Best. Music. Industry. Discussion. Evah.
If you're so inclined, I'd highly recommend hopping on over to MetaFilter and checking out this excellent discussion on the current state of the music industry. There's a lot of talk to sort through there, but it's one of the best round-ups of the current state of the industry that I've seen, especially for the wide range of perspectives represented.
Inaugural Poem: New Domain Christening
Well, now that I've finally gotten around to establishing this humble little museum of mine with a good and proper domain all its own (museumoflostcauses.com), I suppose it's time to declare the museum officially open for business.
In that spirit of new beginnings, I submit the following poem written just for this occasion.
In the Museum of Lost Causes
The old night watchman’s leathery face no longer registers
the fleeting contours of his disgust, though it’s hard to deny
that every new exhibit, nearly without exception, pushes
the bounds of good taste to previously unknown lows,
plumbing new depths of ignominy, as if all human history
could be reduced to a sort of existential limbo dance, each
man and woman’s life merely a more or less successful answer
to the call-and-response challenge “How low can you go?”
though he has been known to shuttle his head from side
to side on occasion, in his disapproving but avuncular way,
as if to say, “Well, at least it can’t get much worse than this,”
though of course it can, and he already knows it will.
And as the guys from the warehouse wheel in their crates,
unloading the pieces for the latest exhibit, the night watchman
can’t bear to watch (though this irony escapes him), for where
such crates in former times might have held harmless trinkets
like perpetual motion machines or shiny new instruction manuals
for performing English to metric conversions, these days they only
ever seemed to hold more and more dead bodies, stacked
thick: bodies of all shapes and sizes, bodies of soldiers, bodies
of school children, bodies of refugees, hollowed-out and putrid
remnants of despoiled lives, the worst lost causes of all—a missing
nose here, a gaping eye socket there, faces contorted into grotesque
rubbery masks of astonishment and grief, which in their ravages
seemed to mock not only human life but even the very idea of humanity.
In that spirit of new beginnings, I submit the following poem written just for this occasion.
In the Museum of Lost Causes
The old night watchman’s leathery face no longer registers
the fleeting contours of his disgust, though it’s hard to deny
that every new exhibit, nearly without exception, pushes
the bounds of good taste to previously unknown lows,
plumbing new depths of ignominy, as if all human history
could be reduced to a sort of existential limbo dance, each
man and woman’s life merely a more or less successful answer
to the call-and-response challenge “How low can you go?”
though he has been known to shuttle his head from side
to side on occasion, in his disapproving but avuncular way,
as if to say, “Well, at least it can’t get much worse than this,”
though of course it can, and he already knows it will.
And as the guys from the warehouse wheel in their crates,
unloading the pieces for the latest exhibit, the night watchman
can’t bear to watch (though this irony escapes him), for where
such crates in former times might have held harmless trinkets
like perpetual motion machines or shiny new instruction manuals
for performing English to metric conversions, these days they only
ever seemed to hold more and more dead bodies, stacked
thick: bodies of all shapes and sizes, bodies of soldiers, bodies
of school children, bodies of refugees, hollowed-out and putrid
remnants of despoiled lives, the worst lost causes of all—a missing
nose here, a gaping eye socket there, faces contorted into grotesque
rubbery masks of astonishment and grief, which in their ravages
seemed to mock not only human life but even the very idea of humanity.
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