If You Can't Make It Anywhere, Go To New York

The old adage is, "If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere."
But nowadays, it might be more accurate to revise that to "If you can't make it anywhere, go to New York."
Aurora and I were talking about this last night after a really shitty show at the Fool's Foundation. A band called Magick Marker played, and they were awful. They took a half-hour to tune, and then they played completely dischordant, atonal jam-crap, flailing away at their instruments in method-acting trances (sooooo spiritual) one girl even plucked at her guitar with a chicken foot. Yeah, a chicken foot. Wait til after the show for the heroin.
Everyone stood around, silent and still, watching. We're supposed to be impressed? Aurora blurted out "Only in New York" and embarrassed me, a fact she enjoyed very much later on when needling me for caring about what people think of me. Anyway, at the time, I was thinking more 'this band blows' rather than 'we're supposed to be impressed because they're from New York' but that was, upon reflection, pretty accurate.
Its like the emperors new clothes. Now, I've seen incredibly pretentious acts from everywhere from Sacramento to Iowa- Noisefest, for one, is almost a parade of that. And when I was in the Bay Area, that place definitely has its crop of pretentious music acts who create noise music because they can't really play.
But there is a certain level of preciousness, a certain almost religious tolerance for unjustified absurdity that must exist in New York, because the stuff that comes out of there... a lot of it just isn't any good. This is a place that produced Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. Regardless of what you think of them, imagine the subtlety of taste required of the New York aesthete. How to sort the poop from the prime? What are the criteria? Is it to do something truly novel, or do something at the right time, with the right look? Or is it a matter of connections, who you know, that determines what rises to the top, not just popular opinion?
Aurora especially feels this way, since a few of her friends who have moved there, far from struggling and clawing their way, have found it easy to find work in their esoteric fields of video art or music or what have you. One band, a couple friends of hers from Davis High, have a CD on a record label, they are signed and have a contract and are going to get to tour Europe playing their music. In my professional opinion as a music writer (barf bag time) they aren't very good, they're ok, but I could name one individual I've known for some time (name of Neil a.k.a. OX) who has far more talent. But, alas, not the networking skills.
So... If you can't make it anywhere, go to New York? Ayn Rand once said "Every time I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my wallet." Ultra-capitalist Rand's jokingly fascist attitude is the same kind of cynical impulse that guides a lot of the business end of the culture business. Hidden underneath that idea that culture is something to be bought, is the idea of buying something for one dollar and selling it for two. Getting on the ground floor of a trend or a band or an artist or whatever is like buying a stock when its down, both in terms of actual money and especially that nebulous other capital, the invisible kind we can here call 'coolness' but you could call by many other words. In that kind of environment, no wonder the line would be blurred between the avant-garde and the merely flatulent. With so many people taking themselves so seriously, you might as well too, right? Business is all about networking: all about connections. Whether you find yourself at home at CBGB's or a local golf club, your nearby Church or the Bohemian Grove, the best business connections you make in your life will probably be in a non-business setting. Get out of the studio and schmooze, arteests. The ones that are too busy with their art to schmooze, well, it doesn't really matter how good they are.
You won't ever hear of them.