I’m against it.

As a kid, I spent almost two years in a hospital after coming down with this illness.

There are different varieties—and newer treatments are about 1,000% better than back in the old country. But just ask the fourteen people who’ve died: it’s no joke.

The irony for me is that I was left with a post-recovery arthritis that has made me just the kind of guy who buys those kinds of injections three or four times a year.

But I don’t do them. Because they don’t work. Or rather, they can work, for a short period. See the injections themselves are pretty controversial. There’s a huge placebo affect. And you’re getting an injection millimeters away from yer spinal fluid—which you really want to stay as far away from as possible. But there are a lot of ‘boomers’ these days with a lot of aches and pains… and spare cash. And doctors convinced that this sort of thing is ‘routine’.

My point is this: apparently the places that make a lot […]

There’s a whole philosophy about ‘the pointlessness of…’ life/love/complaining…whatever.

http://nymag.com/arts/popmusic/features/grizzly-bear-2012-10/

The history of art has progressed along with the history of commerce. Successful artists have always struggled to find ways to make a living with their art. From Beethoven to the Beatles, you see the same story over and over: the artist works like a dog performing; all the while plotting on how to stop performing and concentrate on creation. At some point, every artist needs to stop being a trained monkey and start getting paid for the tune.

I’ve railed here a bunch of times on the huge shift brought about by the internet. The main thing, in my view, has been the radical shift in how musicians are viewed. We’ve spent the last 500 years trying to free ourselves from patronage and performance and actually get paid for the music. And in the past ten years it’s all gone down the pan.

This is not sour grapes. When an artist can only make a living doing shows or selling t-shirts, it turns […]