I'm thinking about end of this piece, where it briefly discusses some artists who are finding some measure of fame and fortune in their seventies and eighties.

I'm thinking about end of this piece, where it briefly discusses some artists who are finding some measure of fame and fortune in their seventies and eighties. And I'm thinking about a story I saw here a little earlier this morning about a guy who built his gleefully stupid idea of "a dating site for fans of Kanye West" into something that got him a meeting with that star. [1] And I'm thinking about The KLF's "The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way" [2] and how much that Kanye-dating story reminded me of the parts of that which weren't specifically about the nuts and bolts of making a pop song for eighties Britain. And I don't necessarily have any conclusions. Something about the role of advertising in our culture to grab attention, to tell people that hey, this thing you might like exists, and to repeatedly tell them that until they actually bother having a look at the thing [3] and maybe deciding they like it enough to tell other people about it and maybe even give you a little money for the thing, and how hard it is to keep doing that when you're focused on honing your craft and doing the best whatever-it-is you can do around the demands of keeping a roof over your head, and who the hell can find time to do all that advertising, let alone learn how to do it effectively. And you know who has the money to pay people to do all that advertising? Mostly people working for the megacorporations that squat over our cultural landscape, making work that walks a fine line between being new enough to be different, but close enough to existing successful work to be able to get funding. And once again I want to start that Kickstarter to dig up the corpse of Jesse Helms and do terrible things to him in vengeance for his role in gutting the NEA that I keep making jokes about lately. 1: https://thekanyestory.com/ https://thekanyestory.com/, hn discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19523853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19523853 (such as it is) 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual - the full text is one search for "klf manual" away 3: tangentially, I make nerdy comics about robot ladies with reality problems (http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/) and cartoon animals in space (http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/) and am working on reprinting my super-stylized and nerdy tarot deck (http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/)