Republicanism vs Democracy

The Dow is up 10 pts today despite the lowest consumer confidence rating ever. That's the point of having experts run complex systems--and in a larger sense the value of capitalism and the specialization of labor. Sometimes the volk is having a bad day or doesn't have a clear picture of what's really going on. Without Wall Street and their highly paid CEOs, we would have missed on on huge growth today.

Everyone hates it when the volk is having a good day and Wall Street ruins the party (like the last two months)--and starts getting pissy and calling for CEO salary cuts. But no one says shit when Wall Street fattens pension plans despite labor's small-picture fears. They just take the cash and smile. Like $60K a year for picking up garbage was a global birthright (the unionized garbage truck drivers in Chicago make $63K, it's $60K or so if you don't drive). That's a lot more than I fucking make.

This high-low interplay has been crucial in the creation of the modern world. Management vs. labor, policy wonks vs. public opinion, etc. All makes for a very efficient system. The conversation between these different viewpoints is what makes the market so valuable and efficient. In political terms it's called republicanism, though it's often termed democracy, which it really isn't. (Democracy is rule by the masses, republicanism is the masses electing a few leaders to rule, oligarchy is rule by the few.)

This high-low system works brilliantly in politics, markets, universities--even non-profit groups. It offers very valuable checks and balances.

The only place this high-low system isn't allowed to function is in mass content markets, where prices are arbitrarily fixed at low rates. Here we have labor but no management, a body but no head, Main Street but no Wall Street--we have the low without the high. Which is why it's so easy to bag on Hollywood, the latest crop of indie bands and network television as derivative, stale and booo-ooring. But impossible to suggest or create a better alternative.

The only way to create a better alternative is higher price points--which allow profitable entry into niche markets. Even the idea of high art is verbotten in today's cultural circles. College "experts" study comic books and Madonna. High art is eliteist, exclusive, and, though coveted, never mentioned but by the "declasse" nouveau riche. (Who buy Banksy, and will make lots of money off of him. Banksy, for his part, works overtime trying to be one of the--anonymous--people.)

In every other market, there are representative perspectives at all price points--for both the elites and the masses. The overpriced and the underpriced (loss leaders or dumped goods) or free. Prada keeps Roc-A-Wear on its toes and vice versa. The street informs the catwalk and the catwalk the street. That creates dynamism, excitement, energy and difference.

In content there is just the mass perspective--just the street. And our culture suffers accordingly. Streets with no cars get pedestrian awfully quickly.

Remember what a true mass-led society looked like--the Soviet Union. An elite led society--like fascist Germany--was no better, but neither was preferable. In fact, the only thing that's even remotely acceptable to me is the presence of both. The interplay of opposites.

A dance, a true dialog. A symbiosis creating a third element and dimension. A true hybrid.

What we have currently is one hand clapping. Y--h!

A true democracy gets lots of lip service but the founding fathers were well aware of the tyranny of the masses. And were very clear that the tyranny of the masses wasn't really preferable to the tyranny of the elites.

The cut rate internet today is the tyranny of the masses in cultural terms--where the valuable and important (judged by any individual's taste) is rare and hard to find. Buried as it is in a sea of irrelevant garbage. Try finding a specific popular video on YouTube in the sea of copycats, hangers-on and "responses" with the same title and preview image. The answer to hierarchy isn't enforced chaos. It's freedom.

And with freedom comes both high and low. Free and expensive. Common and precious. And, yes, arrogant and insecure.

It's like making hot dogs--if you try to skip the messy part you don't feel like doing, your dream ends up a nightmare. In trying to keep the internet--and creative content--free and cheap, we're shitting in our only pool.

A much better system, and one that will obviously arise, is a world where some content is free, some is cheap, some is mid-priced and some is expensive. And some is very expensive, and some is very, very, very expensive.

Then we'll have a cultural system that can weather downturns in public cultural opinion--such as the one we've been weathering since the 60s. A culture that sees so-called problems as opportunities. Only the creation of an independent and profitable culture will allow for creative expressions more valuable and nuanced than cliches like anger, frustration, perkiness, depression, loneliness and the like.

Right now we have the cheerleader and the goth--and nothing in between. With one price point, that's all we can afford.

Recentralization of Content

The internet decentralized content, and that was a fantastic positive. But with radical decentralization comes the growing impossibility of finding anything of quality.

It's one thing if you know what you're looking for--say recent political polls. That's intangible content and fairly easy to tag, catagorize, etc. Intangible content is highly mediated and so lends itself to being organized under existing brands such as newspapers, bloggers and the like.

But looking for something you don't know you want--like new songs, or creative writing is a much more daunting task. This is untangible content, and it doesn't matter if two short stories are both tagged Appalachia and Mining (or whatever)--the key differences between then are indescribable. The content is often unmediated in direct relation to its quality. (A new unheard song by an unheard artist that would become your favorite song being worth more than a new unheard song that would become your favorite by an already known artist.)

Attempts to mediate this process--like Pandora or Platinum Blue--are inefficient because they can deliver results similar only to our previous choices--they cannot allow for recent changes in taste and growth. They can introduce us to more of the same, but ignore the most important part of untangible quality--novelty. Breaking the mold.

If content is really good--of excellent quality--any brand above it, such as a literary magazine, will detract from it, not add. (Not to mention that an entirely new kind of story might appeal more to an audience than a magazine built on past success. The street changes and grows more easily and rapidly than any institution or business.) Hemingway is more important than any magazine in which he was published, though it is rare that a political columnist transcends The New York Times.

But typing "the new big thing" into Google yields nothing but jibberish.

Recognizing these pitfalls of decentralization, people are setting up alternatives to Google in an attempt to provide more relevant results, these attempts will continue until people realize the value of floating prices (and likely after). These are boutique search engines--attempts to re-centralize, or impose hierarchy on, the decentralized mess.

These search engines will be useful for free content, but will not provide as valuable an experience as floating prices could. This is what the market is learning. Pop-ups are entirely useless way to monetize content because they take from the consumer but don't give. Prices take but also give valuable information--they allow the consumer to make very complex choices very efficiently--so if you like hand crafted selvage blue jeans you don't have to start your search at Wal*Mart.

All content searches start at Wal*Mart. They then go to Target, Sears, Payless, Penny's, and TJ Maxx. Then they go to Wards, Old Navy... You get the point, they don't even get to Barneys' for the first ten minutes. If you prefer Saks, that's another five minutes. If you like upscale, bespoke designers with immaculate production values--real craftspeople making real quality--and have a geographical preference like local, then the free, decentralized internet is almost useless.

If you like the same kind of care and attention, novelty and bleeding edge values in your art, and are looking for someone you've never heard of, you're better off driving across town and asking someone. If it doesn't exist in your town--that is if it's truly rare--you may never know until it gets mediated. If you're an artist looking for inspiration, this is too late. You've already missed the boat.

Prices contain so much more information than any other tag or blurb. And they do so in such an elegant and compact manner that they are irreplaceable--just ask the Soviets.

The market is about communication and will always be arbitrarily inefficient and unnecessarily unclear without price information. In many cases, how many clicks something gets matters much less than even a ballpark idea of how much each consumer would be willing to pay for that click. Free isn't always better (or even nice) in the same way that welfare isn't always better than a job. Sooner or later the content sector will be forced to reckon with this immutable fact. White Gold is a hedge fund betting everything on this eventuality.

And it stands to profit fantastically. Though a majority of the gains will go to consumers and producers in the form of more efficient, more clear and more valuable markets, cultures and societies.

Proof of Premium Content Demand

Still don't believe that content prices are under massive pressure from consumers to rise? Still don't believe that boutique culture is the future?

Here's some proof:

A flick with no stars scores highest per-screen opening. $30 tickets. (And to think I've been talking about $24 price points for movies--I may have to adjust my prices upwards.)

They seem to have done it by offering free booze but it's a shorter walk from dropping the free booze and offering a better movie than it was to tripling the movie price and offering a way to get drunk. It's my assertion that films ultimately hold more value than booze. Call me crazy, but Yoga, tea instead of coffee and consciousness are on the upswing in my medium and well-heeled circles. Getting blotto and unconsciousness are increasingly passe.

All people need to know is that people will pay $30 to go to a movie-based event. The imagination of entrepreneurs and hustlers will do the rest.

$10 Magazine with a $117 Subscription Rate

This magazine is called Monocle and is $10 only because it's made in the UK (where it's 5 Pounds) and sold in the US, but it was front-racked in the Lincoln Park Borders in covering up a bunch of the business heavy hitters--Fast Company, Conde Nast's Portfolio, etc. And it has two stacks--proof that there certainly isn't much consumer resistance to higher prices for better content here in little ole' Chicago--just producer ignorance and entropy.

A year's subscription is 75 Pounds or $117--about eight times higher than a regular monthly. A lot of this is because they get all fancy, and I can't say it's as enjoyable a read as a Vanty Fair (they fall into a common "premium" trap of trying to appear different and precious to justify their price instead of just being more fun, lovelier, smarter and more varied), but the point is that consumers are happy to drop coin for something special.

Inside, they also note that the market for high end sunglasses is growing at twice the rate of that for moderately priced ones--but you already knew that. Premium branded everything is growing more rapidly than moderately priced offerings. Just read Trading Up.

Except poor little content, of course. The product that informs and inspires our lives most directly. There we only have one option--mass market drek or going without. The demand for premium content offerings just grows and grows. It's never satisfied because the market won't allow it to be generated sustainably--profitably. A premium boutique movie or book is rewarded nine times out of ten with commercial failure. I'm constantly amazed at the meager content offerings on which rich people have choosen to survive. They have the best of everything--and not a single film, tv show or song in the world. Even the Paul Allens, who spend tens of millions on Jimi Hendrix guitars and music museaums (and are wont to hop up on stage with a guitar), would rather devote a hundred mil. towards newer, zippy electronic gagetry than better content to enjoy on it.

Maybe they just all feel the best days are behind us--are stuck emotionally in the long lost nostalgia of their high school years?

If it wasn't their own uptight, repressed fault, I'd feel sorry for them. People all the way down the socio-economic ladder have not only songs but dances, movies, YouTube, DJs, mix tapes, soap operas, reality television, scores of magazines and lots of novels.

As more and more of us get rich, the demand for premium, boutique culture and floating content prices grows and grows.

Table of Recent Contents

As my posts run longer and different folks have different interests, here's a brief description of my last 5 posts:

Where I'm From -- Who I be and my credentials for running the world's first premium content corporation.

The Bridge Is Over -- Evidence that the fixed content price dam is under severe strain and will break soon.

Get In On the Ground Floor -- How you can make money and enjoy love while radically changing the world. The White Gold business plan, prose form.

How Will Humans Survive? -- My theoretical framework in historical/economic/scientific terms with any mention of White Gold or my own work removed. A historical snapshot of where we're going scientifically, economically and culturally. (Originally a response to a question posed by Steven Hawking).

Untangibles -- More background theory. Untangibles vs. Intangibles vs. Tangibles.

To read any of these posts, just click on the link to the right.

Where I'm From

I've been getting a little business interest so I thought I'd give a little info about myself personally. I usually don't have much of an interest in beating my own chest but I understand that investors will want to know what I'm made of, so here 'tis:

I'm 41, around 6' and W.A.S.P to the bone. In fact I'm such a W.A.S.P. that some of my family came over on the original coupla boats and were given tracts of land in Virginia by the King. This was back in the days when the land was described to include everything West of the deeded tract. I'm related to a couple of presidents and notables--Zachary Taylor and Martha Washington among them. Some of my cousins had Civil War generals camping on their lawns and stuff like that. One of them invented the first tobbaco brokerage, which became Universal Leaf Tobacco. Other early family members owned sawmills in the Pacific Northwest.

I was the 40th-something person in my family to go to Hamilton College, in upstate New York. At Hamilton I majored in History and minored in Studio Art--basically painting. While there a friend and I orchestrated an art take-over called Dig Day, which included issuing a school-wide manifesto and turning the campus into an art gallery. We got class credit for the whole thing and managed to get all the materials paid for. (Although the school and a good portion of the student body was less than happy with what basically amounted to a bum's rush.) The manifesto was later printed in a literary journal unrelated to the school called Big Fish.

I went to Garfield High School in Seattle--the same one where Jimi Hendrix, Quincy Jones and Bruce Lee went. (And Debbie Armstrong and the guy who designed the World Trade Center.) At Garfield I majored in getting fucked up every weekend and trying to get laid while taking AP and Honors classes. I majored in getting fucked up at Hamilton, too, but they gave me degrees too.

High school was fun, we tp-ed people's houses, jumped off buildings into the lake (a common practice in Seattle called "jumping"), went water-skiing, broke into country clubs and broke motor mounts jumping cars off the steep hills (another practice commonly called "jumping").

After college, I lived in Seattle during the prime grunge years and was integral enough to the scene to enjoy free entry and backstage access at most events and make it into a book about Nirvana. I had the Nirvana fan club database on my computer before it was handed over to a corporation to run (ie: before they got big big). At one point my floor was an inch or two deep with fan letters, solicitations for sex and the dollar bills people would include for return postage. I also knew guys in most of the important bands (those that were good, and not cheesy) and for a little while worked doing promotion at one of the clubs.

[An interesting note: the Seattle scene was basically born over the question of selling out. When the proto-grunge band Green River broke up, half of the members (Jeff Ament and Stoney Gosard) set out to find commercial success (later becoming Pearl Jam) and the other half (Mark Arm and Steve Turner) set off to keep things punk (starting Nirvana precursor Mudhoney). The Seattle scene was literally a discussion over what part money should play in art. Sub Pop turned making money into a joke and ended up striking a chord. Pearl Jam were seen as nice guys, but musically much less important than bands like The Rites of Spring, Fugazi, Come, Beeteater, The Afghan Whigs, and the like. (FWIW, I've always liked Stoney--he grew up a few blocks from my house and I've known him since the 6th grade or so. Jeff I've played basketball with and plays a decent, if unspectacular, game.) Soundgarden was pretty marginal after their early stuff and manufactured bands like Alice In Chains didn't even rate (or relate).]

After a brief stint as a bike messenger (where I was written up by my friends at Dirt Magazine in a blurb called "The Legend of Hamburgerhead"), I started my own graphic design company and did work for, among others, Sub Pop, Nirvana, Atlantic Records, The David Letterman Show, NBC, Henry Rollins, and a host of fashion, snowboard and youth culture related companies and tons of bands. I did photography and design and pitched to clients as well. I had a few international accounts and flew around occasionally for out of state clients. I ran the company out of a warehouse in downtown with a pool table and enough room to skateboard (and a front entrance in a stank alley).

During this time I lived next door to Charles Peterson, the seminal photographer of the Seattle scene and the guy who introduced the world to half-blurred, half sharp photos and distressed film borders as part of photographic prints (but don't quote me on that--I'm no photo expert). I thought I was in a few photos in his books but have been unable to find myself recently. I'm in a few of his photos used for other purposes and Charles was one of my closest friends during this time. We took drugs together, chased and bedded the same women and in general just did the damn thing. Charles took the photo on the front of my book The Love Artist, for which he refused payment.

I lived downstairs from Nils Bernstein, who owned Rebellious Jukebox and went on to be the publicist at Sub Pop. Nils is now publicist at Matador in NYC (having graduated from Seattle). Nils was largely viewed as the Mayor of the scene. He introduced me to loads of interesting folks and cooked me many delicious meals as well. (Thanks Nils.) Nils and I ran around for years as part of a core group that included the wonderful Kathy Mar and a few others--every show, every bar, every party, every BBQ. I have no idea now how I managed it, but it was pretty much 4-5 days a week for years.

Before Nils moved in upstairs Tammy Watson lived there. Tammy is about as close to the queen of the scene as you could imagine. She was slightly more on the more punk side of things, though she still knew just about everyone. In my cosmology, Tammy was #2 for a long time. I went to high school with both Tammy and Nils at Garfield, though I wasn't in their class and didn't see them daily back then.

We all lived in adjacent buildings (a four-plex and a two-plex) owned by a nursing home right off Broadway on Capitol Hill. (Periodically we'd hear people screaming "Mommy" or something similarly creepy for a few hours before they died--the home was right behind us.) It was rumored that the buildings would be torn down any minut, which meant no upgrades when something broke, but it also meant that if you missed a month or two of rent, they probably wouldn't do much (earlier residents had already collected $2500 relocation checks and taken trips to Europe with them).

Being right between the grocery store on 12th Ave where they sold crack pipes and Wite-Out (for huffing) on the counter (and trucker wallets and "Black Love" incense) and the reservoir, the street was nicknamed (by Tammy I think) the "freak freeway" for its colorful traffic. One party before I moved in evidently ended with homeless people joining hands around the four-plex and yelling at the cops to "arrest us--we're the bums!" and to "leave the kids alone". Rent was dirt cheap even though the hot water heaters shot flames when they turned on and some of the floors were falling in.

I knew Bruce Pavitt and Jon Poneman but was closest to Megan Jasper, who is now the #2 at Sub Pop. Megan worked at ADA at the time but she was, and is a dear friend.

I also knew a bunch of rock "stars" but discussing that is weird. And I didn't hang out with any of them very regularly as their business kept them quite transient. I had a band in Seattle with my friend Robin Perringer on drums and Brandon Angle on bass. Robin went on to play with Elliot Smith, Modest Mouse, and Band of Horses. He currently plays guitar with The Fratellis. Brandon was playing with Love As Laughter that last I heard.

A bunch of my friends made millions off of Amazon and Microsoft. Still more are making millions the old fashioned way--by grinding it out starting (numerous) tech companies, developing data-mining techniques, building yoga studio chains, working their way up the corporate ladder and opening restaurants.

I tried to ignore it as much as I could growing up but my parent's friends were running the show in many ways. One was the CEO of Boeing, another became mayor of Seattle (I used to babysit for him--he lived on the alley behind our house). One became the head lawyer at Microsoft, another became the Secretary of State in WA and went on to found a strange and influential rightist think tank. My neighbor across the street was a state senator.

Today, my sister is the environmental head of the Chicago Public Schools' environmental efforts (and has a non=profit start-up under her belt), my other sister gets regular promotions in Nordstrom's corporate office. My step-brother is a photographer with international clients working out of Madrid. Another step-brother works at the Tribune Foundation here in Chicago. (By way of inclusion, another step brother is an actor and life coach in NYC, and my step-sister works for a group here in Chicago that does civic consulting.)

I don't usually name drop or talk about people I know and I only mention all this so you know where I'm coming from. So that you'll consider dropping a couple milli instead of $100K and really getting this party started. My punk rock credentials aren't shit without my mainstream credentials--and visa versa. White Gold is nothing if it can't transcend both the best of the counterculture and the best of the mainstream simultaneously.

A tall order to be sure, but since both of them have such blatant and obvious shit they're scared of, it's easlier than it looks.

Rich folks can't have fun or let loose, punk rockers can't want money. I'm not convinced either of them are really fucking like they'd like to. And no one has time.

New Agers' music sucks (as does their fashion) and environmentalists are too crunchy, non-profit and preachy.

People are sophisticated enough that they want all the best from all these various value sets, but no one has pulled it together yet. Until now. White Gold is pulling it all together.

White Gold has pulled it all together. We're relaxed and luxurious and fuck your brain creative and have immaculate production values and hold spiritual truths higher than earthly facts. We're everything. We're everything you are. We're everything that everyone is. We are both inspirational and aspirational. We're the question and the answer.

My dad was an incredible photographer and lawyer who also worked to desegregate Seattle schools back in the day. He was also a .5 (.25?) handicap golfer and a voracious reader and thinker. (I think I was 13 when he gave me a book on the cosmological constant.) A bad day at the links for dad was a 76. When he wasn't otherwise occupied he was ruminating on the history of consciousness.

My mom is a leading national advocate for public school reform and has founded numerous successful non-profits around the issue. She currently consults with a group called Grow Your Own which is dedicated to developing community talent to teach at urban schools. Interesting fact: she knows Barack Obama and used to fund him when he was an organizer and she ran a foundation here in Chicago. She also co-authored the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for which Barack later served on the board and as Chairman. She's got deep connections in the foundation world with people at the Bill and Melida Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation and places like that.

My step-father was a Methodist minister who, among other things, founded the South Shore Bank in Chicago. South Shore was the first community development bank in the US. It is often hailed as a model of success and still operates today with 9 branches in Chicago. He also co-founded (in 1978) The Center for Neighborhood Technology, which is now recognized nationally as a model for promoting and implementing urban sustainability.

A great article about my step-father was written for the Chicago Reader by Billy Wimsatt, author of Bomb The Suburbs and No More Prisons and the founder of national group The League of Pissed off Voters. Billy is a close friend and says that the LOPOV was the result of a conversation he and I had in Chicago one day about The Puny League, a group I started with some friends in Seattle to educate voters and shake up the lame good government group The Muni League, for whom I had volunteered for a few years during election season. (I actually met Billy when Megan Jasper and one or both of my sisters flew him out for my birthday one year. I initially wrote him after reading Bomb the Suburbs.)

Also during the grunge years in Seattle, I volunteered and served on the board of The Service Board, a group that teaches job skills, community service and snowboarding to young people in Seattle. I volunteered there for a number of years.

The turnaround between then and now was the five years I spent from '97-'02 writing and putting out The Love Artist. It was during that time that I got clear on my own beliefs about art and commerce and tossed out the entrenched and arbitrary punk/counterculture viewpoint that money was bad and made peace with the mainstream way of doing business, although I still cringe at the actual lives of those who put themselves through that particular grind.

Sitting down to write the book, I started off writing something my friends probably would have loved--a scathing indictment of just about everything under the sun. Something David Foster Wallace or David Sedaris or Dave Eggers (who I term the Davids) might write--but more. Something cool enough to make me famous enough to get over in a miniscule counterculture way but not really changing anything. Something cool and white and detached and knowing wink, wink.

Instead of writing that book, which I thought might actually kill me (I was significantly depressed to start with and I could tell that tact would dredge up serious bile), I vowed to write anything else. In making that pledge, I ended up writing the only thing I could.

The truth.

The truth was that I didn't care about being punk or cool any more than I did about being hyper and corporate. I didn't give a fuck about any of the options that my culture provided. The truth was that all I could tell was my own story. All I could do was be vulnerable--go first.

What I learned over the course of writing the book was that there was no fucking vulnerability in our culture because there was no safety, support or reward for those making culture. There was no incentive to love, no incentive to find a way that worked. Only incentives to be sarcastic, harsh, angry, bitter, tepid or fake and shock. I wanted a hybrid--the best of everything. I also gave more of a fuck about getting "enlightened" than being cool, looking like I fit into some Eastern guru's ideas or making money. And I gave more of a fuck about being happy and enjoying myself than being "enlightened". I also wasn't prepared to give up great fucking, getting rich, living the good life, cashmere, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors, nice cars and motorcycles or any of the other good shit I wanted. [Almost all of which I now have--despite not having worked a "real" job in 11 years (though I have done some actual work--even manual labor).]

And I didn't think I should have to.

I also learned that getting enlightened should make me the most money of all--all other things being equal.

As this idea was completely taboo in both my mainstream and counterculture circles and no one but the freaks on the street could feel me, I knew I was on to something. And that I would either succeed or just leave behind some of the most interesting shit ever made and that people could have it when I died.

ALong the way I saw a vision of the world with the entire socio-economic pyramid opened up, an economy that not only grew more rapidly but was also sustainable and responsible. And not just sustainable and responsible but loving and fun. Remember fun? I saw a way for overworked executives and managers to become more valuable and happier at the same time. I saw a way for the Middle East and Africa to become participants in the world economy if they so desired without having to compete with insane Asia.

I didn't start off to save the world, I was just trying to save my own ass. The other shit just followed. I'm going to make plenty from this shit, so don't worry about me. All the extra--all the inspiration is free. Remember, I spilled the secret about floating price points for content and untangibles here for free long before I made a fucking dime. You chose not to listen, but it was sitting here free.

(I also tried to pitch it to some of the top business and creative minds in the world, but that's another story. That'll be fun to tell once it breaks. "Dude, I passed on White Gold--$50,000 for 1/3 of everything." "--Yeah, he pitched me his book on untangibles and I ignored his email. I wonder if it's worth anything on eBay?")

Did I mention that I'm not only not crazy, but that I don't even drink, smoke, do drugs, eat sugar or drink caffeine. (I do eat plenty of meat so don't worry about weird political diets.) Once in a while I'll get a chocolate dip ice cream cone--that's about as crazy as I get. My version of going on a four-week crack bender.

The premise of The Love Artist is that a guy sits down to write a book and finds that everything has already been written. That's the somewhat stated premise anyway.

It's set five minutes in the future.

Though The Love Artist was in many ways a bridge between popular art and counterculture art, when I finished it I realized that it had neither a mainstream nor a counterculture audience. And that it would be a while before it sold millions of copies a year. I also realized that once it broke, they'd have to teach it in college for the forseeable future.

But that and $4.50 would get me a fucking latte. In the mean time I needed to eat and make more shit.

Which wasn't going to happen at $14 a copy.

To say that I learned about mass content pricing from an artist's point of view is an extreme understatement. I was not only broke and severely in debt but also completely cut off from the comforts of being a part of the broke but with-it "in" crowd that serves as a cultural elite in this country. I had nether money nor the "alternative credibility" that confers authenticity. I wasn't a sell-out and I refused to be a maligned but hip victim.

I was unmediated. And thus incomprehensible.

Publishers didn't give a shit about me--even though one of their underlings, a guy who meet with me in NY at the risk of losing his job, told me that this was exactly what his friend all wanted to see. He told me that no publishers would touch it with a ten foot pole.

A white guy telling the truth--are you fucking crazy? South Americans we let tell the truth. Indians we let tell the truth. White folks? You better be new age or something. Be an expert.

So I published it myself--they would never have put me half-naked on the cover anyway--nor my price on the back. A singer we'll put on the cover, but a writer--a white writer--not unless his ass is dead and gone.

After I put it out, I did some readings and spoke with Spike Jonze, a friend from the grunge days, about the possibility of a movie treatment. (I knew Spike from his Dirt days and he was kind enough to return my call. I knew his friends Mark Lewman and Andy Jenkins better--these three went on to be involved in Grand Royal Magazine, Jackass, Girl Skateboards, Bend Press and about half the cool shit in LA). My thinking was that what was coming next would best be realized by someone at the crossroads of the waxing indie and the waning corporate cultures. Not so much.

So there you have it. I do have a few other qualifications that might be worth mentioning. In addition to my design firm, I started and ran a clothing company in Seattle called T HREE and was responsible for the overall look and feel, the catalog, clothing design, sizing, picking fabrics, working with sewers and overseeing production from patterns to labels to finished product. We billed T HREEE as liberation capitalists, it was basically a prototype for White Gold. I have also worked with top clothing and accessory companies on various branding and design issues so know the business.

And this is about it. In a few weeks I'll have my 1946 Harley Davidson sold and enough money to last throughout the winter. And re-do the vocals on the songs I've already gotten written. And I'll be strong enough that I won't have any interest in groveling.

The songs are all that's lacking. And while some uptight cultured motherfuckers might be able to ignore the next great American novel, and some stupid art fucks might be able to ignore some dope paintings, there's no way the kids can resist shaking their fucking asses. When they find it's $14 a song, with no downloads available, they're going to cry "Why?!"

And as the good book says: "Ask and you shall receive."

And they shall ask and I shall receive.

Now may I please have a couple million dollars? It'll make your whole life, guaranteed. Not to mention usher in the entirely new age everyone's been hemming and hawing about for so long it's boring. It will also solve the current market problem, reverse the trade deficit and save us from impending environmental disaster, but don't do it for those reasons, do it for the pussy or something interesting.

Peice.

(Did I mention that I'm whitegoldsoundsystem on eBay—a Silver Power Seller with perfect feedback on over 300 transactions and that I pack carefully and ship everything from guitars to vintage Neve preamps everywhere from Europe to Japan?)

That's as hard as I sell... oh wait..

I forgot, in case you need artist cred--I've also fucked 6' black models and even more attractive Korean lawyers (thought in the spirit of full disclosure, she wasn't a lawyer at the time, just managing people twice her age at a cool non-profit and putting on break dance competitions).

So..

That's all I've got. If you don't like me yet, you'll probably never like me.

So peice out, bitches.

Either make yourself rich or be another one who passed on the future. I don't give a fuck. It's not like this shit can be stopped.

The Bridge Is Over

People--if you want to make money, hit me up!

The fixed price content dam is breaking.

Warner Brothers Wants Higher Prices

Apple Threatens to Shut Down iTunes Over Royalty Increase

Songwriters Fighting for Living Wage

This is the battleground of the immediate future and fixed prices have never held their ground before.

If you can even partially feel premium mass content--read the next couple posts and hit me up.