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

[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.