kogan's DDR paying for itself and blah

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. from 1983 to some time in the late 90s (when its management team bought it from its owner) the wire's (probably substantial) tab was picked up a sugar daddy who liked the idea of owning a fancy music mag -- basically everything i did there was tossing this guy's money down the drain (hurrah!)

ii. open question: w!re's current editorial team's mortages ride on the continued success of the mag -- does this tend to limit its freedom to play with any idea, any approach? i say yes

iii. the tale of the music papers, uk and us, is a complex hitched ride on an ad-fuelled gravy train -- the industry in the 60s needed to know "what's good?", as all around the "rules of the good" were apparently being broken by the kids, and magazines which discuss this is a way to research same, the trade-off being that you're paying for writers to say YOU SUCK (or to write stuff which is of marginal interest to you but keeps them happy and "working for you") -- in fact, "the kids" also, for the usual reasons of gang-formation, needed to know what was good and what wasn't, a self-doubt which extended from post-beatles music to post-vietnam politics, with these two constantly melting into one another

iv. does this gravy train even function now? the kids be downloadin -- hence written discussion of "what's good" is these days more like a salvage operation for i. what got lost, and therefore ii. old-skool consciences than anything trend-congealing -- what added value does writing bring? (i'm asking this feeling fairly strongly that e.g. simon reynolds's pitch for the importance of critical rumination is MISSING SOMETHING; which is why he sounds like grandad telling the kids to get off his lawn)

v. the closest thing i think currently exists to frank's dream is the us netroots -- the centre-leftish network of blogs and semi-online mags which are fighting to drag the democratic party out of its stasis and alienating dependency on big money (these taken, by the netroots, to be the same thing): they survive by a mix of reader donation -- there are constant fund-raising drives -- and ads (there's a politically simpatico group of liberal advertisers evolved, selling books, T-shirts, cmapaigns, TV shows etc). The money coming in pays the wages of the people running the sites (including, importantly, the fund-raisers and ad-managers). Daily Kos, which is the main hub for the netroots, gets half a million hits a day, sez kevin drum, with the next in line (atrios? hullaballoo? tpm? yglesias? drum himself?) getting closer to 150,000 pd or less. There's a fight on for who else can join this krew though -- some newcomers regard it as elitist and self-perpetuating, cynically operating a shut-out as its power within official dem circles grows. Atrios argues that if you write well, the readers will come (eventually). In the end, the fuel in this entire zone is liberal self-defence and self-definition, intensified by anti-bush anger -- old-fashioned politics in fact. As per net commonality, most readers probably freeload on the generosity of a few...

vi. if we took ilx etc as the DDR-feedzone, is there something in what DDR offers that's big enough and strong enough to coalesce into a drive (rather than a diversion)?

vi. in particular, can the immanent politics of the music -- i myself wd just say "of music" -- be brought back to the surface in a way that attracts rather than repels? (youtube posting has been a telling phenom in the netroots recently: "the music", cheerfully argued over, is certainly taken as a shared taste and pleasure) (also of note: atrios, i think korrektly, refers to the anti-war netroots as the "dirty fucking hippies", reclaiming as a proud self-labeling the terms of dismissal directed at anti-war commentary by the MSM liberal establishment)

vii. academia -- as frank notes wrt classical music depts -- is hugely on the defensive, as regards old-skool humanities/liberal arts ideology and "pure" research

viii. the early 70s and 80s saw a number potential new cross-disciplinary fields emerge (eg women's studies, af-am studies, queer theory, post-colonial studies, cult stud, media studies, film studies, critical theory...): this coincided (in the uk) with a huge drive to expand tertiary education -- the effects of this are complex, as, since the 80s, there have also been intense budget-tightening and rationalisation drives, in particular as regards budget oversight and measurable success... more students means more money; more departments means (in principle) more students; but also -- realistically -- more modes of potential value that can't be reduced to tabulated figures

ix. the effect of this, as aelxt noted, is a tendency for departments to reward projects which are good for the growth of the department, rather than projects which deliberately hunt in interstitial zones

x. meanwhile the academy's publishing departments are hungry for BOOKS WHICH SELL, ideally BOOKS OF QUALITY WHICH SELL

xi. 9 and 10 are a good example of the contradictory drives of commodification btw, marx-fans

xii. it seems to me that the DDR, to establish itself on-line, needs to be able to pay a wage for AT LEAST three people -- frank, as presiding spirit, provocateur, interlocutor, MC etc; the person structuring the fund-raising systems; the internet systems admin

xiii. (but i actually think it wd need an "editorial board" of more than just frank, to provide dimensionality and/or respite)

xiv. one potential route to funding no one has so far mentioned is SUBSCRIPTION -- the goodwill gathering in advance of THOSE WHO WOULD LIKE TO SEE THIS SUCCEED (and are willing to see it thrash about a bit till it finds its rhythm)

Comments

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

I can't get past i): did the sugar daddy ever make his hand felt at all? Did he like or dislike any (of the/) music? Is our main chance for DDR funding from Tanya Headon?

Sorry for completely avoiding the rest of the post, I just am really fascinated by the setup. Also I have little to say about the rest.

how i felt the hand

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. the mag's founder anth0ny w00d wz bought out and dismissed when it became obvious his original concept of the mag wd not fly (at least w.him at the helm)
ii. the mag's best designer, p4ul ell!man, was dismissed when he refused to do design work for other projects w/i sugardaddy's empire
iii. the mag had to run free ads for books published by sugardaddy's empire's publishing arm (to be fair this could be treated as cross-subsidy ad-revenue offsetting the money being poured into the mag)
iv. sugardaddy empire's PR company had julian ll0yd-w3bber (a's cellist bro) as a client, and i wz pressured to run a piece on him -- i did an invisible jukebox
v. just once in my time i had to run a piece at sugardaddy's bidding, on a new orleans trad revival singer who did regular seasons in a london hotel, who sugardaddy liked -- i can't actually remember her name -- but to be honest this happily fit under the all-music protocols i had in mind (as did JLW), even if i wouldn't have thought of it myself (certainly i ran lamer things, in the sense of poorly written pieces about apparently interesting people who actually weren't but it was too late to spike the piece and fill the space)
vi. my eventual ouster came as an early part of a negotiation by sugardaddy and the publisher, to sell the w!re to the guardian -- in the end (after i wz out), sugardaddy demanded too much money and the sale fell through

in general, he didn't interfere

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

xiv is a very good point, though I doubt it would get one wage together, let alone three. But it could quite possibly pay for a lot of other stuff.

(The other points are good too of course, I will not pick favourites.)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

xiv: I'll join up! Where do I sign?

[koganbot]

One possibility is that people just send me money to live and travel on and I do whatever I want and anyone who interacts with me is therefore in the Department Of Dilettante Research. (I suspect that this won't get me the membership I desire, however.) Perhaps I would sell subscriptions to an annual ball in my name and I would live off of the money raised this way. (Several characters in Luc Sante's Low Life did this; presumably they'd have been derelicts if these schemes hadn't paid off.)

One question: Is US Netroots any good? How good? Btw, if you eliminate the explicit politics and add foundation support and donors' names sometimes being announced (e.g., a bit of advertising) and some govt. funding through the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, there's a similar far-more-successful donor-based system that supports radio-TV stations (TV network called PBS, radio network called NPR). (Frank Kogan aficionados will find the previous sentence amusing.) There are or were other donor-supported radio stations (Pacifica network being the most important, I think, though I have no idea if it still exists; avowedly leftist and countercultural). ilX paid for its server through donations. (Strangely, I have no idea where Paper Thin Walls, which pays me 50 bucks a review and now hosts ilX on its server, gets its money. The reviews/news site was supposed to attract people to an online store, but ten months in I don't see a store.)

I think all politically minded magazines (the Nation, the New Republic, and such) in the U.S. survive with the aid of donations; some even raise money by sponsoring cruises.

I'm still more intrigued by the question of What rather than How (which may explain why I'm always short of money).

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

One possibility is that people just send me money to live and travel on

Would you care to put a figure on that?

One fairly laughable (no offence) aspect of the DDR discussion so far is that ppl are carefully avoiding doing a cost-benefit analysis of it.

(P.S. the above two sentences are not necessarily connected. Do not let taking umbrage at the second overshadow the important question in the first. I am trying to be helpful as well as inject some realism.)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Could we not persuade Bill Gates that Frank Kogan can save the world and get him to donate large amounts of cash?

Or imagine some kind of great internet business model which we would use as a trojan horse i.e. get ludicrous amounts of startup funding from someone seduced by web 2.0, but spend it all on the DDR and then laugh at the investors when great i b m goes tits up. ALternatively we could just make our fortunes off the g i b m and use that to fund the DDR.

But seriously -- great post from the judge, sensible response coming later in the day.

[koganbot]

One thing to bear in mind is that Poptimism attracts people by giving them games to play/polls to participate in. And that Why Music Sucks was a spinoff of a zine called Readers' Poll.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ILM is currently infested with polls! (albeit very boring ones)

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

the poptimists 'all know each other'; the group is small

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

how good is netroots? well for starters, it depends if by "good" you mean "politically effective as regards its specific policy goals", or "interesting to read and insightful even if yr specific goals are not their goals" -- i think something they provide not found elsewhere (certainly not in PBS as i understand it) is a sense of the direct connectedness of these two elements*

i think the netroots are VERY good at linking up old-skool lengthy academic wonk-work with relatively free-fire thread discussion, via the shortish-post medium of the posters whose sites are listed (and several others i didn't list); the traffic is largely top-down still, but the mediators (see 1 below) have more moral presence now than they did even two years ago -- they are being taken seriously as intolerable gadflies at the upper level, if not as content-providers and contributors (in frank's sense they care clearly contributors, but are still seen more as hostile ranting rabble)

there's two levels of network, intimately wound into each other

1. atrios and drum and yglesias and tpm's josh marshall and hulaballoo's digby (and several others) all read each other and link and counter-link and agree and disagree, at the "established critics" level

2. they also link -- all the time -- into upper-level discourse, in journals and old-form magazines (viz New Republic) and mainstream newspapers and TV outlets, and comment on this, dissenting or affirming; also they monitor the opposition, to counter trends and explode arguments

3. at the same time, they provide a home for the next-level-down of discourse, in other words thread-commentary; the threads can be testy and uncivil, or chatty and silly (rarely ilx levels of silly, sadly), and havbe complex ecvologies of clannishness, ancients feuds, not-quite-trolls and etc etc

4. they are in a sense parasitic on old media, despite occasional "we will bury them" rhetoric, but what they actually do provide (albeit at early stages, and who knows how it will actually develop) is an articulated pressure from disgruntled old-media readers in respect of what's gone wrong with old-media commentary (and what's ALWAYS been wrong with it) -- in other words, writing about writing

*in politics, the issue of "following through on ideas" is (in the end) driven by goals rather than logic, let alone pure enquiry -- so entire strategies (and the discourse surrounding them) can vanish from the discussion, despite "ideas not being completed", when the situation makes the strategy in question just irrelevant to the goal in question**

**of course particular activists, having devoted themselves to the enactment of a specific strategy, often live out their lives making a fetish of a a clearly-outdated or even pernicious strategy -- in a sense all of politics is about judging the acceptability of the width of the gaps between practical strategy and larger goals...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

in a sense all of politics is about judging the acceptability of the width of the gaps between practical strategy and larger goals... -- here this wd be the gap between frank's "how" and frank's "what", the issue of how much we accept that the latter be circumscribed by achievable versions of the former

in other words: there is -- or will be -- a politics of form at work in the set-up for the (semi)achievement of the DDR, and it may be that thrashing this out a little with clarify the limits of the what

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

what wd a "music-world" daily kos be? i think an controlled blogswarm agit-prop "consumer guide" that focused on info abt material matters in music OTHER THAN how good records are -- how good venues are, where to get instruments, where to get training, the issues of IP, questions about contracts, what's good and and abt record companies, -- would be a strong semi-central stem

(cf the MM and the village voice back in the day were kept afloat by musicians' want-ads and the personals, respectively)

in a way i think the "established critics" internet infrastructure already exists IN A WAY -- ie ilx, poptimists, dissensus, FT, blissblog -- but it has no low-level political drive (its drive is "high-level" in a narrow-defn-of-intellectual way) (and that's a problem)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

a useful music-world thing would be one which tried to identify emergent shifts in the field: both ways of making, distributing and selling music, and in ways of talking about it. I guess a lot of people claim to keep an eye on the former, but are mostly hamstrung because they're not interested in the latter. We seem to be living through a fascinating time for music culture -- perhaps not in terms of formal musical innovation, but in the complete restructuring of relations of production and distribution, which will eventually settle down again. At that point we might be stuck with the musical forms we already have (if innovation becomes less of a key in pop-write / pop-sell and narrowcasting takes over) or all sorts of new things might happen.

I agree about the pop-write blogosphere: it seems to me (and I include myself) caught in a love-hate tug-of-war with the past, and especially with the cultural status and roles and modes pop-write has had in the past, and that stops it seeing the present, or finding successful new ways of doing new things. (This is a partial response to the Amy Phillips (?) EMP thing, but I need to think longer and harder about that.)

Department Of Dilittante Research found here?

[koganbot]

For those who don't know where they are, the original Department Of Dilettante Research threads are here and here.

Re: Department Of Dilittante Or Dilettante Research found here?

[koganbot]

More spelling challenged in the last couple of days than usual.

Re: Department Of Dilittante Research found here?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Is it possible to have cross-journal tagging? Then we could pull up those DDR threads, and this one, and the one on Tom's journal all at once?

[koganbot]

Me keeping my eye on the prize: my two main motivators for the "department" are (1) my need for colleagues to push my ideas and their own ideas forward, and (2) my difficulty in getting paid to write the analyses I would like to write (and that I tend to write for free).

viii. the early 70s and 80s saw a number potential new cross-disciplinary fields emerge (eg women's studies, af-am studies, queer theory, post-colonial studies, cult stud, media studies, film studies, critical theory...)

My guess is that these (and EMP as well) would be pretty far from my model. My next koganbot's livejournal post will probably be about why. Briefly:

(1) The "dilettante" in dilettante means that we don't focus on one particular interest/subject matter.

(2) A crucial component (the centering component, perhaps) of the Department Of Dilettante Research is conversations among several people (surrounded by kibitzers, onlookers, revelers, brawlers, etc.) where no one leaves the conversation until everyone is satisfied that the others understand him or her.

Number (2) will not be the only official activity, by any means, since I want to attract people with differing but interesting talents, and thinking through ideas isn't a talent that most people have, but it will be what I'm there for, basically.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

It could be fun/productive to stage #2 in public, unannounced, drawing people in, etc. etc. And then fundraise/pass the plate. That's getting a bit evangelical, but I kind of like the evangelical model as applied to not-evil.

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

i don't understand the way in which you think (2) is realistic or idealistic or fantastical or what. where, anywhere, is that kind of conversational goal actually maintained?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes i think those projects were cross-disciplinary by virtue of throwing a single linking thread (gender, say) across (in principle) everything: but i think their general development is an object lesson in how not to proceed

as regards (2) -- and you -- my instant (not-thought-through) response is that you should pitch it as "Why are your ideas so rubbish?" and yrself as the Mr answers who ppl (pay to) come to to get their so-called theory dismantled and retooled

(to answer josh's earlier question i assume that socrates was paid as a private tutor by rich families to get their kids "thinking for themselves" -- in.ref becoming generals and leaders -- instead of hanging out at the athens mall ogling the slaveboys)

[koganbot]

Alternately, Socrates was actually a pimp or procurer who used the philosophy stuff as a lure.

bbl

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Oh my god my hangover makes this totally incomprehensible.

Re: bbl

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha sorry mog, i wrote it cz the sun pouring through the window onto my bed made me wake early -- COMPLETION time = 8.30!!

i do not wake till 10.30 even when i am out of bed!

Netroots

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

(I got confused as to which post on the Netroots to reply to, so I'm just doing a new one, sorry all.)

I cringed a bit when I saw the netroots comparison, I think because they seem like the opposite of good writing to me, they seem like lazy groupthink polemical-for-the-sake-of-polemics assholefest 2007. They are basically Stereogum, and I don't think we want this to be Stereogum. Very much about self-reinforcing opinions, and no one else gets in.

But, more importantly for the case at hand, they are able to function so well monetarily because people in the US have come to the opinion that the only way to get what you want in politics is to make sure there is a lot of money raised for it, an opinion which has the added advantage of being largely true. In music right now, almost the exact opposite is true--having money just means you have money to lose, and people would seem to prefer that the things they support have as little money as possible. This may be a bit cynical, but it's certainly true that they're not going to give a mag or a band more money just to make sure they have enough money. There needs to be something like a medical crisis or an impending closure in order for that to happen.

So what to rally around? I think dubodee was gesturing at this with #6, but maybe veered away from it. Is there a way of coupling the politics of copyright, which does garner a LOT of support online right now (see boingboing), to musical analysis? Or making it a central part of a site that also did musical analysis, even if it was only connected to the politics by locality? That seems to have the best chance of drawing money in.

Re: Netroots

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes, it's true that appreciation of high-quality writing is by no means a key to netroots membership! kos is largely an info dump, dealing w.info not easily available elsewhere (and certainly not gathered into one place) -- a bit liek the way listings used to be the gathering pretext for the inkies

i think the communities gather round the various specific net-pundits i mentioned do so for more writerly-readerly reasons (ie analysis, and the generation of arguments-as-weapons): including critique of cliched arguments and the analysis of what's structurally wrong with other forms of media (how it produces bad politics)

essentially what i'm interested in i guess what how broader communities can motivate and shape themselves -- in that sense i think there is a structure well worth looking at, not least bcz its (self-inflating) success is recent, very much bound into the nature of the available technology, and a harbinger of changes in the funding of extant media

as to the last bit, the material technicalia of producing music (and the whole question of IP generally) is something that ought to be built somewhere into music analysis from the off, so i am VERY keen to see if a structure could be fashioned like this, where the relationship was just a click away and updates in the central info-spine generated discussion and analysis

(i TOTALLY take the point abt political assholery: but frank's central commitment is that eg thoughtful new yorkerish belle lettrism, by cutting itself off structurally from schoolyard jerkishness a la meltzer, is doing itself a disservice as regards CONTENT, and the style suffers too -- so i think firewalls are in principle ruled out -- there's a fair variation in the content-quality of the comments threads to the pundit-sites) (some are routinely so primitive i don't even bother; others have regulars who i think are worth reading and create zones of genuine debate)

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

I am on disability, so the government is paying for my art, frankly. but i keep wondering when will i be paid for the work i do, i work about 60 hours a week and get paid for one out of 6 projects. my photo work is picked up by yahoo and the cbc, but no cash comes. my reviews result in the odd free cd. i believe in the net, in creative commons, in deconstructing ownership, but i also need to eat...i dont know what to do about that?

in another way

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

or there is money out there, but unlike information, money doesnt seem to be free or distrubited, as information becomes miasmic, capital seems to clump.