It's been a year full of pleasant surprises, as I suddenly learn or remember all over again all the things you can actually do with a credit card that you can't do without one; and I don't necessarily mean expensive things, either, but simply the kinds of doors that electronic money opens that physical cash does not. So for example, even though I'm still spending the same amount for them, I'm now buying all my soaps and bubble baths from "housewife entrepreneurs" over at Etsy, where I can order the kinds of exotic, masculine, savory scents that I spent years searching for and failing to find at the traditional bath shops; and my CTA fare card is now automatically refilled whenever I drop under two dollars, for another example, which has eliminated one of the hugely annoying weekly quests that used to dominate my life for so long, making sure I had the right change on me every single time I wanted to get on the el or a bus.

And then along those lines, one morning a couple of months ago I was going through my news feeds, and just happened to catch the news right when it was announced that the sugary-great Swedish pop singer Jens Lekman would be playing soon at Chicago's Lincoln Hall, a fairly new large-club-sized space (I think it can handle around three or four hundred) over in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, owned by the same guy who owns the smaller but much better-known Schubas, and the two coordinating their schedules to complement each other; and there was a big inviting button just right there, that said "CLICK ME TO ORDER TICKETS RIGHT NOW..." so I did! Oh yeah, that's right, you can do those kinds of things when you own a credit card!

And see, this is an even bigger deal than it might seem at first, because barring things like friends playing dive bars in the middle of the night or whatever, this would be the first traditional rock concert I had attended in a decade; and I mean literally in a decade, because the more I think about it, the more I'm pretty sure that literally the last rock show I'd been to before this had been Sonic Youth at the Riviera in the very early 2000s, because of getting a free ticket from a friend. And that's because of a combination of factors -- my hearing getting so much worse, having so much less disposable income, me getting older, me completely losing touch with what was going on in the world of indie music. In fact, as regular readers remember, that issue of becoming a big ol' REM-listening fogie had become so bad with me, at the beginning of 2008 I issued a challenge to myself, to fill my little one-gig iPod Shuffle by the end of the year not only with all music less than a year old, but with me personally liking every single song on it (so in other words, no packing it with entire albums full of filler material), which was a big success and that led me to writing an entire book about the fascinating process.

And I started the process by cheating a little, by basically turning to Pitchfork's "20 Best Albums of 2007" list and downloading them all via BitTorrent, and building my first playlist that way; and Jens Lekman's Night Falls Over Kortedala happened to be one of my favorites in that Pitchfork list that year, so I ended up listening the shit out of it during the first half of 2008, right when my arts center was having its first successes. And so now of the thousand or so bands I own individual singles of on my computer, Lekman is perhaps one of only two dozen that I can remember by name (along with Feist, Battles, Of Montreal and many of those other Pitchfork 2007 picks); and since those songs are so associated in my mind with the pleasant memories of first building up CCLaP, I have a real soft spot in my heart for the "Scandinavian Morrissey" that Lekman sometimes is. (Or, he doesn't really sound like Morrissey; but like him, he writes absolutely beautiful little upbeat songs about these very dark, serious subjects.)

Original photo credit

Original photo credit

Original photo credit

And so the concert finally arrived just a few days ago, and I made my way down to the trisection of Fullerton, Halsted and Lincoln, very close to where the old Lounge Ax punk club used to stand, along that night with what seemed like the city's entire population of balding, clunky-glassed, forty-something slackers. And I have to say, Lincoln Hall is freaking gorgeous, built from scratch and with a very contemporary look and feel, much like Steppenwolf's main space not too far away, all euclidian bar tops and shiny black surfaces, and with a breathtaking two-story performance space containing a table-and-chair U-ring balcony overlooking an SRO floor below, with a decked-out stage and a military contractor's worth of tech stuff in the back of the room. And of course I'm 42 now, and simply don't do things like stand for three hours at rock concerts anymore; so I showed up as soon as the venue's website told me I could, a full hour before the show's start (and two and a half hours before headliner Lekman actually took the stage), and I indeed was able to easily snag a stage-left chair up in the balcony, essentially giving me the same view as the owner's box across the way from me, "paid for" by basically sitting there for several hours with pints of Guinness and a book, waiting for first opener Geoffrey O'Connor and then for the main set to begin.

(Shot by me from the actual concert)

And the show itself was just really...well, it was really just great; turns out that Lekman left his entire band at home for this tour besides a percussionist, so it was a much more intimate show than it could've otherwise been, Jens telling a lot of jokes and giving a lot of introductions to songs, talking in detail about both the tour and his Chicago impressions, apparently the very first time he's actually been to the city. And I guess...or, I'm not really sure about this...but I guess it apparently turned out to be one of the biggest, most intense shows that Lincoln Hall's now held since first opening in 2009? Like I said, I'm not sure about that; it was definitely a sold-out crowd, I know that, packed to the gills by the time Lekman actually took the stage, and the crowd was passionate enough that near the end, they sang nearly an entire song from the audience to Jens's amazement, and certainly Jens himself seemed so moved by the end of the night that he almost cried when taking his final vow. But admittedly, all of those things could've just come with a normal if not popular show as well; but now add that several days after the show, Lincoln Hall announced with a surprise that they had commissioned a special after-show hipster poster to commemorate the occasion, because demand was so high. And again, I suppose that could be a regular activity of Lincoln Hall, to commission special silkscreened posters of individual concerts after the fact, to mark especially popular ones; but that's suddenly a lot of 'ifs' and 'buts' lining up, right? More realistic, perhaps, to acknowledge that it turned out to be a surprisingly special and memorable event, one that even the people involved didn't realize was going to turn out to be so memorable, so much so that the main star was moved almost to tears and the venue hastily assembled a collector's item to sell long after the crowd had gone home. (These posters weren't for sale at the actual show; I know that for a fact.)

My point is that it was just a really special night to begin with, combined with it being my own first rock concert in a decade, my amazement over having bought my ticket with a credit card in the first place, three hours of drinking Guinness and doing edits on my arts center's latest original book, which made me feel like a badass, sitting next to these two absolutely adorable hipster nerd-girls there dateless, all fucking excited, who kept waving their hands in the air and dancing in their seats every time Lekman played a song they liked. It was all of these things added together that made me start having this slow realization about halfway through the evening, one that had become like a tidal wave of surety at the end, this suddenly sort of absolute confirmation that this karmic "time of penance" I've been going through for most of the last decade is finally and completely over. Oh, you remember the karmic time of penance, right? I suppose you could say that it started with September 11th, although for me it was more like six months later, spring of 2002, when in a period of only two or three years I had most of the details of my life turn to complete shit -- my girlfriend and I had one of the messiest breakups I've ever went through, I quit pursing writing for a career, I lost my 9-to-5 job and to this day have never managed to get one again, I got chased out of the poetry scene while tied to a rail, I lost nearly every friend I had, I eventually had every single tooth in my mouth go rotten, and of course let's not forget that I got hit by a fucking car, and the shattered hip and shattered hand and PTSD and year of daily physical therapy and four months of living with my parents again that all came with that.

By the mid-2000s, with a lot of soul-searching, I had come to the conclusion that all of this stuff seemed to be adding up for a deliberate reason; and that's because it was the universe essentially punishing me for being such an asshole to so many people for so long in my youth, a form of karmic penance I was being forced to pay for all my past sins, basically the closest I've ever gotten as an adult to admitting to any form of spirituality or metaphysics. And in fact, if you go through my old journal entries here from that period, say around 2004 to 2006, you can see me very explicitly grappling with this subject by name, declaring that I now know that I'm going through this penance but having no idea when it might be over, when I might finally pay my debt and be allowed to start having good things happen to my life again. Because, see, I'm one of those people who also believes that my life tends to always be generally sloping in either an upward or downward direction, in these very long waveforms that take years and years to complete; so in the early '90s, for example, I was at the low point of one of these waves, completely burnt out on my collegetown slacker existence and literally slinking off to Chicago with two suitcases and 75 bucks in cash; but then by the late '90s I was at the high point of the next wave, when in a period of just two or three years I had several books come out, appeared a couple of times on NPR, had all my successes in the poetry-slam community, had easy sex and was given free drugs all the time, etc etc. And then by the mid-2000s, I was back to another low point, with all the things I just mentioned; and so who knew when things might finally flip back around, and when I might find myself once again building towards another crest?

It's been pretty clear for awhile now that the lowest point was right around the re-election of Bush, and that the wave had started its uphill climb again by 2007 when I finally got my arts center open; but sitting there at Lincoln Hall that night, so buzzed and happy and content and proud of all the things that had been going right for me recently, it finally hit me that the negative part of this most recent wave was over for good, that literally right that moment this emotional wave was passing the zero point again and permanently into positive territory. That my penance was finally paid, that I had finally received enough punishment for the asshole I used to be; and that now that I'm a profoundly different person than I was before (and I am a profoundly different person than I was before, both because of maturing, learning from this process, becoming an authority figure to a couple of little kids for the first time, and finally switching my profession from artist to small business owner, where you simply have to become less of an asshole to even get your job done), I'm finally set for the next half-decade of my life to once again be a series of overlapping highs and accomplishments, not just the modest successes I've been having with CCLaP but pretty soon a much bigger hike in revenue and national reputation, or maybe finally a new apartment, or God forbid a new girlfriend. Now that my health is back to normal, now that my finances are back to normal, now that I don't have to be embarrassed to tell first dates what I do for a living, now that I'm a calmer and wiser person, now that my debt to karma has been paid, maybe all the elements of my life will finally start clicking again at the kind of full strength they haven't since the mid-'90s, when I was having all my first big successes as a writer in the first place.

And I started to cry, right there at the Jens Lekman concert, so overwhelmed with relief and gratitude for having this realization, with just such an immense lifting of what had been such a heavy weight that'd been on me for the last decade; and you know, thank God that it was so dark, and that people were so intensely into such a memorable show, so that I could just sit there and quietly sniffle to myself and wipe my eyes without anyone noticing, although it's too bad I couldn't do the same on the el afterwards, where I continued to slowly leak tears all the way home. It seems sometimes like such a giant rock that's been on my back all through the 2000s, this just overwhelming sense of how much there's still left to do before my life is back to something even resembling normal, how it seemed sometimes to be just one giant piece of shit after another and without there being any end in sight. It's been a humbling experience, a learning experience, a painful experience, one where I had to literally break my entire life down into basic building blocks and then reassemble it again from scratch; and I leave it with a lot of burned bridges left behind, a lot of people who will despise me until the day they die, a lot of people who will never trust me again and certainly will never want to be my friend again. And it's gratifying and overwhelming to suddenly realize that the worst of it is over, that I've indeed become a new person and am ready for the next wave of successes in my life, wherever those successes might lead me. It's gratifying to know that my debt to society has finally been paid, and that I'm ready to have good things start happening to me again.

Anyway, that's enough for today. Talk with you again soon.

In fact, I've talked before about how pleasurable it is for me to spend a Saturday night fully "visiting" Onlinistan in this really full-sensurround kind of way, or at least as immersive as a clunky interface like a desktop computer gets; you know, pick up a six-pack, smoke a joint, listen though all the new music from around the world I downloaded a song at a time earlier that week, look through all the new photos that my thousand-something friends at Flickr around the world posted that week, do the same at YouTube for all my acquaintances' videos, do the same at Google Reader for their drawings and written thoughts posted at all their blogs, keep my Facebook and Twitter and GChat windows all open to watch the real-time updates from all these people come streaming in from around the planet. I can spend an entire pleasurable Saturday night doing nothing but this; and then when I occasionally stumble back out onto the streets all googly-eyed afterwards as I sometimes do, to go have a beer at the corner pub and get re-adjusted to the physical world again, it can often feel like I just got back from a very real other place, like if I was just getting home to my place in Oakland but had just spent the evening at a really fun party in San Francisco.

I guess this is so fascinating to me because I can already picture how quaint and innocent it's going to sound to future ears; how in a hundred years, no one's going to think twice about the concept of half their consciousness permanently residing in this virtual destination that's become as real in people's minds as any physical space, but how right now when it's happening for the first time in human history, those of us taking the time to think about it are all having these kind of existential-crisis freakouts over it all. Because really, when all is said and done, it's that "consciousness" part that's the key to why this is such a future-shock paradigm; it's essentially humanity beginning the process of permanently redefining what it means to "occupy" a space, making it much more in the future about what it is that is commandeering your attention, your time, your dedication, and not necessarily dominating just your physical surroundings, which is how we've always defined it before. And this is really why the makeup of the places I'm going to online is so important to this process, and not simply that I'm using a technology that a whole lot of other people are also using at any given moment; because the people like me who exist scattered around the world -- creative, intellectual, tech-savvy, introspective -- we're not just finding each other and assembling online, but actually creating something unique and of value there that doesn't exist in any of our individual creative communities scattered around the planet.

Onlinistan doesn't contain the full plethora of different neighborhoods like a normal urban space does, no dangerous slums or apocalyptic-looking industrial zones; instead, it's an entire city made up only of fun artsy districts, an endless parade of tastefully decorated streets full of used-record stores and art galleries and renovated Victorian mansions, where everyone bicycles and everyone recycles and everyone has WiFi and everyone treasures the local park system. And so in some ways, it's actually preferable to whatever Tea-Party-filled hellhole you might actually live in out in the physical world, and certainly at least a much different experience than simply visiting a different city, a much more delightful experience that actively makes you want to believe in it, believe that you could actually live there full-time if you just wished for it hard enough.

And in my case, the weird blending of these experiences doesn't end there; the photo above, for example, is the view from a cafe in my neighborhood I frequent almost every day, the place my Facebook friends are always seeing me check in from, and I know from personal experience now that if you blurred the actual language in the signs, it'd be nearly impossible to differentiate this view from one of a random quiet creative-class residential streetcorner in Denver, Amsterdam or Frankfurt, and I'm sure a thousand other middle-class urban spaces dispersed around the planet. So in my case, all that media consumption from similar places around the world when I'm visiting Onlinistan is only amplified when I head back out into Chicago again, because my physical environment here in Uptown and Lakeview and Lincoln Square is nearly identical to the eco-liberal-creative space of Onlinistan itself, leading to these sometimes almost hallucinatory experiences where I'll just be biking around my neighborhood and suddenly can't remember whether I'm in Chicago or London or Sydney or Barcelona, whether there's dollars or euros in my wallet, whether I'm heading to the slacker neighborhood or Die Kuenstler Distrikt.

And then speaking of Facebook, I'm sure this is a big reason why the Onlinistan Problem is becoming more and more pronounced with each passing year; because with so many of us in our particular circle now owning "smart" mobile devices, even when we're out in the physical world we're carrying a magic little doorway to Onlinistan in our pockets with us, and can both follow all our Onlinistanian friends in real time and let them follow us in real time, not just an opportunity to talk at any given moment like phones have let us do for a long time already, but a constant barrage of multimedia updates, photos and videos and venue check-ins conveniently centralized and contextualized for us via a surprisingly small number of applications that are always a flick of a touchscreen away. The online world was bad enough when we could only access it at home while literally chained to a monitor the size of our head, but at least it just seemed like a technology then; with it now being ported to our pocket in real-time passive pushes no matter where we are, it's no wonder that it's more and more starting to look like the geographical equivalent of Esperanto, a culturally neutral shared space where everyone across the planet can come together to exchange information quickly and easily, while simultaneously celebrating their own culture wherever it is that they live.

Anyway, no big conclusions today; it's just something I've been thinking about a lot again. Sigh -- I need to get out more.

So yes, it's true; for the first time in officially a decade, I'm out exploring Chicago's live literary community on a weekly basis again. (And I mean exactly a decade; I officially quit the poetry scene and first lost track of all that stuff in April 2001.) And that's because, lo and behold, after four years of shooting my mouth off about it, my arts center's first paper books are finally here; and unlike the electronic books we've been publishing since 2007, if I want to actually move a decent amount of paper books I need to go out and get myself ingratiated into the local scene again, not only to directly sell copies that way, but to get my authors booked into more and more local events, and to get more and more people out to CCLaP's own occasional live events, such as the giant release party I'll be throwing this August for CCLaP's first four paper books all at once (Mark R. Brand's Life After Sleep, Sally Weigel's Too Young to Fall Asleep, Ben Tanzer's 99 Problems, and Jason Fisk's Salt Creek Anthology, coming June 30th). And so I'm out making the rounds again, hitting anywhere from one to four shows any given week, and shaking hands and buying drinks and gabbing about projects and handing out CCLaP samplers like candy.

I have to confess, in many ways I'm finding the entire thing kind of tedious, and something I'm doing definitely more because I have to than that I want to; but on the plus side, I used it as a flimsy justification to buy a new Kodak Zi8 hi-def video camera (the first HD camera in history to retail for under a hundred dollars), so to shoot little recaps of at least one show a week, to post at YouTube and the CCLaP Podcast to generate yet more monetizable original intellectual property out of the entire thing, because why just do something when you can do it and get monetizable original intellectual property out of it? Sheesh, people, I swear! And also to be fair, it's not necessarily the quality of the shows themselves that make the whole thing tedious to me, but rather that when I was younger, I spent almost a decade attending and performing at almost four shows a week myself, every single week all year long, and got so completely burned out on the whole thing even back then that I really could've gone the entire rest of my life without attending a single one ever again.

It's funny -- I recently met this local writer named Lauryn Allison Lewis who I'm thinking of publishing through CCLaP next year, and that's had us gabbing a lot recently, where I'm getting to tell the entire story all over again of being a spoken-word artist in the '90s and all my good and bad experiences with it, and it's just always an interesting thing to look at those years through the fresh vicarious eyes of someone who wasn't there and who didn't know me then, back when I was a much different person than I am now. As I was telling her, although I suspect that my thoughts about this subject will mellow with time, here ten years after my experiences with the poetry-slam community, I still carry around a lot of bad blood and unpleasant memories of those times, and so in some ways being out at all these live shows again is like experiencing a Vietnam flashback...oh, and especially at shows in crowded bars with no microphones that last for three hours and don't end until midnight, which is pretty much the definition of my entire twenties in a nutshell. But of course in some ways it's a much better experience now, precisely because I'm no longer a performer but an administrator; that since I'm now the guy who publishes all these people instead of having to grab the attention myself, I can simply sit back and enjoy myself more at these events, don't have to be in the room's spotlight but can rather just sip my beer and let the artists themselves go on and on (and on and on and on and on and on). Plus, let's not forget, it's mostly now fiction and other narrative readings I'm attending, which by and large is a completely different kind of monster than a typical poetry reading, and whose better focii and earlier end-times tend to gel better now with my sorry middle-aged ass.

Anyway, ever onward, I suppose, with the good news being that it's working; I'm literally selling books these days as fast as I can make them (and I mean quite literally -- I have copies targeted for specific customers drying in the corner of my apartment as we speak), which I'm frankly astounded, humbled and grateful for, given just how many other small publishers out there right now are instead sitting with entire garages full of unsold paperbacks that they can't even give away for the price of postage. It's a precarious time right now for the underground arts, as we shift from a predominantly physical to a predominantly digital industry, and I'm going with an experimental plan for CCLaP that hasn't nearly been proven yet will work; so I'm grateful to see things finally starting to click, now that I finally have all three parts of the center's convoluted publishing plan in place (that is, to give out the electronic version for free, sell it on a customized USB stick at live events for ten bucks, then sell a handmade, Arts-&-Crafts-style paper version to hardcore fans and full-time book collectors for twenty bucks, to subsidize all those free ebooks that generate most of the title's actual readers). I've suspected for half a decade now that a plan like this would be a big success, both financially and from a publicity aspect, and I'm enormously satisfied to be able to finally start it up and so far be proven right.

Okay, that's it for today. Talk with you again soon.

My arts center's latest original book finally came out last week, a day-after-tomorrow novella called Life After Sleep by a local sci-fi vet named Mark Brand that I have to say I'm very happy with; and like the other three books that CCLaP has now published, it's had me thinking recently about my life, my career, aging, and other subjects along those lines. Because the fact is that these little ebooks the center puts out are ridiculously far away from being any kind of decent moneymaker; if history is any indication, for example, I can expect to make absolutely no more than $400 or $500 from this latest title, with half of that of course going to the author, which means I'd have to publish over a hundred of them a year just to make the same kind of salary as I would as a low-level office secretary (i.e. around $25,000 a year, the absolute minimum I need to live in Chicago). And so until CCLaP has the capacity to pay me that kind of money, it's always essentially going to be more like a toy or hobby than job or career, no matter how seriously I take it, no matter how close I am at any given point to it being my main source of revenue; so while I'm very happy with the release of Life After Sleep, right now it's hard for me to see it as much more than having just played my latest move in a giant game I've been conducting since 2007, that game being "Let's Convince People To Give A Shit That I've Started An Arts Center," and my opponent being the entire rest of the human fucking race.

But then again, now that I'm in my forties, I find myself thinking a lot about middle-age, the questions that middle-aged men ask themselves at this point in their lives, and how I might or might not be reacting differently to them if the circumstances in my life were different; for example, how it's highly doubtful that I in particular am going to go through a mid-life crisis, and that if I were the type of person who had one, doing something like opening an arts center would be my exact response to it anyway. And that's not something I take lightly, because over the years I've learned at least one of the great lessons that life has to teach us, that we tend to blow off the problems that people in other life circumstances have that we don't, instead of being happy and grateful that we've managed to avoid those problems ourselves. And now that I'm middle-aged, I gotta say, I can quite easily see just how miserable so many other middle-aged men around me are, and how even my friends deal many times with some pretty dark issues that I never have to even contemplate; and in fact, this is one of my greatest pleasures in publishing fellow middle-agers like Brand and his peer Ben Tanzer, is that they are both middle-class husbands and fathers who examine all kinds of fascinating moral issues in their work regarding these subjects.

The fact is that I shouldn't blow off the relief of knowing that I'm not going to have a mid-life crisis, because the fact is that I'm exactly the kind of guy who has one; or, that is, in an alternate universe, I'm exactly that guy who was a creative and motivated young artist but who in his thirties turned to a life of middle-class corporate mediocracy (for any of the ten thousand reasons that people do, both legitimate and il-), then right around 42 has a big giant freakout over it all, and leaves his family and quits his job and motorcycles across Asia or opens an arts center or whatever dumb shit I do in that particular space-time thread. And I'm glad for that, because that's an extremely important part of my life -- the fact that I can definitively state what I do, the fact that I can take a clear moral inventory of myself and ultimately come out on the positive instead of negative side of the karmic balance range. This used to be not much more than a platitude when I was young, but is something I find more and more important with each passing year, the issue that mainly influences whether we're to have a mid-life crisis in the first place -- the question of whether we're a decent human being, of whether we're doing something decent with our lives, something constructive or destructive, something that adds a tiny bit more to the world or that takes a tiny bit away.

Say what you will about the lack of money, stability and health, but I'm at least ethically proud of being in the arts for a living, of my job being to present new and beautiful things to the world instead of convincing preteen girls to spend every cent they own on dressing like a slut. I'm not trapped in a loveless marriage, like some of my unnamed middle-aged friends are; I don't slightly resent my children for ruining my aspirations; I'm not stuck like an indentured servant in a job I detest because of a loan I won't get paid off for decades still to come. Or, you know, if you want to be less dramatic -- I'm not a high-school principal. My job is to expand minds, not belittle them. To create things that used to not exist, not take away things that someone else has declared a threat. I'm proud of every single thing I've done in the last ten years that's made me money, something I bet that less than five percent of the population can say, and that's not something to take lightly at all, and especially not in the particular age we live in.

And so I balance all this agains the more pressing question, the one also asked more and more with each passing year, and the question that most usually kills artistic careers -- of whether I'm kidding myself that I can ever have a career doing this in the first place, of whether I'm one step closer to winning that giant lottery that the arts is. And the professional arts is a lottery, make no mistake, which is why so many give up on it; and the irony is that you have to be at the top of your A-game at all times even to be eligible to randomly win it, whether or not you're ever given that random opportunity. Because you never know when tomorrow is the day that an Oprah producer downloads Life After Sleep and changes my life permanently; but it's all for nought if that producer comes by on their random day and the site's not up to its full potential, or the book itself isn't impeccable, or you don't already have a ton of people out there talking about it, meaning that you have to be on top of all this at all times no matter what kinds of rewards you're currently receiving from it. And so that makes it extremely difficult to determine the difference between a good plan that merely hasn't come to fruition yet, and a bad plan that's never going to succeed no matter how many random opportunities it's given.

That's why I say that the whole thing feels like a game so often, because it often is; and the maddening part is that it's nearly impossible to tell whether you're doing things exactly correctly, so that things really will explode that random day that that Oprah producer comes by, or whether in fact you're completely deluding yourself over whether you have what it takes to be a big success, whether this "game" you're playing really is one, just some giant complicated round of Solitaire to distract you from the fact that you'll never really be a commercial success. That's another hard realization to make as you get older, of how many people in the arts are in reality just "playing" at the arts, and having legitimate successes even as they come nowhere even close to what one would consider an actual career; that's the big danger of electronic books, after all, which was the same danger of performance poetry back when I was involved with that in the '90s, that the petty instant rewards (downloads, praise, booze, sex, a pocket full of cash) help distract a person from the fact that they're really accomplishing nothing long-term or substantial, that they are again just another piece of this giant game they're playing.

And so that's what happens when a project like Life After Sleep is finally finished and comes out, is that I ask myself a series of questions and make a series of observations, to help determine where on the "pointless game/worth my time" scale it belongs. It's going to make very little money in the grand scheme of things; but I'm not some ennui-filled professor having a pointless affair with a 19-year-old student. There's no paper version of the book; but I didn't have to hide in a public toilet from an asshole boss a single time this entire year. CCLaP's last book cracked the Amazon Kindle Store Top 100 in its category (sports memoirs); but that still only accounted for an extra ten sales. But did that lay some kind of groundwork at Amazon that didn't exist before? Was one of those readers someone who might be able to randomly help out five years from now, and will only do so because they happened to have such a good experience five years previous? Or even if I make no money at all, isn't this still better than having a bitter wife who's drunk by lunchtime each day and a resentful daughter who cuts herself when no one's looking?

They're questions without definitive answers, of course, but something I go through every time I release a new book or host a new event through CCLaP. In any case, though, absolutely I'm very proud of the new book itself; and I have to admit, no matter what the other circumstances in my life at any given moment, there's still a real thrill that comes with being able to say, "I publish books for a living." Take away everything else, and being an arts administrator is still almost worth it just for that alone.

So what do Moammar Ghaddafi and Charlie Sheen have in common? Well, they both apparently in the last couple of weeks have undergone complete psychotic breakdowns, through a combination of stress, drugs and previous mental problems; but since both are rich and world-famous, they've been allowed to have their breakdowns in full view of the global public, and have been surrounded by fawning and preening sane people who have treated every crazy word as serious for ulterior motives. And I have to say, this is something that really bothers me about human nature, and especially here in America in the last thirty years, our endless capacity for worshipping random strangers in an almost godlike fashion for largely random reasons, which is then used as a justification for gleefully hurling rocks at these people the moment their pedestal starts to wobble, which is itself justified by continuing to worship them, making them even richer and more famous than they were before. And the reason it's so insidious is that everyone's at fault but not a single person will admit it; we all decry how much that poor crazy Sheen has been plastered all over the front pages, yet we all giggle along with the apocalyptic latest, the newest sign that he's now one step closer to his undoubtedly messy homicide/suicide demise.

It's had me thinking again about a philosophical question that's been on my mind ever since the end of the Bush years and the economic collapse and all that, now two and a half years ago; of how you even begin to punish a nation's worth of people at once, if that entire nation is guilty of committing some kind of horrible crime or another. Because I'm convinced that in the future, historians will see the unchecked darkness that has so far defined the 21st century not as a matter of a few huge ethical transgressions, but rather a hundred million tiny small ones; a hundred million Americans out of the approximately 400 million the country currently holds who were dicks during the Bush years exactly one time when they didn't need to be, simply because they could get away with it. The hundred million authority figures who used their petty little power to officially make one stranger's day just a little bit worse, simply because. The hundred million people who tried to censor or shut up someone else for their opinions or lifestyle. The hundred million people who took a bribe, who ran a scam, who "flipped condos" because they had been told it was a fast and sure-fire way to make a quick profit. The hundred million corporate executives committing sins behind the closed doors of skyscraper offices, the cartoonishly unbelievable stuff of bad fiction -- having orgies, snorting coke off iPhones, taking the corporate jet halfway around the world to have a thousand-dollar cocktail at a dictator's luxury hotel on the company's expense account.

Or, if you want to look at it in terms of people who really don't think they're also guilty -- the hundred million people who day-traded risky stocks in get-rich-quick schemes, brought on by screaming "experts" on a constant exposure loop via cable television. The hundred million middle-classers who collected dividends on mutual funds made up of bundled bad loans. The hundred million lower-classers who accepted those bad loans, knowing full well that they couldn't afford them. The hundred million people who handed out these bad loans like candy, to any random stranger who walked in, doled out from behind bulletproof windows in concrete huts in the middle of rundown neighborhoods, specifically to the uneducated and desperate. The hundred million political moderates who completely ignored the mustache-twirling politics of Bushism/Tea-Partyism altogether, in order to bury their heads in the sand and read their Boing Boing and tweet about their startups and bake their fucking cupcakes, their precious little Brooklyn organic bike-delivered fucking cupcakes, and who cares if the world is falling apart because look at this yummy vegan burrito I made! This is my whole point, that not a single one of us is completely innocent, even as every single one of us smugly proclaims in public that we are. And usually when a crime is discovered, there's a culprit to be caught and definitively punished, delivering what we think of as "justice;" but how do you achieve justice when it's a hundred million culprits who are all just a tiny bit guilty?

After thinking about it for two years now, I suppose the answer is exactly what you've been seeing in this country lately. The way to punish a hundred million guilty people is to create an economic crisis that literally won't end, precisely because the people it's affecting can't make even the tiniest step forward as to finding a viable solution, with every proposal actually a thinly-veiled partisan political maneuver, designed more for "punishing" their ideological "enemy" than in trying to find an actual solution. You punish them by saddling a decent President with millions of conspiracy nuts and conservative Christians who are convinced that he's literally the Biblical Antichrist, fueled heavily by sociopathic media titans who happily erase the line between objective journalism and crazed ranting, thus giving immediate legitimacy to what would otherwise be the ignored shouts of a shirtless corner panhandler. (And it's not just conservatives who are guilty of this; look at all the former liberal Obama supporters who have abandoned him just two years later for being "not radical enough," their own rantings rationalized by the lefty version of these sociopathic media empires.)

And so what's the solution? How do we finally stop the collective punishment? Well, as far as I can tell, the best proposal seems to be the one that hearkens all the way back to such Eastern religions as Taoism, which is the same thing that fuels most liberal forms of Christianity, which not by coincidence seems to also be the guiding principle behind the "atheist religion" known as Existentialism; namely, worry about yourself, both in terms of not being so obsessed with the sins of others, and in terms of not letting other people tell you how to live your own life. In fact, I think it's no coincidence that the greatest Existentialist book ever written, Albert Camus' 1947 The Plague, is a direct response to the question of how the French were exactly supposed to think of the Nazi occupation of their country a few years previous, now that it was all over and they were back to being an independent nation again, one that had just recently been split between vicious Fascists and those waging an underground war against them, very similar to the issues we're dealing with (or, er, not dealing with) in America these days, of how exactly we become a post-Bush society, of how to become morally clean again after being so morally dirty just a decade ago.

The answer lies in no longer letting other people define "right" and "wrong" for us, "success" and "failure." It lies in then sticking to these definitions of right and wrong once we come up with them, to not abandon our sense of right and wrong just because of this or that, because you need the money or because someone came up with a clever justification for it. ("It's not 'torture,' it's 'enhanced interrogation.'" NO. IT'S TORTURE. I KNOW WHAT TORTURE IS, AND THAT IS TORTURE, NO MATTER HOW MANY FANCY WORDS YOU COME UP WITH FOR IT.) It lies with doing what the Buddhists and Quakers and Humanists do, not try to convert strangers but simply live your own life as well as possible, so that others will voluntarily approach and ask to learn more. And for God's sake, it lies with breaking the Charlie Sheen Cycle, to stop ridiculing the famous at their lowest points then buying all their stuff, then ridiculing them then buying all their stuff. People, that isn't funny, and nothing's going to get better in this country until you at least do that, at least stop giggling at the antics of the rich and mentally unstable. It's just not funny.

It's just one of those things that sorta generally came about in my life; not from one big terrible incident, but rather just years of being first a poor art student and then a poor artist and never really caring for the subject of finance, or at least apathetic enough that I've just left a trail of small bills behind me for decades now that I've just never given much of a shit about paying off -- medical bills, my old college bookstore bill, old utility bills and the like. And so, thank God, that's left me without the tens of thousands in debt that so many of my friends my age now have, because of mortgages and car loans and student loans and credit card bills, but it does leave me with a credit rating that's virtually worthless right now, and an only spotty record even of my very existence, as far as the government and corporations are concerned.

But as regular readers know, I'm in the middle these days of trying to change all that; it was in fact one of the major goals of the new ten-year plan I wrote for myself in 2004, the same time that I quit writing in order to open my arts center instead, which I've also covered in the past here at the journal, in case you need to go back to 2004 and get a little refresher course on how all that came about. And now that I suddenly find myself with this chunk of money I wasn't expecting, I'm using a big wedge of it simply to get my credit back in order, which miraculously looks like it's going to be even easier than I imagined; because when I finally pulled my credit reports last fall, I learned that there's only less than $10,000 total debt listed on them right now, or in other words only the last seven years' worth of bills (and almost all of that related to my bike accident), when I had always assumed that unpaid debts stayed on your credit report for the rest of your life. (They don't -- a company has to pay an extra fee every seven years to do so, and most choose not to after seven years unless the amount owed is huge.) So paying all that off, combined with a year of avoiding trouble with a checking account and a "secured" credit card (i.e. they hold in cash reserve whatever the maximum credit amount is, so that the credit company ultimately gets paid one way or another), is apparently enough to at least put your credit rating back into the "not terrible" range, at which point your bank will most likely offer you a "real" credit card; and apparently a year of doing well with that is usually enough to qualify for a small loan from your bank, a few thousand for something like a car or (more likely in my case) a fancy mobile recording studio for CCLaP; and if you pay that off with no problems, all that added up together is apparently enough for your credit to be back in the top tier again, and to qualify for full mortgages and low rates and the like. And that's literally five to seven years from now, if you count receiving this settlement check as day one.

It all reminds me of something I learned several years ago about fantasy author JRR Tolkien that's stayed with me, that he deeply believed in a concept he called the "eucatastrophe" -- that is, a sudden and unexplainable event of luck or good news that can randomly happen to a person with no warning, just like the more well-known "catastrophe" of the opposite fate, for example like getting cancer and then beating cancer. (In fact, Tolkien was so enamored with this concept, he used it as the climax of Lord of the Rings, which is how I learned about it in the first place.) And I've been thinking a lot about this recently, because in many ways this is exactly what this settlement check represents; because despite my desire to get all this financial stuff taken care of this decade, the fact is that it would've been almost impossible to do so in a timely manner without this check suddenly falling into my lap, and that with it I'm suddenly going to be able to do a bunch of amazing things that I couldn't do before, for example be in a position five to seven years from now (hopefully) to actually be able to afford a permanent physical location for CCLaP for the first time, instead of it continuing to be the pipe dream it's been since first envisioning it back in 2004.

So in a certain way, you could say that getting hit by a car a year and a half ago was actually the best thing that ever happened to me; and yes, as I joke with my friends when discussing the subject, "...and it only took a shattered hip and three rounds of surgery for it to happen!," but it's hard to deny that the events that have resulted from it are going to change my life in a profoundly better way. And frankly, I like thinking about my accident in those kinds of terms; because believe me, it's very tempting to wallow in self-pity when you're going through something major like that, especially in my case where I had to do things like go on anti-anxiety medication and move back in with my parents for three months, and I had to fight against this crippling depression and self-hatred every day that I was going through the recovery process. And so, just like I now find myself with a much bigger appreciation for taking long walks in cold and snowy weather, simply because I now can after not being able to for so long, so too do I like being able to look at my accident in terms of the accidental good things it's brought to my life, the "eucatastrophic" moments, if you will -- the fact that I now work out at the gym three times a week, the fact that I now have this screaming-fast high-end computer, the fact that it's allowing me to get my credit back in order, and thus one step closer to dating agin, and this time dating women who aren't batshit crazy, since those are the only women you can convince to date you when you're unemployed, in bad health, and don't own a bank account. It's a bit pollyannish, I suppose, but much better than to be consumed by bitterness and self-pity, so it's a choice that for now I generally take. How strangely blessed my life sometimes seems these days...with the operative word of course being "strange."

So did you know that Kevin Smith is now producing a new podcast literally every single day of the week? It's part of a fascinating thing that's going on in his life right now which has been mesmerizing to watch, in which he is basically converting his career from that of a filmmaker into a full-time, professionally paid raconteur -- a fancy word, basically, for someone who tells witty off-the-cuff stories at cocktail parties and the like. See, he and his longtime producing partner Scott Mosier have had a weekly podcast for awhile now, which they call the SModcast, in which they basically sit around and randomly shoot the shit for an hour while Smith is high, and in which it's become clear that the two have the natural rapport of a professional comedy team, which has then convinced them to do the show live on certain occasions and even go on a full national tour last year with it. And that got them talking about how fun it'd be to open like a little 50-seat theater in Los Angeles that exists only for live-audience SModcasts, which is exactly what they did, called the "SModcastle" and with tickets generally ten bucks to any particular show; but now since they had this new venue that could potentially be open seven nights a week, they suddenly now needed at least six other podcasts besides the original to fill those nights, which again is exactly what they've done in the last six months, the vast majority of them featuring Smith in one way or another.

And so I now listen every week not just to SModcast (still easily the best of them all) but to "Jay and Silent Bob Get Old," in which he and his old cohort Jason Mewes sit around talking about random stuff and playing trivia games with the audience, and which ultimately was started mostly as a weekly public challenge for Mewes to stay sober; and I also listen every week to "Red State of the Union," in which each week Smith has been promoting his newest upcoming film* by doing long-form interviews with his cast and crew. And then there are some podcasts I've sampled but wasn't much of a fan of, like "Plus One" (the podcast Smith does with his wife); while there are others that don't feature Smith at all, like the comics-related "Bagged and Bound" or the hockey-centric "Puck Nuts," which to be honest I just don't give much of a shit about. And as you can imagine, these shows end up varying in quality, sometimes drastically: for example, Mewes in real life seems to be just as brain-addled as the "Jay" character he's played in so many of Smith's films, and will often resort to the mere screaming of curse words when running out of things to say on the podcast; while I've now learned the hard way what a nightmare it is when Smith doesn't have anyone else around to banter with, and how listening to a half-hour of him talking with no interruptions is akin to being in the first circle of Hell -- you know, where demons aren't exactly pulling your body apart limb by limb, but it's annoying as all fuck nonetheless.

(*And speaking of Red State, the film just had its public premiere at Sundance literally a day before I wrote this, and early reviews aren't good -- Aint It Cool News, for example, called it meandering and obvious, with the usual Smithian overly talky dialogue but this time not in service of a witty comedy but a preachy drama about the dangers of Fundamentalist Christians. And Smith dropped another bombshell at the premiere, too -- he announced that the film is going to be entirely self-distributed, basically one city at a time through a national tour, each stop of which will include Q&As with various cast and crew, and that will cost significantly more than just a simple movie ticket, so that the whole thing will make a decent amount of profit before coming out on DVD in October, which frankly is how the vast majority of its total audience will end up seeing it.)

What's turned out to be the big breakout show, though, and easily my own favorite as well besides the original, is a weekly look at the entertainment industry called "Hollywood Babble-On" that he does with a wacky radio DJ in Los Angeles named Ralph Garman, which has become so popular that it's moved to the 300-seat Jon Lovitz Comedy Club. And that's not because of the content -- after all, it's mostly just the same kind of fluffy stuff you'd see on Entertainment Tonight, recaps of box-office receipts, casting gossip, recent obituaries and the like -- but rather because the combination of these two personality types literally works out not just like a comedy team but actually as a professional comedy team, with Garman's otherwise intolerably cheesy radio personality tempered well by Smith's constant filthy jokes and laid-back attitude, and in turn with Smith's unending references to weed and dicks made vicious fun of by Garman. It's a prickly relationship, but one where both participants respect each other's boundaries and never take the jibes very seriously, which as a result makes just about anything they discuss come out unintentionally hilarious, a big reason why the show now has nearly the same ratings at iTunes as the original SModcast itself.

Based on the things he's been saying in these podcasts, it's obvious that Smith clearly sees this as a central part of his future career, and not the films for which he first became known, with recent changes to these podcasts that clearly reflect a new emphasis on long-term profit-making (every episode of every show, for example, now starts with an entire ten minutes of commercials, while "Hollywood Babble-On" is set to clear a third of a million dollars this year just in ticket sales alone); and I find that utterly fascinating, in that this might well now make Smith the very first person since Oscar Wilde a century ago to get rich simply from telling funny cocktail-party stories in public. And I have to say, despite my up and down opinions about Smith himself as both an artist and filmmaker, I have a tremendous amount of respect for him simply going out and trying this crazy thing that no one else thought would work, and has me now thinking about how easy or hard it would be to try something like that in Chicago, to take one of those 50-seat storefront theaters endlessly sprinkled across the city and nurture an entire series of live-audience podcasts at it. Maybe something for when I finally get a permanent space open for my arts center? Absolutely; and in the meanwhile, it's worth as well thinking about how a smaller version might be set up right this year through an existing space somewhere in the city, so that the theater's making some money and the hosts are making some money, and CCLaP gets lots and lots of original interesting content to feature and hopefully monetize at the site in some way. In any case, I encourage you to check out all the shows in the "SModcast Podcast Network," if you never have before.

But before anything else, perhaps I should first describe how CCLaP's first big live Chicago show went, my talk a couple of weeks ago with AV Club head writer Nathan Rabin, for which I spent several hundred dollars renting out a 150-seat theater; because in a nutshell, although the talk itself went great, audience turnout was lousy, only 25 people and with half of them comped in for free, which when all is said and done caused me to officially lose $220 on the whole thing, or pretty much every penny of profit CCLaP had generated in the last two years. And yes, there are a number of external factors beyond my control that I could point to, to mostly rationalize the low turnout -- it needed to be held in the busy month between Thanksgiving and Christmas to sync with Rabin's existing tour schedule, was done on a Monday night for cost reasons, with me only having a month to promote it because of my first theater deal falling through at a relatively late date, and of course with the eight-hour freaking ice storm Chicago saw that actual evening not helping things at all, thank you very much, God! -- but as my friend Carrie indadvertedly reminded me, while talking about her and her late husband's own forays into producing artistic events in their youth, even if you can come up with half a dozen legitimate reasons why it's not your fault that your show lost money, it still remains that your show lost money, which means you either need to get smarter about how you're doing them, or give up on the idea of making money in the first place, and simply accept the loss as the cost of doing something impressive and fun.

And that's brought up a larger, more existential issue this winter, which has had a big influence on CCLaP's plans for 2011 -- that plainly speaking, the best way to guarantee success at your own live literary social events is to become active yourself in the local literary social scene, to attend everyone else's shows and talk with everyone there, make friends and generate interest in your own upcoming event. I learned this lesson in a profound way during my time in the performance-poetry scene of the 1990s, and is simply something I'm going to have to get involved in again if I want to pull off more expensive "Evening With..." events; but as I've learned with dismay this fall, as I indeed started attending a scattering of readings and open mics again for the first time in years, I now find such events to be for the most part fucking intolerable -- partly because of burnout from when I was a writer, partly because I'm a decade older and have a lot less tolerance for such things, partly because of my hearing losses over the years, partly because I'm no longer using such events as tools in a constant attempt to get laid. Whatever the reasons, though, when I look honestly at the situation, I realize how much of a chore all these things this fall have felt like as I've begrudgingly taken them on, making me realize that my time would actually be much better spent doing things I find fun but that will still hopefully generate attention and revenue. That was the entire point, after all, of opening my own arts organization instead of working for someone else's, so that I would never have to blindly adhere to what is "traditionally" done in arts administration to the detriment of what's more practical; and so if I need to put off regular programming of the center's bigger live events for another few years, until I can simply hire someone young and enthusiastic who's actually into all this social stuff I now find a chore, then so be it, because I certainly have lots and lots of other things to keep me busy.

In that respect, then, one of the things it's looking more and more likely that I can count on is surprisingly enough CCLaP's electronic books -- the three I've now published in the last three years have respectively made $200, $200 and $300 (making for a total take-home profit of $350 for the center), with I think it being entirely possible to get these numbers even higher, if I get more serious about marketing specifically to the Kindle crowd. So that's a no-brainer, then, to finally up the number of ebooks CCLaP is putting out to the four per year I've envisioned for awhile. And hey, what do you know, I already have four books lined up for 2011! And that's the side-effect of course of CCLaP simply being open for awhile now (three and a half years), and getting out some books that have impressed others: so coming up next, for example, hopefully at the end of February, will be science-fiction author Mark Brand's day-after-tomorrow novella Life After Sleep, regarding a device that can immediately trigger constant REM sleep, so that people now only need two hours of bed-rest each night, and how such a thing would change the way that society works; then after that (end of May?) will be a still-untitled project by local flash-fiction author Jason Fisk, a story collection about the skeleton-closets among a group of neighbors in a bland Chicago suburb, which interestingly is going to be presented "hyperfiction" style on the web (think "Choose Your Own Adventure" for grown-ups), including lots of multimedia elements like photos, videos, audio clips and text animations, and with a mobile EPUB version that contains the same hyperlinked layout. Then in September will likely come a new anthology called American Wasteland to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in which a group of writers pen stories set in a shared alt-history US, one in which McCain and then Palin became President after Bush and turned the country into a quasi-fascist state, where the squatter poor live anarchic Mad-Max existences in far exurbs full of crumbling McMansions, none of them able to escape because driving a car regularly is now an expensive privilege that only the rich can afford; and then to round out the year, in November will be Ben Tanzer's new collection of stories regarding small-town life in upstate New York, a companion piece to his 2008 Repetition Patterns which right now is without a title. And so if history is any indication, I should be able to make $400 to $500 of profit just on these four titles alone (or $800 to $1,000 total revenue).

And then speaking of Ben's stories, my long-discussed plan to put out CCLaP's first paper book is still on for next year too; because at the same time I'm releasing the second ebook, I also want to release an extremely high-end, handbound "fine-art" edition of the two volumes combined, simply called "The New York Stories." You can think of this exactly like a musician releasing a fancy limited edition of an album -- featuring full-color illustrations on vellum overlays, archival-quality paper, a signature page, hand-numbered sequencing and all kinds of other bells and whistles, it'll cost $75 and is designed as a coffeetable piece for Tanzer's most diehard fans (and collectors of handbound fine-art books), with people otherwise able to read the contents itself for free electronically, cutting out the middle layer of trade paperbacks where small presses seem to be literally bleeding money these days. That way, you only need to sell a minimum of books for a decent amount of profit; say for example that you spent ten dollars on materials for each copy and five dollars mailing it, that's $60 in profit for each sale, which if you only sold twenty copies would still be $1,200 after costs, leaving $400 apiece for Ben, the center, and the illustrator. And since I'll be making them myself, technically I only have to invest in material for small batches, say ten at a time and not bothering with the next ten until the previous ten have been sold.

And in fact I have a good idea for hopefully selling around ten such books next year to people who maybe wouldn't have otherwise bought them, at least guaranteeing that the project would break even, which ties into what I was talking about before; that even if I'm not going to be doing more big expensive "Evening With..." events next year, I still definitely want to continue doing some sort of live events in 2011, just to at least tread water with what I've already established instead of going backwards, if for nothing more than to mark time until I'm ready in the future to finally try expanding the program again. And so this coming March, for example, I was thinking of finally holding the center's next smaller themed event, which like last May's show in Hyde Park would feature a group of local writers doing new pieces based on a common subject for a show with no cover, done just for fun and to create goodwill among the local lit community; then in June I'm thinking of sponsoring some sort of city bike tour that would tie in with the arts somehow, maybe for example a ride up the entirety of Lincoln Park specifically to check out public sculptures, ending at a bar next to an el station up in Rogers Park, so that people can drink and take the train home at the end; then in September, I'm thinking of having an honest-to-God release party for the American Wasteland book, since anthologies tend to guarantee a big and varied turnout for such things; and then for next New Year's Eve, I'm thinking very seriously about establishing a new tradition for CCLaP, an annual New Year's fundraiser, designed to generate significant revenue from just a small slice of the center's most financially comfortable fans, essentially $150 a couple for a private party full of free food, liquor and entertainment, and with each couple getting a free copy of The New York Stories to take home with them. If I could get ten couples to go to something like this, that would pay off all the book's upfront fees, leave a couple hundred dollars for Ben, pay for all the party's expenses, and still leave a good $400 to $500 to stick in CCLaP's coffers, to apply to the upcoming projects of 2012.

Now, of course, it'd be nice to actually have something to sell at these events as well, which is where the next part of the plan comes into play -- after months of hemming and hawing, I've decided to indeed start up in 2011 this new hipster photography magazine I've been endlessly talking about at Facebook, entitled Imago and which I'm planning on putting out four times next year (January, April, July and October), featuring five artists each issue all collected around a common theme (the first issue will all be intense or cutting-edge portraits...and yes, there will be boobies), heavy on images/design and light on text in order to cater more to a global audience. The reason I've been on the fence about it for so long, frankly, is that I've wondered if the world really needs yet one more impeccably-designed minimalist hipster electronic photography magazine, and whether starting a new one might be an exercise in throwing a lot of effort into a bottomless cavern of no returns, much like how it currently is with all those endless thousands of online literary journals that now exist. (And by the way, when I say "bottomless cavern of no returns" to refer to these ezines, I mean financial returns, not the simple emotional satisfaction of publishing the work of people you admire. Don't forget that all of today's conversation is deliberately geared towards the bottom line.)

That's why I'm only doing four issues next year, as a test run that I can accomplish literally in my spare hours on the weekends; and that's why I'm planning not on making much money on the magazine itself (because frankly, you can't, not with the glut of sharp free hipster e-magazines already on the market that fucking no one is reading either), but rather on a series of print-on-demand merchandise that I will set up with each of the five photographers in each issue -- basically, a series of postcards, posters, refrigerator magnets, mugs, t-shirts and buttons concerning all twenty photographers I plan on featuring through Imago next year, each image branded with the center's name like you would find in a museum store. Then I want to do some t-shirts just for the center itself as well, something sexy and cute and anime-ey that people will actually want to wear, a bad example seen above and appropriated from of all things an ad campaign this year from the Wyoming Public Library system, but will be much better when I actually do the t-shirt; then all I have to do is order a small amount of all these items myself at cost from these POD places, which I can then have on hand to sell at retail price at CCLaP's local events in 2011, as well as any conventions or fairs I might end up attending, or if I go in with some others to rent a table at next year's Printers Row Book Fair, which I had a chance to do last year but now this year am seriously thinking of actually doing.

Then the magazine itself will be free in electronic form, both as a PDF for mobile devices and as an incredibly cool onscreen embedded "flip-through" version sponsored by Issuu.com, a central database and feature-rich service for electronic magazines that I've become a big fan of in the last six months (and seriously, try the "full-screen" option of the Issuu interface I've embedded above, and tell me if it doesn't feel exactly like flipping through a glossy paper magazine); and then speaking of a paper version, there will be one of those available as well, at $18 a pop over at yet another print-on-demand company called MagCloud.com, which I will purchase with each issue and perhaps not a single other person on the entire planet, which of course is the great thing about POD merchandise that makes up for it being so freaking expensive. So how much will all this make in a year? Sheesh, who knows? $20 in merch sales for each artist would be $400 for the year, or a take-home profit for CCLaP of approximately $100; or maybe this will make twice as much as that, or perhaps only half. Like I said, everything with Imago is basically a big experiment for now, which is why I'm treading only lightly next year; but I have to admit, I'm glad to be finally doing something through CCLaP that primarily supports the photography side of things, and can absolutely guarantee if nothing else that at least the magazine will look slick, and get people talking more about the artists being featured.

So, all said, that gives CCLaP something now to do or release every single month next year; and in a world where a whole lot of things go right for me, that could potentially mean a realistic top revenue of around $3,000, which after bills and royalties would mean a take-home profit for CCLaP of around $1,500. But of course, we don't live in a world where a whole lot of things go right for me, but rather one where a vindictive god pisses ice on my head for eight hours on the day of my first big event, so who knows what this number might actually be by this point a year from now? I mean, more than zero, that's at least for sure, which is the main justification for doing it in the first place, and certainly I'll be very happy if CCLaP was to have its first year of four-figure profit next year, which I think under this plan is absolutely a realistic goal that I have every right to shoot for, and especially now that I own my fancy-ass 27-inch quad-core Mac with fully functioning copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5 (thank YOU, bike-accident settlement check!), and can now put out electronic publications that will blow away in sophistication all the CCLaP books I've been putting out before, and that will let me produce actual interactive editions for iPads and the like. As always, we'll see how things pan out; but for now, at least I have a plan for next year in place, which of course is always the most important thing.

Oh, and speaking of all this, I imagine some people have been wondering how I might be able to do all these new things next year and still crank out 150 book reviews; and the answer is that I can't, which is why I'm happy to announce that CCLaP next year will finally be taking on its first outside writers, definitely at least one and maybe up to three or four, depending on the quality of the applicants. Yes, I am looking for suggestions and submissions, although please be concretely aware right off the bat that these contributors will not be paid in the traditional sense; instead, I'm hoping that each contributor will bring with them an idea for a funny, unique year-long essay series, much like the existing "CCLaP 100" or "Naughty Netflix" series that currently run at the blog, which at the end of the year we can put out as its own ebook that will hopefully generate the standard couple of hundred dollars, and that will serve as that critic's "paycheck" for the year. And in fact, to be frank, the perfect situation would be to find a young, smart writer who is eager to use this as a jumping-off opportunity for their own career -- to do maybe one book review a week and one chapter of their ongoing essay series, to generate and nurture their own core group of fans through supplemental outlets like Facebook or Goodreads, and then use all these things two or three years down the road to get themselves promotions to paid positions elsewhere, like at bigger publications or maybe an industry job. Given that these are essentially volunteer positions, I'm certainly not expecting anyone to stay long, and am of course more than happy to see a person use an opportunity like this for their own personal gain.

Anyway, as expected, it's a very certain kind of writer I'm looking for, one who matches the "ethos" of what I've already established at CCLaP: someone who brings a sense of history to their reviews yet still weighs contemporary factors, someone comfortable with blending high-art with low and mainstream lit with genre, someone who can add an academic sensibility to their reviews while avoiding academic language, someone who can sometimes court controversy with their opinions but isn't a controversial figure themselves. As with everything related to the center, just because it's an unpaid position doesn't mean I won't be exacting or demanding over who I'll bring on, since in this case content literally is king; and that's all the more reason for me to get exposed to as wide a pool of potential writers as possible, so that I can eventually find the handful of ones who best fit this decidedly narrow slot I've just described. Just drop me a line at [ilikejason at gmail.com] if you have someone in mind, or would like to apply yourself. As always, I look forward to hearing from you.

I detail in my CCLaP 100 write-up the main reasons I feel like I responded so well to the book this time at middle-age -- basically, a combination of understanding Thoreau's message a little better this time (his experiment was actually less about 'roughing it' and more about breaking himself of the middle-class habit of endlessly collecting rooms full of worthless shit), plus now not having to emotionally overcome the fawning love for the Transcendentalists held by all the former '60s hippies I had as teachers in high school in the '80s -- but there was also a part of my enjoyment that I didn't talk about in my review at all; namely, I found myself really charmed by Thoreau's habit of revisiting certain well-known spots around his cabin over and over through the course of a year, and noting all the subtle changes that happen to that spot as the weather progresses from spring to summer to fall and then winter. And the reason this struck me so profoundly, I'm convinced, is that I've recently been doing the same thing in my own life; for the last five years or so, in fact, ever since quitting smoking and starting to bicycle on a serious basis, I've found myself really starting to love more and more my regular bike rides through Chicago's Lincoln Park, of traversing the same paths over and over and noticing all the subtle changes that these paths go through as the weather goes from warm and sunny to cold and rainy and back again.

Although I suppose for this entry to make sense, I need to first get across what exactly Lincoln Park is for those who have never visited, and its relationship to Chicago in general; in a nutshell, it's one of the greatest urban parks on the planet, a seven-mile stretch of green space that largely comprises the northern half of the city's lakefront, which at almost 200 years in age has now provided generation after generation of Chicagoans their main dose of unstructured nature in their lives. Or, "almost 200 years" isn't exactly accurate, which is a large part of the park's charm; it is in fact only the southern tip of the park, down near North Avenue, that is this old, and hence unsurprisingly is the location of many of the park's most important structures, things like the Chicago History Museum and the Saint-Gaudens Lincoln statue, and the mansion serving as the home of the Archbishop of Chicago (with a public back alley, by the way, that is one of only three streets left in Chicago still paved with wooden blocks instead of brick or asphalt). As the city slowly grew outwards, then, over the next 150 years or so, so did the park itself, with various sections developed in big chunks every 20 or 30 years, literally from the 1860s to 1960s, the northern half situated on land that was literally created artificially, originally for the purpose of constructing the badly needed Lake Shore Drive highway.

Living up on the far north like I do, then, this makes biking Lincoln Park a fascinating lesson in living history: how the section right above my neighborhood of Uptown, for example, originally constructed in the 1950s and '60s, is filled with soccer fields and skate parks, and with all the bridges and lamp posts done in a sleek Mid-Century Modernist style; how my area of the park, originally constructed in the 1910s through '30s, is dominated by golf and tennis facilities, with local architecture done in an Art Deco style; how the section below that, constructed in the 1890s to 1910s, is full of baseball fields and beach facilities; how the section below that, constructed in the 1860s through '90s, contains most of the park's well-known Victorian elements, things like the zoo and conservatory and formal gardens, with narrow underpasses done in the organic pebbled-stone style of the Arts & Crafts movement. The whole thing is hooked together, then, by an unbroken bike and running path that extends way past the park itself, 21 miles altogether until hitting almost the southern city limit; and of course, this being a city park, most of the square mileage is devoted simply to landscaping, the massive space randomly dotted with surprises both old (an endless supply of statues honoring people you've never heard of) and new (wild-growth bird sanctuaries, the Chicago Nature Museum).

As a Chicagoan, Lincoln Park has of course been a regular part of my life the entire 16 years I've now lived here; but it wasn't until I quit smoking and first became an urban bicyclist in 2006 that I started traveling through the park on a profoundly more regular basis, almost every day when the weather is warm (it's a great way to quickly move up and down the city on a bike in a fast and safe manner), definitely 150 times or more over the course of every calendar year. And I've discovered here at middle age that, far from finding such a repetition tedious like I did in college, the last time I biked through semi-rural spaces on a daily basis, I now find this repetition a real delight, and find myself deriving real pleasure out of anticipating and then passing the various landmarks that are a part of my most common rides -- Peace Garden at Buena Avenue, the totem pole at Addison, Dog Beach just north of Belmont, the weeping willows near Diversey, the Shakespeare statue near Fullerton, the creepy straight lines of trees forming a canopy over the path just north of the Ben Franklin memorial, and a lot more, way too many to recount here today in full.

Over the last half-decade, these places have become like old friends to me, the various bumps of the bike trail now memorized (look out for the dip across from Wellington!); and I admit, I find something comforting about watching these landmarks be affected by the differing weather just like I'm affected by it -- to witness a wet Hans Christian Andersen statue in that weird little nook just west of the zoo's Cafe Brauer, where all the new-age yoga moms meet on weekday mornings, to plow through a leaf-covered trail hugging the edge of the North Pond, to see the steam of my own breath while keeping pace with the sculling teams going up and down the South Lagoon. I'm not sure what the exact connection is between this and my growing age, but I admit that there's something about the continuance of it all that comforts me, in a way that I neither needed nor noticed in my youth; I find it soothing to realize that city dwellers have been passing this particular tree or that particular stone for decades before me, noting like I have the never-ending cycle of budding, greening, coloring and hibernating that the park goes through, a cycle that will continue in its gloriously natural way no matter what's happening to us petty humans around it at any given moment.

I don't have much of a big point to make with all this; I just find it interesting, that's all, that the simple process of aging brings changes to our lives on such a regular basis, changes we can literally see and track over decades, much like this recent experience with Thoreau shows in such an eye-opening way. It reminds me, mostly with satisfaction, that I am indeed a profoundly different person than I was just 20 or 30 years ago, so easy to forget when you're just living your day-to-day life; that I'm a more patient person than when I was younger, a more contemplative one, a person who has a better appreciation for the simple cycle of life, someone who better understands that the universe for the most part just continues on its regular merry way no matter what we do, so the real key to happiness is not to try to bend the universe's will to one's own, but rather shape our own life to complement the natural cycles of the universe. New-agey enough for you, fucking hippie? Yeah, welcome to Jason Pettus At Middle Age, who in many ways the 21-year-old me would've been disgusted by; but then again, the 41-year-old me's not much of a fan of the 21-year-old me either, so I suppose it all works out at the end.

Another CCLaP-type space opened up in my neighborhood this week, a growing occurrence in these economic times; and by that I mean a thousand-square-foot retail space close to an el station that I could actually realistically afford as the first version of my arts center's physical headquarters. That way you could cram in 60 or 70 people on the rare occasions when things warranted it -- a popular show, or maybe a fundraiser; but it would also look quite full with only 20 or 30 people, which to be honest, will most likely be the more realistic size of most of CCLaP's live events. (And that window area you're seeing in the front is actually already a raised stage, which would be dramatic and perfect for live performances.) Paint the walls, then, and you have a perfect space for a photography gallery as well; then during the day the space could serve as my office, a retail space for the rare-book service I hope to eventually start up down the road too, and a recording space for local artists, especially once you install the kick-ass digital soundboard system I would want to put into place, to make the place and its ever-occurring live events a virtual factory for high-end recordings to use online and for CDs, DVDs, etc. You could maintain a BYOB policy at a space like this, which would keep the young poor artists happy because they can get wasted cheap; but since this is just a block from a whole string of hipster restaurants and bars, you keep the middle-class audience members happy too. Perfect!

I've been having this pipe dream regularly since 2004, in fact, when I first envisioned CCLaP to begin with; so it's kind of weird, then, to know that this month, I officially started the process to make this pipe dream an actual attainable goal; and not just attainable, but literally attainable in just another five to ten years, if I play my cards right and have a little luck. And that has to do with the large settlement check I received two months ago, in compensation for a bad bike accident I was in about a year ago, which I have a policy of not detailing online but can tell you was originally in the six figures, until all the medical bills and legal fees started getting paid, dropping the number considerably. What I've decided to do with what's left, then, is something else I've been thinking about a lot for the last few years, which is to get all the old bills in my life finally paid off, and my credit back into decent shape.

After all, it's not like I have a lot of debt, but more that I've simply been "off the grid" for much of my adult life -- I've never owned a credit card, have only had two bank accounts in my life (for only a few years apiece), and have in fact learned this month that my credit reports show less than $10,000 in outstanding bills altogether, most of them frankly having to do with the bike accident. No, the main problem with my credit is simply that I've never given a shit about it, because I had never been in the market for the things that good credit gets you -- high card limits, car and house loans, good insurance rates, etc. But as regular readers know, back during my 35th birthday six years ago, which was also my tenth anniversary of moving to Chicago, I decided to reassess my life, and write another "ten year plan" for myself like I did when I first moved here; and one of the things in the plan is to get my finances in order, not only so I can finally get health insurance for the first time in a decade, but so I can establish CCLaP's bonafides so to get a legitimate business license, be able to set up a nonprofit wing if I want, and eventually be able to secure a loan so to sign the exact kind of small retail space like you're seeing above, helped by the fact that I'll have a so-so chunk of settlement money left over after all this is taken care of, not a lot but enough to help quite a bit with the securing of a little thousand-square-foot space.

Granted, it's a long slog, as I've been learning by reading up on the subject -- it starts with ordering your free annual credit reports like they're always talking about on television (that URL above, by the way, is the only single place on the web to legitimately do so; all the other places you see advertised are commercial scams), which are basically the three reports used to determine your credit score (which is administered by a group called FICO), with that single three-digit score actually being the thing that determines whether or not you get loans, what rates you receive, etc. It's complicated, because all four of these things are determined by four private companies, so no one knows exactly what goes into the complicated algorithms that turn all this debt data into a simple score; but in general the experts opine that roughly a third of it is based on how much past debt you currently carry, so getting rid of that as quickly as possible is the very first thing and most important thing to do to restore one's bad credit.

Those debts are basically all being handled at that point by debt collectors; and that's because it costs money and requires paperwork for these companies to report debts to these credit report services as well, which means that most places don't unless the matter is substantial enough to turn over to a collection agency, who file that paperwork and pay those fees for them, and call you a dozen times a day about paying it back, etc. All their information is listed in the credit reports themselves, so basically the next step for me is to start calling these places, and essentially start haggling with them over the final payment, like a tourist arguing with a shopkeeper over a Persian rug. And in fact this was an eye-opening part of the legal process too, when my lawyer was negotiating with the hospital over the six figures in bills I had racked up there last year; that even modern law still mostly works on the same principles that guided the Greeks and Romans in the Classical Era, that it's all about trying to find a practical space in the middle where both parties walk away fairly satisfied. Take away all the TV histronics and impossible legalese, and that's essentially the definition of "justice," which I hadn't really thought about before all this -- of reaching a point where everyone involved can walk away without trying to kill each other. So in this case, my lawyer talked the hospital down after my settlement to an immediate lump payment of about half my total bill, in exchange for them dropping the other half; and the hospital was grateful to see even half so was satisfied, and my settlement money easily covered that so I was satisfied, and since the insurance of the guy who hit me covered it too, I didn't have to sue him for the rest, so he and his insurance company were satisfied too. And that's...well, that's justice, in a nutshell.

So that's what I'll be doing with the collection agencies too, only acting this time as my own lawyer, and talking to another human there in plain language about what kind of deal we can make; and after those are all paid and the companies remove their claims from my credit reports (which you need to get them to agree in writing to do; don't trust a collection agency guaranteeing this over the phone), that alone is supposed to raise one's credit score high enough to at least quality for a simple checking account, the second most important thing for repairing one's bad credit. (And by the way, your credit score is never just a static number, but is literally redetermined every time someone requests it; that's why it's good to literally time loan requests and the like to specific weeks, ones for example where you've now paid that month's bills and they've been recorded and transferred to your credit reports.) Maintain this for just a little while successfully, and you should then qualify for a credit card somewhere, even if it's only for a low limit or even maybe if you have to maintain your debt limit in real money in a bank account tied to the card (known as a "secured credit card"); and at least according to all these "Credit For Fucking Morons" books I've been reading at Borders on the weekends, usually all it takes is a year of clean credit reports and responsible use of a checking account and credit card to quality for what's called an "installment" loan from your bank, which is usually just a few thousand dollars for something like a car (or in my case, the digital soundboard, amp and recording system I mentioned). And that's step four towards repairing your bad credit, and essentially the last step before your credit is theoretically good again.

Do all this over the course of five, six, seven years, at least according to these guides I've been reading, and you should have a good enough credit score by then (750 or above, on a scale of 350 to 850) to qualify for a major home loan at good rates, or in my case a loan for securing CCLaP's first Chicago headquarters; and we'll see of course if these guides turn out to be true, or bullshit like usual, but if they're right, that means I could be literally, realistically eligible to open CCLaP's first physical space by maybe even the age of 46 or 47, and almost definitely by my 50th birthday. And that'd be a hell of a 50th birthday present, I have to admit -- to go in a decade from no credit cards and no bank account to being able to open a retail business, and to finally for the first time make a real go at the idea of CCLaP being the thing that pays all my bills in my life, that is literally my full-time career. And in fact, I'm coming to realize that this has been a real key to why America has been such a prosperous place for so long now, because the entire system is designed to help and encourage those who are serious and determined to pull themselves into the middle class, and who simply need some systems in place to make this a little easier. Now compare this to a place like, say, Dubai, which famously has no bankruptcy laws, which means that someone there can be thrown in jail for a decade literally for missing one rent payment; and so that's why you've seen Dubai become a ghost-town in light of the economic meltdown, because of the tens of thousands of laid-off workers who have slipped past the borders in the middle of the night, so terrified of having their lives ruined and never being able to recover.

It's a remarkable part of the American System, I've come to realize this year, and a big reason so many immigrants are drawn here -- because this is a country that very much wants its citizens to succeed, and will help those citizens as much as possible if they're willing to put in the hard work needed to succeed, something I think we maybe take too much for granted here in the US, and that can easily get overshadowed in all the doom of the Great Recession we're currently going through. Anyway, so this maybe means that I'll have more and more good news over the next decade regarding all this? We'll see, I guess! If nothing else, it should make it at least entirely realistic that CCLaP starts doing bigger and bigger projects; just for one example, I now have the $2,000 in seed money I need to finally start up the center's paper publishing program next year, which as I've explained before will consist of extremely high-quality, handbound "fine art" editions sold at a high cost, which is why the budget is so high as well. And it will certainly also give me the chance if I want to set up a nonprofit "foundation" wing of CCLaP as well, which is another long-term goal; because when it does come time to get a physical space, I definitely want there to be a mechanism in place for people to make tax-deductible donations towards such a goal. That's why I'm happy to hand out all this free shit to you middle-classers these days, all the free ebooks and the like, because later this decade I'll be hitting you up for 500 bucks all at once. You've been warned!

And in fact it was fascinating, if not terrifying as well, because what an anxiety attack actually is, I've now discovered by having one, is a case of your brain literally comparmentalizing itself, and then those compartments both working at once for control over your body and refusing to communicate with each other; so in other words, even as I was going through the attacks themselves, there was a fully functioning part of my brain realizing that I was going through them and that it was silly to go through them, that I was not only worried about something I shouldn't be worrying about, but worried to the point of physical sickness. Ah, but see, then there's that other compartment of your brain, the one actually worried, and it's not listening to a word that the other compartment is saying; so for a good example, the first time I tried putting weight back on my hip again, about a week after the reconstruction surgery, even though half a dozen doctors had told me it was perfectly safe to do so, this dysfunctioning part of my brain was convinced that doing so would make the staple stitches in my ten-inch hip incision burst and go flying across the room, PING-PING-PING like a fat man's zipper after doing a sit-up. And it was so convinced of this, even while I was trying to force my body to do it anyway, that the paradox made my brain literally try to shut my body down, by giving me literally a fever and making me break out in hives, the tipping point that made my doctors realize that it wasn't just stress I was experiencing but actual PTSD, and that I needed to be put on medication for it.

To tell you the truth, this is the one clearest memory I have of those early days, when in the fog of painkillers and sleep deprivation and constant vomiting (I had an allergic reaction to my first painkiller on top of everything else, until switching to a different type and accompanying it four times a day with anti-nausea injections in the stomach as well), of just doing a profound amount of sweating, like literally a red-faced heat factory for the first week I was there, which it turned out after the fact was me essentially having constant stress attacks 24 hours a day, and not realizing it so not reporting it to my doctors. And frankly, I had a lot to be stressed about -- I'm uninsured, after all, so no one knew exactly how long I was going to be allowed to stay in the hospital in the first place, and with me having nowhere in Chicago I could go if I happened to be discharged early, and still too injured to make it to St. Louis by car or plane and stay with my family, and with my parents not in a position to even come visit becuase of my mom happening to be recovering from hip surgery at the same time, so except for a brief period when my brother came up from Dallas to help, me pretty much having to deal with the bills and the insurance companies and Illinois Public Aid all on my own, even as I was recovering from surgery and on the painkillers and suffering from PTSD and all the rest.

It made me realize something that eventually came to be a big joke among everyone involved, that I am in fact kind of a high-strung person, which when admitting to friends that month would always be greeted with laughs and a response of, "Fucking Christ, Pettus, you're 40 years old and still haven't realized that yet?" But it's true, that I had just never thought of myself as an overly anxious person, or at least no more anxious than anyone else, and that it took this experience to make me finally realize so, and realize that given the right mix of overlapping stresses, I can literally worry myself into life-threatening physical illness, so much so that I then need to be put on special medication for it. And that was...illuminating, yet another important self-realization to have here at the tail end of a period in my life when I went through a lot of them; and truthfully, it also made me a lot more sympathetic to people who suffer from anxiety problems all the time, friends here in Chicago for example who are on anti-anxiety medication every day, because it makes me realize that there is an odd and terrifying breakdown in inner-brain communication going on that's causing that, a case literally of your brain not working the right way and you realizing it but still unable to stop it.

Anyway, so this is one of the realizations about myself that I've been trying to really stay attuned to, now that I know it about myself, that just the normal amount of stress and anxiety I place on myself is actually much higher than the human average; and much like, for example, the realization I made a few years ago about how I like having lots of acquaintances but want very few of these people to become actual friends, I've been trying to rearrange my life in the last year in a way so to cut out as much needless stress as possible; and this is just one more example of how I've actually tried to learn something from this giant life-disrupting accident I had last year, and how I've tried to bring about some positive change from it instead of simply wallowing in all the poor-me victim-mentality self-pity that just about anyone would be tempted to have in that situation. And like, I said, I'll be detailing yet more examples of this in the coming weeks and months here, so I hope you'll have a chance to stay tuned.

So with this being the longest amount of time I've ever spent in a hospital, as well as my first time as an adult to do so, needless to say that I got a whole eyeful while there about how modern hospitals actually operate, and with there obviously being room for improvements, if the administrators in charge of such a system are able to get over the inertia of routine and tradition. Just to cite one glaring example, it's important to realize that there was something like eight different people who attended and took care of me over a 24-hour period while I was there -- the day nurse who gave me my medication, a different person who took my food orders and delivered my meals, a surgeon's assistant who checked up on and cleaned my incisions, a different day nurse who would change my sheets and help me bathe, an in-house physical therapist, an in-house psychiatrist, and of course a whole bevy of night employees as well.

Often these steps would have to come in a certain order for them to be effectie -- so for example, in order to get through my physical therapy, I would have to make sure that I had taken my painkillers about an hour beforehand and no longer than three hours, but I had to make sure I had eaten before taking the painkillers or else get sick from an empty stomach -- but the problem was that each layer of this process operated independently of all the others, their schedules maintained in relative terms to all the other people at the hospital doing the same thing as them, which meant that these people's work was often delayed or duplicated because of scheduling conflicts, with for one example the in-house physical therapist often having to stop by my room two or three times in a single day, in the hopes that he would magically catch me at a moment when all these other steps (the meal, the painkiller, the incision cleaning) just happened to have already taken place.

Much better, I kept thinking in the weeks I was there, if maybe a hospital actually assigned a "team" of employees to a specific patient each time they were admitted, where a central administrator for that team actually puts together the schedule of activities for all of them, so that it all takes place in the right order and with no wasting of resources or "hurry up and wait" situations; because I gotta tell you, in just the relatively short time I was there myself, I saw an unbelievable amount of wasted manpower take place, a handful of incidents every single day where a nurse or orderly or specialist would show up to do their thing, just to realize that they couldn't because of a whole byzantine series of other things not yet happening, and no one around to say when exactly they would. Yes, I know, I'm sure the reality is so much more complicated than how I'm painting it; and yes, my GTD lifehacking know-it-all ass tends to think that it can always come up with better solutions to every situation it encounters. But still, I don't think it's any exaggeration that there are huge improvements that could be made in the way an average hospital actually runs, just one of the many realizations I had last year by actually be exposed to these environments for the first time.

And Lord, don't even get me started on the week I spent in a nursing home, in my transition in health from the hospital to my parents' place in St. Louis...or actually, I guess you should get me started, because this is the subject I'll likely be writing about next here. Ciao!

And that's because...well, for a number of reasons, really. Because I'm over 40 now, for example, and not such a fan anymore of confessional writing, even though that's exactly what first garnered me a large audience back when I started this journal twelve years ago (twelve years...sheesh). Because what I've worked so hard at recently is finally starting to come true, that people really are starting to respect me more and more as an arts administrator who can be trusted with their money and reputation, and have made it a policy recently not to mess this up by writing overly personal essays online anymore. And because the four months away from my apartment last year that it took for me to first recover -- three weeks in a hospital, where among other things I suffered from PTSD and had an allergic reaction to my first painkiller, then a week in a nursing home full of disabled octogenarians, then three months living with my parents again in rural St. Louis -- was a real low point in my life, a time full of mind-numbing drugs and painful rehab and chronic sleep problems where I felt completely helpless and impotent (symbolically and literally), and I'm not sure how much I want to revisit some of these events that I'm just now starting to get over. And also because, even though I'm sure that a laundry list of all the adjustment problems I went through would produce enough guffaws to fuel an entire award-winning indie screenplay, I'm not sure if that's fair to the people I would be talking about, family members and doctors and the like who were only trying to help in a bad situation however they could, with it not their fault that some of their efforts came out as unintentionally hilarious.

In fact, I've been thinking about just this subject recently; because although she's never discussed it with me directly, it's become obvious through small comments that one of the writers I've published in the past through my arts center, a very young (undergraduate) author named Sally Weigel, has gone back and read a lot of my confessional books from my twenties about the trainwreck life I was leading back then, and has become a bit of an obsessive fan of them, which means that she in particular has been really looking forward to me writing about my accident, and asks on a regular basis if I might ever write a traditional book-length memoir about the experience, which I have enough material to easily do if I wanted. It's made me realize that what I've been working towards for so long is finally starting to come true, that my youngest generation of readers now only know of my earlier exploits through dusty static documents like stories and pictures, that I'm finally putting some distance between that period of my life and my new one as a successful middle-aged small business owner and respected publisher. And as disappointed as it sometimes makes people like Sally and especially my older fans, it's a situation I've been deliberately trying to bring about for half a decade now, so will for the most part be doing more of the same over the next half-decade as well.

But as a treat to these people, let me start my reminiscences with what's probably the most embarrassing detail out of everything I'll eventually be sharing, which is that I finally understand why so many people develop sexual fetishes for nurses, much to my shame. See, I was actually interred at Illinois Masonic in the Lakeview neighborhood, which is ground central in Chicago for hot ponytailed yuppies, so much so that I had more than one visitor independently remark that my hospital seemed sometimes more like one of those fake soap-opera hospitals full of impossibly good-looking 27-year-olds; and since all the middle-aged Latina mom nurses have seniority over them, the hot ponytailed 27-year-old nurses are all forced to work the graveyard shift at Illinois Masonic, and care for you in the middle of the night like they are constantly having to do when you're recovering from major surgery, these unexpectedly intimate rendezvouses at midnight or four in the morning with only your tiny bed-light on, them whispering to you and poking and prodding your naked body while you lie in bed all warm and half-asleep.

And unlike the middle-aged nurses, the hot 27-year-olds all wear modern solid-colored scrubs, with the whole idea being that they're naked underneath them for sterility's sake, with these low-cut neckholes and elastic waistlines that always show a bit of their ass whenever they bend over. And there you are, all laid up in bed and completely unable to take care of yourself, literally being fed and bathed by other people, with your masturbating hand in a cast and unable to achieve orgasm anyway because of all the painkillers, with a giant erection because it's the middle of the night and you've just been woken up, and with them knowing you have an erection and you knowing that they know you have an erection, because you're essentially naked except for a gown that the nurse has hiked up so to give you your anti-nausea shot in your stomach. And it'd be so easy at that moment, so incredibly easy, for that hot skin-showing 27-year-old to simply whisper, "Would you like some help with that?," and proceed to do the deed that nurses worldwide since Florence Fucking Nightingale herself have all known are occasionally an unofficial part of their duties, just one that's never ever discussed; and indeed, I pleasantly wasted many a night in those four months thinking of just such a scenario, which has shamefully stayed with me since the accident and has now become a regular part of my sexual fantasies.

There; that's probably the most ridiculously inappropriate thing you'll hear from me about the accident. You're welcome.

I'm celebrating yet another anniversary this fall as well, by the way; the 20th anniversary of GALLERIA, that is, the student-run art gallery at the University of Missouri that my friends and I started up in the autumn of 1990, running for nine shows over the course of a year to a combined audience of around two thousand people, and that received around two dozen media mentions that year as well, including from places as far away as St. Louis and Kansas City (both about two hours from the mid-state city of Columbia, where I went to school). Inspired by a similar project in the '70s pulled off by Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo when they were students themselves in Buffalo, New York, it was basically our attempt at creating an artistic showcase for undergraduates on a campus that didn't offer a single similar official opportunity, overseen by possible Guerrilla Girl and our hero in college, Picasso scholar Dr. Karen Kleinfelder, now in California (I think) but who started her career in Baltimore the same years that John Waters was making all his notorious countercultural films there.

Looking back on it two decades later, I have to say that I'm still immensely proud of what we actually pulled off -- we exhibited over a hundred different artistic portfolios and special projects in a single school year, a perpetually sold-out monthly event at a popular danceclub in a town that many thought couldn't support such a thing (our most popular event saw over 700 paying audience members in a single night), with nine issues of a supplemental literary journal published as well, and the most money raised of literally every non-sports student group at the University of Missouri that year. And I'm convinced that a big part of this was because of a policy that I've since transferred to CCLaP as well, to not feature any creative work by anyone actually doing administrative work for the group itself, a small but intensely crucial step we took towards getting artists to take us seriously, as well as guaranteeing staff members who were there to actually work, not because they thought it gave them a better chance of getting their own work exhibited.

In fact, there are all kinds of practical lessons I learned running GALLERIA about both the arts and small business that I still apply on a daily basis to my newer, bigger current project, such as: what most young angry artists want more than anything else is simply to be listened to and taken seriously, and that this and a little money is enough to get them to lay down in front of tanks for you; that substantial live events will take three times as long to set up as you expected, no matter how well you thought you planned things; that when you're the boss, underlings will often not tell you their true desires until it becomes a crisis, and that a big part of your effectiveness as a leader is the ability to clairvoyantly understand these desires long before they're ever mentioned out loud; that once you do something that's truly successful, people will come out of the fucking woodwork to criticize you for it, literally for no other reason than that they're literally jealous.

It's an experience that I think back on fondly, because of all the other major milestones that are connected to it: it was also the first year I stopped being an art student and finally started being an artist, the first year I lived entirely off-campus, at a house my roommate Ted and I named "Kunstwiescheisse" (German for "art as shit") because of me having recently read Howards End and becoming enamored with the idea of a house having a name instead of a street address, the year I officially went from being just another undergrad schmo to being a Big Fish In A Little Pond, a description that more or less hasn't left me in the twenty years since. It's true what they say about such experiences, that GALLERIA mostly succeeded because we were too young and dumb to know that such things usually fail, and it's an attitude I try to have with CCLaP as well, even while trying to be a little more realistic as far as budgets and fundraising and long-term plans. And in fact really my only big regret is that I literally own no photos from any of the GALLERIA shows; so if you're one of my old cohorts from college who now keep up with this personal journal through Facebook, I do hope you'll post your old GALLERIA photos soon so that we'll all get to bask in the glorifying nostalgia of it all. Don't make fun of my goatee!

And I had a bunch of other stuff to mention today too, but I think I'll just save it for next time, as a way of enticing myself back into regular updates like I promised earlier this year. (And don't forget, by the way, that all twelve years of the journal archives are now centrally located at this site, versus being split between here and Geocities like it was for years, although I still haven't gone through and properly categorized all 700 old entries, which is why the only way right now to easily browse them is by date only.) So for now, toodle-ooh, and here's hoping that pretty soon I'll have my new computer, which is the only personal purchase I'm making with my surprisingly large settlement check (the rest going towards my medical bills and getting my credit back into good shape). Tschuss!

And indeed, part of me is fascinated with just the concept of museums itself, of why they even exist and what their role should now be in the 21st century; and that's because for the most part, and definitely here in Chicago, the rise of the popular museum coincided with the rise of the Victorian Age, and I'm a real sucker for just about anything having to do with Victoriana, not just objects themselves but the lessons about life that were learned back then, and how these lessons can and cannot be applied to our own times. Oh hail, Fair Victoria! A golden time to be sure, in which a bustling Industrial Revolution and a profound rise in literacy and education inspired a certain amount of people to think more optimistically than perhaps any other time in human history, before or since, to dream of a world where all citizens no matter what their class are informed and savvy about the basics of science, math, art, history, culture and the like; this after all is how the modern museum came about in the first place, through ridiculously grand plans by pie-in-the-sky upper-classers, traveling the world in large numbers for the first time and deciding to share with the public what they were bringing back, an opportunity for everyone to learn about the exotic corners of the planet first-hand since most couldn't travel there themselves. And thus in Chicago, for example, did you see the formation in the late 1800s of the Field Museum of Natural History (started by Marshall Field), and the Adler Planetarium (started by Max Adler), and the Shedd Aquarium (started by John Shedd), not just mighty public institutions but lasting monuments to their founders' unending egotism, which at the time brought to Chicago one of the largest unified collections of natural and scientific objects on the planet, and almost immediately vaulted the former cow-town into the ranks of world-class cosmopolitan centers.

It's where I started my own summer project earlier this year, in fact, because how can you not? After all, they're still thought of to this day as the "Big Three" museums here in Chicago, not least of which is because of their grouped location in the so-called "Museum Campus," a lovely large lakefront parkland area just east and south of the downtown "Loop" district, which collectively is still overwhelmingly the largest tourist destination in the entire city. (The largest single destination, by the way, is Navy Pier, basically a giant mall just to the north of the Loop, which really should come as a surprise to no one.) And this was another big reason I decided to do such a project this summer, because as an actual Chicagoan, it'd been years and years since I've been to these places myself; when you're a local, after all, you pretty much need an external excuse to get out to the tourist destinations on a regular basis.

And I have to say, the Victoriana-lover in me was not disappointed at all, as you can see for yourself in the huge photosets of my visits I've posted at my Flickr account (click here for the Adler Planetarium, here for the Shedd Aquarium, and here for the Field Museum); this is one of the main benefits of even going to the larger museums in Chicago, I think, because unlike a lot of other cities, many of the cultural institutions here are still housed in their original 1800s locations. And so especially in a place like the Field Museum, which you're seeing in that top photo there, part of the pleasure of visiting as an adult is simply imagining what it must've been like to stand in the same exact place a hundred years ago, looking at the same stuffed elephants but that time surrounded by people in top-hats and carrying parasols, to marvel for another example at the exquisite ornate detail found in every inch of the Shedd Aquarium's core (what you're seeing in those other two photos above), all the way down to the fish-themed wall tiles and light fixtures. And I have to say, after visiting them myself, I'm kind of amazed at how much these three particular museums have been able to blend their old collections with the new, and especially as two of these places (the Shedd and the Adler) have taken on massive new expansion projects in the last few decades, effectively doubling their size while still trying to ingratiate the Postmodernist new with the Victorian cores found in their centers, not just architecturally but conceptually as well.

I mean, just take the Field, for an excellent example, which also has the distinction of being the second largest museum in Chicago (after the truly gargantuan Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park), and which for decades was known for its just unending exhibition halls full of dusty mahogany display cases, showcasing hundreds upon hundreds of stones, plants, fossils and more, in an endless progression of rectilinear spaces that can easily boggle the mind. But like most museums, the Field in the last 30 years has been slowly rehabbing more and more of their square footage into Postmodernist-style exhibition halls -- you know, with the dramatic lighting and friendly type and curving glass walls and "narrative" layout -- with perhaps now half of their total interior space converted to such a contemporary-friendly format. So it was surprising and pleasurable to see the Field enfold many of the most famous details from their old way of doing things into these shiny happy new exhibits -- just for one example, the way they retained the old Art Deco oil paintings that used to hang in the dinosaur rooms, showing what the skeletons you're looking at probably looked like as flesh-and-blood creatures in their natural habitats, and which for almost a century was about as exciting as the museum got apart from the fossils themselves. But then like I said, about half of the Field still hasn't been rehabbed; and so one of the big pleasures for me as a grown-up on this most recent trip was simply to wander around the utterly empty back hallways of some of these older exhibits (especially the "Hall of Plants" -- man, it's deserted back there), checking out the dusty wooden display cases that sometimes literally haven't been changed since maybe the 1910s or '20s, with yellowing information cards literally done up on manual typewriters.

But of course, these are also modern organizations we're talking about, which is where the conversation suddenly starts getting a lot more contentious, as it does as well with just the general issue of the contemporary museum experience in the 21st century, and what exactly the museum's role is anymore in an age of the internet, cable science channels and cheap international travel. Because admittedly, sometimes these places get their modern exhibits exactly right, a perfect combination of legitimate learning and awe-inducing visuals; take for example the brand-new exhibit at the Shedd, built literally under the museum into the bedrock because of running out of room on the surface, a recreation of typical South Sea coral reef environments that is also known as "That Place Where The Shedd Has Now Moved All Their Sharks," which includes among other elements a massive 15-foot-high water tank whose top is curved outward, so that you can literally stand underneath it while sharks swim over your head, one of the most thrilling experiences I've ever had a museum. But then sometimes these new exhibits are much more an attempt to turn the modern museum experience into one more like an amusement park, which is expressly the exact opposite reason that museums were invented in the first place; for an excruciating example, see the new hourly live show the Shedd now does in its fantastic "Oceanarium" space (a recreation of an entire Pacific Northwest ocean environment, including Beluga whales and one of the largest indoor water tanks on the planet), the "Dolphin Show Meets Cirque du Soleil" disaster known as Fantasea, in which these poor marine biologists are forced to don these sleek European Modernist costumes and go cavorting around like something from a cutting-edge Olympics opening ceremony, with not a single thing taught during the show anymore but rather the whole thing synced to a wordless bombastic New Age soundtrack, even more insulting when you consider that during their first live show after opening the Oceanarium in the '90s, these marine biologist narrators went out of their way to explain why their show wasn't like an amusement-park dolphin show, but rather attempted to explain why what you were seeing was actually the natural behavior of these creatures, and what the elements were of their natural environments that brought about this natural behavior. Wow, talk about selling out faster than a drug-addicted prostitute!

And in fact this gets me to my biggest complaint about going to these museums now; that in their never-ceasing crises over funding these days (much of it, frankly, caused by the explosion in middle-management positions at these museums, as well as upper-executive pay), these museums have mostly now resorted to never-ceasing crude grabs for your money the entire time you're there and literally around every corner, starting with the shameful ballooning in the last decade of the number of "special exhibits" at these places, that now require a separate fee besides what you paid just to walk in the front door, which is bad enough at a place like the Field which has plenty of other things to do, but is freaking intolerable at a smaller place like the Adler, where now literally (literally) half of their floor space is dedicated to exhibits you have to pay an additional fee to access, on top of just your general admission fee. (And even these general admission fees are sometimes out of control -- over 20 dollars now at the Shedd just to walk in, for example, with that amount effectively tripling if you want to see each and every single thing that's available for viewing there.) And speaking of which, ask me how much of a dispiriting drag it is to be bombarded with retail opportunities once you're actually inside these places anymore; and I don't mean simply a gift store and a cafe, because even I'm for that inside a museum, but rather a place like the Shedd now that has seven different gift stores and cafes inside its building, a space that only takes half a day to traverse from one edge to the very other to begin with.

Yes, it's something you can "learn" to "put up with" while you're there, but it's an emotionally draining experience as well, a soul-killing experience akin to having a random stranger run up to you every ten minutes, slap you in the face as hard as they can possibly hit you, and scream into your ear as loudly as they can, "GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY!" And like I said, this leads to all kinds of ethical compromises among these museums anymore, calling into question just what the different even is in the 21st century between a museum and an amusement park -- and if there is no difference anymore, why we even need museums in the first place. (And don't even get me started on the rise among these museums to host traveling entertainment-value-only cash-cow exhibits on subjects like freaking "Star Wars," a thing that makes me a little more morally disgusted every time I see it.) Like many of us realize already, there's a crisis that's been going on with these kinds of museums over the last twenty years, a crisis of identity in an age where we're not sure how necessary museums even are anymore; and unfortunately, the most common solution attempted during the Reagan Era was to try running these places as if they were private corporations, a dismal failure that resulted only in an endless downward spiral of dumbed-down bottom-line moral compromises, in order to fund their ever-increasing corporate-style bureaucratic employee structures, which were justified by arguing that these were the only people who could pull off these dumbed-down bottom-line projects in the first place, a cycle that's in danger now of completely bottoming out in this post-Bush Great Recession national hangover we're experiencing right now. It's obvious that we need to come up with a different way of doing things here at the dawn of the Obamian Age we're just now starting; and while I personally don't know exactly what that is, absolutely it should involve in my opinion a renewed concentration at these places on actual science, culture and education, and the systematic stripping of this middle-management layer that came with all the corporate thinkers back in the '80s to begin with. After that, who knows; but based on my experiences, do at least these two things and you've already removed half of the cause of the spiritual malaise these organizations are currently going through, and half of the reason why going to museums in the 2000s is simply not as fun as it was when I was a kid in the '70s.

And that's about it so far from my Summer of Museums project, except for a fourth trip last week for the first time in my life to the historic Prairie Avenue district (basically Chicago's first rich neighborhood, which saw its height in the late 1800s before quickly descending into a slum in the early 20th century), and the two private homes down there that have been turned into public museums, the Clarke House (Chicago's oldest building still in existence) and the Glessner House (a famous precursor to Modernism which must be seen to be believed -- and by the way, there's a much more detailed explanation of this neighborhood over at my photoset for it at Flickr). Then next week I'm off to the Chicago Nature Museum, which I've also never been to before; and then before the year is over, visits as well to the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago History Museum, the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Oriental Institute, the Swedish American Museum of Immigration, and the granddaddy of them all, the mind-boggling Museum of Science and Industry (which among other things has an entire German submarine inside it, an entire 727 jumbo jet, an entire fake coal mine, half a dozen full-sized railroad locomotives, and dozens of automobiles, and with all this still only taking up only a fraction of its entire space). And before the year is over, I'll also be sure to post another update about the entire project here, and let you know how these visits to the city's lesser-known museums went in comparison to the Big Three. For now, though, toodle-oo, and I'll talk with you again next week.

One of the genres I've been getting really into during this "second indie renaissance" of mine is electronica, which has really just expanded in the overall music industry in a way we literally couldn't have even envisioned back when I was in college, and that has spawned a whole series of subgenres we would've never been able to even imagine; I could name dozens, but just take for one good example the rise of so-called "math rock," which essentially combines the sounds and rhythms of electronic music with the high energy of a live indie-rock show, a style of music that I suppose has its roots in such '80s experiments as Devo and Kraftwerk, but is an altogether rawer, more visceral experience than anything those two bands ever tried to do. (Or to think of it another way, a band like Devo took the sweaty reality of rock clubs and tried to impose a clean, shiny sterility to it, while math rock takes the antiseptic environment of a club DJ booth and tries to introduce an earthy, chaotic element to it.) Like I said, there are dozens of such sub-definitions in the world of electronic music now, a world that contains thousands of artists and that is now embraced in a live context in a way that would've made us laugh back in the '80s and early '90s, back when even a night of avant-garde live electronic music at some museum was considered a rare and weird event.

And the more I explore and learn about this scene, the more amazed I am by the business side of it all; because for all the talk recently about sampling and monetization and intellectual property and "pay what you want" experiments, it is electronica that has more quickly and passionately embraced these attitudes than just about any other subsect of any artistic discipline at all, with a lot of electronic artists no longer even attempting to make money from the music they produce, but rather seeing the singles as yet one more easy way to promote their live shows, tours and merchandise, no different than a MySpace account or a stack of club flyers. And so that leads for one example to just a tremendous amount now of "remixes" in this electronic world, where every time an artist releases a new song, two or five or a dozen other artists will take that song and cut it up and put it back together again in an interesting new way, and do the same for these other artists when they release their own new songs. And I mean, obviously some of this is above-board and all worked out in advance -- to cite one example, the Bacardi Rum company actually sponsors an entire remix series, and given their corporate nature I'm sure that they're legally crossing all their T's and dotting all their I's before any of those remixes are actually allowed to be released under the Bacardi name. But given just the sheer number of remixes that show up at these blogs and podcasts -- dozens and dozens of them every week -- I just know that a large number of them are being done without the original artists' knowledge or permission.

For this community to work rather smoothly under such circumstances, then, instead of being bogged down in an endless series of petty lawsuits like you see right now in top-40 music among the major labels, says something profound about the arts in the 2000s, I think, providing more general lessons that can be successfully adopted by all kinds of other forms of creative output. Because like I said, the main reason all these artists don't go apeshit over all these unauthorized remixes out there is mostly because they have changed the very way they even think about intellectual property; that as long as the original crediting information is still attached to these mash-ups of their work, for the most part they see it as simply free advertising, a case of other people literally running around doing their promotional work for them, raising their stature in the electronic world and thus getting them more gigs, better pay, bigger live audiences, a chance to go on television, etc etc etc. Because I should mention that this is the glue that holds the entire thing together, that there seems to be a sort of "gentleman's code" in the industry regarding these reappropriating artists correctly attributing the songs they're remixing; in fact, it seems that among remixers who want to be taken seriously by these blogs and podcasts, the standard action is to always list these remixes by the original artist's name and title, then only adding on the actual remix information in parentheses afterwards.

Without this attribution, then yes, such remixes would simply be stealing; but what amazes me is that once this attribution is given, how many electronic musicians don't really care if a bunch of strangers are out there cutting up their songs into new shapes or including them in longer "mixtapes," and in fact in many cases see it as a compliment, a sign that they've finally "arrived" in the scene and that their songs are popular enough to want to be remixed and re-distributed in the first place. And I'm sure that part of this is that electronic music is a pretty recursive genre on its own, fundamentally based on throwaway music where only a finite amount of sounds are mixed together in evermore subtle ways; and I'm sure that part of this is that electronic music is fundamentally digital and therefore virtual from the first step to the last, and relies much more on the internet and massive electronic sharing than other forms of music do; and I'm sure that part of this is that electronic musicians tend to be a nerdy lot, and therefore are already worshipping the online philosophers like Cory Doctorow and Clay Shirky who are busy writing essays on why all this makes sense in the first place. But whatever the reasons, despite the horror stories the mainstream record industry tells about the evils of piracy and sampling, in the world of contemporary electronica this has all combined to produce a thriving, happy, cooperative community, one that right now is seeing more artists and generating more revenue than at any other time in the genre's history.

I've been thinking about all this a lot over the last two years, not just since starting this iPod challenge but since starting up my arts center's publishing program around the same time; because for those who don't know, CCLaP's publishing program has so far been an only electronic one, sort of foretelling the ubiquitous rise in ebook readers that is just starting to happen now, and so far all of CCLaP's books have been released under a "pay what you want" system, which means statistically that so far about 80 percent of CCLaP's customers have now read the center's books completely for free, with the center's full permission and encouragement. (For those who are curious, by the way, of those 20 percent of readers who make voluntary payments, over two titles now they've been donating an average of around eight dollars apiece, and combined total readership for both books is about 1,500 people now.) So that has me thinking about the issues that come with digital media and monetization in a way that a lot of other publishers aren't yet; and I have to say, at this point I've been pretty much sold on what these electronic musicians believe too, and plan on gearing CCLaP's publishing program much more along the lines of what's happening among cutting-edge musicians these days than anything you currently see in the traditional publishing world.

I mean, let's just start with the most obvious issue staring us in the face -- that instead of seeing those above numbers and getting pissed about the 1,200 freeloaders in CCLaP's audience, like a lot of publishers are tempted to do, I simply acknowledge them as 1,200 extra readers we wouldn't have without the free version, 1,200 people who are out there talking about the books and promoting the books and becoming passionate fans of the books' authors, versus the mere 300 so-so fans we'd have if we offered only the pay version. And in fact this number directly corresponds to the sales figures of most basement-press books these days -- that even when released on paper in traditional brick-and-mortar stores, most such titles are lucky to sell just a few hundred copies altogether, and in many cases mere dozens. (And the situation's not that much better for mainstream publishers, either; according to Publishers Weekly, once you remove the 40 or 50 titles each year that are massive bestsellers, the remaining tens of thousands of titles published in the US each year sell a national average of only 1,500 copies apiece.) I instead choose to find it more important that people are actually talking about CCLaP's books, that they are influencing the general popular culture around them, that they are helping to define what's going on in the arts instead of merely being a reflection; and in this there is a double benefit to CCLaP's pricing scheme, in that it not only gets the book into a profoundly larger amount of hands, but gives people an immediate interesting and unique thing to talk about regarding these books.

Just take for example a recent appearance on WGN radio here in Chicago by one of the authors I've published, Ben Tanzer, who was appearing with a group of other writers to talk about the upcoming Printers Row Book Fair; but just as soon as Ben mentioned the pricing structure of his book with CCLaP, as well as saying that magic phrase that journalists oh so love to hear -- "You know, just like Radiohead!" -- suddenly the entire conversation was shifted into this pricing scheme and the future of literature, and you ended up having CCLaP instead of the fair talked about for an entire ten minutes of that fifteen-minute segment. That simply wouldn't have happened without this unique and interesting aspect of it all, which is the lesson that so many small publishers don't seem to understand -- that in a world of fractured media, a world where hundreds of small presses are putting out thousands of titles a year just in the US alone, it's no longer enough simply to be good at what you do, or to be dedicated to putting out the kinds of titles that the mainstream presses won't. That's a huge problem in the publishing industry right now, is that those attracted to it in the 2000s tend to be extremely old-fashioned; and a lot of these people like to pretend in their heads that it's still 1956, and that their basement press is fated to one day be another City Lights or Paris Review breakout hit based only on the quality of their books alone, not even beginning to understand that we now live in a very different world, where the rise of a single organization based on editorial choices alone is now a practical impossibility, and especially in a world where the most avant-garde artist out there can now run their own instant free distribution network merely by signing up for a Blogger account.

But of course, none of this takes into account the other half of CCLaP's publishing plans, the thing that hasn't officially started yet and that the last two years have been basically a long build-up for, which is the paper side of things; and in this I am also taking a cue from how the smartest musicians out there these days are doing things, via embracing the fundamental idea that in a digital world, it's not the actual intellectual property that is worth any money anymore (or at least, not in a world where that intellectual property can be immediately and infinitely reproduced with no loss of quality, by any random teenager with a minimum of skills), but rather the pretty physical package that that intellectual property comes shipped in. Because for those who don't know (and yes, I know, I've talked about this a lot here before already), CCLaP's plans for paper publishing don't include traditional trade-paperbacks at all, but rather a much smaller amount of extremely high-end hardback "art books," hand-bound and with color illustrations inserted on vellum pages, on archival cotton paper and with a signature page and everything. The idea, then, is to sell just a hundred of these for $75, $100 apiece, just to that writer's most passionate fans, as well as those who professionally acquire fine-art books for collectible purposes, and to simply keep handing the electronic version out for free to those who simply want to read the story; if I were to sell out such a print run of the center's first book, for example, that would generate a total of $10,000, or the exact same amount I would make by selling a thousand trade-paperbacks for ten bucks apiece. And I gotta tell you, in all honesty, I think I have a fuck of a lot better chance of selling a hundred copies of a fancy, expensive coffeetable-type art book than a thousand copies of a normal cheap paperback, given that I'm only averaging 750 readers of each title even when the books are completely free.

Again, it all boils down to what I said before, the thing that the electronica community is rapidly figuring out long before any of the rest of us -- that in a world where information can be instantly distributed to billions around the world at once, so cheaply as to realistically be free, then the actual words on a page, the actual notes in your ear, no longer have any intrinsic monetary value of their own, but rather only the unique products and experiences that are wrapped around that content, like going with your friends to a concert hall to hear those notes, or reading those words in a handsome book that can be considered an artistic object unto itself. And so that's what I'm working towards right now, to be able to put out CCLaP's first high-end paper book by this time a year from now, which is going to require startup money of $2,000 -- five hundred so I can take a bookbinding class at the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College, then $1,500 for the book itself. (Yes, I plan on spending fifteen dollars per book just on raw material; it should give you a good idea of just how high-end I plan on these being.)

And so that's what CCLaP's coming fundraisers this winter will be about, raising this two thousand dollars in seed money I'll need to do the center's first paper book; for example, our first fundraiser is going to be a formal sit-down dinner party in November, just for the fans of CCLaP with the best-paying jobs, $50 a plate which gets you a five-course meal and an evening of free entertainment, plus a chance to hub-bub with your fellow creative-class arts fans and local movers-and-shakers, which if I can get twenty people to sign up for would generate a thousand dollars in revenue, minus of course the roughly $200 in raw ingredients for the meal itself. So we'll see how it goes, of course, although I have a feeling that it's not going to be too terribly difficult to raise that kind of money by next spring, which will let me take my class and then be ready to actually make the center's first book by next summer. And that after four years will finally give CCLaP its first opportunity to start making serious money, money in the thousands instead of dozens of dollars; and needless to say, I'm highly looking forward to that day finally arriving.

Anyway, that's it for me today; and as always, I hope things are going well with you too these days. Next time, a mid-year report on how my "Summer of Museums" project is going, which by then will have included five of its twelve stops -- the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Clarke and Glessner House Museums in the historic Prairie Avenue district, and the Chicago Nature Museum. (Those links above take you to my Flickr photosets of each visit, for those who want to check out the detailed individual reports right now.) See you!

So it's official; I've now finally pulled off the first successful live literary event sponsored by my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP). Well, thank God for that! This has been a big part of CCLaP's plans since I first envisioned the center back in 2004, and is the way I plan on the center to eventually make a big chunk of its money, once I finally own a physical space for it somewhere in the city and can afford to do live events every night of the week; but based on the things I learned when studying small business in the early 2000s, it's also something I've been waiting awhile to actually start up for the first time, because of reading over and over in my book studies that the best thing a small business can do is wisely pick only a select amount of things to accomplish at first and do them very, very well, and to not even think about adding new projects until those existing ones are smoothly clicking along like clockwork. And so that's what I've been trying to do, starting with the book reviews in 2007 when the center first opened, then not getting serious about the podcast until the beginning of 2008, then not getting serious about the electronic publishing program until the beginning of 2009, and only just this summer starting to get serious about the live-events program.

And I have to say, such advice has really worked out well so far, and is something I recommend to others starting up small businesses; because just to cite this latest example, this first event of CCLaP's ended up getting four fairly major media mentions (Chicago Tribune, Time Out, Gapers Block, and even a full-length article at Chicagoist) with me having to do almost no work to make such a thing happen, and I'm convinced that the main reason for this was by the center building up a certain amount of trust and goodwill first by the other things it's done. As far as the show itself, then, I'm of course happy with how things went, although admittedly it wasn't the most earth-shattering event in the history of the Chicago arts -- it was simply a one-hour literary reading featuring a total of five writers, after all, all of them doing new pieces around a specific theme (urban decay and urban renewal for this show), the kind of set-up I preferred doing back in the '90s as well, when I was still part of the poetry community and was organizing and hosting a lot more shows, with this one garnering maybe 40 audience members total when all was said and done, perhaps 30 of them there specifically for the show and another dozen who were regulars of the actual venue. (If I haven't mentioned this yet, the show was held at this great "ad-hoc community center" down in Hyde Park called The Op Shop, founded and run by a friend of mine named Laura Shaeffer; she basically convinces the University of Chicago about twice a year to let her take over one of the unused retail spaces they own in the neighborhood, where for a month or two they'll run a full-time gallery, thrift store and performance/film center, eventually packing it all up and opening somewhere else in Hyde Park a few months later.)

The performers, however, all seemed to have a really good time (it worked out that they all got along together particularly well, which is always a great thing to see); and Laura seemed to have been really happy with how things went too; and we even had beer left over by the time the night ended, which is always a thing to celebrate, when you don't run out of alcohol halfway through and get grumblings from all the undergrads in attendance. And I'm grateful for all these things, because like I said I've been patiently waiting awhile now to hold CCLaP's first event, and so am glad that doing so generated all the goodwill and positive word-of-mouth that I was hoping it would; and of course I'm also grateful that the recording of the show came out decently as well (thanks again, Erik Cameron), which when run on the podcast and combined with all the Flickr photos and the upcoming electronic book version of the stories, gives the center actually four pieces of promotional product to come out of a single one-hour event. And this of course is a major component of CCLaP's operating strategy, as I've talked about numerous times here, to be like a Native American with a dead buffalo and to salvage as many different useful things out of that single kill as possible; as I've mentioned before, I see this as a key way for CCLaP to be able to provide an entire cultural center's worth of benefit for a fraction of the cost, and everything the organization does is in fact judged beforehand precisely by how many different tangible items it will eventually produce, in terms of either promoting the center or directly making money for it.

So anyway, hopefully another two artistic events like this will be coming before the end of 2010 -- one in September and one in November, the latter perhaps being a sit-down formal dinner and fundraiser for just a select amount of the center's readers, say twenty attendees at $50 a plate held in someone's home, with free entertainment and with me cooking (I used to be a personal chef long, long ago) -- so definitely let me know if you have any tips on venue/sponsor leads, or if you're an artist who'd like to be involved with a future event. And then hopefully over the next year, I'll be able to first put together a few hundred dollars so I can take some bookbinding classes at the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, and then another $1,500 or so to actually put out CCLaP's very first paper book by this time next summer. And that will suddenly jump the center to a whole new level, because with its first paper book I'll finally have a chance to make up to a maximum of $10,000 on a single project (and in all realistic likelihood actually will make something like $5,000 or $6,000), which will make it the first time I'll be able to tell people that I run an arts center for a living without feeling the need to add an invisible air-quote asterisk to the end of such a sentence. So as always, I guess we'll see what the future holds; for now, all I'm concentrating on is getting an event pulled off in September that's at least as fun and as successful as June's was.

And another first in the last two weeks to report -- I'm back on my bicycle again! Well, how about that! Yeah, I know, I too consider it a miracle of sorts, that I should be back to daily urban bicycling literally less than a year after shattering my hip in a bad accident; but I've written about the wonders of modern medicine in earlier journal entries, so won't go into it again today. In fact, here's been the real surprise, that nine months now of daily physical therapy actually has me in better shape now than even before the accident; or at least, between my real bike and the stationary one at the gym, it's not much of a challenge to put in at least ten miles every single day and sometimes fifteen, a pace which I most definitely could not keep up with before the accident, and I also find myself able now to go five and sometimes six miles at a stretch without having to take a single break at all, not even a 30-second one to catch my breath and take a sip of water, when before the accident my absolute maximum for such a thing was four miles.

Surprisingly (and gratefully), being back on the bike hasn't been nearly as psychologically difficult as I feared it was going to be -- after all, I was freaking out so badly after first crashing, for a month I actually had to go on anti-anxiety medication for the first time in my life. But then, I'll also admit this, that so far I have been sticking almost exclusively to either the lakefront bike path or the extra-wide streets in my neighborhood with dedicated bike lanes; plus I haven't biked even once yet at dusk/night or in/after bad weather; plus when forced for short periods on narrow side streets in my neighborhood, I tend to constantly check my rear-view mirror so that I can ride out in the middle of the street most of the time, in that I am still awfully skittish about riding anywhere even near parked cars along street edges (which of course is what caused my accident last summer, someone in a parked car flinging their door open a split-second in front of me). But still, in general I'm surprised by how easily I've been able to take up bicycling again; and this makes me very happy, in that before my accident, biking was one of the most effective ways I had for relieving stress from my life (like many, I often enter a state of trance-like calm when I'm exercising), so I'm grateful to be able to add such a calming influence to my life again, after a year now of perhaps the most stressful existence I've ever faced as an adult.

As I mentioned here last time, I'm trying not to have unrealistically fast goals, and in general am preferring to simply be grateful to be back on the bike in the first place; but that said, I think I will almost undoubtedly be attempting my first 20-mile day within the next week or two, an important milestone for me in that this was the maximum I had ever put on my bike in a single day before the accident, so doing so again would effectively prove that I'm finally back to "100 percent" healthiness (or, not really, but you see what I'm getting at). My whole goal last summer was to be able to put in a 30-mile day by the time Labor Day rolled around, which I was going to prove by biking from my place all the way up to the Chicago Botanical Garden in the far north suburbs (which believe it or not you can do via a 30-mile nature trail), then taking the Metra train back to the city afterwards, which only costs five bucks on weekends; I'm not saying necessarily that I'll actually be able to pull off a similar goal this summer, but certainly I see nothing wrong with shooting towards this goal. As always, I'll let you know the latest here in future updates.

So how am I dealing with the ruckus these days about Facebook's lack of privacy over personal updates? Easy -- I simply don't say anything there that I wouldn't want to be public knowledge, the simple solution for pretty much any grown-up with even a modicum of willpower. And yes, I know, this is an awfully glib joke (I know, I know), and is also the lazy justification used by supporters of censorship and government spying ("If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about"); and in fact, the entire reason I bring it up is actually to make an entirely different point altogether, which is this -- thank fucking God the web didn't exist when I was nineteen years old, when I was young and naive enough to go around blabbing about any ol' bullshit to just about anyone who would listen, which of course is exactly what a nineteen-year-old should do. It's a whole issue that the current generation of youth are going to have to deal with, that even my generation never did, of having each and every stupid little fucking thing you ever say in your life dragging behind you in a virtual paper trail no matter how old you get, to pop up for out-of-context misinterpretation exactly at the moments in your future where they'll precisely do the most damage. I mean, even the founder of Facebook himself has been a victim of this, when an old transcript popped up last week of a random drunken chat he once had with a friend when he himself was nineteen, unwisely boasting of the stupidity of his original Facebook customer base and professing amazement that they were so willing to hand out private information to a complete stranger in the first place. I shudder to think of some of the stupid shit I did and said at nineteen suddenly becoming front-page news in my forties, or being brought up during a job interview or whatever; it's going to be one of the major cultural issues facing society another twenty years from now, mark my words, as this current generation of pot-smoking, boob-shooting college students become middle-aged parents and community leaders themselves.

So can I talk about something sensitive here for a moment without being called a Jew hater? Because I'm not a Jew hater, just to make it as obvious as I can, which I've learned the hard way over the years is something I simply need to state in a basic way here sometimes when talking about sensitive issues...

I'm fascinated with the idea that the fracas going on this week with Israel opening fire on a flotilla of Palestinian aid workers might turn out to be a tipping-point catalyst of sorts, for it finally being socially acceptable here in the US to be publicly critical of things done by the Israeli government. I've been thinking about these subjects a lot this year, because of doing a lot more reading over at CCLaP recently about the beginnings of the Postmodernist artistic movement; and as I read more and more of these great older books from the '60s and '70s by people like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, I'm coming to realize just what a thorough plan was put into place in the US after World War Two to make it socially unacceptable to say anything bad about either Jews or Israel at any time or for any reason, a big reason why it's generally perceived that the US has a much friendlier relationship with Jews than with Muslims. (In fact, it's very common now for American Christians to fondly view their religion as the sort of younger brother of Judaism that ended up doing well for itself, while if you had suggested this to most Christians pre-Holocaust, they would've looked at you in horror.) But see, this came at the cost of simplifying the Jewish race in Christian eyes into a profoundly reductionist, almost cartoonish kind of caricature; this is what Roth and Bellow (and Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce and Mel Brooks and all the other great Jewish artists of Postmodernism) were complaining about back then, and in many ways you can see the entire countercultural period for them as being the struggle to bring a more complex, more realistic view of Judaism to their mainstream American audiences.

Far from being a sign of anti-Semitism, I think this recent wave of Israeli criticism here in the US is the best thing that could've ever happened to Jews; it means that Judaism has become legitimate enough and permanent enough in the eyes of the world to deserve a complicated viewpoint, to acknowledge that there are actually both conservative and liberal Jews, that they actually don't get along most of the time, that the radical fringes of both groups often actually do things that a lot of others find morally reprehensible. It's a hell of a lot better attitude to have than what you saw in the US in, say, the 1950s, when Jews were generally thought of in Anne-Frank-saintly, permanent-victim terms, and when it was considered in bad taste to even mention Judaism in polite conversation in any context at all. Like I said, this is exactly what the daring, envelope-pushing Jewish artists of Postmodernism were fighting against (with surprisingly the most important one of all perhaps being goofy ol' Jerry Seinfeld, who when you really look at it, did more to normalize the complex ins-and-outs of daily Jewish life to mainstream America than maybe any other Jewish artist in human history); and it's a real testament to these artists, I think, that in 2010 you can have a growing amount of Americans feel comfortable with calling out the radically conservative current leaders of Israel for their radically conservative actions, without fear of being branded a general Jew-hater by society at large. My two cents, anyway.

And finally, a recent observation I made about the tech world (yes, I still have them, "Great Fucking Start-Up Disaster of 2006" notwithstanding)...

Whenever I finish a new blog entry over at CCLaP, I almost always take the time to add a robust amount of helpful terms in that entry's "tag" field; and that's because I'm one of those people who have been updating websites since literally the mid-'90s, so have become inured to the idea of adding as many useful tags as possible, to make those entries much more popular at the various search engines out there. But I confess, on the days that I don't have the time or energy to add such tags, I no longer worry that much about it; because Google by this point has become so sophisticated, it hardly matters anymore whether you add useful keywords or not, in terms of it understanding what that blog entry was about and how it should be ranked during specific searches there. And that got me thinking about how Google in fact has pretty much ruined several sub-industries within the tech world that first got their start in the dot-com '90s, and if not for Google would now be multi-billion-dollar sub-industries just on their own; take for example the entire subject of "search engine optimization" (or SEO), which even a decade ago was a big enough issue to support thousands of people in this country getting paid millions of dollars, all in the name of trying to get their clients' websites to show up higher on result pages at the various search engines out there, which at the time mostly amounted to these quasi-legal scams involving complex backend coding, expert manipulation of these very tag fields just mentioned, and the hiring of thousands of flunkies to literally sit there hour after hour at their home computers, conducting thousands of searches for these client websites at Yahoo and MSN. Google eventually made the entire process so sophisticated yet so plain, that it's now patently obvious to just about anyone as to how to get your website listed high in search results -- simply talk in an informed, entertaining way about the subject at hand, and make sure that your customers are liking it and linking to you. That's it -- no complicated keyword schemes needed anymore, no paid Yahoo trolls, no six-figure SEO scam artists.

This is the thing that so many people in the tech world still seemingly don't get, and is one of the many things that makes me thank God that I'm no longer trying to establish a career in that industry -- that Google didn't become the juggernaut it now is by being the best at what all its competitors also do, but by literally changing the very rules by which the entire game is played, rightly deciding for example that if you spend 95 percent of your budget making a product that simply works amazingly, and almost none of your budget on fancy marketing and advertising (pretty much the opposite of the rut most tech companies found themselves in by the late '90s), people will just naturally flock to your product on their own, without you needing to pathetically beg them to through false promises and flashy distractions. Every time I see Bing announce another twenty-million-dollar ad campaign, or Yahoo announce another tie-in with some sad Hollywood actioner that no one wanted to see in the first place, I laugh and laugh at all the fucking losers in that industry who still can't see what is plainly staring them in the face, and marvel at the mass stupidity of most humanity that still somehow lets us function as a society at the rate we do. Sheesh, I can't tell you how glad I am sometimes to be an arts administrator now.

Well, it's official; for the first time since my accident last summer, this week I finally got my bicycle out of storage (aka my friend Patrick's garage, where it's been since my other friend Tom moved it from the hospital last August), and down to my friendly neighborhood hippie-owned repair store (and Critical Mass hotspot) Uptown Bikes, where I'm assured that it'll be ready to ride again by this coming Thursday. Well, how about that! I've been mostly thinking of this as ho-hum news, but it's actually much more profound a development than I usually give it credit for; after all, what we're really saying is that less than ten months after shattering my hip, and having a giant hunk of steel surgically implanted to hold all the pieces together again, I'm ready to resume an activity that even some healthy people can't handle, and certainly even 50 years ago would've seemed like an impossible dream to accomplish again after an accident of this nature. That's the thing, really, that strikes me the most intensely about this entire experience, of just how supernaturally quickly the medical industry as a whole has progressed since first adopting the scientific process back during the Enlightenment; for example, as recently as my own childhood in the 1970s, I remember it being generally accepted that an elderly person's chance of any mobility at all was pretty much dashed after breaking a hip, that they were fated after such a thing to essentially spend nearly the rest of their life in a wheelchair.

I mean, it's been a daunting challenge to get back into bicycling shape, don't get me wrong, with me for example now having participated in one form or another of painful rehabilitative physical therapy every day for something like 250 days in a row; and in fact there's an entire future entry to be written about my first-ever experiences this year with the subject of chronic pain, and how it is that most people you meet who complain of it tend to be a little crazy, because low-level pain that lasts 24 hours a day, every single day, is enough to drive just about the sanest person out there at least a little crazy, as I've discovered the hard way. (And this is not to even mention the bizarre things that start happening to your brain when you've been on painkillers every waking moment for weeks straight, which sounds delightful at first but, believe me, isn't.) But like I said, mainly I've seen these developments as the miracles of our modern (post-Renaissance) age that they are, and figure that as long as I live in a time in history where hard work and a little luck can get me back into nearly 100 percent fighting shape again, I might as well put in that hard work and gain control again over my life; and in this I suppose you can finally see a benefit to the intense stubbornness I've possessed my whole life and which usually causes nothing but problems, in that I tend to get wildly angry over the entire idea that some random act of a non-existent god could have such a permanent influence over the whole rest of my life. That's what keeps me motivated to stick with the physical therapy, frankly, no matter how painful it gets, is the opportunity to point to the Giant All-Knowing Finger In The Sky and scream, "FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!" Yes, I know, they won't be making any inspirational Lifetime movies soon about a man who overcomes his handicap as petty revenge against a god he doesn't even believe in; but hey, it seems to work for me.

To tell you the truth, I still sometimes get palpitations simply over the idea of being on a bike again at all, and out among vehicular traffic in general; for those who don't know, among other things I suffered from a pretty bad case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the first month after the accident, or at least bad enough that I had to go on anti-anxiety medication for the first time in my life. But again, this taps into this overwhelming stubbornness I have regarding the world telling me what I can and cannot do, which as mentioned turns out to be a surprisingly effective motivation for doing things that are naturally difficult to accomplish; because I gotta tell you, I sometimes get just filled with disgust over the idea that some random dick with a car would be able to have that kind of control over me, that he could literally stop me from ever enjoying again what had been before the accident one of my favorite activities of all time. Many times in my past, when absolutely nothing else would do it, sometimes a long contemplative bike ride would be exactly what I needed to clear my head and get back in a good mood, and I'm looking forward to having that opportunity again, despite the unfocused dread I sometimes have right now over the idea of being back in the street again among vehicular traffic. Needless to say that for the time being, I'll be sticking a lot more than before to the non-vehicular bike trails of Chicago's parks (easy for me to do, in that I live just four blocks from the lakefront, which contains a "bike expressway" of sorts that stretches almost from the northern city limit to the southern one); but that said, I'm definitely looking forward to being back on my wheels in general, and as always will post updates here throughout the summer on how things are going, and hopefully some new videos soon as well.

So speaking of returning to fun activities I haven't done in awhile: at the end of this month, my arts organization CCLaP is finally throwing its first live literary event! Yeehaw! In fact, I've been meaning for awhile now to do just a general update here on how things have been going with the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, but realized a couple of weeks ago that I just don't have that much to say -- I continue to write book and movie reviews each day, continue to produce a podcast episode every two weeks (one interview a month, one music special a month), continue to publish and promote original eBooks, and CCLaP's audience continues to slowly grow each day as a result, as does the amount of media coverage the center receives. (In fact, just last week one of the authors I publish was the focus of a major article by the insanely popular PopMatters.com, including an incredibly astute analysis of the book he wrote for CCLaP, something I'm grateful to see because of this being one of the goals of the center in the first place, to help garner more academic-style respect for basement-press and self-publishing writers.) And this of course is exactly how it should be for CCLaP at this point in its history, as I've learned from my study of small business over the years; that the center is in the crucial stage right now of simply earning respect and loyalty from its customer base, and that it's much more important right now that I simply accomplish my humble stated goals regularly and reliably, than to be pulling off big splashy experiments that garner lots of short-term attention but no long-term rewards.

In fact, this has turned out to be one of the biggest lessons I've learned in general about the difference between a professional business owner and a mere dilettente, that the former makes sure to get all the stupid little shit crap work done that no one else wants to do, that they indeed garner an immense amount of respect simply from doing the stupid little shit work that stops so many others from being small-business owners themselves; and so that's why for example I concentrate so hard on trying to get a piece of original content posted to the site every single weekday, no matter how little I'm in the mood to do so, which then forces me to get a hundred pages of reading done every single day too, no matter how badly I've instead wanted to get CCLaP's events program up and running. And get it up and running I definitely have been wanting to do for awhile now, which of course taps into one of the biggest ironies about my life these days -- that I in fact have decades now of producing highly fun and successful live literary events (including co-creating and co-running all thirty daytime and late-night events at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, which were collectively attended by several thousand people, one of the biggest highlights so far of my entire career), a fact which is barely known by most of the people I currently count as peers, because of most of them being page-based writers who didn't meet me until long after I had quit the slam scene in 2001.

In fact, for those who don't know, I have a complicated relationship with Chicago's performance-poetry community, for a variety of complicated reasons: because I'm not nearly as liberal as most others in that scene, for example, so have a limited tolerance for the more ridiculously leftist things that happen within it; because of the community's aversion to all non-ephemeral elements of the literary world, making one's time in it essentially an ephemeral experience with no long-lasting benefits; even because of simply getting older, and no longer having the tolerance for the late hours and rampant substance abuse required to be a legitimate success within that community. (In fact, that may turn out to be my biggest lasting legacy within the slam community, of being the guy who invented the joke, "The poetry scene is like Menudo -- everybody eventually ages out.")

But then there are all kinds of things about that community that I liked as well -- the camaraderie, the chance to be regularly influenced by your peers in a way simply impossible with page-based work, the almost palpable sense of electricity that can be generated in the immediacy of a moment like that, and of course the increased sales of related product that results. And back when I was active in the scene myself, I used to especially love producing and hosting my own events, although (surprise, surprise) I tended to run mine a little differently than most others; mine were always based around a common theme, and usually I would make the participating performers write something brand-new for the show, and I would limit these writers to only one piece lasting between five and ten minutes, and I would hand-pick the order of the performers myself, and would put in the kind of attention to that order usually only seen among teenagers making a mix tape for their romantic partner. And unsurprisingly, audiences tended to really respond to details like these, especially within a world otherwise consisting of four-hour shows in the middle of the night with no microphones, and where the majority of the performers are doing the same old shit you've already heard at half a dozen other four-hour shows held in the middle of the night.

I mean, this was the entire reason I decided to open CCLaP in the first place, back when I retired from creative writing in 2004 and was deciding what to do next, because I have a bad habit of getting fatally bored with a subject once understanding the winning "formula" for making it work; with as grand a project as an entire cultural center, though, I can essentially put each new activity by the center on "autopilot" mode once finally learning this formula (which of course is another key part of making a small business a success -- figuring out what your customers want, then feeding it to them ad nauseum), while being able to turn my creative attention to the next big new activity I've decided to take on, once I have the older one running in smooth clockwork fashion. And it's just been this year that I've started feeling this way for the first time about the center's podcast, that I've discovered a format and publishing schedule that audience members seem to be really responding to in a positive, lasting way, and have gotten good enough at them now to be able to put together a whole episode in just two or three hours (versus the entire workday it used to take me when first starting out); and so that's allowed me to start more and more putting the podcast on autopilot while still churning out episodes I'm happy with, which then gives me the extra creative energy to take on a new activity this year, namely the live events (which I should mention will be recorded and aired on the podcast as well, thus making them a "value-added product" without having to spend any extra money, a key part of CCLaP's operational strategy as an extremely low-budget organization).

Anyway, this first show is centered around the theme of urban decay and urban renewal, because of the space in which it's being held; namely, it is part of the events schedule at a sort of ad-hoc cultural center in Hyde Park called The Op Shop, founded by a friend of mine named Laura Shaeffer, a former commercial gallery owner who last year somehow managed to convince the University of Chicago to let her take over one of their empty spaces around the neighborhood a couple of times a year, to turn into a deliberately transient performance center, gallery space and more. (This is a big hot thing in Chicago in these "Great Recession" days, in fact, figuring out cool artistic things to do with the hundreds of shuttered retail locations now found throughout the city, a fact which I'm sure heavily influenced the U of C's decision to greenlight this project.) Anyway, the latest version of the Op Shop is being held in an old Modernist commercial space at 1530 East 53rd Street (next to the Metra tracks), which among other things has been a bank, a clothing store and a video rental outlet over the years, and is slated to be demolished just a few weeks after the center moves out, which is why I decided to go with this particular theme; and it features what I think is a pretty fascinating line-up too, including short-story author Sally Weigel, novelist Ben Tanzer, science-fiction author Mark Brand, poet Jason Fisk, and blogger/urban explorer Katherine Hodges, all of whom will be bringing something unique to their look at urban decay and urban renewal. All the details can be found at [cclapcenter.com/events]; admission is free, and yes, you're encouraged to bring your own spirits. I hope to see all you locals there!

Okay, I finally did it -- I finally figured out how to get the BBC iPlayer to work on my American computer. For those who don't know, this is basically the British Broadcasting Company's version of the streaming sites you see among all the American television networks here, where hundreds upon hundreds of hours of BBC content (both TV and radio) are available for instant watching/listening at the touch of a button; but since the BBC is paid for by British taxes (and since their American rebroadcasts are done on cable, which you have to pay for as well), the entire site is disabled to all internet connections that don't originate from a UK server address. Ah, but it turns out that there's a fairly simple workaround for this, which is to install a way to use a fake proxy server on your system, to literally trick the BBC website into thinking that you're based out of a British country; for example, I used Lifehacker.com's guide to installing the "FoxyProxy" extension on my Firefox browser, then just Googled the term "British proxy server lists" and used the very first fake IP address I found, which has worked perfectly the three or four times I've now booted up the BBC iPlayer here at home. (And just so there's no misunderstanding, let's plainly admit that what I'm talking about is against the law in Great Britain; but more on the ethical considerations of all this a little later.)

I've wanted to try this for a long time, to tell you the truth, because just in general I find the pop detritus of a foreign culture to be infinitely fascinating; this is one of the big things I learned during my trips to Germany in 2003 and '04, for example, that among the items I found most exotic and interesting while there were such lowbrow things as bathroom graffiti, local tabloids, highway billboards, daytime television programs and the like. And let's face it, I'm already a fairly heavy Anglophile to begin with, which I absolutely do not deny, and have already established a habit over the years of watching an unusually large amount of British television when given the chance -- in fact, many of my favorite shows of all time are originally from the UK, such as The Prisoner, Monty Python, Doctor Who, The IT Crowd, Monarch of the Glen, Ballykissangel, Absolutely Fabulous, The Young Ones, Rising Damp, Coupling, Fawlty Towers, and a lot more.

But those are all major, traditional shows we're talking about, easy to export to other countries and with a fairly surefire way to generate revenue; what gets lost in this overseas transfer instead are the local versions of the more transient stuff, talk shows and soap operas and local news, the stuff that makes up the bulk of any television station's daily programming, no matter where on the planet that station is located. And that's the most fascinating stuff, I think, because it's like a window into daily life in that other country, and just as big a peek into another national culture as viewing locals' photostreams at Flickr or reading their blogs, which as I've discussed at length here before is something I find one of the biggest singular pleasures about the entire internet as a communications platform, this opportunity to literally transfer your consciousness to another location (if you do it right), and to feel for at least a few hours like you have literally somehow magically transported your physical self to a location halfway around the world.

And so like I said, I've ended up booting up FoxyProxy about three or four times this week, and have now watched or at least sampled somewhere around 15 or so shows; and I have to confess, it's been so far just as riveting and interesting an experience as I thought it was going to be. Because the thing to know about the BBC if you don't already is that their big, splashy, well-known expensive dramas and comedies represent only a small fraction of what's on the air there each day; much more common there is just a whole endless series of inexpensive talk shows and game shows, news shows and soap operas, almost none of which we ever even get glances of here in the US. And so for example I've now watched episodes of Have I Got News For You (one of the oldest of these game shows), and Never Mind the Buzzcocks (a music version of these game shows), and QI: Quite Interesting (a popular and unusual game show hosted by Stephen Frye, and the inspiration behind NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!), where I've discovered that they all essentially work the same way; that in reality the "game" part of these game shows are basically excuses to bring a panel full of British comedians together to riff on various current events from the news that week, and with each and every one of them starting with monologues that basically pair up current headlines with outrageously silly photos and videos. And then for another example, I've also now watched the talk shows Frank Skinner's Opinionated, The Graham Norton Show, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Russell Howard's Good News, and the teen-oriented The 5:19 Show (and had already gotten hooked a year before over at YouTube on The Sunday Night Project, one of the first British talk shows to get me interested in throwaway programming to begin with), and they all tend to share a lot of the same traits too, including this penchant for wacky-photo opening monologues, as well as the BBC's habit of making all their show sets primarily revolve around bright purple color schemes. (And why do all the sound stages at the BBC seem to share this purple color scheme? Well, I guess that's a question for someone else to answer.)

The reason I find these so fascinating is precisely that they discuss the things that don't usually transfer well to an international audience; they are chock full of references to local events, feature a whole series of only minor celebrities who will never ever be known to American audiences, rely on jokes that many times go straight over my head. But so too is it fascinating to see the different style of humor and patter that used for these shows, a much more biting and dark-edged style of comedy than seen in most similar-type shows here in the US; and speaking of that, by the way, I've also learned this week that the cliche really is true, that these shows sometimes seem to be nothing but an excuse to create an entire self-sustaining industry for an endless series of genial, tired-looking, leather-skinned middle-aged gay comedians, in that you tend to see the same dozen or so of them pop up on show after show after show, sometimes as the host and sometimes as a guest. I don't know why I find all this so fascinating, but I do; perhaps it's the sense of getting a glimpse at another society, or perhaps the sorta taboo aspect of it all, albeit a type of taboo that has its roots in the banal.

And to tell you the truth, this isn't all the types of shows I've been checking out this week: I also sampled Question Time, their version of Meet The Press but where random audience members get to directly ask politicians questions (which, by the way, is yet another aspect of these shows I find fascinating, that politicians also regularly appear on these jokey current-events quiz shows, and are expected to be just as funny and sarcastic as the comedians they've been paired up with, something you would never see on American television in a million years); and I also checked out one of the Prime Minister debates that have been in the news so much this month, as well as a few of the public-opinion shows that appeared before and after them (where it becomes clear that the British public finds the whole thing a lot sillier and pointless than how American news sources have portrayed it, a sort-of reality-show popularity contest that to many Brits represents the worst of dumbed-down surface-level American influence on UK culture, not the "historic game-changer" it's been portrayed as by CNN, the New York Times and others); and I even caught the latest episode of Britain's most popular soap opera, EastEnders.

That might've been the most surprisingly fascinating experience of all, to tell you the truth; because despite it being not much more than exactly what you would expect from a low-budget daily soap opera, this look at a fictional working-class neighborhood in the troubled east side of London features what's easily the most racially diverse cast of all the BBC shows I've now watched. And that says a lot, I think, and goes a long way towards explaining why Europe is having such a bigger problem than the US is as far as educated, supposedly assimilated Muslim youths turning to extremism and terrorism in their twenties; because in a country whose media only even allows such people to appear on the air at all while in the guise of a trashy melodrama about low-class problems, while all "prestige" shows feature almost exclusively rosters of pale white males in their fifties and sixties, that's a society that obviously has deep and profound problems concerning the idea of permanent class divides, one of the few issues that nearly everyone can unanimously agree that America deals with in a better way, which is why you see so profoundly many more young people of color in the US successfully transition into quiet middle-class adulthood, instead of becoming angry poor suicide bombers like what plagues such cities as London and Paris these days.

Now, to be honest, I doubt I'll be doing too terribly much more illegal BBC-watching in the future, after I get all this cultural experimenting out of my system, because frankly there's not much of a reason for me as an American to do so; out of all the shows I've now sampled, for example, the only one I liked enough to want to watch the entire run of is the truly hilarious, half-improvised, creative-class family comedy Outnumbered, and that's one of these traditional prime-time high-budget shows I was talking about before, which makes it much easier to simply rent out on DVD through Netflix, instead of going to all the trouble of setting up this fake proxy server and dealing with the hiccups of streaming videos online. (And to be clear, there are still shows on my list that I haven't gotten around yet to watching, such as Waterloo Road and Skins and Mock The Week; and for all its coolness, I should mention that there are some BBC shows still simply not available through their iPlayer service, such as the half-century-old astronomy show The Sky At Night, the venerable University Challenge, and such other "legacy" shows kept on the air mostly for tradition, but whose actual ratings are in the basement.) That's the ultimate thing about an activity like this, which is why I don't feel bad about it technically being illegal, just like I don't feel bad about watching the occasional TV show illegally through BitTorrent when I miss its original airing, in that I never use these options as a way of doing a permanent runaround; that when it comes to the projects I truly enjoy and wish to support, the Doctor Whos and Losts of the world, I'm more than happy to consume these shows through the proper revenue-generating channels, like renting the official DVDs or watching them on ad-supported television. Everything else is basically fun experimenting; but like all experiments, they're meant to be both short-term and temporary, not a means of literally taking money out of the pockets of the shows' creators.

So anyway, that's what's mostly been eating up my time around here this week, which I thought you'd enjoy hearing about. I'll talk with you again soon, I'm sure.