It’s the craziest thing, in a world where we buy entertainment and consume sponsored culture in paper cups, that anyone could expect to move forward in a creative business without a good focus group, marketing and branding experts, plenty of street smarts, energy, drive and ambition.  If you have enough money, none of this matters, I suppose.  But for everybody else, selling and funding is the life or death of the creative project.

You send the babies out into the world, but don’t expect too many smiles at those babies, unless you’ve been skillful enough to find the audience that really cares.  The world is a very noisy place, and smiling at babies is low in the pecking order.  The reasons are many.  Some are Zen masters, of course, and float above the world of desire and pain.   Some are being chased by too many things to look back, to pause and smell a flower.  Some truly, and to the bottom of their hearts, don’t give a rat’s tutu.

Myself, I don’t like babies very much.  Yet when somebody holds up their baby, with that proud, expectant look on their face, I have to say something.  “Cute!” I’ll say, trying my darnedest to make it sound genuine.  But that’s just me, too much time on my hands, so I wind up being like that, I guess.