After an entire month, a few observations about the day's experiences

I assure you that the past month's absence is more a reflection of my state of nerves and laziness than it is a reflection of the quality of my life. Go me!

Today I learned…

• My only remaining excuse for taking lousy care of my teeth is that I’m just damned lazy.
• Kansas winters make me homesick. (Go figure.)
• Fish sticks were not put on sale at Dillons arbitrarily; it’s Lent and there's the whole meatless-Fridays thing going on (not that I bother to observe, though I am fond of fish sticks… hmm… piscatine food-like substance).
• Cheap LCD displays hate being unused for extended periods of time.
• There's some dude in town who’s the spitting image of Matt Damon. How strange.
• Doubling up combined width/max-width/min-width attributes in a parent-child node relationship causes Gecko to prove that π = 3 for extremely small values of π. Or something.
• When you are heads-down at a coffeehouse, there are few things more terrifying than discovering that the restroom is Out of Order.
• My MP3 player is sweet in many ways, but its battery life is only a fraction of the length of the playlist it can hold. Argh.
• Firmware updates are a Good Thing — I no longer need to reboot my POS router every time I power up my MacBook.
• The aforementioned router (a Linksys WRT54G) apparently will issue a lease on 192.168.1.100, which caused ZoneAlarm on the desktop to throw no end of conniptions.
• Bloglines is, like my router, a POS. But I’m too accustomed to having it handy to find a better service.

… and that's it for thus far today.

What does the present sound like?

Matt Haughey wrote today-ish about his “half-assed” take on The Future of the Music Business, and after reading it I realized that the matter could stand more thought.

While I do not approach this subject as a musician aspiring to stardom, I have a number of friends — some of whom I’ve rejected as prospective clients by advising them to start out on MySpace — who are so aspiring. One or two of them have actually come tantalizingly close to notoriety, if not actual fame. (Only in Lawrence, folks.)

I care, and consider myself entitled to share my opinion, because:

• I like music, to the point of its near-omnipresence in my life; and
• I may well be one of the professional cohort who help bring about the form into which modern music marketing morphs.

[Say that last one fast ten times.]

What today looks like, from my perspective

You have these BigCorp entertainment companies who find the most marketable musicians, put them into straitjackets also known as “contracts,” and proceed to leverage the hell out of those same properties by recording, advertising, and distributing their creative product in the ways that maximize their return on investment.

[My choice of language is deliberately sterile here, especially when you consider that I haven’t yet mentioned the unfortunate consumers of this music.]

The end result is that traditional record companies — including indies — have the entire market for traditionally marketed music, between them occupying a vast but slowly shrinking majority of the sales graphs.

When I stop to game this out, I see three constituencies with entirely different (but not mutually exclusive) goals:

• Record companies want to make the greatest possible profit at the smallest possible level of risk.
• Musicians want to make a good living doing something they love, for wildly varying values of “good” and “love.”
• Listeners want to get the greatest possible amount of enjoyable music possible per dollar of expenditure.

The way the system works now, most listeners buy Compact Discs with anywhere between six and twenty-plus tracks on each, amounting to a maximum of seventy four minutes of audio recordings. Of these, it’s typical that only half of them are good.

Musicians often wind up playing what they’re told to, of which half is typically crap they can’t stand.

Record companies, meanwhile, operate in a web of legal and political intricacies, which if navigated well result in receipt of the whole profits.

At least, that's what Steve Albini thinks, and he has no good reason to lie about it.

Meanwhile our three constituencies have devolved in parts to the following:

• “Pirates” sit in one virtual corner, all of them merrily downloading stuff they only pay for as part of their Internet service bills, no portion of which go to the recording industry.
• The recording industry sits in another corner, raising barriers of entry to music broadcasting in order to maintain control over their most important promotional medium apart from word of mouth. Simultaneously they make grossly negative examples of loyal listeners, forcing Internet service providers to spend on discovery what could just as easily have been handed over to the record companies without a ruckus.
• Musicians run the gamut. Some whine and others innovate or experiment. Most just sit tight silently and do what they’re told while they wait for the dust to settle.

From all of this the writing on the wall is clear: the music industry as a whole must adapt to rapidly altering modes of distribution, and until it does, revenues will continue to drop.

In the next entry, I’ll discuss where things might go from here. Some of them might even put the lion’s share of the money where it belongs: in the hands of musicians and writers.

For the first time in three years, I’m actually blogging under my own banner.

Maybe I’m being impulsive, but what the hell.

It's time for me to start writing again without delay... mostly about Web-related topics, but there are others on my mind, too.

The item at the bottom of my to-do list for the past three years has been a publishing platform far more sophisticated than the one I built for my Illuminati Online site from back in the day (disable JavaScript before going to the actual content, if you’re really that curious), and my intent has been to write it before going back into regular blogging.

Meanwhile, life is — as they say — what happens when you’re not paying attention.

The good news is that I now have a client willing to finance that work in part (I think). The bad news is that my urge to bloviate has overtaken the march of time.

...So here I am.

Where is that, exactly?

First, some background

There was a stretch of about eighteen months where I had my heart ripped out of my chest repeatedly if only proverbially, most significantly by the unexpected death of my mother from cancer.

Nearer to the end of this spell I moved from Portland to the much different (if not necessarily greener) pastures of Lawrence, Kansas, encouraged by a few now-erstwhile friends.

A move away from Portland was something I was already planning when Mom fell ill, though how ill she’d become wasn’t at all understood until a week before she died.

In Portland, memories would be redolent on the air at every turn.

I have a good enough memory that I do not need to be reminded of the stretches of the lower Valley where I spent the years of my childhood that passed before interacting with my mother became an exercise in supreme patience. All I need to do is close my eyes and concentrate. The sights and sounds of memory will return on demand, vividly enough to make me cry.

No less difficult is recall of the sights and sounds of the afternoon during which I travelled to the hospital, trudged up to the ICU, told Mom — by that time so immersed in pain and the drugs meant to manage it that she could no longer see — that I would be okay and that she could let go, and then only moments later watched her do exactly that.

[...And the conversations I had with my grandparents that afternoon were even more poignant. Let’s not go there.]

That I would willfully choose to remove myself to the oh-so-cosmopolitan place known as Kansas was a mystery to practically everyone with an opinion. Everybody asked what my deal was, so to speak, and my response to everyone was if it was good enough for William S. Burroughs to die in, it’s good enough for me to live in for a while.

Apart from the previously mentioned encouragement and personal considerations too private to lay out in detail, there was the fact that at the time of my decision, I had an outside hope of obtaining a job with the online division of the local paper.

Northeast Kansas had (and still has) the virtues of being 1500 miles from my mother’s family, which became far less dysfunctional after her death but still has more issues than I want to deal with.

[...And lest you wonder, yes, I would move back with dispatch — and some ambivalence — if asked to do so.]

I had attended both high school and college in Columbia, Missouri (during and after my father’s graduate study in American history at the latter institution), which gave me insight about the values and virtues of the area. I knew Lawrence quite well by reputation.

To me, the choice seemed like it had possibilities.

The whole point was to get over myself already in a place where I would be able to steer clear of drama.

...And now?

After more than three years, I know I need to gear up and move on. As years go, 2007 has been full of questions and fears in full measure: is this all there is to life? For the sake of my own health, the answer to that question needs to be a resounding NO! If I stay in Lawrence too long, however, that's not the answer I’ll get in practice.

Having an apartment that I can stand to live in by myself has proven to me how far into my proverbial shell I can go, and at the heart of the matter I am neither young nor parochial enough to get the most out of Lawrence.

I need badly to raise my bill rate (or so I’m told). I need to go legit on software and paperwork. I need a car. But most importantly I need to start connecting with people around me, and starting a new blog is part and parcel of that task.

Beyond the demands of maintaining my own good mental health, I am forced to concede that so much has changed in the past three years. RSS and social networking have come into their own, which makes resource collection fractionally as difficult as before. The maturation of production processes for latest-gen browsers has begotten a lot of conversation in which I’d like to take part, and the evolution of Wikipedia has reduced the hassle of link research. All of these things together mean that blogging is a lot more fun and productive than when I was last into it.

So... "Hello, World!"