Government Grants To Rock

This is actually a response to a comment two posts down but I'm putting it here because it's kind of a personal mission statement and I don't want to lose it.

In response to my post about my fear of being priced out of my neighborhood, Ricky P. says:

Sounds like you need to find a way to get paid for your blog, then you can join the cause for gentrification.

The truth is no one should ever pay anyone to blog... especially no one should pay me to do it. But there was a time when I had made it my life's ambition to stumble upon just the right obscure grant or other accident of fate that would allow me to just get around New Orleans every day watching people, reading the news, and then going out to eat and getting stupid drunk every night.

My friend Ros and I used to talk about this back in the Pre-Katrina days when living in New Orleans wasn't such a big fucking hipster fad. We'd fool someone into giving us a stipend to be here because we had the, then very rare, quality of actually enjoying it. We'd live for free, hang out and dine out a lot and then at the end of the year write up some bullshit report on whatever we could contrive the value of our experience to be. We'd submit it to some sleepy little known federal department of cultural preservation or keeping it real or whatever. They'd send us a check. Nobody would know or care.

But that never happened for us. Of course nowadays there's a whole industry in that sort of thing. Only it's a more sinister and attention-seeking version that capitalizes on the death and horror wrought by the Federal Flood. Witness Treme, Ed Blakely, Kirsha Kaeschle, numerous internet start-ups, half the assholes in town selling T-shirts. But really I like to think of this as a crass debasement of our original vision of what would have been a very quiet little racket.

In 1997 this vision was crystallized for me when I saw GBV (the Cobre Verde Mag Earwig version of GBV) play at the old Howlin Wolf. It was either a Wednesday or Thursday night and Bob was getting ready to start the second encore. It must have been about 2 am. Bob says to the crowd

"Don't you people have to work tomorrow? Does anybody work in this town? Or do you all just get grants from the Kingfish?"

And then there's a quick pause after which he adds,

"Government grants... to rock"

This and Ignatius Riley's "Employers sense, in me, a denial of their values" are still my two most prized personal mottoes. I don't think of this as decadent self-indulgence so much as an admission that most of us, our lives, our labors or what some of us arrogantly think of as "talents" aren't really all that special or even necessary. But we are all alive and we are all people and we all ought to be allowed to appreciate that at least a little bit. There's so much wealth and knowledge and industry in this world but its product is stupidly distributed according to the most severe and fraudulent definitions of what people do and do not deserve. Instead I submit that we'd be better off recognizing that everyone should have at least a modest little grant.. to rock.. or whatever works for them. The older I get the more convinced I am of this.

Government Grants To Rock, in fact, should probably be the title of something. Probably a memoir or maybe an album. But I like to think of it as the title of my long lost dream of being paid to not work. Maybe someday. For now it's still just a matter of hanging on to my sinking paradise.