The public library is a thing of great beauty. It’s a place, it’s an idea, it’s a shining and enduring example of something right with the world, and I love it as much as I’ve ever loved any concept or thing. So you can imagine how this video hit me. 

Thank you to Back To the World for bringing it to my attention.

Here are two not-actual but representative-of-actual ads I’ve seen on Craigslist:

Seeking band to entertain at publishing industry event to benefit a worthy cause. We’re looking for a jazz quartet to play from 7 – 10 pm on Friday at a beautiful SoHo venue. No pay, but great exposure to publishing and fashion industry types.

Your music at our restaurant, Friday nights, 6 – 11 pm. If you’re a solid band with a good following, let’s talk. No $$, but a receptive place for your music; you can pass the hat, and get dinner for up to a trio. Potential for longterm gig.

Hmmm. Let me ask you something, industry event throwers: Is the catering being donated? How about the invitations? The flowers? The venue? All being donated for exposure and the chance to contribute to a worthy cause? Nobody’s getting paid a cent for any work they do to make this happen? If that’s the case, then, okay, you have the right to ask musicians to work for free, too.

Restaurant owner or manager: before I help you build up your business by bringing in my band and my following, please come to my home and cook dinner for my friends and me. I have a stove and electricity (you supply the ingredients). No $$, but a great opportunity to share your talents with an appreciative group of hungry musicians. If the food’s really good, we’ll ask you to come back and do it again.

It seems hard to put a price on something as emotional, as ephemeral as music. But there are hard costs, just as there are with any product. The CD your kid is downloading for free because he knows where to find it online (and, after all, how’s it going to hurt Amazon or iTunes or Gaga or Jay-Z if they don’t get his $10 or $15?), well, that CD may have cost thousands upon thousands of dollars to make, and those thousands may have come out of the artists’ pockets. Granted, my own musical subgenre doesn’t include Gagas and Jay-Zs and overnight YouTube sensations, and that’s a-ok with me. For many of us, pop stardom isn’t remotely the goal. Me, I just want to make music I like and can feel proud of, and to earn a reasonable return for doing so. I’d like my friend who recently didn’t get paid for a gig, and had to pay the band out of her own pocket, to find the check in today’s mail. I’d love to think I might break even on what it costs to make a CD (and I’m only talking hard costs–not time, training, skill, and so on), though I know that’s unlikely.

Now, look, nobody’s forcing me or my friends and colleagues to make the kind of music we make. You are who you are, after all, and I’m sure I wouldn’t get very far as a pop star if that was something I wanted (I’m way too old now, but even when I wasn’t, that wasn’t my thing). But many of the musicians I know are people with masters degrees (and student loans), children, health problems, rent, mortgages. You know the type I’m talking about: regular people. Some of them just happen to be regular people with decades of experience and with incalculable amounts of time and money invested in the development of their art and craft. They’re people who create possibly somewhat esoteric but also possibly meaningful music. And while their music may be appreciated for giving joy, provoking thought, soothing savage breasts, it’s rarely understood as something having monetary value. Music, after all, is free. It floats on the air, on waves. You can’t hold it in your hand, put it on the mantle, hang it on the wall.

Well, it’s easy to take some things for granted, isn’t it? We all do it. I do it. I’m tuned in (no pun intended) to where that for-granted-taking happens in music because that’s the world I inhabit. I thought it might be interesting for non-musicians to have a peek at some of the adventures in Musicland. But that’s all this is, a peek. Oh, the stories I could tell you! But I won’t, not now. I’ll leave you with this request: some time today, or in the next few days, please put on some music you really like. And listen. Really listen. Embrace the music, and let it embrace you back.

(Apologies to other participants. . . as usual, I entered the code to show the list of bloggers, but all that shows is the code. My blog apparently doesn’t want to cooperate.)

It’s all about the food, it’s never about the food. For many Americans, Thanksgiving is the madeleine of holidays, triggering remembrances of holidays past, memories that, before you know it, spiral and spin into other memories. Say you take a sweet potato and drop it in the middle of a frozen lake, ending up with a tangle of cracks spreading out every which way. Start remembering Thanksgiving dinners, and pretty soon you’re every which way yourself. Think of Sallie’s horrible creamed pearl onions and the next thing you know, it’s the little hot dogs in cocktail sauce she served in a little pot simmering over a Sterno flame at grown up parties. Your dress with the bow in the back. Standing on tip toe to spear the hot dogs with toothpicks, and getting scolded for taking too many. And then Sallie herself, and everything there is to remember about her.

The years of unbearable candied yams and marshmallowed sweet potatoes, without which the first unadorned baked sweet potato ever would not have been such a revelation. How Joan and her husband, who served that sweet potato at their quiet Thanksgiving, took you to look for a coat next day. How that was your first Thanksgiving in New York. The vintage coat you’d brought with you from California, the one your new east coast friends laughed at as winter approached. The down coat you finally bought on Greenwich Avenue, and how you bargained for a better price – bargained in a store! The nameless color of that coat. The time Carole came to visit and it was the wettest, coldest day ever, and you both took off your soaking, inadequate boots in the Frick Museum.

The time too much holiday dinner and too much emotion, spiced by teasings from the cousins, created a terrible combustion over the kitchen sink. How tender Uncle George was, holding your hair back. The time in high school, when Bonnie got sick from too much tequila and too many tears, and you held her hair back. How Michael, it turned out, loved you, not Bonnie, but you loved Ted, though not for very long. The look on Ted’s face when he saw your sudden lack of love hanging there between you. Singing “Night in the The City” with Bonnie in the stairwell. Finding out years later that Bonnie had died in a car crash.

The Thanksgiving when you asked your mother if you had to eat turkey and she said no. The smoked salmon for brunch the next day that was the last time you’d eat meat of any kind. Barbara who, though only a year or two older, seemed the coolest, the most sophisticated. Her green velvet pants, her thick brass necklaces. The Chinese restaurant where she insisted on a vegetarian dish. How her vegetable noodles and her green velvet pants got you thinking about things you hadn’t thought about before. Then another restaurant on the way home from another ski trip. Feeling the men staring at you as you passed through the bar on the way to the restroom.

The gelatinous horror of canned cranberry sauce. The stereotype of string beans and sliced almonds. The enormousness of the turkeys. Baba asking who vants a ving. Her apple cobbler. Your mother’s butter-soaked baked chicken. Outlining your hand on construction paper, then coloring in the head, the beak, the feathers, the jiggly thing. The raw potato stabbed with colored toothpicks to look like a turkey’s tail. How it looked more like a peacock. Hearing peacocks cry in the valley behind Tina’s house. Leaving Tina alone while you and Bonnie sang in the stairwell, and all that that led to. The one time it snowed, and the whole family took a snow ball in a coffee can to the hospital so Sallie could feel it. How the neighborhood kids stole your snowman off the brick post while you were gone. How you and Karen loved to walk on the boards between the brick posts as if they were balance beams.