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TODAY, of course, is the start of holiday-shopping season — which sounds like a euphemism for something — so I want to remind me readers how important it is to frequent independent, brick-and-mortar shops when you go looking for books and music especially.
This year sees both the Indies First campaign — which urges support of independent bookstores — and Small Business Saturday, during which Neil Gaiman and other authors will volunteer at an indie.
Here is a link to the Indies First page.
A Wall St. Journal story says that so far, despite the crushing power of Amazon and chains, some indies are doing okay this year.
Hoping that many of my fellow Angelenos will shop at stores like Book Soup, Skylight Books, Vroman’s, Amoeba Music, or Rockaway Reccords.
If you are buying a guitar or strings, don’t forget shops like the Fretted Frog (Pasadena) or Imperial Vintage Guitar (Burbank) — both wonderful places run my musicians.
Image courtesy Skylight Books
Happy holidays to my readers.
We need to get to the source of these problems. We might thus address the ethos of cultural plutocracy that is destroying the diversity of our cultural lives and shaping how culture and its business practices are formulated.
A recent article in the WSJ provides an excellent illustration. The NY Phil and the Met are courting international donors. To woo these people the Met is offering a special event for them for the price of $35,000 per couple. They have 29 foreign couples signed up. They’ll get special privileges at the house, a private concert by the house’s stars, name recognition in the program, etc. Average Americans, however, will likely never see a live opera in their lives. The article is here:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-citys-arts-groups-the-world-is-their-oyster-1417136326
This is only one of many programs the Met has to privilege the rich. Wealthy donors are also given priority seating with the result that most good seats are gone by the time the tickets go on sale to the general public. And in any case, the general public couldn’t afford the better seats which are 4 to 5 times more expensive than in Europe.
This also explains why the USA ranks 39th in the world for opera performances per year, behind every European country except impoverished Portugal, and just ahead of Costa Rica in position 40. We need only service the wealthy with a handful of deluxe houses while the rest of the country is told to go to hell. It’s a reminder of how cultural plutocracy functions in the USA, and why our cultural lives are so centralized into a few major institutions and businesses. Until this ethos is changed, most small book stores, music shops, and regional arts groups will remain impoverished. So let’s look at the larger picture and work for change, even if that seems impossible in a country that is essentially a one-party plutocracy.
The above should 39th in the world for opera performances per capita. In the meantime go give those people in little bookstores some hope. Most are running those little stores because it was their life dream.