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"Competition is for horses, not artists." --Bela Bartok

[Several people have told me this was one of their favorite Other Windows columns. It does, I'll grant, encapsulate what is perhaps the best developed of my limited repertoire of socio-psychological rants in an unusually cogent form. The fact that it's also a piece of armchair philosophizing about how to have a career in art by someone who is not in fact a successful artist ... well, let's not dwell on that, shall we? Even a fool sometimes says something true. The fact that the last sentence is either sarcastic or an expression of a far deeper faith than I've ever had bothers me more, but no other cadence seems possible.]

Sometimes you stumble on a truth where you least expect it. Like, you're reading about archeology or sitting in a business meeting, and you discover something about songwriting and playing in a band.

Here's a curious fact: Before the invention of agriculture (in what is now Iraq, 8,000 years or so ago), human beings were, on the average, taller and healthier than afterward. Once our ancestors started building cities and laboring together in the fields, they were less well fed than before, had worse sanitation, undoubtedly passed around more diseases because they were packed closer together, and almost certainly died younger. The quality of life eroded, too. Hoeing the barley year after year is pretty dull compared to roaming the world with a stone-tipped spear.

And yet, agriculture triumphed. Except in a few remote corners of the world, the short, poorly fed city dwellers stamped out the tall, healthy savages.

The reason is not hard to see: A city can afford to feed everybody a little less in order to keep a standing army. With an army, you can take over the most fertile land, and a few savages with spears can't drive you off. Heck, "primitive" tribes don't even understand how to wage organized warfare. Personal glory and personal loyalty they understand. Marching obediently out in front of the cannon, no.

An African !Kung tribesman, one of the last of the hunter-gatherers, shared this bit of wisdom, which I've seen quoted more than once: "Why should we plant a crop, when God put so many mongongo nuts in the world?" A hunter-gatherer has a lot of items on the menu. Berries all gone? Climb a tree and get some eggs.

A farmer has ... barley. Baked, fried, or boiled, your choice.

But at least there's plenty of it. Except when there isn't. What we civilized folks inherited, along with paved roads, the alphabet, and other fascinating technologies, was the Fear of the Failed Harvest. Once a bunch of people have gathered together in a small area and planted crops for a few generations, there's no turning back. The population grows, due to your ability to nourish (marginally, at least) more babies. You quickly find that the population has bulked up past the natural carrying capacity of the land.

Also, once your community is fixed in one place, within a few generations you've hunted down most of the game animals within a few days' walk, so your dietary options are more limited. Yes, you can raise pigs and cattle, but when the weather turns bad, the pigs and cattle are going to have to eat from the same granary as the rest of the family. If the harvest fails, everybody starves. The land doesn't produce enough mongongo nuts to feed all those extra mouths.

Civilization has its advantages, don't get me wrong -- hot showers, refrigeration, murder mysteries, the grand piano. I could make quite a long list. But there's a price to be paid. Ultimately, civilization and personal freedom coexist in an uneasy truce. In a civilized community (a redundant phrase; "civitas" is Latin for "citizenship," i.e., membership in a community) it's important that everybody march to the same drummer. If a few rugged individualists develop an attitude about paying taxes, the whole edifice trembles. If one farmer diverts too much of the irrigation water, all the other fields run dry, so you need rules for how much water everybody is allowed, and big beefy guys with sharp spears to enforce the rules.

And pretty soon the king starts thinking, "Hey, I'm surrounded by big beefy guys with sharp spears who do whatever I tell them! I must be pretty special." The king starts making up nasty, arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with keeping the granary full.

So in place of spontaneity, civilization gives us regimentation. In place of curiosity, it gives us conformity. In place of joy, safety (maybe ... unless somebody with a bigger army covets your granary, or unless your neighbor's goats eat your crop, or unless...).

* * * * *

During the period when I was writing this essay, Dave Williamson, who was Keyboard's associate publisher at the time, called a special meeting to let the editorial staff know about his department's latest promotional campaigns. Normally, we editors have our hands full catching typos, interviewing artists, plugging in MIDI cables, and the like. On this particular afternoon, Dave brought us up to speed on his ongoing mandate to increase circulation. If you work for a corporation, or even a small business, you've probably sat in meetings like that. Whether you're selling magazines, pizza, or DVDs, the topic is always the same: How do we boost our sales?

Dave wanted to show the staff "the numbers" so we'd understand the parameters of the situation. (Whether he was looking for creative input from us or merely trying to get us to agree that he was doing a great job I don't know.) The term "profit margin" was bandied about. Keyboard was turning a tidy profit at the time, you understand. Underlying Dave's presentation, however, was the idea that it's important not to let the profit margin slip. If that happens, people in tall office buildings in London start scowling and making long-distance phone calls. Dave never actually mentioned these people, you understand; they were hovering invisibly over the meeting, felt but not seen.

I found myself wondering: Why do we need to keep the profit margin up? What does it matter, really? If the company as a whole breaks even, or even loses a little money for a couple of years, isn't that basically okay? Isn't it okay if fewer people are reading the magazine this year? Maybe more people will read it next year, or the year after, when there's a new breakthrough in keyboard technology or a new trend in keyboard-based pop music that they need to know about.

Or maybe the natural readership base of some magazine or other happens to shrink, because fewer people than before are riding on skateboards or collecting stamps. To beat yourself (or, more likely, your sales staff) to a bloody pulp because you're not willing to accept a downturn in the bonsai business or the integrated circuit design industry is surely a species of insanity. If Keyboard is selling 70,000 copies a month this year, and next year we're only selling 60,000 copies, why not congratulate ourselves for saving a few trees?

I didn't ask these questions at the meeting, you understand. It would have caused, probably, a brief uncomfortable silence, after which Dave (in real life a hot blues harmonica player, and nobody's idea of a stuffed shirt) would have cleared his throat and shuffled some papers, and the meeting would have gone on as if I hadn't said a word.

Ideas like these simply can't be discussed in such a forum. The widespread belief in the inviolable importance of profitability, and preferably more profitability this year than last, is a fundamental tenet of free-market capitalism. Also, the top executives, the ones whose policy decisions give people like Dave their marching orders, have salary incentives and stock options based on how much profit they turn. Any business philosophy that would cut into the payments on their second Porsche or force them to put off buying that diamond necklace for the trophy wife is going to get short shrift indeed.

If you choose, you can entertain the idea that certain things -- like maybe health care, or art, or the fate of the planet -- are too important to be entrusted to the blind brutalities of the marketplace. But for goodness' sake, don't bring up such ideas in a staff meeting. And don't expect anybody who is in a position of power to take them seriously. Expect to be frozen out or shouted down.

Any idea that is not open for discussion and debate is a religious dogma, pure and simple. Try to argue, and you're a heretic. Your ideas are heresy.

Naturally, those who adhere to a dogma don't like to think of themselves as wearing blinders. They have a lot of personal capital invested in the idea that they're rational and sensible and high-minded. The Medieval Catholics who burned heretics at the stake surely thought so. It wasn't that they were afraid of other ways of looking at the world, or of people who questioned their wisdom. Not consciously, anyway. It was clear that the people who disagreed with them were just plain wrong.. God made the rules, and the rules weren't open to debate. The punishment for being wrong was widely known, and if you were foolish enough to stubbornly persist in being wrong -- well, that was your choice.

I know the idea will strike many people as baffling or obviously wrong-headed, but I don't think it's even faintly important how many copies of a magazine you sell, or how many copies of your next CD, or how many concert tickets. (I don't even care how many people visit this website. The whole idea of a hit counter is kind of creepy, when you think about it.) What's important, in magazines and music and human dealings of all kinds, is treating your fellow beings -- human and otherwise -- with love and respect.

Of course, plenty of people would agree with that, as long as they're having an informal conversation at a Sunday afternoon barbecue. But when push comes to shove -- as it always does sooner or later, because in corporate America the good times will not always and infallibly roll -- well, the bottom line is the bottom line. No course of action that is incompatible with profitability stands much chance of being put into effect.

In the case of activities that involve disseminating information -- songwriting and magazine publishing, for instance -- the way you act with love and respect is to tell the truth. Telling the truth is the only thing that matters.

I'm certainly not out to insult my co-workers -- or anybody else who works in a corporation, for that matter. My fellow Miller Freemanoids [2001: UEMediaites; 2006: CMPians] are mostly a bunch of decent, intelligent, creative people, and we work hard to put out the best magazines we can. We have been known to tell the truth, even when it impacts our ad revenue.

But then, we can afford to. We're making a profit. If we weren't, or if somebody decided they needed to pump up the bottom line in a hurry, what would happen? Your guess is as good as mine. (The preceding passage was prescient: In all candor I have to admit that by 2001 negative product reviews were scrutinized even more closely by management than they had been in 1995, and well-trained editors spent more time jumping through hoops than formerly in order to give manufacturers every possible chance to put a positive spin on questionable features, system lockups, and the like. The reasons for the erosion of editorial independence were exactly as described in this essay. I don't actually know for a fact that somebody's stock options were feeling the pinch, but it's a reasonable guess.)

Anyway, truth, accuracy, and respect for the readers weren't what was being discussed at that particular meeting. The meeting was strictly about ways to pump up "the numbers."

A hunter-gatherer doesn't have to worry about numbers. Hunter-gatherers don't even have any words for big numbers. Any number bigger than three is "many." When you have to carry all your possessions on your back, there's no incentive whatever to accumulate mass quantities.

Clear as a bell, that staff meeting echoed with the Fear of the Failed Harvest. We dare not stop. We dare not slow down. If we don't feed the machine, we'll be out on the street. And there are not a lot of mongongo nuts growing in the back alleys in San Mateo. If there were, that guy sitting in the Safeway parking lot all day long with the hand-lettered cardboard sign could wander off somewhere else.

* * * * *

Calvin Coolidge said, "The business of America is business." But I don't think the business of the artist is business. The business of the artist is art. Or better still, the art of the artist is art.

Art is not about numbers. It's about the human experience, the human vision, the human spirit. And deep in our souls, we're still hunter-gatherers. Listen to the wind in the leaves, the rustle of a small creature in the bushes. Watch a cloud drift across the face of the moon. Squat around the campfire and sing about the wonder and strangeness of the world to your children and grandchildren.

Art connects people with one another. It does that by speaking the truth about things we all share. Art reminds us (and living in civilized communities we so easily forget) what it means to be human.

Human beings have faces, hands, weaknesses, obsessions, personal twitches. Interacting with them is often inconveniently complex. Technology is so much easier. But the more we "interact" with technology rather than people, the more we deaden ourselves.

In the past couple of years, I've gotten back to performing with other musicians. For all the limitations and compromises one has to contend with in a local music scene, playing out is a lot more satisfying than sitting by myself day after day in a computer music studio. I'd rather not go back to playing in bars, though. Maybe coffee shops. I'd like to play for people who are there to listen, who care about music and are sober enough to pay attention to the lyrics and maybe appreciate a few subtleties.

For a group to work in a way that would nourish my soul, I think it would need to follow a few simple but rather unorthodox guidelines.

First guideline: We play for free. The ticket receipts go to causes we believe in. We will accept voluntary donations to pay for renting the P.A. or whatever, but our music cannot be bought or sold; we share it freely with the people in our local community.

Second guideline: We don't count the size of the house. If three or four people ask us to play for them, we set up and play. More than three people in an audience ... that's "many." "How big a crowd did you get last weekend?" "Oh, we played for many people."

Third guideline: We play only music that pleases us. Connecting with an audience as well as other musicians is vital -- and yet, paradoxically, if we count heads or measure the loudness of the applause to see whether we're pleasing more people when we play Tune A than Tune B, we're falling back into the Fear of the Failed Harvest. If one listener has a negative reaction to a song, and articulates her reaction in a way that makes sense, then the song probably needs to be changed or abandoned, even if many other people say they like it fine the way it is. Conversely, if one listener is moved by a song, then maybe the fact that many other people don't get it is irrelevant. Maybe the other people just need to listen harder, or listen with a different spirit. Maybe they need to listen to a different song right now, or to a different band.

For a marketing expert, this is heresy: How can it possibly make sense to say you should pay attention to the feelings of one listener and ignore the feelings of a thousand? The answer: You pay attention to your own feelings. You take the time to ask questions, to learn where that one listener is coming from ... and then you mull it over until you reach, in your heart, an answer that makes sense to you.

As Mark Twain said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Market demographics are a particularly virulent species of statistics. The answers to a public opinion poll can be biased in any direction the pollster desires; it's all in asking the questions that will get the results you've already decided on. Beyond that, the pollster is assuming that meaningful information can be gained by quantifying what large numbers of people think and how they feel.

Even "hard figures" lie. If your album went platinum, or if it stiffed, so many factors have to be included in the equation -- from the cover art and how much money was spent on payola to the weather in New York the night your show opened -- that sales figures can tell you absolutely nothing useful about the music itself.

When it comes time to decide what to play, or sing, or write, you're on your own. A thoughtful response from that one attentive listener is useful, but you have to weigh it in your own heart to find out whether it tips the scales any heavier than a feather. The people who have the depth of understanding that's needed to choose music wisely are those who know music intimately. If a casual or untrained listener is not qualified to dictate what your group should play, are ten thousand casual, untrained listeners any more qualified? Or a million of them?

If members of an audience don't like your music, maybe it's not the right music for them. Maybe they're right to walk out. If they do walk out, it will hurt, and maybe the hurt will spur you to do a little soul-searching. Or a lot of soul-searching. You may need to spend years searching your soul before you'll be ready to write that one perfect sonnet.

But it doesn't really matter. You know why?

Because God put plenty of mongongo nuts in the world.