Goodnight Facebook

If you're reading this its a good chance you got my note about shuttering my Facebook account. I appreciate that you took the time to follow me over here. Here, Master of my own domain. I get to set my own rules and I'm not sharing your info with anybody. Promise. (If you should take issue with my posts, note that I'm factually incorrect or have some relevant commentary that you feel like sharing, please feel free to contact me.)

Before I start cranking out observations and opinions here  that would have gone over there, please do me this one favor. Check out my new website, www.JewofOklahoma.com. When you're there you can find a link to my latest release. I'm super proud of it and I'd like you to hear it at least and download it free for nuthin'.

So! Welcome to the place I used to share my stories with before I got derailed by MySpace, er, I mean Facebook.

Thanks!

Mark
New Orleans LA

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It's my birthday and all I really want from you is your email address.

No really, that's it. Just scroll down to bottom and plug it in. Thanks!

By Dan Piarro, Ironically a Facebook "friend"

I'm turning 48 today and very soon will be shuttering my Facebook account. It will stay up, and my Twitter and Blogger accounts will be linked to it. But I won't be looking at it and surely not responding to any of its many stimulus's, much less checking its email. Call me a 
fuddy-duddy or a moldy fig, but I've come to realize that I've grown uncomfortable with the false sense of intimacy that social media tends to create and really don't need the extra souris. As a dear friend just noted to me just today "I have to really work on keeping a very mellow scene between my ears." Me too!

I realize there's people who use Facebook as an aspect of, if not the basis of, their "business" model, But frankly I haven't seen it raise my fortunes any. The only thing I have to sell is my music presented in digital files, and even old fashioned CDs too, to a public increasingly uninterested in owning any of it, much less pay for it. And for some folks, more and more it seems, it has become the basis of their "actual" social lives. In the words of my pal Danny Barnes, who left Facebook for good himself recently, "Yikes!" It's like a lot of things: some folks have the discipline to make this tool work out for them. I just have to acknowledge I don't and that's OK.

Tell you a story:

When I was about 14 or so, right about the time my father passed away, I recall how my mother's custom was to be glued to the telephone from the moment she got home from work until late at night, chatting with all manner of girlfriends, hours at a time. Not once did it occur to her to get out of bed and go less than a mile a way to actually visit any of the people she was calling. This was a smallish college town that I biked across daily, BTW, you could walk literally anywhere. It seemed strange to me, even in a very strange household. It was about that time as well, I started noticing girls. Amazingly there was even a neighborhood girl who would actually call me at home and talk to me, sometime for hours about all manner of important 14 year old stuff. But every time I saw her at school, or even out in the neighborhood, she barely acknowledged my presence. It was hurtful and confusing that someone would share so much over a telephone line and then be so cold and distant in person. When I left my home for my own apartment at 17, a didn't get a phone line. In fact, my friends from Norman will attest, I never had a phone. 

Yeah, in WW2 it was a Naval Air Training Center. weird?

My reasoning was simple: its a small town, come visit. And it worked, my true friends found me or at least left notes saying that they'd stopped in. (This was infuriating however for the many punk rock bands who ended up crashing at my place over the years. They had to trek down to the nearest laundromat and use the old pay phone there. Ask Boche from Billions. He booked an entire tour for Das Damen there one weekend, poor guy.) 

Didn't get one until I had moved to Dallas years later and then only grudgingly. Strangely, I am an early user of smart devices (Remember the Sharp Wizard? I had the 2400 baud modem and checked my AOL account on the road,) the cell phone (Sprint customer since '96) and even webpages, where www.badlivers.com was recognized as amongst the first 500 links ever collected by Google. Hmmm. Burned out? Not sure. But even one of the inventors of the Internet thinks it eventually destroyed the Middle Class and makes us all idiots. Oh well, I digress...

In all this thought and consideration, it occurs to me that there's a great many folks who follow me in social media that would actually like to hear from me and keep up from time time, to stop in and "visit" as it were. So I established an email list with Mail Chimp and every 3 months or so I plan on composing a little note about whatever it is I am up to. That's it, I won't sell it or give it away, it's just for us, promise. And this doesn't mean I'm dropping off the face of the Earth either, I fully expect to hear from you too! Just not on a public forum anymore, I hope you understand. I have a Twitter account, a Blog that I contribute to regularly and an informative Homepage, so I should be able to find, right?

When I made the painful move from Austin to NOLA, I was pleased to note that 3 sets of folks stopped by to say howdy and welcome me here all within being here just a few days. Happy to report we do accept visitors here quite frequently, so you'd be welcome to stop in.

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The Peon and the Patron

I've been thinking a lot about patronage and peonage these days. Times are such that the arts are required to make their own way or simply go away. Everyday someone tells me how they heard my music on Spotify, and I guess that's cool. But they used to say that they bought my CD and enjoyed it. Now the trend is to not buy anything and just stream it all. Great for the listener, but it begs the question: Why should the artists continue to create content for a community that doesn't value it, even when they claim they enjoy it? Are we only to enjoy art made by the idle rich, the only people who can afford to produce it? I spent over $3000 on my last CD release and have to date recouped less than $500. Are my releases simply vanities? Dynamic conversations on every end of the question.

But frankly, I'm too old to get into all the arguments. All I can do is say "Here's my catalog."  If you like what I've been putting down all these years, then let me know the only meaningful way you can in our present society and buy something. Anything. Every little bit counts, even the .0057 cents I received from a years worth of my music streaming on Spotify: