Millennial Ambivalence: Work

I remember an evening sometime in my early twenties, at band practice (not rehearsal) with a group of mostly much older people, when I said something I immediately regretted about never wanting to retire. In that moment, conceiving of my profession as playing tuba in public, it seemed like a fair statement. What I really meant was that I hate being idle and I hope never to stop doing the work that I care about. A decade and a half later, it seems like no one in any profession cares about work, period, not even those whom many others envy. Work is, definitionally, unimportant, usually involving offering up something others don’t really care about either and convincing them that, in a moment of weakness, they could take it or leave it and don’t want to miss out. A great many people are idle at work in precisely the way I can’t stand being idle anywhere. If I was stuck in that bind and couldn’t ever retire from it, things would be dark indeed.

So, as of the precise moment that I am clicking the “Post” button, I do not like idleness and I do hope to retire someday. But I also self-identify as part of the silent majority who likes work, not just activity; who finds the structure helpful, even if it is minimal; and who is mildly to moderately unhappy being totally unemployed. Because there is so little dignified work, this seemingly adaptive and salutary characteristic is functionally the reverse: however much you dislike idleness, you can always find a job that you hate even more. Slowly but surely, pre-millennial generations are having to admit that millennial altruism only looks idle and destructive because the structures these generations bequeathed to us are insidiously designed to punish initiative, shame creativity, and enforce idleness as a defense mechanism. The scholars who foresaw this almost perfectly were dismissed as extremists, so the realization has had to proceed literally block by block, industry by industry, until enough scattered individuals have become upset enough at the meaninglessness of work that they actually start to relate to us a little bit more. Some have long since accepted that money can’t buy happiness while insisting that consumption is good for the economy. But now, production is not good for the worker, and no rate of growth will make it any more possible to buy our way out of that abyss.

Bring Back The Muzak (or something)

One of the lengthier and more in-depth chapters of Anthony Haden-Guests's 1973 book The Paradise Program is about the Muzak company. Among other things, it makes clear that Muzak was doing very interesting and timely Music Cognition research decades before that term achieved wide currency. Also that the human and material resources the company devoted to this and all other facets of their business were anything but lightweight even as this process dictated that the programming itself could be nothing but.

I for one find this history newly relevant in light of the poor musicianship and uninspired curatorial sense that I've recently heard piped into so many LA establishments. One musically astute non-musician acquaintance of mine is known to react even more viscerally against this than I do, and, claiming a well-placed source in the local Whole Foods hierarchy, is convinced that simple nepotism is at work. This seems to me at best a partial explanation. For one thing, the Wild West of digital music distribution is finally starting to stabilize into fixed settlements, the squatters are jockeying for position, and the Spotify playlist game is among the biggest pile of crumbs left to fight over. There is, in absolute terms, more music being made specifically for this purpose than ever before, yet with the Gatekeeper summarily deposed there is nowhere near the level of care going into curation that Haden-Guest unearthed in his fieldwork. In Econ101 terms, the market pressures are, if anything, more intense on today's individual music creators than they were on the small handful of Muzak's competitors, and the barriers to entry into this market have been reduced to an almost negligible level; yet this is still a race to the bottom, it just has more contestants and fewer rational actors.

As a teenager I worked for 3 years at the Bruegger's Bagels at East Hennepin and University Avenues in Minneapolis. In addition to learning a few of the many life-lessons such jobs are supposed to teach young people, I also had the opportunity to passively consume a relatively constant selection name-brand Muzak. Only the classic Miles Davis rendition of "Someday My Prince Will Come" made any impression on me whatsoever; in fact I now can't recall any other specifics about the song rotation. But The Paradise Program did bring back to me one crucial detail: the 15 minutes of dead air for every 45 minutes of programming. Cue the obvious snark about how that sounds like the best part of an hour of Muzak; but it turns out that this recovery time was a carefully-considered, deeply-investigated, research-led decision, one which I wish every retail proprietor would consider. If we've lost those programmed respites forever, then I for one will have to stop using the word "Muzak" pejoratively.

From Recent Conversations With Co-Workers

The pretty decent guy who drives a Corvette, at being told that petroleum is a non-renewable resource:

"Wow...I thought we could just keep making gas forever."


The dudebro ex-Marine, at being called out for his recalcitrance at taking orders from female superiors:

"Nah man, I'm cool with all that stuff about women being equal. I just don't want it around me!"


The smart and ambitious young lady with aspirations of cophood, at my attempts to put recent events in Ferguson, MO into historical context:

"Wait...when was slavery?"


And the revolution is supposed to come from...below?!! God help us all...

A View From The Place Where Blog Month 7 Went To Die

This post is a protest against Operational Need; as in, "applicant must be able to work a flexible schedule depending on operational need, including evenings, weekends, and holidays." Those of you reading this who know me personally know that holidays in particular and weekends to some degree as well don't mean all that much in my world. Evenings don't have to either, except of course when I've already spent all day, week, morning, and afternoon in the unique state of imposed intellectual deprivation mandated by the private security industry and, to varying degrees, its clients.

Though I've had some long days and weeks of teaching and touring, and though I'm no stranger to the Day Job scene, I'm always a bit embarrassed to admit that until 15 months ago I had worked 40 or more Day Job hours in a week only a handful of times. What I now know is that while 40 hours in five days can in fact be made to coexist with my musical life, 46 hours in five days definitely cannot, and 54 hours in six days sure as hell cannot. And the kicker is that the line I quoted above didn't actually appear when I applied for this particular job. It was a pretty decent scheduling situation for a while. Then I tempted fate, wrote a bunch of stuff about privilege and non-privilege, and vowed to keep doing so for an entire month. Me and my big ideas. What about my operational needs you guys?

Security is the most un-zenlike profession on the entire planet, one where you are not allowed to trust anyone unknown to you for any reason, and even those known to you only incrementally and symbolically over time. Security itself is an abstraction, not something you can simply install in your building or hold in your hands. The industry is, contrary to everything you might be lead to believe by the severe overrepresentation of men in its front lines, a soft-skills, people-skills, customer-is-always-right driven one. It is ornamental masculinity at its most purely symbolic and, in most cases right up through the Secret Service, dysfunctional as well. The facilities department "runs" the school; the security department merely holds red-faced conferences on how to look busy when you're really not.

And so this post would be remiss if it did not address what the phrase "operational need" really means. This is what it really means, and this injustice has no place in our country or our world. Fortunately for me there is no child relying on me for support, just a lonely weblog project which is already fully accustomed to not getting much action. I am not tied down by breadwinning duties or institutionalized prejudice against my kind, but merely by adolescent hubris and recreational verbosity. It could be worse. Even so, I take exception to being asked to work on 24 hours notice when officially, if not always practically, getting a day off requires two weeks advance notice; and I chastise the very notion of contracting out services, understanding as I now do that this creates a buffer zone of responsibility between a client that never has its shit together vis-a-vis The Schedule and the front line employees who are held hostage by said incompetence but have no direct recourse against an entity that does not legally employ them.

Once upon a time, a certain newly minted MFA spewed the following venom all over the internet:

In many ways, the day jobs I have held have engaged, challenged and utilized my entire physical and intellectual capacities to a much greater extent than many of the paying tuba gigs I have played. Those prone to hawking music as the ultimate multi-disciplinary task for the developing brain will of course accuse me of exaggerating, but I'm not so sure I am. In fairness, it is true that I have invested quite a bit more time and effort in improving my tuba playing than I have in becoming a better security guard, and that this has made certain kinds of tuba gigs much easier than they would otherwise be. That being what it may, in facing the transition from academic to civilian life for the second time, I find myself far less fearful of the indignities associated with low-wage jobs than of those which inhere in the musical cultures I inhabit.

I stand by those words. Indeed, the problem with the current situation is that once again, after a long and frustrating several months of job hunting and a dozen interviews with HR neanderthals who saw in me only an overqualified, distracted artist type destined to play by my own rules and bail in short order to go on tour, I have predictably outlasted scads of less qualified, less educated, less competent people who have managed to get themselves fired in every conceivable way, from urinating in public to smoking on campus to having their dad pick a fight with a homeless guy on their behalf. And now, somehow, some way, the one that's leftover after all of this, that long-haired hippie with a graduate degree and gaping chasms in his employment history, is too important to the operation to be scheduled for a mere 40 hour week. No, instead we must extend two of his shifts from 8 to 11.5 hours, netting him several hours of time-and-a-half and a few precious hours of double-time by the end of the week. If anyone else doubts that there is dignity in this in some circles, simply witness my co-workers bickering over who is chosen for overtime scheduling and who isn't. And then there's long-haired, distracted, ungrateful, overqualified me trying to give mine away and having a hell of a time. Color me privileged on payday and exhausted the rest of the time.

[sc]airquotes (vi)

"The Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, a coalition of business and education leaders and policy makers, found, for example, that education in dance, theater, music, and the visual arts helps instill the curiosity, creativity, imagination, and capacity for evaluation that are perceived as vital to a productive U.S. work force. And the Conference Board, an international business-research organization, polled employers and school superintendents, finding that creative problem-solving and communications are deemed important by both groups for an innovative work force. Additionally, IBM, in a 2010 report based on face-to-face interviews with more than 1,500 CEOs worldwide, concluded that 'creativity trumps other leadership characteristics' in an era of relentless complexity and disruptive change."

Sunil Iyengar and Ayanna Hudson
Who Knew? Arts Education Fuels the Economy
Chronicle of Higher Education
10 March, 2014


Has anyone who conducts these studies or writes these articles ever tried to get a job armed with an arts degree?

Beds of Sin (iii)

This almost hit me in the head at work the other day, so I picked it up after it came to rest and snapped an iPad picture for the blog:

I realize that the pine cone and the maple leaf have their fans, but seriously, isn't this soooo much cooler? There's just something about Los Angeles, from the architecture to the flora to the sunsets. It makes up for the quotidian inconveniences of modern American life in a way that fall colors, dendritic snowflakes, and the IDS Tower just never quite could. And though I've never been one to take overt cues for my music from environmental sources, I do think the aesthetic change of pace has had a charitable impact on me and my work. So sure, come on over everyone. We'll make room for you.

Exit Strategies II: The Two Dignities

In many ways, the day jobs I have held have engaged, challenged and utilized my entire physical and intellectual capacities to a much greater extent than many of the paying tuba gigs I have played. Those prone to hawking music as the ultimate multi-disciplinary task for the developing brain will of course accuse me of exaggerating, but I'm not so sure I am. In fairness, it is true that I have invested quite a bit more time and effort in improving my tuba playing than I have in becoming a better security guard, and that this has made certain kinds of tuba gigs much easier than they would otherwise be. That being what it may, in facing the transition from academic to civilian life for the second time, I find myself far less fearful of the indignities associated with low-wage jobs than of those which inhere in the musical cultures I inhabit.

As with so many other musico-cultural issues, a disconnect with my peers is palpable when it comes to weighing these two dignities against each other. One consideration, of course, is instrumentation. I cannot demand $100 for a $50 gig where the contractor truly needs about $20 worth of tuba playing, and I struggle to take pride in imbuing that $20 worth of music with $100 execution. Of course, I understood from a relatively early stage that this is what it means to play the tuba. All of this came quite a bit more easily to me then, a time when I more readily embraced the idea that any musical task is as hard as you make it for yourself, when I enjoyed the particular challenge of being an accompanimental voice, took pride in being saved only for the biggest and best parts of the piece, and found fulfillment in doing the little things. I was constantly commended as a young adult for my "maturity" in such matters, scoffing at that evaluation with increasing frequency as neither I nor my less "mature" peers seemed to change much as we aged. With time, however, the politics of orchestration have indeed eroded my willingness to sit idly by while the bulk of the music is made without me. As the saying goes, I set out to change the the world and the world changed me instead.

By any number of measures, this is a rather petty and selfish tantrum to throw, not very zen at all, and potentially rather destructive to just the kind of collaboration that sustains creative musicians like me. And yet I don't think it can be denied that there is something profoundly unhealthy and equally un-zen-like about living one's musical life bottled up; about so rarely being necessary to the whole of which you are a part; about enduring the absolute insistence by careerist colleagues that the indignities and injustices the rest of the world suffers through on a daily basis makes the life of a $100 tuba player being paid $50 for $20 worth of work into one of the world's higher privileges. Perhaps it very well should be. For me, it is not.

By and large, tubists as a group have quite admirably taken to heart Jacobs' admonition to seek out greater challenges than our established roles present to us on a daily basis. I would, of course, agitate for casting a much wider and less stylistically conservative net throughout this process, and I have written plenty about that already. The point I want to reprise this time around is that because of this overwhelmingly conservative orientation, we have not succeeded in establishing idiomatic roles for the instrument in living contemporary musical traditions, roles which are commensurate with our newly evolved technical achievements. Instead, the emphasis has been on getting better at the roles which already exist. Neither as performer nor as listener would I want to live in a world devoid of those traditions, but nor can I say that I have much of a shot at a dignified existence within the confines of that music. Earth to tubists: we need this music more than it needs us, a surefire recipe for an unhealthy relationship in virtually any sphere of human existence.

Such it is that when the dignity of making a living through one's life's work gives way to the indignity of boredom and superfluousness, it doesn't matter how much we're getting paid to play whole notes or how beautiful those whole notes are. Raising the technical bar is only half the battle; only in applying these advances to great, living music do we ensure ourselves a share of the musical future, by which I mean the dignity of being necessary to a living musical tradition. (Quick! Somebody reading this convince me that the tuba is "necessary" to a "living" musical tradition! No, seriously, I really need to know!)

I certainly have found my way into some interesting tuba work over the years through my investment in playing changes. Perversely, that is my most marketable skill, with both competition and demand being almost non-existent. Yet by and large, the gig that absolutely needs me and my skill set just to be able to happen is a rare bird, and the more gigs I play as an interchangeable piece, the stronger I sense that there is an indignity here for me of the type I've never sensed at any day job. Of course, in the professional music world, you are supposed to be thankful that people want to hire you, period, no matter who they are and what the occasion might be, and all of that should go double when someone else could just as easily have gotten the call. "He's a great player and a swell guy to work with." The meritocrats admonish us that this is no less that the essence of dignity in our chosen profession. Where is the dignity in walking away from it?

I have already given part of the answer, but the more important part, I am only recently coming to think, has everything to do with what might be called "family values" (note lower case). Music history is of course littered with major and minor figures alike who rankled their parents by abandoning more stable, respectable, lucrative paths in order to follow their respective muses. Other aspirants are themselves rather terrified when they first fully grasp the reality of the situation they are facing and either take up a fallback career or become the most rabid of self-promoters. Still others were raised by parents who suffered true indignities of various stripes along the way, leading both them and their children to aspire to something better. It seems quite clear to me now that most of my peers have been shaped by one or more of these factors and that perhaps I am rather exceptional in not having been shaped by any of them: my career choice met little parental resistance, I was raised to fear bourgeoisification more than poverty, and economically at least, there was scarcely a better life my parents could have aspired to give me than the one we had.

As for place, it may or may not be relevant in my case:

The culture in Minneapolis is very comfortable. Our guest artists almost always comment on how much they love Minneapolis--the clubs, the scene. But they also comment on the lack of drive in local players. They're all like, 'I love it--but where's the fire behind these musicians?'

Well...there's fire, and then there's fire. There's rehearsal, practice, listening, study, diversion, and then there's hustling. There's proving something to yourself and then there's proving it to others. For whatever reason, my thing has always been outward humility and inner fire; I think that derives from an upbringing where achievement was valued, self-importance was discouraged, and basic needs were never in jeopardy of failing to be met. Meanwhile, ever since I discovered the degree of misjudgment and misinterpretation that goes on in the professional music world, as easily in one's favor as against it, it has been rather difficult to get fired up about controlling my own narrative. I decided to direct that energy into my work instead. That way dignity lies.