We are all in this together...

These are fine, weird and interesting times that we live in. Anyone reading this is well aware of the unstoppable earthquake of change that is rolling through seemingly everything all courtesy of this here intertubes that is carrying these words. Not long ago if you were an artist or writer or musician or filmmaker, you had to grind away for many years honing your craft hoping for the day when you might be able to get your efforts in front of the right eyes. Eyes in the head of someone "connected", a gatekeeper that would bring the manna down from heaven in the form of a recording, publishing, exhibition, production contract that would whisk you away from the hard-living reality of Ramen and Natty-lite. Well, those days are gone with record, publishing and movie companies all reeling from the tsunami of all this interconnectedness. What is happening now is that the middle man is getting cut out for better and worse. The worse is with the gatekeepers of cultural taste falling to shadow, we are no longer protected from the massive mountains of steaming shite that lie in wait to steal our time and attention away. The better is artists can now sell directly to their fans and cut out all those many layers of corporate dependents siphoning off all the real profits until the artist is left with only crumbs. Part of this new paradigm is fans getting the ability to "invest" in an artist's project before hand often for the price of a CD or DVD, in small payments often as low as one dollar, art funded by the crowd or "crowdsourcing", as it is called. I've been throwing my money behind some projects via the fine web site Kickstarter that is designed to help artists raise money for their projects. Any kind of art you can think of, any kind of project you can conceive can be found on their. So far, I have supported seven projects, everything from a horror film (Hardcore Indie) to a couple of video games (Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns) and my latest, my old friend Barbara Nesbitt's Album project. If you like alt country, then you you love her stuff. I love her voice and heartfelt, authenticate lyrics. She has a good way to go to be fully funded, so give some of her songs a listen and consider helping her bring this album to life. Because you know, we are all in this together. We got to help each other out and we can do it.

Zahdah!

OK HW