So, I haven’t been typing much for the past three weeks. Theoretically that’s because I actually have been pretty busy. In practice it’s because my Life from the outside has gotta look pretty damned boring. But as I transfer from the Old Journal to the New – it’s good to be reminded that this whole excercise isn’t merely for your amusement, dear reader, it’s also functioning as a record of my weird-ass, probably-more-meaningful-than-an-office-drone-but-generally-not-very-impactful-on-the-world Life.
As the “new normal” has gripped us Kristen and I have fallen into patterns that are PROBABLY healthier than the ones we’d tread before. On an average day I wake up before my alarm around 8.45am, lie in bed playing a stupid video game till my alarm goes off at 9.15am, get up, start the coffee, feed the cat, work out for half an hour and then come back upstairs to drink the coffee and make breakfast. That’s generally about when Kristen comes down the stairs, cat in tow (the moment he’s done scarfing down breakfast he goes to the Living room, meows fervently for about a minute, then goes upstairs to keep Kristen from getting up… when she finally comes down he faithfully follows).
And then the day begins… I spend an hour doing my one steadily paying activity (Kristen’s doing a LOT of work for House of Musical Traditions but I’m literally just picking up an hour here or there). I do an hour’s worth of work for Focus Music, which named me Executive Director just in time for my first tasks to be the cancelation of shows, the refunding of tickets, and the creation of a steadily-evolving web page to put together online shows for our Focus performer alumni.
I’m reaching out to every artist in their performance roster (roughly 450 musicians) to give them a link where they can add their shows to our calendar and our mailing list. Included in that email is also a list of resources for artists and musicians and small businesses to try to make use of during this rapidly-evolving but slow-rolling Apocalypse. Unfortunately, I’ve become uncomfortably aware that I myself am not in a good position to take advantage of those resources.
As a small-time often-paid-under-the-table non-contracted coffeehouse and bar musician, I rarely have a contract to point to prove I’ve lost work. I DO have savings so I don’t have receipts or paperwork to demonstrate that any collections agencies are after me. I have no space or equipment rented under the business name that’s going to fall into arrears. It frankly reminds me of applying for student aid when I was going to college : I have a little bit of savings, a stock portfolio-based IRA and that keeps me from being able to receive funds, but my entire income stream has evaporated so it’s sure not comfortable financially. It sucks to think that my ‘nest egg’ may be eaten up by a fucking virus.
But hey, then maybe I’ll be able to apply for assistance! (except for the fact that even now most of these funds have dried up and warn you that your application only places you on the waiting list – except for the fact that fully 1/3 of the grants and things are reserved for minority business owners, POC, women and LGBTQ+…. I guess it’s time to put ilyAIMY in Kristen’s name? Except everything specifies that the ownership details must be in place since Feb 1st or so…)
I’m getting off track. What I meant to say is that even though this list of opportunities, grants and low-interst loans doesn’t apply to ME, it’s proving useful to others, so I include it. I’m working my way down the list but all I have is the name of the act and the date they performed, For many artists that’s enough to track them down. How? Google of course.
NAME of artist + “music” and we’ll see what we get. Because I’ve got a huge list to chew through I’m going for quantity over quality so I’m just looking at the first page of results. For a lot of the more generically named I either can’t find them or I find SO MANY of them that I’m putting those aside for more research later. For those that I receive hits on it’s STILL frustrating. Most of the first page of google results for all but the more-established artists are iTunes and sales sites – surprisingly a HUGE amount of which point to the defunct-as-of-2020 CDBaby pages – none of which will provide contact info. I’m looking for the artists’ .coms or barring that a Facebook page.
SO – go to a likely-looking link. Most artists’ pages have clearly marked “contact” links. Plenty don’t. I scan around for a while, if I can’t find contact information I back up and look for a social media page … if they DO have a contact link I look for the ARTIST info since I’ve found that so far most contacts with management have resulted in no action, with managers refusing to pass the message along since… hey… they’re not making a percentage off of privately-streaming shows! About 10% don’t have an email, just a form. Of those a couple have just been “get on my mailing list” forms, and maybe 10% of the remainder are broken. Despite having NOT signed up for mailing lists on any artist site, I’m definitely getting signed up on them. Uptick in random crap emails from artists who I’m just trying to help, but have no interest in actually following, seeing, or communicating with….
Right. If I have to I cut and paste my message into their Facebook page in the theory that even artists with management are probably personally monitoring that – and their social media presence is what would be allowing for streaming shows so they must be connected… somehow…. Artists who only have links to their Myspace page I ignore and put in the pile of “to research later”. Some artists are deceased. Some bands have disbanded. I’m looking at a fifteen + year spread of records and I have gotten as far as the “N”s.
So I spend 45 minutes a day doing research and outreach, and then spend the next 15 minutes on other Focus business including updating the website with the information my form’s harvested – sometimes Focus work bleeds on (especially if board members are online while I’m working there can be a LOT of almost-real-time back-and-forth emails) but it’s been made clear to me that Focus coffers aren’t infinite so I’m trying to… well… flatten the curve of my financial impact.
That usually gets me to about noon.
That’s about when I start thinking about the fact that they haven’t paid me yet for my last month’s invoice, at which point I look for abandoned money. Depending on dates and the amount I spend a couple of minutes shooting out reminder emails for unpaid invoices. There’s only a couple of these still outstanding, but they’re worth my time.
Transfer five Journal entries from the past (at the moment September of 2010) into WordPress. I’d paused this for a while. I’m doing it again. It should take me years. While I’m signed in look at the 2 – 5 comments added to the Journal. It’s been over a month since any of it wasn’t spam. Delete.
From there the lion’s share of my days have been spent testing audio, helping others with streaming, setting up online show gear, experimenting. I’ve been fooling with lighting (yesterday I cut myself some cardboard barndoors for my random-but-fortuitous studio lighting impulse buy from Feburary) I’ve been fooling with streaming, I’ve been fooling with cameras and I’ve been fooling with bitrates, OBS, Facebook Live, Zoom, Youtube Live, research, research, research.
For better or worse I feel like I’ve learned more in the past month than I have in the last year. I’m not sure I care about any of it.
At 5.45pm my alarm goes off to remind me it’s time to read a kids book on Facebook Live. Generally I’m selecting one that sort of follows a narrative in my head (we had too many grownup rules today, so here is the secret knowledge of grownups… that illustrator did a book about Golem so I read that the next day… which inspired Frankenstein so I read that the next day…) and at 6pm I read. This timing is becoming increasingly inconvenient but Sam Vimes says it MUST be so! I generally only for fifteen minutes. Sometimes less. Yesterday was complicated by an evening show with a 6.40pm soundcheck so I made sure it was a short story session. I have a devoted following of two dozen people or so that care. I think I’m mostly doing it for Heather.
And then on Mondays I try to run an open mic. And on Wednesdays we play a “show”. Otherwise it’s sort of more of the above, updating our website, prepping the mailing lists for various things including Institute of Musical Traditions, Focus and of course ilyAIMY. Somewhere in all of the above I’ve eaten something. Somewher below all of the above we’ll have dinner, usually while watching some variation of Star Trek, whose universe I think I’m getting mildly tired of. We worked our way through Picard. Now it’s Discovery.
Fuck Discovery’s “displacement-activated spore hub drive”. “Some real-world scientists have criticized the story line and technology”. I’ll bet.
Neither here nor there. It’s pretty. We watch it. We do other random stuff and go to bed generally pretty early. 11pm or midnight or so. Somewhere in there I’m also trying to play for at least half an hour even on days when we’re not “playing” – but the inspiration isn’t there. I’m not writing. I’m not recording. That’ll probably change this next week. But at the moment I’m occupying myself with the technical.
Because Jesus fucking Christ, who wants to think at a time like this? I’ve been self-isolating for 3 weeks. Kristen’s been self-isolating for two. The last person that I hugged that isn’t my wife was Jimmy Stewart after the El Golfo open mic on March 11th and I felt weird about it all the way home till I could wash my hands and throw my jacket in the wash. I move my car once a week. It’s been THREE WEEKS. It’s only been three weeks. It’s going to be a LOT longer because for too many people it’s been a lot LESS than three weeks.
To-do : write music. Record music. Mix set 2 from my birthday and make some videos out of it. Make a facemask out of whatever we’ve got lying around. Clean the house. Think too much. The “new normal” means that even if… sometime this summer… there’s SOME return to SOME semblance of normal… I won’t be able to let my guard down (social distancing, mask wearing, wiping shit down) till I either catch Covid-19 and fight it off or die trying – or till I’m able to get an as-of-yet-to-be-developed-much-less-produced-much-less-distributed-much-less-distributed-widely-to-people-Living-on-minimal-income-in-Baltimore vaccine sometime in the summer of 2021.
It’s only been three weeks.
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