyou in the future. If I do, I will try to link back to the original fragment wherever possible.

I don’t know when the first of these Fragments will appear, as I said there are a lot of them, probably numbering in the hundreds. So it will take some time to sort them out, but I hope to publish some here as I go along.