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December 31, 2007

An Aging Club-Goer's Plea

We snuck out of town a few days back, Susan and I did, and went to the big city to celebrate belatedly our ninth anniversary. It doesn't matter which big city, because I've stood on the hard concrete of the finest and worst clubs in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Nashville, Chicago, Chapel Hill, Austin, and wherever else the road took me. Little Rock, once. But I was struck, once again, but how singularly unfriendly the club world can be to those of us who are no longer in our twenties and looking for love in all the wrong places, or for an excuse to forget its absence.

Often in this space I write about the pleasures of listening to and writing about and contemplating music written by and for adults. Which doesn't mean it's only for we meandering middle-aged folk, but which does mean it's about somewhat more than mating rituals and temper tantrums. Because most of the artists praised in this space are not to be found in the upper reaches of the Billboard charts, they are principally touring acts. Club fighters. It is very much, as my co-editor often reminds me one way or another, a live music format, and that's where most of the living is to be made.

All of which is good. It has long been my thesis that arena shows are not about music at all, and I can't really remember at this point what their charm may have been, but it wasn't musical, and it wasn't the drunken fights I remember at (of all things) Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

But it's time -- past time -- club owners made some concessions to their audience. Following are a few humble suggestions, a kind of new year's prayer.

(1) We have jobs, most of us. Which means it would be darn civilized to start shows at 8 p.m. Now, I understand that clubs book music to sell beer and spirits and such, and that they want to stay open as long as possible and serve as many patrons as possible. Fine. Book something else later in the evening that caters to kids who don't have to go to work the next morning, who don't have children banging on their doors for breakfast. But we adults would like to see good music and go home before the 11 p.m. news.

(2) Our time is valuable, so please tell us when acts are really going on stage, and stick to it. And, y'know, if something goes wrong, feel free to come on the PA and explain that the band's stuck in traffic or the lead singer's too drunk to play for another hour or whatever. We'll understand, we'll adapt. But we're not standing there in the audience to mill about, stare at each other, and get sloppy drunk. We're there to see the band. In this case, Susan and I waited fifty minutes for the headliner to emerge, and finally gave up.

(3) Our backs are old. It is, I believe, Dave Marsh's cliche (somebody will doubtless correct me) that the first thing to go on a critic is his/her back, not the ears. True words. Chairs, people. Some place to sit. I understand that it changes your club's capacity. Honestly, I'll pay a couple bucks more to make up the difference. It's not about the money, it's about the experience. It's about my back, and 30 years of street basketball.

(4) I'm not looking for a cheap drunk. Please stock a reasonable handful of decent beers, a drinkable bottle of wine, and a handful of call brands of hard liquor if your license permits. And then -- this is the key part -- take care of that stock, and serve it appropriately. Don't hand me a Belgian in a bottle; some of them will froth all over the floor if you do that, and none of them are meant to be drunk that way. And don't give me a plastic cup, that's just insulting to the beer, and to me.

(5) Fix the bloody bathrooms. There is no surer sign that a club is going through hard times than to find crudely repaired bathrooms. I know they get torn up, and, as a homeowner, I've done my share of quick fixes to the family toilet. It's a cost of doing business that drunks tear up bathrooms. But this audience, the ones who came to your show tonight to see adults play adult music? We're not going to tear up your bathroom, although if it looks and smells like an outhouse, there's always a chance we'll go native.

(6) That sound of empty beer bottles clanking into a garbage can? Can we not do that during the set, please?

(7) Oh, and the sound. I want to be able to hear the opening act, no matter what the headliner says about it. And I want to be able to hear the headliner. I don't want to watch soundcheck unless I get there way too early. But if your sound engineer can't handle what's on stage, find somebody who can. I saw Old Crow in Nashville a year or so back at a venue where the sound was so deplorably bad that I will never go back. There's no excuse for that, especially in Nashville. But there's no excuse for it anywhere. A lesson, long ago, from Thelonious Monster, who played the Central Tavern in Seattle and sounded magnificent. They traveled with their own soundman, and he conquered all. The Central NEVER sounded that good, before or since.

That's all for now. I'll be back, if you treat me right.

Posted by Grant at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

December 28, 2007

In praise of corporate music

We received, Christmas Eve, the first response to our now-annual year-end poll, expanded this season so as to include both critics and readers. "You all boast of it being musical," he wrote, "All I see is it all being commercial."

Since many of you won't have received (or picked up, as the case may be) our January-February issue, I won't more than mention the furrowed brow that charge occasions. (We will, when the time comes, post most of the critics' ballots on this website. But not those from our readers, not this year, anyhow.) "Commercial" I take to be the present incarnation of the old canard vilifying "corporate rock" and such, and all I can say is that I've never met a musician who didn't wish to make a living (and a good living, if possible) through his or her songs.

More than that, the age of the major label is coming to a close, though that does not mean big business will loosen its grip on the making and selling of music, only that it will wear different suits. (Peter forwarded David Byrne's essay in Wired, which talks about six different approaches to the dissolution of the major label empires: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne?currentPage=1), and while Byrne is so smart I very nearly fear him, even his cogent piece is far from summary judgment.)

No matter. The reign of the majors is over, though some will survive in altered form. There's too much money there for them to collapse entirely. And I do understand the great bitterness with which no few musicians remember those new dinosaurs, for it was always (and will always be) an unfair power relationship: an artist's hopes and dreams balanced against a corporate ledger and a legion of lawyers.

But listen for an hour to classic rock radio, to pick a format, and try not to sing along. That was and is corporate music, as, in its own way, were and are Sun and Fire and Stax and Vee-Jay and Chess and Sub Pop and Motown and SST and all the rest. All the rest. The difference may have been passion and intent, but it was also a matter of having come to grips with the demands of running a functional business.

Lashing out at the names on our year-end lists for being "commercial" seems, again, silly. What musician doesn't wish for a bigger audience? Doesn't need an audience, in some deep and profoundly disturbing way? In today's musical environment, "commercial" doesn't necessarily mean "shoved down the audience's throat," as once it might have. Sometimes it means a chord was struck, people were moved to go buy a record. Sorry. To download a file (not that I have yet been so moved!).

Years ago, amid my transition from typesetter to editor (the second time), I stood up at a publishing program offered by the Stanford Alumni Association, in an auditorium of vastly more experienced (and better paid) publishing executives, to remind them that, yes, computers would take typesetters out of the publishing equation, and make things faster and less expensive. But there was a tradeoff. We typesetters fixed their mistakes, even though caste rules said we weren't supposed to alter submitted text. If we didn't fix them, we simply had to make corrections, which was a time-consuming pain in the ass process nobody enjoyed. So we learned how to spell Juilliard and added the extra i regardless how it was typed on the manuscript. They were shocked. "You CHANGE things?" they protested. Of course we do, I answered. We, too, are professionals, and those of us who took pride in typography also took pride in watching the backs of writers and editors, at least the ones we liked.

From where I sat and sit, as a critic and publisher, the major labels were very much the Medici. Capricious, generous, deeply flawed. Their advertising budgets -- their co-op budgets distributed through local and regional retailers -- supported, or helped to support, a disparate variety of independent local newspapers, including my old friend The Rocket, and its competitors. And, yes, they have been very kind to No Depression, and to our competitors. They have also provided good jobs for some very good people I am still honored to call friends, though we rarely speak these days. Some have hung on, others have drifted off. (And, yes, they housed plenty of pretentious idiots who didn't have a clue what they doing, and came with an ego to match.)

We will miss them, their role in the making and selling of music, just as I still suspect it is unfair and unwise to make most art directors responsible for working with text.

And for all the horror stories, the major labels also produced and marketed generations of stunning music. And crap. But go back through any label's roster, and try not to ask, "what were they thinking?" And they sprinkled money on everything they touched, from photography and design to tour bus construction and roadie salaries.

Wasteful and unfair? Sure. Big business is always those things. So, too, is small business, just on a grimier scale.

The new boss is always the same as the old boss. And most of us are simply grateful still to have a job. The only thing worse than a bad boss is no job at all.

But if you can make a living from your art -- even if it's bad art (the fairness of things means we don't have to listen, after all) -- bully for you. Listen to what you like, but don't begrudge the folks making the music a chance to make a decent living.

Posted by Grant at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

December 22, 2007

Typing Merry Christmas...

...places me, in theory, on a very particular side of a cultural divide that was news a year or two back, and is now codified and institutionalized nonsense.

I am unable to summon the faith or the need necessary to believe Jesus Christ was (or is) the son of God. And I am not a seeker. It is enough for me to accept that great work has been done, that there may be a plan (and may not), and that my job -- our job -- is simply to be and to become the best person one can be. Everything after that is a bunch of rules and excuses for putting our fellow humans on the other side of various dividing lines.

But Christ was a fine teacher, best we can reconstruct. And what he taught seems common kindness, a necessary reminder of the power and necessity of love. We could do worse; we have done far worse, and some willful misreadings of his teachers inspire some of his would-be followers to do worse. None of which I wish to argue today.

Merry Christmas was not, when I grew up, a difficult thing to say, nor to type. In one of the few examples of religious instruction I can recall, my mother once explained to me what the X in Xmas was replacing, by way of explaining why it offended her. She has no religion, but was raised to respect such things, best I can tell.

In our need to pick sides, to identify tribes, to include and exclude people in our in-groups, we have picked a senseless fight. Christian evangelicals wish to use this occasion to remind us of their version of Christ's teachings. Secular folk wish to use this occasion to remind us of the separation of church and state, and so type "happy holidays" instead. My side of the divide.

Ah, and this nation of the mostly faithful isn't strictly a nation of Christians anymore, is it? And so there is kindness meant to our Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Wiccan friends when we type "happy holidays" instead.

Whatever.

We all understand this as Christmas season. Most of us nurture our children on Santa Claus and the Grinch, which little Maggie is watching (the Jim Carey version) as I type quickly in my back office.

No. We understand this as a competitive shopping frenzy. And since my in-laws are in the retail business (coffee and books!), and I want people to go home from the holidays with good new music in their hands (however it gets there), I'm sympathetic to all that.

Sort of.

We buy a lot of crap out of guilt.

Landfill.

My wife's church arranges Christmas for 20-odd families in Rowan County, which I mention not to brag on them, but by way of a reminder of the point of the season. It's an awkward moment of human kindness, delivering those boxes of things, and poverty has its own distinct smell. But maybe it helps. We have to believe it helps. We have to believe in our capacity to help each other. We have to believe in each other's willingness to try to help.

Anyway. I don't care what God you pray to. Or if. But an institutionalized reminder that it is our obligation as human beings to take care of each other? That we need. Dear God we need it. And if Christ is to provide the brand name for that enterprise, so be it. I've been typing "happy holidays" all week, in those few moments I've had to respond to queries, because it's easier than trying to explain all those paragraphs I typed above.

"Happy holidays" sounds like a consumer mantra. And I keep hoping we are capable of rather more than that, that our principal contribution to our social ecosystem, and to our democratic republic, is not our winter solstice purchasing power.

So Merry Christmas, friends and strangers.

And if you can't figure out what to give somebody at this point in the shopping madness, let me suggest a check to the charity of your choice.

Or, y'know, a subscription to No Depression. (Typed only by way of proving that I am a loyal American, and not entirely humorless.)

Merry Christmas.

Posted by Grant at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

December 17, 2007

Rissi Palmer and black country music

Along about 1997 an entrepreneurial singer in Nashville by the name of Frankie Staton coalesced a small group of singers into something called the Black Country Music Association. Country was big on boots and hats and one-named stars like Garth and Shania, and Dr. Cleve Francis had come mostly to the end of his quixotic, three-album battle (on Liberty Records) to become the next Charlie Pride. So there was a willingness in the air to embrace something...different.

The BCMA arranged showcases at the Bluebird, and the Sutler, and, doubtless, elsewhere. We writers came, because it was a good story, because we always long to hear a great voice or two, and because it is impossible to write about country music for any length of time without worrying that one is attracted to and/or defending an unwanted kind of racial purity.

And there were one or two terrific voices on display at those events. So a couple of us talked about pulling a compilation together, dragged a producer and a record label into the tentative mix, and scheduled a meeting with the most experience of the singers we'd seen onstage. It was the last meeting we had. We three were, I think, accustomed to being around singers who wanted it so badly their dreams spilled into every waking moment. The singer with whom we met may very well not have believed we could do anything for her; regardless, she had no songs she wanted to sing, no idea how best to present her voice, no plan. No ambition. No drive. No want.

It was more complicated than that. At least one of the younger singers had a developmental deal with one of the majors, and at least one other singer was holding out for some such. And the talent on the ground was thin; it would have been a challenge to come up with a dozen African-American singers, at least within that particular orbit, who could and wanted to sing country music.

Nevertheless, like so many still-born projects, it fled into the slow wind without another murmur.

But it's wrong, still. Clearly there is (and, more clearly: was) an African-American audience for country music. Certainly country is still, at its roots, an expression of rural dreams, realities, and values, and much of rural America (although not much of this particular Kentucky county) is populated by African-American. Running through reissues from the 1960s, one finds not simply Ray Charles playing country, but Little Richard, and Solomon Burke (whose reading of "He'll Have To Go" is among the pleasures of the new Atlantic soul box), and the Staples and on and on. If compilations still were made and sold, there'd be a good one of African-American country covers (with Ted Hawkins' "There Stands The Glass" still at the top of my list), but they're more career quirks and experiments than they are statements of purpose. Or so it seems from this distance.

Some months back I started receiving e-mails proclaiming the arrival of a young African-American country singer by the name of Rissi Palmer. She had been given, the press releases said, the choice to go pop or country, but had chosen country. Her self-titled debut came out, according to my advance, October 23; she's had some slots on the Grand Ole Opry (and I wonder if she's replacing Elizabeth Cook as the Opry's "it girl"), and maybe some radio stations have played her first single, "Country Girl."

Maybe it'll work. She is, of course, an attractive woman, and has a serviceable (if unexceptional) pop voice. But, as with most mainstream country, there's nothing soulful to her singing, nor is there anything rural to her pronunciation. She has some of the gestures, but none of the emotion.

Well, it's a first record. It's further than the BCMA got, and no worse than Cowboy Troy.

But somewhere out there is a great voice of color yearning to sing country music. Unable to do anything but. With no choice in the matter. With nothing but want and raw talent. And I still hope to hear that voice one of these days. We've got to blur the class and color lines in this country, or retreat into armed camps. And I still refuse to own a firearm.

Posted by Grant at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

December 13, 2007

Travis Tritt

Two SXSW conferences back, Bill Friskics-Warren and I played hooky and went to see Sam Moore and some other soul veterans at Zilker Park, surrounded mostly by citizens with the good sense to enjoy free music, instead of our peers. We were well-rewarded for our trouble.

Moore had a hell of a band, and some guest singers, including Travis Tritt. And Tritt was terrific, clearly enjoying himself, in fine, full voice, and absolutely natural as a southern country soul singer.

That was the second time I saw Tritt sing. The first time was at an anniversary for Ernest Tubb's Record Shop, shortly after I moved to Nashville. Tritt was a much bigger star just then. They had blocked off Broadway and set up a stage, but it was a brutally cold night and there weren't many of us there. Tritt came anyhow. He sang, and that may have been where I first heard his hit "Where Corn Don't Grow," which I still think a terrific piece of schmaltz.

So I was waiting when The Storm came in last summer. Co-produced by Tritt and Randy Jackson, who I gather is one of the judges on "Star Search", it was offered as his southern soul re-emergence. And the musicians are first-cabin, from Kenny Arnoff on some of the drums to Kenny Wayne Shepherd on some of the guitars (and Greg Leisz on various crying strings), Matt Rollings on some of the pianos. Quality all around. I'm not being disingenuous when I claim no knowledge of "Star Search" and Randy Jackson. I have no idea.

But I figured he was a pro, Tritt was a pro, the whole thing might be a little shinier than I like but it ought to be spectacular.

And it wasn't.

I'm still baffled.

I was reminded of this when I flipped past Tritt on Glenn Beck's chat show on CNN's Headline News Channel, which on our cable provider is right between the two ESPNs, CNN proper, and Spike (where I tend to spend a little too much time watching the UFC). That's my excuse, although I do find Beck oddly interesting. Anyhow. Tritt was wound up and chewing his gum too hard and maybe trying too hard to have something political to say, or maybe I just wasn't receptive to what he was saying. (It was the line about the Left Coasters who SAY they support our troops, but we know they don't REALLY mean it that got me to surf elsewhere.)

Whatever. We're not going to agree about politics.

But I bet we both agree he's got a great voice.

Regardless, what I really want to know is what happened to that guy I've seen on stage? What happened to that singer challenging the great Sam Moore (and his fabulous backup singers)? Where's all that heart and soul I've heard on stage, and on more than a few country singles?

Say what you will about his hair and his politics and some of the cheesy songs he's made hits: The man can flat sing. And I was so hoping The Storm would be the album I could finally hold up to Peter and insist upon the point. That maybe Tritt could even have a surprise, break-through hit with classic southern country soul, and open doors for Sam Moore and Mavis Staples and Carla Thomas and Bettye LaVette and Solomon Burke and all the others at the edge of the present soul revival.

Ah, well. Not the first time an artist has disappointed.

But I'll play his next album when it comes, too. Even though I can hear my readers laughing!

Posted by Grant at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

December 12, 2007

A compleat idiot

Nothing is more humbling for a writer than trying to explain what a word means to a precocious four-year-old.

Except this: Being wrong, continuously, conspicuously, in public.

For several decades I have used the archaic spelling of complete -- compleat -- improperly. And I have finally been brought to reason by the simple expedient of being forced to look at a dictionary.

At some point in the early 1980s there was a book and video set (and maybe a box set of LPs?), originally published, I think, in England, titled "The Compleat Beatles." And perhaps a series of spin-offs. (A quick check at Amazon suggests the spelling is particularly embraced by fans of bondage and discipline.) And at some point in the late 1980s I asked somebody around the office at The Rocket what that variant spelling of complete meant. We had a couple writers of British extraction (who shall go nameless), and a staff member of mixed citizenship and great and curious erudition (and I'll leave him blameless, as well), and while I'm pretty sure it was one of those three who answered my query, I don't know which one. No matter. What I was given to understand was that compleat meant, ironically, "not really complete." As in..."the subject is exhaustive and this book is exhaustive but, inevitably, incomplete."

I didn't make it up out of whole cloth, I swear.

And so, I've used it to that purpose in various contexts. Including our print and online release schedule. Which is as exhaustive as we can make it, and, inevitably, incomplete. Over the years several people have told me it was misspelled, and I've replied haughtily that it was no such thing and they should look the darn word up.

Never, of course, having troubled to do so myself. (We also went some years at The Rocket before Patrick Barber looked up segue in the dictionary and so we finally quit spelling it segway!)

Not misspelled, mis-used!

My new Oxford American Dictionary -- given me last year by my wife because I insisted collectible was the preferred spelling to collectable (and it was, once, but my trusted dictionary was old and out of date) -- defines it thusly:

...chiefly humorous skilled at every aspect of a particular activity; consummate; these articles are for the compleat mathemetician. [the spelling compleat is a revival of the 17th cent. use as in Walton's The Compleat Angler.]

And so...we got it fixed in the next issue, the one that's on press. And we'll get it fixed on the website one of these days when we're fixing other things.

In the interim, I shall try to remember to question my own authority a little more regularly. Which, having a four-year-old running the household, ought not to be so difficult.

Posted by Grant at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 7, 2007

I Have a Problem with the Grammys

OK, we all have problems with the Grammys. Theoretically I qualify as a member of NARAS (I've written barely enough liner notes over the years), but it costs money and I've never joined and so maybe I should shut up.

But shutting up isn't among my strengths.

For the last two days I've gotten a string of e-mails from publicists telling me which of their artists were nominated, and that's all well and good and I'm tickled for most of them.

But where's Mavis Staples in all this?

How in anything resembling a just universe is Mavis Staples' We'll Never Turn Back not up for multiple Grammys this year? I mean, her producer, Ry Cooder, got a nod for his curious barnyard opera of an album. But which one do you want actually to listen to at night?

And, for that matter, Bettye LaVette is nominated in contemporary blues? I mean, I'm thrilled she got a nomination and all, but did anybody actually LISTEN to the records? (Surely if they had Joan Armatrading wouldn't have come through -- and I have nothing but admiration for the bulk of her recorded output.)

You want to tell me there are two better R&B albums than Ms. Staples and Ms. LaVette put out? That ANYBODY cut a better gospel song than Mavis Staples?

It ain't right. I tell you, it ain't right.

And, yeah, I know it's all about business and politics and I'm just a pipsqueak critic in a dark hollow in Eastern Kentucky.

But, damn. They should be giving Mavis Staples a lifetime achievement award, not ignoring the woman.

I'm just saying...

Oh. And what Peter just wrote about the Bottle Rockets' "Kerosene"? He's never been more right.

Posted by Grant at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 4, 2007

Toward a slow life movement

If the music industry were filled with kind people who were not presently consumed with the hazards of our own dubious survival, we would assemble a delegation and schedule meetings with every book publisher in the known world. "Look at us," we would proclaim in a massed, masked chorus. "We don't know what the answer is to the digital realm, but we've gotten it wrong every time. So whatever you do in the face of Amazon's latest book-reading electronic gizmo, don't do what we did."

Fellow old fogey Ed Ward, on his blog (http://berlinbites.blogspot.com/) and in our correspondence, rails eloquently against what he calls "the cult of the new." To bowdlerize: New is not better, it's just new.

Quite reluctantly I will admit the utility of a certain amount of online music sampling. It makes it simple and efficient to dismiss utterly irrelevant music, which was never the hard part of this job anyhow. BUT IT HASN'T MADE MUSIC BETTER. The CD was not broken, not unless you stepped on it or my daughter got honey all over it. As a vinyl enthusiast I never thought I'd mourn the passage of the CD. Now...those early silver discs sounded way too bright, and software eventually evolved to warm it up. Doubtless MP3s will, at some point, be of sufficiently high resolution to bear repeated listenings.

But this new technology only makes the marketing of music different and places the revenues in different hands. Period.

The makers of MP3 players, quintessential examples of expensive and intentionally disposable consumer objects, have -- under the buccaneer banner of free enterprise, free markets, and do it yourself punk puckishness -- shifted the music industry's revenue stream from software (the music) to hardware (the device which plays it). They haven't put more money in the pot. They've simply grabbed more of it for themselves. And it doesn't MATTER to them if the artists and songwriters and labels get paid. It doesn't matter of creative work is valued in the marketplace. What matters is that the markers of electronic devices have created and exploited a brand new market which they now control.

This is the WalMart paradigm. WalMart became so big and so dominant that it shifted almost all the risk of retailing into the hands of manufacturers, while hoarding all the rewards of good sales for themselves.

And so, to my friends in book publishing: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE BOOK. It's a wonderful, durable product which has, yes, survived the test of time. And some darn fool disposable electronic device which, by the way, holds a whopping 200 volumes (oh, please) isn't the answer to any question consumers have been asking. So don't make text available electronically. There's no reason to. All Amazon is trying to do, and this is one of the few American companies to have embraced the 1980s lesson of the Japanese business boom, and think long-term, is beginning the process of shifting the cash flow from publishers and printers into the hands of people who create and sell disposable electronic devices.

How else to explain the errant foolishness of present web logic which insists that user-generated content is the way to go? Why user-generated content? BECAUSE IT'S FREE!

And, yes, you get what you pay for. And somebody else -- not the user -- is getting paid.

This isn't simply tribal loyalties to my fellow creatives, though there's that, as well. Even if I were obliged to, I don't know, go kill chickens for a living (we ate the first one last night, for those keeping score at home, and he was quite tasty), I would still be a reader and a listener. The marketplace must continue to reward quality work and hard-won skill. It has to.

All this data people are so urgently seeking to acquire at ever-faster rates? Does it really matter? Does it really make your decisions better; does it make your life better not to be able to turn off work at the end of the day? Does it make you a better person? Improve your relationships? Really?

There's a slow food movement. We need a slow life movement.

And just say no to the Ken Doll.

Posted by Grant at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

December 1, 2007

Financial Planning

Though I kept company with a bond trader for some years, and have owned all or part of three businesses so far, in truth I do not understand money. Believing the stock market to be over-valued at 2,000, for example, I chose to invest my freelance earnings from the grunge era in an art gallery.

Vox Populi lasted a year and a half, but we had fun. I think my partner had more fun, but he had less to lose.

My vocation as a writer taught me what to do in the absence of money: Buy Ramen when it's on sale, principally, and learn to need as little as possible. For any number of years my retirement plan consisted of one bitter sentence: I'll be a burden on society, so as to repay it for being such a burden on me. But at some point -- right around marriage and parenthood, probably -- the consequences of that decision-making seem less attractive.

Much has been made for most of my adult life of the instability and undependability of Social Security. Don't expect it to be there when you need it, we've been told; or don't expect it to support you. It won't be enough. And so generations have scrambled to set money aside.

What we have done with all our obsessive retirement planning, it occurred to me in the shower this morning, is fuel the capital markets. It is our retirement monies which make possible corporate consolidation. We have paid for Clear Channel and WalMart and the aggregation of record labels into a handful of hands (though that seems more and more a pyrrhic victory). It is our retirement funds which have been leveraged to turn farmlands into suburbs, to turn small downtowns into wastelands and antique malls, to end the era of the sustainable family business.

And because most of us aren't stupid enough to try to micro-manage the investments which show up on our quarterly reports (or smart enough; but I think the game's rigged, or beyond my understanding, or both) we've largely been oblivious to the consequences of our choice.

We seek to use socially responsible investment screens with our modest savings, but without obsessing with a financial planner (who's inclined to think we're nuts, anyhow, choosing a lower rate of return), I couldn't tell you if we were investing in WalMart and Starbucks, both of which are or may be working to hurt my in-laws' coffeeshop and bookstore.

How different would our futures be we strangled the capital markets and chosen, instead, to invest in Social Security?

I dunno. I don't understand about money.

But it's a thought.

Posted by Grant at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)