Quote of the Day

"'All good inventions come from something personal,' she said. 'People create things because it's personal.'"

BINGO! Can you say Napster?

Monday night I went to see Jade Bird at the Troubadour. Before that Daniel Glass held a party at the Polo Lounge. And this is where you excoriate me and him and I get it, but the truth is if you had an invite you'd go too. Because it's fun to hang and meet people, you never know who will show up, like Jim Pitt who books music for Jimmy Kimmel, or Toby Emmerich who runs Warner Pictures. And it's all friendly and nice and I ultimately had a long conversation with someone from Apple Music about getting indie stuff on their service and also had a long conversation with Jade herself, it's her real name, yup, Jade BIRD, and I don't believe in the concept of an old soul, but when this twenty year old started referencing Son House I reconsidered, and one of the great things about Jade was she had stage presence, could talk, when so many acts cannot, certainly not early in their career, but Jade went to that same music school Adele did and you wonder why we don't have places like this in the U.S. like they do in Sweden and the U.K. but the reason I'm telling you all this is about a conversation I had with Daniel on the way back to his hotel, wherein he was telling me a story about a new Knick who was hanging with his hero, Michael Jordan, who only gave him one piece of advice, YOU'VE GOT TO LOVE THE GAME, and it got me thinking, especially after Daniel said he loved his game, the music business, and I've been wavering a bit recently but when I turned on the CMAs I felt left out, like I wanted to be there, when they had all those stars and Keith Urban started to wail I could see the direct line back to rock and roll, what got me started, they do play real instruments and sing real songs in country, despite too many pandering lyrics and fears of controversy, then again, Brad Paisley did walk over the line, but isn't he a Democrat anyway, can you be a Democrat in Nashville?

I read everything Michael Lewis writes. And in the new issue of "Vanity Fair" he has a long article on the U.S.D.A., uber-glamorous, I know. And so much of VF is hateable, all the focus on ingenues and celebrities, do I really care about A-Rod and J. Lo? No, I didn't read that, but this Michael Lewis article...

You've got to read it. I'll link to it below. But I must say, my eyes glaze over when reading a long article on a computer screen, which is why I love my Kindle, it's optimized for reading, and there's no smoking gun in the Lewis article but every American should read it because the bottom line is the government does good. There, I said it. It's illegal in red America. But the truth is the government supports so many of these red state citizens.

"As the U.S.D.A.'s loans were usually made through local banks, the people on the receiving end of them were often unaware of where the money was coming from. There were many stories very like the one Tom Vilsack told, about a loan they had made, in Minnesota, to a government-shade-throwing, Fox News-watching, small-town businessman. The bank held a ceremony and the guy wound up being interviewed by the local paper. 'He's telling the reporter how proud he is to have done it on his own,' said Vilsack. 'The U.S.D.A. person goes to introduce herself, and he says, "So who are you?" She says, "I'm the U.S.D.A. person." He asks, "What are you doing here?" She says, "Well, sir, we supplied the money you are announcing." He was white as a sheet.'"

I didn't know what the U.S.D.A. did before I read this article, and it does much more than you think it does, like study geese at airports and...

I don't expect the people who need to read this article most to do so. But the spin is how Trump has not peopled the U.S.D.A. and to the degree he has, it's been late and with incompetent people. But it gets even worse...

But you'll have to read to see.

But there's this story of Lillian Salerno, from a family of nine in nowheresville Texas who invented a retractable needle for injections since nurses were afraid of HIV patients. She went to the hospital to visit infected friends and saw the injustice and took it into her own hands to create a solution, it's her quote above.

That's where the good stuff comes. When people are just in it for the money it oftentimes doesn't work. And there's another public servant in this article who could have switched sides and gone to work for the corporation and made much more but he wanted to do good, isn't that what life is about?

The educated are oftentimes checking boxes. Leaving their desires in the dust as they pursue capital.

And the poor and uneducated can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps because there are no bootstraps, that made the protagonist in this article switch from Republican to Democrat, his father was an immigrant who made it, but then he went to New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane and saw people couldn't help themselves.

You make a difference. If you focus on what makes you special, if you pursue your dream and deliver what you want to exist. I mean come on, do those people making pap music really want to hear it? Chris Stapleton seems to be making the music everybody in Nashville wants to hear, even though they're afraid to follow in his footsteps, he keeps winning all the awards.

Think about that.

But if you're in the creative sphere think most about what you want to see.

I read all day, I love to read, but most writing sucks. The content may be good, but the words are unreadable. Kinda like all those articles Jason links to in his newsletter. The topic is good, but unless it's a well-known publication, you can't read it. I believe first and foremost the writing must be readable, exciting, content comes second.

I write what I want to read.

"INSIDE TRUMP'S CRUEL CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE U.S.D.A.'S SCIENTISTS - The folks at the Department of Agriculture laid on a friendly welcome for the Trump transition team, but they soon discovered that most of his appointees were stunningly unqualified. With key U.S.D.A. programs - from food stamps to meat inspection, to grants and loans for rural development, to school lunches - under siege, the agency's greatest problem is that even the people it helps most don't know what it does.": http://bit.ly/2iTweA3

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