Why It's Hard in the Arts

The New York Times had a fascinating article on the state of humanities in the middle class. Basically it is terrible. Writers, musicians, filmmakers, painters are in bad shape. It begins early in college when you decide to major in the humanities. Your starting salary is around 31k while someone in business is around 56k. And from there we go down hill. If you decide to become a writer lets say the odds you will make a living are very against you. So you decide to become a teacher or a professor.

Teaching in high school is all encompassing and so that leaves no time to write. Teaching in college is now an adjunct world. So you make no money. The few get tenure. So you take a low paying job you don't do well at because your heart is not in it. Compared to your business counterpart who likes making money and does much better. But you are an imposter looking for employment in a world that does not offer it.

I know that when I started out I worked sales jobs because they allowed me to write. I always got fired because they smelled a rat after a while and I moved on. The comparison to sports is apt here. Sports are subsidized in our country in a very large way through universities and cities and states. It is very acceptable to build stadiums and give Universities grants for sports. Try that with the arts and a mantra of 'get a job' rings in your ears. It is no wonder it is hard to survive say as a writer or an actor when the one percent rule is generous at best. A small group of people make all the money.

The article ends with saying  society needs the humanities and we should support our artists. I could not agree more but I don't see that happening...but at least someone wrote about it.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

What you Don't Know

What you don't know is that someone is getting a million dollars for a manuscript that may not be that good but is new and different and plugged in. Or that person lives in New York or LA and has lunch with editors and agents and scores book deals  and film deals the way you talk to someone from the PTA. That these directors, actors, authors, moguls, all came from power band schools in the East and they read authors you have never heard of and know brands you have never heard of and go to clubs you have never heard of. What you don't know is that they don't know you exist.

And it is not your fault or is it. What you don't know is they knew it every young. They knew they would have to go to the best schools and live in the best ares and vacation in the South of France and go to prep schools and attend prep games and drink coffee in the wee hours in Manhattan or LA or Chicago and walk with other people who know the same things they know and maybe they will become a pundit, a movie star or  a lawyer or run for President. What you don't know is that they knew about these options while you were riding your bike in some Midwestern neighborhood and goofing off in school.

And what you don't know is that right now they are eating better food than you ever will. They are eating food you have not heard of made in ways you have not heard of. You are eating a burger or some animal based garbage that will give you cancer and heart disease while you sit at your sedentary job while they work out in some three hundred a month club and then have a radicchio salad and drink organic Super Foods that will make sure they never get cancer or heart disease.

And they don't know about you and they don't care. You simply don't exist. There are these people who have known what you never knew, but you watch them on television or hear about them or see a movie about them and you ask yourself...do people really live like that?

They do.

www.billhazelgrove.com

Kiddie Novelists

 There are now kiddie novelists. Parents who publish their kids book for three grand or whatever POD (print on demand) cost now. And yes there is a publisher specializing in kidpress. Why shouldn't there be? With the advent of helicopter parents and Spockian reward systems (the childs world most important) of course parents will get in the act. Yes you can be a novelist. Yes you can be a rock star. Here I will burn you your CD complete with graphics for your cover. Yes you can be a filmmaker and here is your high definition video to film camera to do it with. Just upload to Youtube and you might get a million hits.

Art for the masses or everybody gets to be a star. Sure. Give little John or Jane their book and as the parents in the New York Times article pointed out ,it is just like sports. Some people give their kids five thousand dollar travel teams and we give ours a book. Right. The problem is that little Johnnie or Janie don't really deserve a book the same way they don't deserve a five thousand dollar travel team complete with major league uniforms. Life and art are not that easy.

Novelists spend years honing their craft. Musicians bust their ass to little notoriety. Film makers agonize over edits and toil mostly in obscurity. People kill themselves in jobs for little money. That is the real world even more so now that the pie is so much smaller. Yes. You are doing your kids a disservice by telling them they are good enough to publish their book. They are not. And it is better they learn that hard work brings the reward, not just being alive. The school of hard knocks will let them know sooner or later.

Better they know it now.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Mozart was broke...another struggling artist

Mozart was deeply in debt at the time of his death and spent the last years of his life trying to make ends meet and pleading with aristocrats for money, so what else is new? Another struggling artist. Seems we can't get away from that starving artist thing when it comes to even our great artists. But he was an artist. He wasn't a celebrity dipping into the well of immortality at the end of his career with a book or a painting or a rock band to finish off megalomania fame to satisfy the craving that we will be remembered beyond our time. Mozart had no such worries, but he did worry about being broke.

Apparently scholars have connected the dots and found Mozart took a big loan and the payments were coming due and his music was in a slump. Sounds familiar to our 2010 ears. Slump. Loans. Payments due. Even musical geniuses get caught up in the boom and bust of capitalism. But artists seem perpetually in the economic dumps. We hear this frequently with big name stars and of course all the starving artists who never hit the radar scream and die in obscurity. It is just the nature of art that it does not produce a lot of money. From A Confederacy of Dunces to Van Gogh it just seems sometimes the public is not ready for what artists have to offer.

Of course Mozart was one of the few who was appreciated during his lifetime and celebrated. Of course he was brilliant and his music stands. But we strip away the gloss from Amadeus which does a good job of showing the squalor in which the last years of his life was lived and we see the artist lot in all it's glory. Maybe stability is just not in the cards. We know of all the musicians who produced great music right up to the moment they became successful. It seems struggle is wrapped up with being an artist, maybe it is the fuel that pushes on all great art. Certainly Mozart proved that magnificently.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

The ER of the Arts--The final episode

A friend of mine from high school just appeared in the final episode of ER. I have never watched one episode, but I watched the final three hour show in support of this old friend. His name rolled in the credits and it was prominent. So then we waited through the special retro portion of the show until the real two hour show began. We didn't have to wait long. My friend was suddenly there in a shot and then he was gone. We waited through another hour of the show for him to reappear. My wife said she thought that was it for his character. I said no, there had to be more. Then towards the end he appeared again and said a few lines. That was it. Here then is the hell of the arts, a blip on a television show that lasts not two minutes after toiling for years. What makes it worse, is this guy was the best actor I ever knew.

We don't want to go down the road of statistics. They are too depressing. For the Authors Guild it is something like poverty level for ninety percent of the writers. The rest eek along and the golden one percent haul it in. Probably something like for every one writer you have heard about, a hundred thousand that will never see the light of day. In acting it is much the same. In all the arts it is much the same. There simply is not enough to go around. Talent is not enough. Timing, luck, connections...just about every variable in the world plays into the lottery of Who Wants To Be A Star, A Bestseller, A Rock star. Brutal reality is the word here. The brutal reality is that most artists will die in obscurity.

This fact does lessen the nobility of the act. Artists generally do not have a choice. They just are. There is no logical reason to choose a life in the arts. The pay is horrible, the hours long, the rewards few. So why do it? Therein lies the rub. Like my friend who managed to get on a show watched by millions (no small feat) he will continue acting long after the ER's of the world come and go. Artists are driven by their passion. If there was no passion then no one could stick to the road of thudding rejection, impoverishment, and alienation from a society that views most artist as suspect slackers. Get a job! Please!

So I watched ER to it's inglorious end. I had never watched the show and frankly if I ever seen another one it will be much too soon. Everyone dies. Every one is about to die. The situations are hackneyed and schizophrenic. But that's television. They way I see it, the show was lucky to have my friend. He's much too good an actor for television.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

American Entertainment

I attended a staple of American Entertainment this weekend: the big time sporting event. The game I went to in Chicago was not a good game. Both teams were at the bottom of their standings. The beginning was a study in light and sound. The lights dropped as fireworks went off and earthshaking sound shook the arena. A large bull floated like a dirigible through the pumped out smoky haze. Then the basketball game started and it was quiet enough to hear the squeak of the players tennis shoes. First time out and a bagel, a donut, and a coffee cup raced around on the giant Trinatron. The crowd simply went wild. People screamed uncontrollably for the bagel and the donut that ran neck and neck. Then the game resumed and we were back to the squeaks of the tennis shoes. Another time out and a man came out and began shooting T shirts from a large gun into the crowd. The place went nuts. Then a meter came on the Trinatron for screaming. The crowd exploded as the meter went into the red zone. Play resumed and we were back to the squeaks. Another time and out five people tried to eat twenty four cookies in five minutes. The crowd screamed in contortion as a fat man stuck the final five cookies into his mouth. Play resumed and we heard the dulcet tones of rubber on wood.

I began to watch the players on the Trinatron. It was more exciting. More dynamic. When I looked down at the real players they looked strangely normal, a bunch of grown men trying to shove a ball into small hoops. So I went back to the Trinatron. Another time out and a giant tic tac toe board was set up on the half court. People lost their minds as two boys tried to put the giant X's and O's in on the grid. Play resumed and everyone went to sleep. The game ended after overtime failed to get a rise from the crowd. It didn't really matter who won. We all came to see something extraordinary and we did. Too bad it wasn't basketball, but as Americans we expect more from our movies, sports, television shows, than just the event. We expect what Hemingway said so long ago: "In the end the age was handed the kind &*%# it demanded." I guess that's what we got.