Bad News, if True

[Stephon]

http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/111881/careers-headed-for-the-trash-pile

[Kate Awesome]

"The kinds of jobs that are disappearing are the jobs that pay really well [for] relatively unskilled workers," says Harry Holzer, Ph.D."


Well,...I'm fucked.

[martin ewen]

In some cases, market and technology changes simply speed up an occupation's decline once it goes out of fashion, Shatkin says. Stage performers -- a category that includes magicians, jugglers, clowns and dancers -- suffered a steep five-year decline of 61%. Increased interest in movies and home entertainment technologies, including video games, he says, has decreased the demand for live performances.

Oh no's no more 7 flag jobs!

80's 90's and hiccuping into the next decade most of the western world was flush with "living beyond our means" easy credit and the backbone mirage of ever increasing property values to underwrite the blindly optimistic tinkerbell rationally unsustainable bollocks as way of life.
Middle class is not dead but worse, bleeding out and deliriously delusional with short bursts of undirected/misdirected rage.

Disposable income is redundant, fear stalks the suburbs, all those comforting get governess like renn faires are doomed. Due to the fact that round 07/08 the indicator that used to be published monthly (m1/m2/m3- fucked if I can remember) anyway a data point that investors used that publicized how much American currency had been printed that month . Well that was withdrawn and nobody knows how much currency's been flushed into the system since then but the estimates are nightmarish. That is stealth inflation held at bay by nothing more than an ever increasing flush and confidence and the fact that most of the world still uses greenbacks as the defacto dosh with which to purchase petroleum .
This trains been roaring towards the waded out bridge for a few years now. The things I've outlined are not opinions. They are irrefutable factors. But thank god for tv. Look at all the neat stuff I could buy if I wasn't unemployed and now that I am look at all the programs I can watch that follow people who still have jobs. I can live vicariously through them. Fishermen and tow truck drivers and hock shop owners and gold prospectors and cops. Notice how some of these televised jobs deal with recycling other peoples shit that they've stored before going broke. Bit of a clue huh?

Anyway. Back to us performers. Two types typically. Ones job is to preserve the status quo. Keep people comfortable. The renn faires the 6 flags the amusement parks. Change is happening so fast there's little status quo left to preserve. Surplice to requirements as the concept of "austerity" takes a big bite out of the flabby middle class ass.

The other type of performer doesn't do 'multitalent' is not reliant on any one market but has some unique appeal. Less of the best and more of the only.
Much harder to do and thus far fewer are qualified. The "wow" that used to be almost entirely marketing driven with only the need for a polished but pedestrian show to punctuate the whole commercial feel good circle jerk that if you look at the corporate market you see the naked emperor clothed in a shiny website typically. These are already withering, most of the promo is just ra ra money marinating years thats heart stopped beating round 05 but the patients not brain dead quite yet.
Anyway I'm ranting obviously but yeah corporate is still viable but the markets shrunk. The upper middle class is still doing the cruise ship thang but that markets just one gas- hike from oblivion.
The future? Hell I don't know. Performing for tramps under bridges for moldy bread? Producing your own web-based eccentricity to exploit the long tail? The days of disposable middle class income are finished. Street festivals are like a civic marketing ploy, they will be the last to go as councils like corps give one last convulsive effort to extend the business as usual fallacy.

Clowns are my area of study and humor. Clowns are used as a social lubricant in times of change. They make change digestible. Think Chaplin and keystones and Keaton . They existed in those generations that existed in the transition from horse drawn buggies to a full on mechanical age with cars and trains and velocity suddenly increasing for the Everyman. And what was their subject matter generally? Velocity, running on foot away from chasing cars, everything deliberately speeded up, trains, lots of physical peril involving forces and velocity. And they survived these challenges and made us laugh. They helped a generation digest change.

As performers, clowns, variety performers, whatever. Those who can distract with beauty and those who first define a change and make it at least subtexturally obvious and digestible . Will find work. More probably invent their own new markets.

But the other type. The type who merely reinforces a status quo. Whose mantra might as well be 'rubber chicken rubber chicken rubber chicken'
Well for the next convulsive wee while they're fucked.

That actually cheered me up. I am without a doubt one sick fuck.

[martin ewen]

Also... There are some strange words in the above that make no sense.
Let me explain.
My ex wife ran over my computer a month ago the last time we had the misfortune of meeting. She didn't mean to. Just as I never set out to make her life a panic attack ridden misery. Shit just happens.
So anyway she ran over my computer entirely innocently and I am left with an itouch that randomly inserts fucking gibberish in place of words I use but sometimes perhaps misspell .
And the incy bincy eeny beany screen does not scroll in any way when I go to edit after my usual method of posting then correcting my howlers.

So fuck it, you'll just have to make do as I do.
Kinda sad really. Using several hundred words when two would do.

I'm lonely.

[Frisbee]

This article is true, but not really...it is skewed.
There is and always will be a need for live entertainment.

The acts that are losing out are the bottom feeders, those who were struggling to begin with, or perhaps those that jumped in thinking it would be a quick buck or acts where they are not really committed to being a full time performer.

Yes, some of the more lucrative corporate gigs have cut back, but someone is still getting those jobs, and that is true for all sides of the industry, someone is still getting the jobs. If it is not you and your act, then maybe it is time to evaluate what it is you are doing and if it fits with the current trends and markets.

everyone still always has a birthday, and people will always look for ways to make them special, so entertainers will always be a part of that.

Festivals are always going to look for ways to entertain the people who come

corporate gigs/presentations will still have their trade shows and need a spectacle to create a buzz or a draw

Casinos will still have the need to bring in shows.

you get my point.

the gigs and shows are out there.

[martin ewen]

Ok don't take this argument as personal. Think of it more in a classical sense where I take your assertions and submit counter evidence and then perhaps you defend your position with evidence.

There will always be birthdays. True. But how many people can afford a real live performer at them?

"A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244."

You charge minimum $500 for a solo act for example. 90% of the us earns just over thirty grand in a year. That's roughly one weeks income you charge.

My point is that markets that have fueled whole variety careers no longer exist or are gasping their last. I did a birthday last year. It was one of the ten percent people. A NBA player.
Have you kept records of birthdays? Bar and bats stable? They tend to be lavish. I've yet to work a middle class one.
Ma and pa lashing out may have been an earner over the last decades but the idea that the part timers will simply go back to their real jobs without any wholesale shrinkage in the overall market is without evidence.

Quite simply. More people have less money and with that trade shows have a smaller market base and with that there are less trade shows .

Might be able to chug along a further year or two, competing with the same amount of performers seeking dwindling markets. Underbidding all the way.

I'd caution against undue optimism. 41 American states are technically bankrupt this fiscal year. Federal Govt has no more bailouts available. The pell grants have even been cut. Unemployment is growing and the only records kept are those on benefits so it's a phantom percentage but I think the great depression was 26 and the current 'on the books' is around 10.

My point is there's a whole generation of us who leeched off a financial excess that has and further is, grinding to a standstill.

But I could be wrong. It's not a matter of optimistic faith however any argument against.

There is always opportunity. New markets among the top ten percent. They are the only people who can certainly afford parties and they will probably have more of them to distract and separate themselves from the bewildered herd. They will need encouragement. That's our job yes?

The whole middle class budget is rapidly shrinking. However knowing that for some money is no object and working out lavish looking spectaculars that themselves cost a bit to produce is probably a good bet.
Jazz your show up with a couple of grand of tech and charge ten times what that tech costs at least could me viable yardstick.

When I can finally afford a computer and timidly teeter out of my rehab facility. I'm doing Sandiago in April , I intend to start an event based performance singularity called... Wait for it...
SuperHyperMegaUltra.com
Test this theory out. Because with the middle shrinking and the lower end all but dead all that's left is exclusive opulent mega mega.

That's where the live stuff will be viable. Then there's producing online curiosities of between one and three minutes to exploit potential traffic and incidentally build up a creative portfolio. I'd suggest people look at that.

I have a go-pro hd camera but at this stage my 'clown in recovery' fullface monologues are crippled by my computer being run over by the ex wife. Kinda my version of the dog ate my homework.

And my books slowly being edited but that's just me.

I've been traipsing round for nearly thirty years now. I'm trying to look at things objectively and not simply as someone getting older.

There are some younger newblood acts but there used to be a whole European street based factory of performers that flowed everywhere and I don't see that renewal there once was. Which is ok. Less dross as well.

But economically politically and environmentally everbodies just not as carefree as they have been the last thirty years.
So that means those of us who distract for a living have to work that much harder to be noticed and seen to be indispensable at gigs.

Where was I? Just prattling before the ex cons arrive back in the dorm before 11. They go out to party. I found their dope plants here at the drug rehab center hidden in the garden last week. Oh yes and today is 100 days clean and sober and that and the mind that doesn't fucking stop is all I have to celebrate. Along with the sandiago gig. And nicks visiting off a cruise ship some week soon.
Transmission ends.....

[nick nickolas]

here ya go

http://rense.com/general93/amrs.htm

peace

nick

[martin ewen]

One reason I stayed here was a curiosity I had, given I tend towards a disastrous life, to sit right down in the belly of the beast and witness the destruction of an empire. I arrived just before Bush the anti-clown pulled off his coup . And I've been here and there ever since just watching this thing being dismantled. Ny blackout, the infrastructure broke we are led to believe because a tree fell on a line somewhere and started a cascade. Then 9/11, then Katrena then, and it's only been ten years, a slow creep of the survelience police state and prisons for profit using the slave labor within to produce most of the refrigerators and all the flak jackets to the new record of over a million citizens in prison, to the straight up fraud followed by the pillage called the bailout, two ongoing wars without end and the gulf poisoned while oily shrimp are sold to the plonkers and scrotums searched at each airport and now just recently at railway stations and get this, it's after you get off the train. They don't even bother to disguise it's just there to get you used to the brownshirts.

And I put my face on and make like I'm not very pleased with it all and glare at millionares at private parties and now have come to a point where even those I'd trusted to tolerate me not jumping wholeheartedly into the system reject me because, well not to put to fine a point on it I lack a certain motivation and drive. Self medication also. So I'm still in the market, still on my feet so to speak and noticing too how the stylized hopelessness I do for a living is being matched in uglier forms by the society around me. I've learnt in ten years what a couple of generations of Americans are themselves waking up to. You live beyond your means and take that shit for granted and the plummet that follows it's withdrawal is a bitch.
So I'm focusing on tomatoes, 11 varieties, heirloom, got over 120 plants up and running. All new to Hawaii so some of them will fuck up but I'm taking care of them and protecting them and watching over them because as those of us here who lived off the streets know because we proved it to ourselves. The oldest currency is small useful things and sometimes moments of laughter in an otherwise complicated and grinding existence is a small useful thing. And those who receive it instinctively want to return the favor and so the purists, without even asking, get money in their hats.

People like laughing however I'm banking on them being more grateful for exotic tomatoes in the next wee while. Tomatoes can handle me popping off to gigs also so they are a good death of an empire transitional fruit or vegetable or whatever the fuck they are.
I sometimes feel like one of those mad guys who mutters gibberish and you're scared to lean in and listen in case they make sense.

[nick nickolas]

Thanks Martin,

I always wondered why ,


nick

[martin ewen]

Well nick there's also the fact that in those rare instances where people are prepared to tolerate me wholeheartedly I invariably turn into a pathetic kind of red setter. I left home at 11 and arrived fashionably late at 3 years so this last consistence I've just finished is the longest I've ever been tolerated by another human being and whatever country that happened to be in was quite secondary honestly.
I could get a lot of therapy or wait till western civilization destroys itself to become relatively cheerful. I think the second ones cheaper personally. Less effort on my part. It's not much to ask is it? I wouldn't want to appear unreasonable.

[nick nickolas]

here ya go another

http://www.prisonplanet.com/mob-robbers-and-rampant-looting-is-this-the-future-of-america.html

[martin ewen]

IMO Alex jones is a bit of a limited hangout gatekeeping tool and the fact he's thrown his lot in with the tea baggers and is disruptive of any antiestablishmentarianizm other than his own brand makes him highly suspicious to me.

Here's four pages of background

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26878

Heh , gotta be careful of Rense too but it's worth a look in . I get all my conspiracy juice from the "general discussion" section of the link above.

It's the best self critical analysis rather than a counter culture echo chamber I've found.

[nick nickolas]

Hey Martin,
yeh I tend to agree with you regarding Alex Jones,

hope to see ya next week,

here's another article I just found to keep us all 'safe'

cheers

Nick http://uruknet.com/?p=m75413&hd=&size=1&l=e

[Schuyler]

I found this blog post just now which I feel is weirdly relevant to this discussion. Especially for all the other jugglers like me out there.

[harmonicakev]

Life goes on...

It's never been easy to be a performer..any job that is perceived to be glamourous will always have more people trying to get jobs than there are jobs...and for many cultural and economic reasons, the demand would appear to be less right now...so I'll work a little less maybe, practice more...and I won't be vacationing on the Mexican Riviera.
Kevin M