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BARBELL

                                             April   21, 2009
                                             October 25, 2013

   A very common strategy is
   to try to use income from
   the low-but-popular to
   finance the high art that
   you'd rather be doing.

      For example:

      There were magazines like "Spicey
      Stories" and "The Black Mask"             (Or... could it be that
      that were founded by H.L Mencken          Mencken really wanted to
      and friends to finance the "Smart         do these "side projects",
      Set" magazine.                            and thought it expedient
                                                to *claim* it was only for
                                                the money?)

      At Cellspace, we often did DJ-dance
      parties to pay the bills (or try to)
      in order to be able to do more
      interesting things at other times...


                                                         
                  There's a joke from a Bruce Sterling        
                  story about a Bollywood producer: he        
                  was being self-indulgent for producing      
                  a weird, odd-ball movie, and to make up     
                  for it he's also done a "weepie", a         
                  standard sure-fire box office success,      
                  but the public sees it the other way        
                  around: the weird one is the success,       
                  and his boss hassles him about doing        
                  that other boring one.                      
                                                              
                                                             
        And indeed, I wonder a bit
        about this stratgy (a variant
        of the bar-bell strategy?).

        It can be hard to do a good job
        with something you don't care about;
        and it's hard to know if what you
        do care about is actually worthwhile.




               What has "The Smart Set"
               done for *you* lately?           (Well, I guess there was
                                                that Fitzgerald guy.)
               Meanwhile, the "Black Mask"
               haunts us still.

                               BLACK_MASKS




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