Alan Watts Reads “One of the Greatest Things Carl Jung Ever Wrote”

in Photography, Religion | February 9th, 2021

Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology more than a century ago, and many reference his insights into the human mind and condition still today. Alan Watts certainly did his bit to keep the Jungian flame alive, whatever the outward differences between a Swiss psychiatrist and an English interpreter of Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, especially of the Zen variety. Both men believed in casting a wide spiritual net, all the better to expose the common core elements of seemingly disparate ancient traditions. And in so doing they could hardly afford to ignore the religious underpinnings of the European civilization, broadly speaking, from which they emerged. In fact, Watts became an ordained Episcopal priest at the age of 30 — though, owing to the complexities of his beliefs as well as his personal life, he resigned the ministry by age 35.

But Watts’ investment in certain tenets of Christianity endured, and he named as one of Jung’s greatest writings a lecture delivered to a Swiss clergy group. “People forget that even doctors have moral scruples and that certain patient’s confessions are hard even for a doctor to swallow,” begins the speech as Watts reads it aloud in the video above. “Yet the patient does not feel himself accepted unless the very worst in him is accepted too. No one can bring this about by mere words. It comes only through reflection and through the doctor’s attitude towards himself and his own dark side.” To help another person, in other words, one must first accept that person as he is; but to accept another person as he is first requires taking oneself straight, less-than-admirable qualities and all.

According to Watts, Jung himself demonstrated this rare self-awareness. “He knew and recognized what I sometimes call the element of irreducible rascality in himself,” says Watts in a talk of his own previously featured here on Open Culture. “He knew it so strongly and so clearly, and in a way so lovingly, that he would not condemn the same thing in others, and would therefore not be led into those thoughts, feelings, and acts of violence towards others which are always characteristic of the people who project the devil in themselves upon the outside, upon somebody else, upon the scapegoat.” As Jung puts it to his clerical audience, “In the sphere of social or national relations, the state of suffering may be civil war, and this state is to be cured by the Christian virtue of forgiveness and love of one’s enemies.”

What Christianity holds as true of the outer world goes just as well, Jung argues, for the inner one. “This is why modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sorely beset by his own bad conscience and wants, rather, to know how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature, how he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother.” He “does not want to know in what way he can imitate Christ, but in what way he can live his own individual life, however meagre and uninteresting it may be.” Only by being allowed to follow this “egoism” to its conclusion of “complete isolation” can he “get to know himself and learn what an invaluable treasure is the love of his fellow beings”; it is only “in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures.” Without knowing our own natures, we can hardly expect even the most time-tested belief systems to put an end to the civil wars inside us.

Carl Jung Explains His Groundbreaking Theories About Psychology in a Rare Interview (1957)

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Technology Can’t Grasp Reality

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Cannot Stand a Meaningless Life’ (1959)

The Wisdom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Provoking Animations

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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A New Database Will Document Every Slave House in the U.S.: Discover the “Saving Slave Houses Project”

in Archives, History | February 9th, 2021

In central North Carolina, not far from where I live, sits the Franklinton Center at Bricks, a 224-acre educational campus and conference center built on the remains of a historic “Agricultural, Industrial, and Normal School,” then junior college, for the descendants of enslaved people. These schools were themselves built on the land of a former cotton plantation, on former territory of the Tuscarora Nation. The campus acts as a palimpsest of Southern U.S. history. Each successive generation on the site after the Civil War has built memorials alongside modern institutions of learning and activism. The model is rare. As historian Damian Pargas of Leiden University tells Atlas Obscura’s Sabrina Imbler, “slavery is largely invisible in the [current] Southern landscape, and therefore easy to ignore or forget.”

Even at the Franklinton Center, the remnants of the slave past consist only of a whipping post, the focus of a remembrance area on the campus, and an antebellum slave cemetery a short distance away. All traces of slave quarters and houses have been wiped away. Where they remain in the U.S., writes Imbler, such buildings often “bear no visible trace of their past; many have been converted into garages, offices, or sometimes—unnervingly—bed-and-breakfasts. In some cases the structures have fallen into ruin or vanished entirely, leaving behind a depression in the ground.” Since 2012, Jobie Hill, a preservation architect, has tried to change that with her project Saving Slave Houses.

Hill is determined to build a first-of-its-kind database that honors and preserves these spaces in more than memory, and to unite the houses with the stories of people who once inhabited them. As she sees it, such a repository is long overdue. “There has never been a national survey of slave houses, except for the one I’m trying to do,” Hill says.

Houses, says Hill, in her TEDx talk above, “can tell us a lot about the people that lived there…. Each slave house has a valuable story to tell.” A slave house, Hill writes, on the project’s site, “was a place where enslaved people found strength and comfort from one another; but at the same time, it was a place that imposed physical limitations and psychological trauma.”

The project grew out of Hill’s master’s theses in preservation architecture and through an internship for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), “a federal program established in 1933 to employ architects and draftsmen” during the Great Depression, Imbler notes. She has been able to identify slave houses by their small size, location on a property, “and if the building has a fireplace or chimney,” she says, noting that such buildings were rarely included in surveys. She has also cross-referenced surveys with the “largest, best-known collection of interviews from formerly enslaved people: the 1936–1938 WPA Slave Narrative Collection.”

These interviews “paint a grim picture of the cruel and cramped quarters enslaved people were forced to live in.” But slave houses are not only markers of a painful past. “A slave house simultaneously embodies suffering, yet perseverance and strong family bonds,” writes Hill. They are symbols of survival against daunting odds, and like the magnolia tree that marks the remembrance site at the Franklinton Center, they can “serve as a reminder that we too must do more than survive. We must find a way to thrive.” Learn more about Hill’s Saving Slave Houses project here.

via Atlas Obscura

The Names of 1.8 Million Emancipated Slaves Are Now Searchable in the World’s Largest Genealogical Database, Helping African Americans Find Lost Ancestors

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visualized in Two Minutes: 10 Million Lives, 20,000 Voyages, Over 315 Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons

in Art, History, Photography | February 9th, 2021

More than 40 years after Norman Rockwell’s death, the question of whether his paintings are realistic or unrealistic remains open for debate. On one hand, critical opinion has long dismissed his Saturday Evening Post-adorning visions of American life as sheerest fantasy. “A little girl with a black eye, an elderly woman saying grace with her grandson, a boy going to war: Rockwellian scenes represent a certain sentimental America — an ideal America, or at least Rockwell’s ideal,” says a 2009 NPR story on his work.

On the other hand, if Rockwell’s admirers give him a pass on this sentimentality, his detractors often turn a blind eye to his obvious technical mastery. Say what you will about his themes, the man might as well have been a camera. Indeed, his process began with an actual camera. According to that NPR piece, he “used photos, taken by a rotating cast of photographers, to make his illustrations — and all of his models were neighbors and friends,” residents of his small town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

The cameramen included a German immigrant named Clemens Kalischer: “An artist-photographer himself, Kalischer was at odds with the tracing techniques and saccharine subject matter in Rockwell’s work. After all, Rockwell never painted freehand, and almost all of his paintings were commissioned by magazines and advertising companies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shutter, Rockwell directed every facet of every composition,” as you can see by examining his paintings and reference photos together, featured as they’ve been on sites like Petapixel.

At Google Arts & Culture, you can scroll through a short exhibition of Rockwell’s late work on race relations in America that reveals how he had not just one but many photographs taken as source material for each painting, which he would then combine into a single image. This quasi-cinematic “editing” process brings to mind the “storyboarding” of Edward Hopper, who stands alongside Rockwell as one of the most American painters of the 20th century.

But while Hopper gave artistic form to the country’s alienation, Rockwell — whom history hasn’t remembered as a particularly happy man — created an “American sanctuary others wished to share.” And though neither Hopper nor Rockwell’s America may ever have existed, they were crafted from the pieces of American life the artists found everywhere around them.

via Petapixel/MessyNessy

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell & 350 Other Artists to Visually Document America’s Space Program

Norman Rockwell’s Typewritten Recipe for His Favorite Oatmeal Cookies

Edward Hopper’s Creative Process: The Drawing & Careful Preparation Behind Nighthawks & Other Iconic Paintings

Yale Launches an Archive of 170,000 Photographs Documenting the Great Depression

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Magic of the Beach Boys’ Harmonies: Hear Isolated Vocals from “Sloop John B.,” “God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” & Other Pet Sounds Classics

in Music | February 8th, 2021

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to the Smithsonian.
—Bob Dylan on Brian Wilson

The Beach Boys tarnished their reputation when they reformed in later years and tried to “reclaim their wholesomeness,” Dan Caffrey writes at Consequence of Sound, “only to find that it had all but disappeared.” But in the days when they sounded like the most wholesome thing on earth, they also had the distinct advantage of sounding seriously weird: “Weirder than Waits, weirder than Zappa, and definitely weirder than the Beatles. The immaculate vocal harmony that made them famous was their weirdest weapon of all; a sunny fortress of euphony that shone through the darkest of times and strangest of lyrics in their latter days.”

The phenomenon could emerge “only out of the ferment that characterizes today’s pop music scene,” said Leonard Bernstein when he heard “Surf’s Up.” Despite the surface-level corniness, there were “really deep, profound emotions” in the band’s music, emotions “that came out of a lot of pain,” Linda Ronstadt remarked.

The full depths of Pet Sounds may never be plumbed, yet one can also put it on and immediately feel the SoCal sunshine hit them squarely in the face. Only a genius like Brian Wilson could turn surf pop into classical composition, without compromising the simple emotions of pop or the profundity of a classical arrangement. (“I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard ‘Pet Sounds,’ ” says Paul McCartney.)

And only the Beach Boys as a group could pull off those harmonies. The rest of the band may not have quite grasped what their quixotic leader was up to. (Mike Love once famously complained, “Who’s gonna hear this shit? The ears of a dog?”) But they knew how to sing together like no one else before or since. (When David Crosby heard “In My Room,” he says, “I thought, ‘I give up–I can’t do that–I’ll never be able to do that.’”) They were so good, they could pull off gorgeous a‑capella passages like those in “Sloop John B,” Pet Sounds’ lead single. Hear it at the top in a full isolated vocal version.

A traditional folk song that originated in the Bahamas and was recorded in the sixties by everyone from Johnny Cash to Lonnie Donegan to the Kingston Trio, the arranging of the song took only 24 hours, Al Jardine remembers, from the time he brought it to Wilson as a possible cover to the time Wilson completed his version of the track. The vocals were another matter. Jardine assumed he would sing lead, but Wilson had a process:

It was like interviewing for a job. Pretty funny. He didn’t like any of us. My vocal had a much more mellow approach because I was bringing it from the folk idiom. For the radio, we needed a more rock approach. Brian and Mike ended up singing it.

Those demanding vocal recording sessions, Jardine wrote in the Pet Sounds liner notes, could last 12–15 hours a day. The end results are an especially impressive feat considering that the backing vocals were all recorded at once, with no overdubbing or any of the digital studio wizardry used today to nudge stray voices into the right pitch and rhythm:

At the vocal sessions, there was so much good tension. At any one time, you would have four out of five of us get our parts just fine, and there would be one who would screw up. But it wouldn’t be the same person each time. Then the next take, he would get it right, but somebody else would get it wrong. Kind of like the chaos theory at work. The more people you have in a given situation, the more chance there is for error. Then, there would be the magic moment when it all came together, and then you had your take.

Just below, hear Pet Sounds’ saddest song, “Caroline, No,” in a vocal take featuring only Wilson. He thought of it as “probably the best [song] I’ve ever written… a pretty love song about how this guy and this girl lost it and there’s no way to get it back. I just felt sad, so I wrote a sad song.” It’s also a song, for all its melancholy, born from the sense of innocent longing the band brought to all their music in their prime, conveyed in harmonies that would never shine as brightly for any other band at any other time. Hear more of the Beach Boys, a‑cappella, in the YouTube playlist here.

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson & Beatles Producer George Martin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Greatest Song Ever Written”

The Making (and Remaking) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Greatest Rock Album of All Time

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A New Yorker Cartoonist Explains How to Draw Literary Cartoons

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Magazines | February 8th, 2021

“I enjoy poking fun at anything educated people do and civilized society perpetuates that is odd, frustrating, wacky, or hypocritical,” cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, above, recently told the New York Public Library’s Margo Moore.

Unsurprisingly, she’s been getting published in The New Yorker a lot of late.

The process for getting cartoons accepted there is the stuff of legend, though reportedly less grueling since Emma Allen, the magazine’s youngest and first-ever female cartoon editor, took over. Allen has made a point of seeking out fresh voices, and working with them to help mold their submissions into something in The New Yorker vein, rather than “this endless game of presenting work and then hearing ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Kurzweil has a fondness for literary themes (and the same brand of pencils that John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, and Vladimir Nabokov preferred—Blackwings—whether in her hand or, conversing with Allen on Zoom, above, in her ears.)

Getting the joke of a New Yorker cartoon often depends on getting the reference, and while both women seem tickled at the first example, Kurzweil’s mash-up of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and the picture book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, it may go over many readers’ heads.

The thing that holds it all together?

Madeleines, of course, though outside France, not every Proust lover is able to identify an inked representation of this evocative cookie by shape.

Kurzweil states that she has never actually read the children’s book that supplies half the context.

(It’s okay. Like the idea that memories can be triggered by certain nostalgic scents, its concept is pretty easy to grasp.)

Nor has she read philosopher Derek Parfit’s whopping 1,928-page On What Matters. Her inspiration for using it in a cartoon is her personal connection to the massive, unread three-volume set in her family’s library. Because both the size and the title are part of the joke, she directs the viewer’s eye to the unwieldy tome with a light watercolor wash.

She also has a good tip for anyone drawing a library scene—go figurative, rather than literal, varying sizes and shapes until the eye is tricked into seeing what is merely suggested.

A all-too-true literary experience informs her second example at the 4:30 mark—that of a little known author giving a reading in a bookstore. Despite a preference for drawing “fleshy things like people and animals” she forgoes depicting the author or those in attendance, giving the punchline instead to the event posters in the store’s window.

As she told the NYPL’s Moore:

A cartoon is always an opportunity to showcase a contemporary phenomenon by exaggerating it or placing it in a different context.

Over the last year, a huge number of New Yorker cartoons have concerned themselves with the domestic dullness of the pandemic, but when Allen asked if she has a favorite New Yorker cartoon cliché, Kurzweil went with “the Moby Dick trope, because whales are easy to draw, and I like a good metaphor for the unattainable.”

The Not Yorker: A Collection of Rejected & Late Cover Submissions to The New Yorker

Download a Complete, Cover-to-Cover Parody of The New Yorker: 80 Pages of Fine Satire

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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The Breathtaking Courage of Harriet Tubman: An Animated History Lesson Speaks to Her Place on the $20 Bill

in Current Affairs, Economics, History | February 8th, 2021

I was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and I can say what many others cannot. I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger. —Harriet Tubman

Remember how one of the Obama administration’s final initiatives was to redesign the $20 bill, banishing Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, to a minor role on the back of the bill, in favor of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery?

The announcement arrived on the heels of a controversy, after then-Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew enraged American women by going back on a promise to install a woman on the face of a newly designed $10 bill.

The decision to keep Alexander Hamilton, architect of our financial system and the country’s first Treasury Secretary, in place is rumored to owe rather a lot to his status as the subject of a certain hit musical that had opened earlier in the year.

The official design of the Tubman bill was to have been unveiled in 2020, to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed a woman’s right to vote. Had all gone according to plan, it would have been in wide circulation later this decade.

At the time Lew was untroubled by the possibility that the incoming administration might kill off the proposed makeover:

I don’t think somebody’s going to probably want to do that — to take the image of Harriet Tubman off of our money? To take the image of the suffragists off?

It seems, however, that someone did want to do that.

In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump told NBC that replacing Jackson with Tubman was “pure political correctness,” suggesting instead that a place might be found for Tubman on the $2 bill… which is no longer printed.

He also reportedly remarked to former White House adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman, “You want me to put that face on the twenty-dollar bill?”

The Treasury Department website’s revision in the wake of the 2016 election scrubbed all references to planned changes to the currency.

Lew’s replacement, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, finally announced that the new $20 bill wouldn’t be ready until 2028, and that the finished design might not include Tubman at all. He attributed this to technical reasons relating to security features, though a Treasury Department employee told The New York Times that the engraving plate for it was completed “as recently as May 2018” and that the design “appeared to be far along in the process.”

Certainly, there were bigger stories in 2020 than the absence of the promised Harriet Tubman $20 bill, but the obfuscation and delay were maddening given everything Tubman, a woman of action, was able to accomplish well over a hundred years ago.

Most of us are familiar with her prominence on the Underground Railroad, which led to the sobriquet “Moses of her people,” but there are several things in the above animated TED-Ed lesson by Janell Hobson, Department Chair of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Albany, that may come as news to you.

Of particular note, Tubman was the first woman in US history to plan and lead a military raid, resulting in the liberation of nearly 700 enslaved persons in South Carolina.

Her second husband, Nelson Davis, also born into slavery, had been a Union soldier, which entitled her to a pension of $8 as a military widow.

She fought hard for an increase on the basis of her own service to the Union Army, enlisting various friends and supporters to lobby on her behalf, including Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, who said, “I have known her long as a noble high spirit, as true as seldom dwells in the human form.”

Finally, in 1899, her pension was increased to $20 a month.

Professor Hobson, whose lesson predates Mnuchin’s announcement of the stall, called the denomination “a fitting twist of fate.”

As is the rubber stamp that artist Dano Wal created to help disgusted Americans convert Jacksons into Tubmans without the help of the Treasury Department:

Who we choose to honor as a society affects the moral attitudes that are baked into us as we grow up. The impact that seeing the face of Harriet Tubman staring back at you from a $20 bill should not be underestimated. This sort of representation can subtly but deeply affect someone’s conception of themselves and their place in society. The slightly subversive nature of it being currency that’s been hand-stamped by another human makes a discovery of one of these bills all the more joyous.

Good news looms on the horizon. Less than a week into the Biden administration, the Treasury Department confirmed that the agency is “exploring ways to resume” putting Harriet Tubman on the bill, as well as ways to hasten their release. She will be the first female and first Black American to be featured on our folding money.

TED-Ed has a list of additional resources for those who’d like to delve deeper into Tubman’s life and legacy, as well as a discussion as to whether putting Tubman’s face on the $20 bill is a fitting honor.

What the Textbooks Don’t Tell Us About The Atlantic Slave Trade: An Animated Video Fills In Historical Gaps

The Names of 1.8 Million Emancipated Slaves Are Now Searchable in the World’s Largest Genealogical Database, Helping African Americans Find Lost Ancestors

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch a Korean Master Craftsman Make a Kimchi Pot by Hand, All According to Ancient Tradition

in Art, Food & Drink, History | February 8th, 2021

The South Korean capital of Seoul, where I live, has in the 21st century astonished visiting Westerners with its technology, its infrastructure, and its sheer urban vitality. It strikes many of those Westerners (and I include myself among them) as considerably more developed than anywhere in the countries they came from. But however much Seoul may feel like the future, nowhere in Korea has the past wholly vanished. Take the bulbous earthenware jars still visible on more than a few of the country’s terraces and rooftops, meant to hold condiments like soybean and red pepper paste as well as that world-famous symbol of not just Korean cuisine but Korean culture itself, the fermented cabbage known as kimchi.

Commonly called hangari, or more traditionally onggi, these jars essential to the fermentation of kimchi and other Korean foods are today produced in large numbers with industrial methods. But there are also Korean potters who’ve stuck to the old ways — and in a select few cases, the very old ways indeed. Take Jin-Gyu, the subject of the video above, a short documentary from Eater’s “Handmade” series.

“I’m the youngest of the intangible cultural assets in Korea,” he says, referring to the official list of Important Intangible Cultural Properties introduced to protect long-standing traditions in music, dance, and craft just as the country began its unprecedented surge into modernity. The making of onggi itself, a process Jin-Gyu demonstrates from start to finish in the video, is Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 96.

After pounding his clay into shape while describing how its soil first flows down from the mountains, Jin-gyu places it onto his wheel and gives it the distinctive shape recognizable from all those terraces and rooftops. This requires constant use of his hands, occasional use of his feet, and even the application of traditional tools that he also made himself. The contrast with traditional Japanese pottery, its emphasis on small-scale elegance and near-existentialist attitude toward the final product, is instructive: the Korean variety, as Jin-gyu practices it, has a different energy, more of an emotional and physical rusticity. “This makes me so happy,” he says after removing finished jar from the kiln originally built by his onggi-potter father. “After 300 years, it’ll return to the soil.” But there are plenty of hearty meals to be had in the meantime, none of them without kimchi.

The Art of the Japanese Teapot: Watch a Master Craftsman at Work, from the Beginning Until the Startling End

How Soy Sauce Has Been Made in Japan for Over 220 Years: An Inside View

Modern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vases & Artisanal Glass

“Primitive Potter” Travels into the Backcountry for 10 Days with Only a Knife & Buckskin and Makes Anasazi Pottery

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Little Kid Merrily Grooves to ZZ Top While Waiting for the Bus

in Music | February 7th, 2021

A musician in Vancouver, British Columbia took to the streets and busked some ZZ Top, much to the delight of a young child waiting for the bus. From the moment he starts playing “La Grange,” the child bops up and down, then twirls in a circle, losing herself in the song. On YouTube he writes, “I don’t often see this, but when it happens it’s always 99% kids that are doing it. Before they become jaded (age 8), they still have that spontaneous spark, that reaction to music that we all used to have. Emotion is no.1 priority and they express it without shame.”

If this brightens your day, even a little, consider giving the busker a tip on Paypal or Patreon. As he explains on YouTube, he’s had–like many of us–a rough year. He writes:

1) I’m glad everyone is enjoying this video but I want to mention a few things.

Street playing is not all fun and games and dancing kids. Doing this for 7 years. I regularly face not only verbal abuse, but physical assault as I work a few blocks from downtown eastside Vancouver. I’m surrounded by addicts, drunks, and people who should be in mental homes.

2) I’m unemployed. All live music including busking, is banned. I lost all work last year and received ZERO compensation. I had a very bad year in 2020 and only recently came out of a depression.

3) I make ZERO from youtube no matter how many views I get. I don’t run ads. And more importantly, even if I did, most of my videos are instantly copyrighted and auto monetized by record labels because they are COVERS. If you see an ad, it’s the record label collecting. If you liked the performance, please think about supporting me on patreon/paypal tip/bandcamp.

4) I’m a musician that writes his own music and has been doing it for 20 years. Check out my bandcamp page to see what I can really do with a guitar.

5) It’s a lot of unpaid work to post these videos all the time so please try to help me keep the channel going. Many thanks to those that have supported me! It means a lot!

6) I get asked this 100 times a day so here’s the answer: I play on the street and not in a band because all the clubs closed years ago. I used to lead many bands from 2006 to 2018. That’s all gone. Live music is dead, as well as banned. It’s also a lot more hassle, and less money, to run a band than play by myself.

Anyone who has music work to offer can contact me at shatnershairpiece@yahoo.com

via Laughing Squid

Crowd Breaks into Singing Bon Jovi in the Park: The Power of Music in 46 Seconds

80s Pop Singer Jimmy Somerville Surprises German Street Musician as the Busker Sings Somerville’s Hit

Lenny Kravitz Overhears High School Kids Playing His Music and Surprises Them by Joining In

Street Artist Plays Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” With Crystal Glasses

Neil Young Busking in Glasgow, 1976: The Story Behind the Footage

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |