Bunk Business Writing

I'm starting to see a bunch of whack business books as management tries to convince itself that sanity can be achieved only through a more thorough insanity.

The Long Tail is one—it insists that the way to make money is to sell more, older products. Making less on each one.

Sounds like hell to me.

And even the title makes it sound like ass.

Or a shitty idea.

That's like marrying for ass, instead of a face, brains, humor or the whole package. (Hey, he named it The Long Tail, not me).

He should have at least named it The Great Tail, then I could have associated it with Vida Guerra, but now I'm stuck with some crazy kind of droopy visual.

Or bestiality.

The answer, of course, is to allow the market to create more adn more beautiful face.

Or shit, I'd just admit what I want—the whole damn package.

Beautiful face, great body, caring hands, warm smile, luscious hair, fit, healthy, shining personality, relaxed demeanor, poise up one side and down the other, a calm autonomy, can fuck like a wild animal, turns elegant soirees on their ear.

Can bust a move in high heels, flip your lid wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Great style.

Likes to walk around the house naked, likes intimacy several times a day, is happy not working, has a taste for the finer things in life, has things she wants to do, comfortable alone, supportive, proportionate—and all those other things I've been thinking about for my entire life.

With some extras thrown in just to sweeten the pot and keep me growing.

Maybe it's not even one woman?

Who knows what the truth is? Or how good it can get once we admit our identical thirsts?

I'm not going to put a cap on it, let's put it that way.

Let's just shorten it to bangin!

Every day and in every way, of course.

Y'all are going to have to pull me kicking and screaming into social convention on that one.

That is, if you can starve me out (and it doesn't look like you can at this point—your financial and energetic dominance being on the wane along with your belief, mine waxing like that ass).

Which means, of course, selling fewer, higher quality items.

In which case, you better be in the content biz.

And you better not be charging current market rates.

Think premium folks.


The other guy wrote Cult of the Amateur. About how the internet is killing our precious culture.

God bless the internet—and ain't nothing been killed that wasn't dying already.

What do you miss—The Brady Bunch?

Joker's Wild?

Oh, you think the Bird and Dizzy were products of mass culture? And Hemingway and Brando?

They weren't—all the mass mediums had a golden age shortly after they became widely accepted as art.

All pioneered by dedicated individuals who took on the proverbial suits (who themeselves made their living mediating the value that the last pioneers gave their lives to create).

Call it the Tour de France effect.

When the Tour started, the miners who were the first racers lined up like they were offering a Tahitian holiday.

Cause for them riding a fucking bike around France and fucking pretty girls and drinking wine every night was like winning the lottery and going to heaven on the same day.

They could have charged them to ride for the first 20 years.

And they would have worked the rest of the year in the mines to pay for it—they had to fucking anyway.

Same with making records, movies, acting, putting out magazines, skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, even being a lawyer or a doctor.

Hell, even—and maybe even most relevantly—being a New Age snake oil merchant.

They were all so, so, so appealing compared to the alternatives—selling insurance, riviting beams, grinding parts, digging ditches, cleaning up after old people.

Or, even, sitting around starving and not getting laid because of your broke ass.

No wonder they had to beat young sax players off with a stick.

And guitarists started with cigar boxes.

They still do it in Hollywood—the only one that makes any real money (though the money comes from product tie-ins. Movies are essentially the best advertising ever made. Or are commercially un-sustainable).

The book industry, music industry and the rest of em are populated mostly by refuseniks who hate themselves and their participation in commerce.

How declasse the crowd chants. He had to enter a recording studio and try my best.

How judgemental, the posters screamed.

(Can you tell I've been reading my Wodehouse?)

If you see him, tell this dork that the only thing that's kept any sort of culture going for the last 100 years ARE the fucking amateurs.

And that if professional standards and the application of reason were any sort of benchmark for reward, he'd be mopping toilets.

(Then ask him if, knowing he would be swabbing toilets for five years regardless, if he would have thought for one second about writing a book bashing the bloggers he claims aren't worth even paying attention to in the first place. Dude!?)

Since when did writing a business book erase common sense?

Everyone from Charlie Christian to Sid Vicious to Tom Wolfe—everyone who changed teh game was a young turk. A freaking punk.

An asshole.

And accredited institutions—the pros—haven't done shit since Rococo.

It still makes me wince—and no wave of nostalgia has ever even touched it!

It was garbage.

I guess critics need someone to blame.

Since they aren't going to actually get off their asses and create anything of value.