Grr.

[labellementeuse]

I am grouchy today. monkeycrackmary linked to this: Joshua Bell plays at a subway, makes $30. And I wrote up a whole comment but it had nothing to do with her post, so instead I'm ranting here.

I've made more than that busking and I suck, and I'm sorry, but this is just part of it, that very very good music is not universal. It's just, it's not. The difference between bad and good, yeah, that's obvious to the layman, but between very good and Joshua Bell? Not intuitive, it actually is something that you have to learn. The reason Bell tickets sell for so much is that there are two select groups of people who go to classical music concerts: music critics and enthusiasts, and rich people. The first group have enough of an education to recognise it, and the second group wanna look cool. And the first group, I don't mean eminent music critics, I mean people who care about classical music and listen to a lot of it. And the probability is that most of the people going past at rush hour aren't in one of those two groups. And that's just borne out by Picarello, because he's played and he's listened a lot - it's not that he was tortured into giving up his art, or whatever.

It hasn't got shit to do with recognising beauty. People like to hear what they know. If Bell had stood there and played, say, Pachelbel's Canon, some Bach minuets, Humouresque by Dvorac, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star... he probably would have got a lot more, you know. Busking is an art just like classical musicianship is, and that's just leaving aside the problem of time (rush hour can be good for money, but it's awful for getting a crowd; there are a whole other bunch of problems with this kind of busking set-up.)

The article really hit the nail on the head about people looking at you, and giving money, and kids, though. When I busked regularly I used to love kids, especially parents with kids, because they would stop (and, um. Also, sometimes the parents could be generous.)

The other thing that made me pissy today was my boss. Yesterday I was working with Andy who, it turns out, doesn't have access rights to a no sale - opening a till. I talked to Mike today, assuming this was a mistake. Nope, apparently only "shift supervisors" are supposed to be able to open tills - "like at New World and McDonalds". Um, okay. The problem with that is a) we don't have dedicated shift supervisors and b) we aren't a New World. We have different needs. Apparently Andy doesn't need to be able to open his till, because he should be on forecourt the whole time and I should be on tills. What about, you know, the other work that needs doing? Oh, Andy should do that. Except that either Andy doesn't know how to do it, or they're privileged jobs. I love doing the drinks fridge, and it's the prerogative of the most senior or most pushy staff member, because it gives you at least an hour away from customers. Taking that privilege away so you can take away no sale access? DUMB. Plus, anybody who is working a till will need to do no sales. A lot. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Comments

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

Eh, I've known people get in very similarly preachy moods about other types of music that they consider to be 'the best' and the fact that other people can't recognise it. One person on my flist (who is no longer on my flist, but not for this reason) ranted about how people were constantly listening to rock bands that don't feature long meedly guitar chords that require lots of complex fingerwork to do, since according to her this was the most skilled form of music, and anything that lacked it - i.e. anything with any energy - was lame.

Luckily for me, I consider the greatest musical work of all time to be the Birthday Party's 'Junkyard', and I long ago came to terms with the fact that everybody else thinks it's a bunch of atonal shit.

[mandor700.livejournal.com]

Fuckn aye go the Birthday Party!

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

OK, maybe not everybody else.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Discussion about what kind of music is the most valuable always strikes me as frustrating and pointless. Like science, everyone is standing on the shoulder of giants when they write music. I do think having a classical background can be really valuable for a musician because you tend to pick up a lot of musical theory, and IMO musical theory normally makes for better music - but it's by no means vital. *shrug*

[angry-in-pink.livejournal.com]

That's so true. It's also down to taste, time etc; there are just so many variables in busking. I haven't done it personally, but I have some friends how do and it's always going to be different, every time.

Speaking of good music (personal taste wise) I reckon the best male singer EVER was Paul Robeson. Sung "Old man River" in the original "Show Boat". I almost cried, seriously. But, it's all subjective.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

it's always going to be different, every time. Yeah. Street performance is an art.

[disturbed-kiwi.livejournal.com]

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH Retail.

My pet peeve with these jobs is the way that bosses never allow for redundancy in a literal sense. They keep expecting staff to do discrete jobs and never realise that if that staff member is somewhere else or, heaven forbid, sick that they won't have anyone who can do the job. Same goes for hours, sometimes they get huffy that staff are sick or want their legally required holidays and they don't have enough numbers, yet they haven't created a way to deal with it.

I just don't see why you wouldn't have all your staff trained to be able to do everything, so they can all be really efficient and useful.



I have no idea about music. I know I like heavy stuff?

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

AAAAAHHHHHH Caltex. *sporks*

They keep expecting staff to do discrete jobs and never realise that if that staff member is somewhere else or, heaven forbid, sick that they won't have anyone who can do the job.

God, that TOTALLY sums up the problems here, along with our manager leaving and the owners deciding not to replace them - so the owners Mike and Simone rush around doing the banking and ordering and things at all three stores. It's fucking hopeless. Meanwhile we have a total of six, maybe seven employed staff? Lessee, Rob, Graeme and security who do night shifts, Andy, John, Richard who just quit, Shannon who just quit, me. Oh, eight. Kind of NOT ENOUGH. Makes me CRAZY.

[semiramis.livejournal.com]

I had a really long comment regarding the Bell article, too, but it didn't have much to do with what you said, either. Which. I'll post in the morning, when I'm a bit more coherent D:

Other than that. I love the random free-for-all that we have at my job. Ostensibly, we all have designated tasks, but mostly, we just all bustle around and do whatever needs doing. It's nice. (It also invites occasional "Will somebody get the damn phone"s every now and then, but I suppose you can't have everything.) The only thing that's not a free-for-all is that there's only about three keys to the till which is now always locked when not in use, since there've been some problems with an employee stealing from the store a while ago. Everyone's allowed to use the till itself, it's just they have to figure out who's got the keys at the moment. Which, I realize, might not be the most effective way of preventing employees from stealing, but.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I await with interest!

The only thing that's not a free-for-all is that there's only about three keys to the till which is now always locked when not in use, since there've been some problems with an employee stealing from the store a while ago.

But the thing about that is, at least everyone's in the same position when it comes to till keys. For us it's specific individuals only have the power to open the till - and I mean, you can pretty easily log in as someone else, I guess, but it's seriously inconvenient in the middle of a whole crowd of people. Arrrrrrrgh.

[semiramis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's true. Strictly speaking, only the shift managers and the people who're supposed to be at the front (I and a few others) are supposed to have access to the keys themselves, but we're pretty lax about that, especially when the boss isn't around.

[(Anonymous)]

There is a great response to the Joshua Bell article by a NYC subway musician in her blog: www.SawLady.com/blog
She interprets the situation differently from the Washington Post reporters... I thought you might find it interesting.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Hey, thank you! Yeah, I really liked her take on it.

[kitsunerei88]

It kind of makes me glad that I don't work, refraining from the fact that this means that all my income comes from scholarships alone, and my tuition gets paid by a helluva lot of savings, loans, and scholarships. . .

I worked at a turkey farm once though. Paid well, but it sucked horribly. Since my parents wouldn't let me quit outright, I first fled for five weeks to Quebec on government money to study French, and then I started doing university concurrently with high school, which let me quit anyway because I was too busy doing other stuff to work. . . ^^'' Seriously though, when I worked at that turkey farm, I DREAMED about working in McDonalds, where it was WARM, and MOSTLY CLEAN, and the only birds I had to deal with were HUMAN or DEAD.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

haha, yeah, unfortunately I work fourteen hours a week and I'm STILL paying everything, including rent, by loan. Sigh.

Dude. A turkey farm? What did you do?

[kitsunerei88]

Chase around turkeys half my size, get attacked by them, attempt to steal their eggs so the eggs can go in the incubator and hatch and get fattened for people's Christmas/Easter/Something dinner. I was on a breeding farm, so I chased around the hens to try to get their eggs. There is machinery to push the birds out of the nests in some barns, and in these barns, the eggs end up on a little conveyor belt and go into a box for you to collect later in a basket. If you're lucky enough to be in these barns, you really just have to floorsweep (because some birds will lay their eggs outside of the automated nests and SIT on them like, err, nature told them to) and go around the corners and pick the eggs off the ledges there. If you're not lucky and end up in an non-automated barn, you have to slowly inch down the entire length of the barn and manually shove the bird out of the nest in order to steal the egg (and they don't like this. At all.) and hope you don't break it in the process or management gives you flak. And each barn has nearly 300 or 400 nests. . .

After you do all this, you lug your baskets, often about 300 or 400 eggs (a barn holds about 1200 birds) to the main house and send them into a cleaning machine to clean them and pack them in a box to go to hatchery.

And that's NOT mentioning the two or three or four inches of manure on the floor of each barn, the days when the birds ESCAPE FROM THE PENS, the dead birds, the DUST (enough to get you coughing like mad every time you inhale) and stuff. Yeah, I loved the days when I got put on laundry duty. The only good thing about that job was that when you were in the barn/laundry room, no one bothered you.