Oh my God, I’ve looked forward to this for so long it doesn’t seem real. October 31, 2012 – at last Iceland Airwaves is here!
I planned to follow official advice and take the first day easy, so I only put four shows on my schedule, with nothing until 6 pm. In the morning, I walked down to Prikið, which claims to be the oldest café in Reykjavík, hoping to find some waffles. I opened the door and almost knocked over the man standing just inside. The place was absolutely packed, and I was stuck blocking the door. Because none of my shows were there, I had not realized Prikið is an off venue. Icelandic singer-songwriter Myrra Rós was performing an acoustic set to a rapt audience. Read More
You didn’t really think this post would be about church did you? My Sunday was all about music.
After spending Saturday evening in journalistic research and preparation, I took three melatonin, put in earplugs and went to bed at ten. And praise God, I slept until 9 am. I joined my new roommate, Amandine the French fashion-finance whiz, for breakfast, where we talked about food standards, immigration, and social programs. Read More
A lot of things have irritated me this election cycle, but few get under my skin as much as “jobs creation” as an election issue. It wasn’t until this week, when Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ completely DIY album hit number one on iTunes in America, Germany, and probably a couple other places, too, that I put together the messages of “Thrift Shop” and “Jimmy Iovine” to see just what was eating me about the jobs creation.
Jobs creators: A spin-doctored term for the oppressed minority of rich white men upon whose backs the rest of us stand, ungrateful for the jobs they have given us with their very life’s blood
The term assumes that jobs are created out of thin air the same way that jobs creators’ wealth is created on paper. It denies the possibility of jobs growing organically out of the work that actually needs to be done to sustain our lives on this planet.
“Jobs creation” treats jobs like commercial products that must be endlessly regenerated to keep the system rolling, whether the outputs of those jobs are actually valuable or not – which I guess is an accurate depiction of the current system.
Value Creators
Like Macklemore, I prefer to make wise use of the commercial products and jobs we already have, rather than wastefully producing new ones without regard to their usefulness. Imagine if, instead of protecting the privileges of the tiny minority of jobs creators (who, let’s face it, haven’t served that purpose very well lately anyway) we as a society collectively said, “Fuck the jobs creators. Let’s find a system that allows musicians, sculptors, painters, writers, parents of small children – all the people whose creations sustain us – to make a living creating things of value instead of commercial products.”
Then, all the jobs currently held by value creators could be recycled to employ the folks who actually want them.
Our society doesn’t seem quite ready to ask the question, “What about the arts creators?” and we’re not very good at choosing collective responses to social issues. Until the day when proper funding of the arts becomes an election issue, I’m glad to see Macklemore proving it’s possible to DIY without the jobs creators.
I often harp on the irrelevance of genre distinctions, but even I have to admit that some musical tastes are incongruous; for example, opera and heavy metal. ‘Bel canto,’ after all, is simply the Italian for ‘pretty song,’ and let’s face it, metal includes a lot of ugly, ugly music. Opera is classical, classy, appealing. Heavy metal is brutal, thuggish and off-putting.
A lot of great art is divisive, but it is the rare piece of art that is divisive within the same person, at least if that person is me. I can only think of a couple of examples in my own life where I came away from a book or film thinking, “That was amazing. I never want to see it again.” Amores Perros is the first example that comes to mind. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is another. The Red Pony is a third. Read More
