6/2/06
If you make it out of didies and baby shoes in this altogether too real world, you generally come up with a universal observation pretty quickly: things ain't what they used to be. The creeping mists of entropy never fail to blow their flatulent foghorn right in your own personal ear, usually while you're busy listening to Mozart. On the face of it, all of life is one big wind-up Victrola blasting out the Timeline Rag and gradually...slowing...downnnnnn...

The usual counter to all this hilarity is, of course, the equally universal observation: so where did all this come from then, hmmm? We boogie blithely about in our souped-up hotrod bodies, nifty-swifty brains just a brainin' away, teetering at the top of a ridiculously tall ladder of (apparently, at least) useful adaptation, a race of denial in a biosphere of contradiction of that Great Commandment, Thou Shalt Dissipate. Somehow, despite all the thermal gotchas of matter and energy, things can get, well, complicated.

Go figure. You can either deal with the messy intricacies of corporate chordate existence or experience the delightful alternative. Talk about your choices. Is dis a system or what?

Still and all, though, the mere possibility of improvement inherent in the magic jack-in-the-box of life's origins is an all day sucker of a solace in the face of one's gradual immersion into the throat of the Meatgrinder Of Time. And every now and again, if you're patient and observant and willfully tunnel-visioned, you can catch a glimpse of the Great Renovation actually taking place, the very remod crews Themselves busily tearing out old walls and banging up new sheetrock.

This past weekend was the 35th anniversary of the Northwest Folklife festival, a merry maelstrom of seemingly every variety of organized sound ever generated by shaved apes, with a few birds chiming in. Several thousand professional and amateur musicians, dancers and performers unleashed their creative canines within the confines of retro-futuristic Seattle Center, witnessed and cheered on by half the population of northern Puget Sound. Unique in America by all accounts, Folklife has remained throughout its existence relentlessly pan-inclusive, non-commercial, all-volunteer, unpaid and free to the public.

Of course, that's a relative statement. Given that entertainment in America runs a gauntlet from little kids skipping rope on the sidewalk to Las Vegas or Disney World, Folklife could easily be metered anywhere from doe-eyed innocence to cigar-chomping dissolution, and has. S's and my own history with the institution includes a fair share of shameless huckstering (cleverly repurposed as folk art, naturally), and our attitude towards the proceedings in the past veered to the wolf's eye view of the capering spring lamb.

Such bloody-mindedness can lead to considerable remuneration, but it also engenders unfortunate personality deformations. One of the ugly truths of wunnerful wunnerful bizniz is that being an SOB is frequently a profit center. We can put on the dog-mouth as well as any securities trader, but we don't like ourselves much when we do, nor do our friends and acquaintances. In recent years, our distaste for the hot crackling grease of urban busking, combined with a fortuitous bout of debilitating illness, has moved us further and further from our sidewalk godzilla style of yore.

Not surprisingly, we've also seen a precipitous drop in our street take over the same period, enough that we've had to find other sources of income. Oh, it's gotten tougher overall, no question -- every busker we know has a tale of woe about the state of the art. But without what S terms "the eye of the tiger" (cue Rocky theme) (okay, stop), we just can't punch through the chaff of car noise and other performers and paper cup beggars and compassion burnout and the price of gas to make the sale anymore.

That could be a good thing. It's debatable whether music has that much place in the world of competition anyways. I've had occasion in the past to thunder from the pulpit about the abominable institution of the song contest (in this corner, Bob Dylan -- in this corner, Hoagy Carmichael. Fight!), surely the epitome of the usurpation of the esthetic by the athletic. To the victor belong the spoils indeed, and welcome.

This year, shorn of our vulpine excesses and happily supplemented by a demanding but very adequately recompensed church gig, we of the Amber Tide Mutual Aid And Admiration Society were pleased to merely dip our toesies into the shark-infested waters of impromptu performance at the festival. Former sources of irritation -- ingratiatingly ethnic, excruciatingly loud drum ensembles, self-righteous political demonstrators, overpowering stage amplification, incoherent inebriates of every chemical lineage and the like -- were water drops off the wings of our relaxed, accepting attitude. The sets we played were fewer in number, but utterly delightful in their intimacy and audience response. S declared it the best Folklife she'd ever had.

Forces like these appear to be at work all over the commercial music world. Older, more rapacious institutions existing only to exploit and plunder artists are getting their lunches munched by smaller, nimbler organizations less dedicated to clear-cutting than to cooperating with their clients and audiences. Generosity, as exemplified by free downloads, has made its appearance as a business tool. It's the Mammy Yokum principle: Good is better than evil because it's nicer.

In its own way, the increased virtue of music exemplifies an old belief structure, one usually associated with chanting medieval monks and gimlet-eyed Jesuits -- the perfectibility of all things. The notion of the great chain of being, of climbing Jacob's Ladder, of all creation in flux towards the ideal G-d intends for it, is a remarkably optimistic one, given the more recent additions to the philosophical and scientific literature and the Kutthroat Kapitalism (tm) that accompanied them. Though no rational person would particularly care to return to the Age O' Inquisition, that optimism would be a welcome relief.

And after all, g-d or no g-d (or g-ds for that matter), where did all this come from then, hmmm?