First, a music video from a TV series that makes me laugh, laugh, laugh!
Maybe I’ll write my own song and this post’s title will start off the progression. Sounds bluesy already. Some 1, 4, 5 chord repetition, with an upteenth personal failure to round it back, and I’ll sing and record another down, down, way, down-down cautionary tale to add to the Mammoth Cave archive of songs written by depressed alcoholics weeping to the world about business.
The theme is this. It’s always this:
“I failed.”
And if in the beginning one was successful at failure, like say, a Mark Zuckerberg or local butcher, then I suspect the realization of life failure to come down hard at the end, like a piano pushed out a window onto a cartoon of a man or woman who spent their first and last existence fretting about business.
It happens with dreamers too. Not those artists of life few of us ever have the patience to observe and learn from, but with the lessor ones who expect a future reward for a harried present. Painters, writers, and blues singers are shopowners, doctors and hairdressers (and vice-versa) because business is a catch-all phony tent like the GOP, with a cache of little capitalists determining life success by profit margin. It’s never enough to have one chicken in the pot on Sunday. Good business is a tub full of chicken parts set simmering on the street so every neighbor can see. And a tub full of chicken can be an Audi Q8 or just a smug look from a successful businessperson secretly accounting for debits and credits on a coach flight back from Dallas.
I know Mark Zuckerberg is an enormous failure. I can see the invisible piano leaning out the picture window 30 stories up from wherever he is. I can’t prove this to you, and certainly not to him, unless either of you are ready to die this moment and account for a life. Anyway, last words are unreliable sources for proof of life success or failure. Take for example “Rosebud” or, what I learned from a computer parlor game were Henry Thoreau’s last words:
“Moose. Indian”.
I love to quote Thoreau about business. He’s my blood second cousin, 5 times removed, and I feel the kinship:
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed—he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them (italics mine), or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy.
I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
I copied that quote down on an account ledger 30 years ago. I was keeping a daily record, writing bad prose and poetry, and beginning to think on things that nobody cared about, but I kept at the practice like a mid 19th century cousin his huckleberry picking. Thoreau got away with staying out of business because he had good friends (in business), a doting sister, and rights to Ralph Emerson’s brand identity property to build a cabin, bake potatoes, and write a book. I don’t think the piano crushed his spirit in the end. I believe he had enough contentment to keep on dreaming of his moose and Indian right down to the last breath. Emerson, on the other hand, with all his private greed and need for applause, got splayed by the piano and left agonizing for an hour or two before his final breath (the tallest building in the world was 9 stories at the time, and nothing in Concord higher than a church steeple).
So, unlike a Thoreau and more attuned to a displaced Pennacook villager, I’m going into business. I received an attractive sky-blue journal as a Christmas gift from my daughter, and I am using it to account for my first business venture in 54 years. I am ready as I’ll ever be to take the meandering path to successful art sales. Debits are black and credits are red (I just learned that). Here is how I price my paintings, and below is where I’ll set up art housekeeping in Rochester, NY.
Now from the sky, (215 Tremont Street #215, Rochester, NY)
Oh, very cool.
And here is a partially updated website to get to know the beggar better.
I put $630.18 in my PayPal account to start up operations. I’ll get the key from my new landlord, some time around February 1—after the facilities workers are finished refurbishing the room—replacing nicotine stained ceiling tiles, painting the walls semi-gloss white, and adding a hot water line (must keep those brushes clean to stay in business!).
Studio 215 has 900 square feet of space that I intend to share with two or three other painters whom I choose. Next door is a 1,200 square foot gallery for our use (and others to rent) for exhibitions. Word of mouth will be necessary, for 600 bucks wouldn’t buy a quarter page of advertising in a school newspaper.
I need to make $300 a month for the studio to continue, $700 to be proud, and $900 to insure another year of staying in the black. Every second I’m in business is a compromise of a present contentment for a future promise of success, which my gut and smarter people tell me, is impossible—unless of course I pine for that ever ready piano to crush me like a bug.
So how much art will be lost while focusing on art business? I’ll let another Henry give the last (2) words (this Henry is a spirit relation closer than any kindred):
Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
The remarkable thing to observe in children’s work is that the child gives the impression of having done it with his whole being. They surrender themselves completely to what is in hand. Whereas even the biggest artist has to wage a constant fight against distraction. He is conscious not only of the future opinions of the critics, the price it will fetch (or not fetch!), the value of his tubes, the nicety of his choice of color or line, but also the temperature of the room, the stains on the floor, the bath he forgot to take, and so on.
—Henry Miller
Therefore, continue to paint without profit, fill the little blue book up with drawings, sit in my bubble bath like Simon, and go into/out of business every second of eternity.
My business song:
I went searching for more Thoreau quotes copied in journals from long ago. I found the entry when Rose (my wife) first agreed to go on a date with me.
More about Thoreau. Here’s a brief account of a 2015 visit to his stomping grounds:
The Past Is My Future at Walden Pond
For two years Henry David Thoreau lived in a tiny house he built on the northern shore of Walden Pond. He was a philosopher who, like everyone else, ate and slept and voided excrement, but unlike anyone these days, drafted a life worth living to a nineteenth century humanity rife with bacteria and virus that did not play nice. In my opinion, the memory of his fingernail dirt has more value on the exchange market of a modern earth turning than the life of any president or prime minister. He could conduct a future rife with wisdom to any poor boy in America over the age of eleven while wrapped up for a day in his great coat. Thoreau— a higher prince than a modern Buddha, less of a dandy than flutey Krishna, and all the glory Jesus would have become if Texas never happened. I shall not explain, but I will tell you. I am weary of all interpretation and attempts at persuasion. As of today I have transformed into the 21st century mutant red squirrel chip-monk. My eyes won’t blink. I distrust all several billion of you. Your species is insane. Without reason and philosophy, all people are suspect in a culture of sun and moon chasing unto death.
Slip on your tights and bike ride to cleanse, thin middle-aged men of America. There’s a good work-out waiting. Climb a mountain, kayak a pond, check your heart and pulse rates with a magic watch fat burger automatons, and order bean sprouts to sweep out those greasy prostates.
Look what Americans have done to the memory of a great man! A state park. Ten bucks a car. Hired summer work to take the money, but no one paid to love the park. The bike riders come, with bike and gear worth more at resale than all I have accumulated in coin thus far with creative effort. Working class swimmers climbing out from their railroad shanties at midday to test their pallid potato skins in the broad daylight. No proud gait. No soft eyes. Smart-phoning selfies while the Fitchburg railroad roars past the southwestern shoreline. In the guest book at Thoreau’s model cabin a girl wrote “Your book sucked”. I wrote beside her name, “iPhone® thug!” Obviously a young girl, forced to read Walden in high school English class. A breathing, walking mound of ignorance—the embodiment of failure of parents and teachers unschooled in humility, reverence, and pride. The poor girl doesn’t have a chance at happiness and will die a theoretical old maid with the latest game app glued to her face. We handed the bronze statue Henry our Tracfone® and told him to GPS the Marlboro Road. Oops, the data was maxed. So he opted to snort a rock of meth on the pond beach with wannabe Boston skinheads and compare stupid tattoos.
We made our way to the pond and walked north along the shoreline. A man in full body American flag swimsuit was divulging his daily hair gel routine to two interested men obviously unhappy enough about their own hair to commit homicide. At that moment I wanted war to rain down upon us. There can be no future for my unborn grandchildren if this kind of narcissism has reached Walden Pond en masse. Just a few paces more and we arrived at the cabin site, the only original construction left being the foundation to the fireplace. Some society in 1947 thought enough of Thoreau to memorialize it for future Walden perambulators. I am grateful. I touched the stone that Henry dragged to this spot like a believer of the Dark Ages stroked a traveling sandal strap facsimile of his beloved savior. Humility revered is a wonderful feeling. It is a human touch we need now more than ever. So rare is it to be found in this present society. No one lauds the greatness of others in order to mark a hopeful destination for themselves. A woman came up with her friend and I overheard her telling him that living at Walden was no big deal; Thoreau brought his laundry to his mother. Can’t be a great thinker if someone does your laundry! The arrogant ignorance of my countrymen. This poor woman can’t breathe without Ronald McDonald®, gasoline, French cheese, Vietnam sweatshops, Proctor and Gamble®, Internet connection, smart phone, 20% gratuity, big media everything, alarm clock snooze and periodontics unto death after partial.
Up on “Author’s Ridge”, back in Concord village, Emerson self combusted his bones after hearing that one. Alcott didn’t get the irony—she always did her man’s laundry... And wrote books. Equality she knew was several generations away, so adversity was obvious and had to be overcome. Now thoughtful people leave trinkets at her grave, and dumb people piss their Pepsi® in Walden Pond. Thoreau’s mother did his laundry! My god, we should just start eating each other if this is what humanity has become in Concord, Massachusetts. Arrogant ignorance. Men teaching men about hair gel products. Dogs being invited to shop with their loved ones. Bicycling for no other reason than to detox almonds, kale, and the occasional meat product prepared by immigrant slaves a thousand miles away. Target® probably sells “Civil Disobedience”. Why not? It’s all cuckoo without men like Thoreau. America had a very brief Greek revival in a time of devastating child mortality and over-the-top fear of the supernatural. So brief that it lost all ground after one generation. Thoreau knew what seeds his contemporaries would leave. He wrote warnings and solutions. At the Old North Bridge that is in need of much care, the grounds being neglected from lack of help, one can look skyward to a machine of war flying by. It’s good and loud—both arrogant and ignorant. Back home the pilot gels his hair and learns from his kids a new smart phone app. This weekend the family is taking the bikes up to Newburyport to ride the bay circuit to Ipswich. About as transcendental as Gandhi on a lunchbox, or Martin Luther King boulevard on a hot summer day.
Henry Thoreau lived for me, but only I can give a damn.
Thanks for reading!
Ron