Hey, Brother. . . Can You Spare a Dime?

Can you imagine such a thing?  Nudity as entertainment?  It is quite a concept.  That all kind of died when hippies decided to just run around naked for all to see.  People went nuts for it, but the conservatives shut it down.  They liked the strip club concept best.  Why, you wonder?  Profit motive.  Don't give away anything you can charge money for.  People don't value a thing unless money changes hands, it seems.

Same thing happened with all sorts of hippie concepts.  Transcendental meditation.  Yoga.  Those were things that were given away.  Nobody charged money for that.  It was just to make you feel better and be healthier.  It didn't get popular until it was marketed and you went to a studio and paid to get in.  

Crazy, you would think, right?  But everyone thought to make money off the things hippies were giving away.  You could hear the Grateful Dead for free until that shyster Bill Graham saw a chance to make money promoting concerts.  Etc.  

Capitalism dies unless it grows.  How's that for a concept?  

I should have joined a fraternity instead of being a hippie.  Everything, it seems, is about the money.  Even art.  

I needed to take a file box of negatives out of the closet where they were stored in order to scan them.  Of course, the box was on the bottom of the great stacked pile.  When I took it out, everything in my poorly organized closet fell out spilling pictures and 8mm films and papers, etc. across the floor.  It was a daunting mess.  Yesterday, I began cleaning up.  I brought everything out into the living room to clear the doorway and floor.  Holy shit.  I have so many negatives.  I can't house them all.  I have another half closet full of hard drives that store my digital images.  

I will get it all put back together today, but I still won't be able to get to anything easily.  

I'm no artist.  If I were, I'd be making money like Hockney or Picasso.  I'm a hobbyist, apparently, spending my hard earned cash.  I should subtitle this blog, "Confessions of a Hobbyist."  Maybe I should say "Hippie Hobbyist."  

But, you know, if you go by that, Modigliani was a hobbyist, too?  

O.K.  The Modigliani thing is just a joke.  There are other factors.  

I watch YouTube videos about photography by people who take shitty pictures, but they make a living doing it.  "It" being making YouTube videos about photography.  They are quite popular, it seems.  

I don't know what I will do with all the shit I've accumulated.  I've burned a tremendous amount of prints.  I need to start ditching more.  People tell me I should get another studio, but nobody wants to pay for it.  And there are no cheap places to rent anywhere.  You have to be as rich as Annie Leibovitz to have a studio now.  

I feel a bit like Karen Blixon: "I had a farm in Africa."  It was a dream.  She went broke, too.  

But we're all going broke now except for the Big Boys.  The cheapest thing at the grocery store is $5.99.  That's the new standard.  $5.99.  We'll all go back to whittling as a hobby.  We won't even be able to afford to watch t.v.  

I've tried dropping cable.  I had Netflix and Amazon Prime.  What else did I need?  Well. . . that all went south.  Amazon now charges you for t.v. so you can pay for channels like Paramount, Hulu, Sundance, etc.  Everything I want to watch now requires a new subscription.  

I'm giving up t.v. altogether.  I'll just take walks instead.  

Which is what I am going to do now.  Nice segue.  

Here's some music I pay money for from Apple Music via YouTube which I also pay money for so that I don't have commercials.  Money, money, money.  

I give it to you for free.  Like everything else.  If I monetized, would all this be worth more?  

Rhetorical.  

"Hey, brother, can you spare a dime?"

The picture at the top is a matchbook cover.  They gave away matches and matchbooks.  Remember?  You don't see those anymore, do you?  But you can buy a lighter.