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The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

For the better part of two decades, the laughter of the United States lived inside a padlocked box. Charles Rolland Douglass, a CBS sound engineer who had spent the war helping the Navy develop shipboard radar, built the device in the early 1950s and guarded it the way a sexton guards a reliquary. The laff box, as he called it, stood a little over two feet tall and worked like an organ: keys for titters, chortles, belly laughs, shrieks, a foot pedal to let a wave of mirth swell, crest, and die on command. Douglass wheeled it from studio to studio himself. Clients heard the output and never saw the mechanism. Only his immediate family knew what the inside looked like, and when he finally stepped back from the work, his sons carried the trade forward like a guild secret. The industry word for what he did was sweetening, which tells you the industry understood the product. Sugar is what you add when the thing itself goes down easier disguised.

Continue reading → The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

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Eric Clapton Access Fan Club Review

Over the weekend, I did something I’ve never done before — and I’m giddy as a drunken man! — I paid $30.00USD to join the Eric Clapton fan club online.  Eric’s fan club is operated by Warner Brothers, his record company, and it looks like there are around 2,000 paid members of the community.

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How to Get Paid on Time

When you work as a freelance writer, getting paid on time is always a big problem because companies see you as they see themselves:  A monolithic monetary monster where paper replaces actual money in the bank.

How can the freelancer get the corporation mentality to understand the need to make rent and meet the payroll?  The answer is:  It cannot be done.  Contractual payment deadlines are only enforceable one way:  On the freelancer when deadlines must be met.

You cannot make an entity understand emotion or deadlines — except when you are on the cutting end of both when it comes to handing in work for a pauper’s price.

The power dyad between producer and creator will never be fairly subsumed — except when the consumer’s insatiable desire for the product forces the producer to fairly treat the creator.

Unless and until that craving for content becomes the norm — the freelance creative force will always fall fallow to the whimsy and dismay of a punishing, corporate, mindset.

The only defense against the want for rent is easy access to credit cards and, if you’re lucky, the safety net of a Money Market savings account.  Pleading the poorhouse only gets you more heartache and dismay as you are newly viewed as vulnerable and spastic.