Somehow, Neil Gaiman always seems to know exactly what to say.
Trillian Stars all film noir in her cloche walking past city hall in the fog at night.
running, cloche hats, shark repellant, fancy chocolates, love & mythical places
I hate to say “yesterday the party was on Facebook” but the party was kind of on Facebook yesterday. And for this I partly blame LiveJournal for still not having a useful iPhone app.
Anyway, I went out running yesterday and got a cramp in my calf the first 1/2 mile. I ran through it but after mile 4.5 it was obvious the cramp was winning and I was losing so I ground to a halt and checked my phone (like you do)
So I posted to Facebook asking for advice and there was a lot of it and it was relatively consistant and pretty hysterical (“big knife, swiss army knife, trench knife, night vision goggles, butterfly knife….”)
So I limped down to the Army Navy store smelling like a sweaty hobo while Trillian got on the Amtrak to New York to go to a birthday party.
I wandered around the basement of the store, sniffing a bunch of vintage wool trench coats, trying on helmets, asking if they had any bigger bayonets, trying out fishing nets and whatnot. Once I got the presents in hand I started home and by this time it was night.
I was whistling a happy tune and strolling through Philadelphia enjoying the evening when out of the corner of my eye I caught a sign that said:
And I knew this was some sort of husband test — this was a store that didn’t exist during the day or for other people passing by, it popped up from fairy land right there because it needed to be there for me — like E.M. Forester’s Celestial Omnibus or the Phantom Tollbooth. I stood and looked through the window at the trays of chocolates being dusted by elves, the hats being fitted on mannequins that could be living heads by glowing skinned willows with unnaturally long nails and I went in.
“Give me your finest chocolates, and your roundest cloche hat,” I said (still in a track suit, smelling like a hobo but now carrying a bag full of mothballed Korean War camouflage netting, five cakes of expired shark repellant, and a signal canon.)
They smiled knowingly and put my chocolate and hat into a box.
On the bus on the way home a woman with a bag of knitting and a Downton Abbey box set got really excited when she saw my bag from ARTISANAL CHOCOLATES AND CLOCHE HATS. “Oh my,” she said, and launched into a monologue about chocolate. It was a pleasant ride home and I felt buoyed by the thought that I’d done a good job at being a person that day.
That night I cleaned the house and I worked on some magazine articles that I needed to finish and Roswell played with the box.
The next morning Trillian came home and she opened the box and put on the hat and we went to the birthday party, smelling of mothballs, fancy chocolate and love.
Running in a graveyard with a Neil Gaiman hat Kitty sent me
Clickenzee to Embiggen
His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama, photographed in New York. Whole Story here: http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/555222.html
A 2 second exposure capturing the last second of 2012 and the first of 2013. I’ve been doing this since 1999.
If you watch one version of Auld Lang Syne tonight, let it be this one, from a video I did in 2006 w/ Nicki Jaine on the saw and Ray Ashley on the accordion.
Be grateful for everyone with you tonight who may not be with you next year. Treat everyone like you know they might not be.
Share as you see fit.
Auld Lang Syne - Nicki Jaine (by Kyle Cassidy)
Armed America – photographer Kyle Cassidy takes portraits of gun owners in their homes.
Inexplicable Roswell fan art by Cbatta. (More of Roswell at kylecassidy.com of course.)
Why the Philadelphia Orchestra Should Have More of My Money (and How They Should Get It)
Why the Philadelphia Orchestra Should Have More of My Money (and How They Should Get It)(Originally published here where you can add comments.)
Trillian and I have been members of the Philadelphia Orchestra for a number of years now. We’ve watched them change — trying to find the right space in this New Digital World just like everybody else in the music industry. We’ve watched their foray into Twitter and Facebook and the feelers they’ve reached out with — trying new music, old favorites, the blog (not terribly engaging, but its there and now we know that cellist Yumi Kendall is also a kickboxer) talk backs, pre-show talks (lifting the … stage/audience barrier) — largely all good things. But having recently declared bankruptcy it’s obvious they still have a long way to go.
I’d like to give the orchestra my money and occasionally we work something out — sometimes they phone & ask for a donation, or they get me to buy a really expensive drink in the Wolfgang Puck bar which is kind of hit-or-miss and I don’t think is the best way. Instead of this they should be triple charging me for music at the point at which I already have my wallet out. What?? Yes.
Walt Disney long ago stopped thinking of sales in terms of people coming to the park and paying to get in the door. They realized that those people eat, and they stay in hotels, and accordingly, the business that Disney did expanded to food and hotels in an ever widening net of providing services. When people left Disneyland they were like orange trees that had been shaken until every bit of fruit had fallen off — and all that fruit had landed on one blanket spread out beneath.
This is something the orchestra hasn’t seemed to figure out yet.
Increasingly for people a very central function of the Internet has been autobiographical, we keep photo albums, lists of countries that we’ve been to, conversations with old school chums, our precious moments recorded and archived for the future. As anybody who’s Instagrammed a photo of their breakfast can tell you, this is how people think now.
The orchestra is part of my life and it shouldn’t be a fleeting part. Listen up, here’s how to get my money and make us both happier.
The orchestra tunes up before a show.
1) Sell me music before I see it Before we see a show, Trillian and I usually buy whatever music it is that we’re going to listen to — we like to go prepared. If there was an option at the beginning of each season to buy previous Philadelphia Orchestra (if possible) recordings of the music we’ll be listening to, for say … an extra $40 I’d do it. These are sales that are already going to happen, but they ought to be going to my orchestra, not amazon.com or even if they do use amazon as a front end, they could set up an affiliates program. But it’s got to be convenient, and it’s got to be less expensive than me going to eclassical.
2) Sell me the experience of seeing it They seem to have this down, I buy tickets on the web, they show up in the mail. And they’re doing a decent job of trying to entice me to come to the Kimmel center earlier, though shutting down the third floor bar makes it a lot less fun. Some day they might realize they can have a caterer up there serving food and charge me for dinner too.
3) Sell me music after I’ve seen it. This is a big one, and it’s one of my primary regrets about my orchestra experience — that I can’t re-live it. For years we saved the playbills but it’s not the same, because a lot of the music I completely can’t remember at all, thought I remember thinking at the time it was so much different than the recording I’d listened to in preparation.
If I could also buy a copy of the concert I’ve just listened to for … say $9 or so … I’d do that as well. I imagine sitting on the sofa with Trillian in a dozen years or so and saying “let’s listen to that concert we went to oh those long years ago,” and being born back upon a wave of nostalgia. Wouldn’t that be some sort of engineering hassle? Not really. Last year I discovered while listening to Chamber Orchestra Executive Director Peter H. Gistelinck at a talk-back that the orchestra already records every show they perform. What happens to these tapes? Who knows. But, you may ask, wouldn’t this be a union problem? A problem with guest conductors? Maybe, but that’s something for someone to negotiate. It’s a win for everybody, extra money for the orchestra, extra money for the musicians. Do they sell the exact concert I saw or do they pick the best of four performances? Who knows. Someone needs to figure out how to make it work.
Clickenzee to Embiggen
“Ah, but Mr. Cassidy,” you will say, “you obviously are a naive fellow who knows nothing about how musicians unions, buildings, endowing organizations, patrons and management function and interact.” — This is very true. John Kennedy didn’t know how to put a person on the moon — he only knew that he wanted one there, and on an insane, completely unrealistic deadline. People are like water: they’ll find the riverbed on their own. You can make a sluice that they all pass through and generate electricity on the way down or they’ll make their own way, but they’ll get to the riverbed. All this stuff either already happens or will happen, it’s just a question of who gets to benefit from it.
The world’s obviously changed and we’re all still finding out places and our methods. Orchestras find themselves in a double bind, exacerbated by a disconnect between an aging subscriber base and potential new, younger, subscribers baffled by the old model. Options exist now that really didn’t even ten years ago — the possibility of crowd-funding things through pre-sales, the instantaneous distribution of digital recordings, the ease at which transactions can be made on line (why can’t I pay for my tickets with paypal for example? Why do I need a physical ticket at all, why can’t i use my phone? And little things that suggest there was no coordinated effort, like why is the name of the website PhilOrch and the Twitter name is PhilaOrchestra?). All these things can be helping a symbiotic relationship between orchestra & audience member, someone’s just got to do it.
And why is the roof garden always closed?
Outtake from the Tom Stoppard “Real Inspector Hound” photo shoot at @Curiotheatre
