Prompt – If you had unlimited money to start and maintain a business, what would it be?
I would find the guys who bought GEM’s digital hybrid modelling piano technology from the Italian bankruptcy court. Last I looked they were in Finland. I would buy them out. Then I would enlist a handful of my old artists (that are still alive) to once again create the best digital piano on the planet. Upgradeable via flash. Maybe even get Phillippe at Modartt/Pianoteq involved in a hardware hybrid.
I would hire a marketing team to expand the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz concepts to inner cities/community colleges with matching grants. Kids who are playing/learning music, regardless of style, aren’t doing something less productive. I’d expand this concept into an all-inclusive arts program that is not exclusionary like Arts Magnets schools. The program would also have a community outreach and service program so that those challenged mentally or physically would have a place for their inner ballerina, artist, musician, writer – Any pathway to constructive creative expressions is a highway of growth for the soul. Better foundations, better citizens, better people.
Last, but not least, I would hire an army of underemployed editors, pay them enough to work without an eye to marketing and making “friends”, make them available and affordable, if not completely free, to Indie writers. Editors who won’t blow smoke, coddle, hand out semi-colons and way-to-gos for starting and ending but will force line-item consideration, paragraph logic and consistency.
On that thought, for those of you who don’t bother with the other times I erupt post, but need to feed your inner self editor, here’s NVDT 70
And maybe a clean, small, high-quality restaurant on a coast somewhere that all I had to was fund to keep open, show up occasionally and eat. In the fog. Like Cape Fear in Duncans Mills, CA.
There should be something added about grants for animal rescue, certain tree hugging issues, alternative materials for sustainability, like bamboo and artificial cellular materials for furniture, musical instruments, housing etc. But that goes without saying. Some guy has already made solar panels from food waste that are more efficient than current natural resource depleting panels! Go, dude!
The Promega 3 in the header belonged to Keith Emerson. Photo courtesy of Julien’s Auctions.
Click the link below, see what others would do with this prompt!
Wow, you’d be a busy boy, Mr Huston. I fear you might run out of old artists though, if you leave it much longer…
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There are new ones! And I’d hand off the detail work to more competent people. I’d sell dreams and goof off.
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The arts (and I include writing) are often the first things thrown under the bus, unless it’s the highbrow and/or produced by those who KNOW people. Because apparently, we don’t need them. How many books did you read in lockdown? Did you watch a movie, listen to music? Anything that keeps the roots alive is OK by me.
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I tried to comment on your piece and the spam blocker didn’t believe me when I answered 2 to 7-5= so after about 8 tries I gave up.
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Phil, you get that going and I’ll add that music to the playlist in my store.
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Some of it might be a little outside. The stuff experimental types get up to is like acid with a soundtrack… however the jazz guys, that’s solid.
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Honourable choices. The arts have taken a beating in Australia.
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Thank you. Over here, too. First things to go are the arts. Not football or any of that, arts, I suppose that explains the high rate of cultural illiteracy and the “this isn’t relevant” chants. I was never asked if literature, grammar, communication history or classical anything was relevant.
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Cool picture. It’s telling that your plan to start and maintain a business doesn’t include much emphasis on making the money back. (Or is that only because it’s unlimited funds? Nah I don’t think that’s the reason.)
I can’t think of any business I’d start with unlimited funds. Too much pressure to keep being productive. At least when the business folds I have an excuse to stop.
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There’s the point. Who cares if it makes money? And you employ people to do the leg work. Pressure to be productive? That’s manufacturing or service. We should do something where the stockholders don;t matter and success isn’t quantitative in business terms. Did you make somebody happy? Feed somebody, educate somebody? As you have done for the least of these, right?
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No there are people (already rich I’m sure) who would immediately start thinking about how to funnel profits into their personal bank accounts. And if you told them that the unlimited money had to stay within their business, they’d walk away very sad. No, people suck. Are they even worth making happy? Maybe I’d fund research to develop ways to perform medical research without fucking up animals. (For example, polytrauma research involves stuff like shooting a bolt into the chest, breaking a leg, piercing the intestine, and inducing hemorrhagic shock, all at the same time with no anesthesia or analgesics. I get that there are not really alternatives, but that’s why I’d fund it, right?) Or maybe fund research into an infallible method of identifying pedophile child abusers so they can be killed at birth. No amount of money will alleviate the suffering of the world in any significant way. I don’t even care about an afterlife, this is already hell and I just want off the planet. Maybe I would sign the money over to my fiance, who’s a special ed teacher for students with serious disabilities, so he could start his own school and then I could make my exit stage left.
Have a happy day! 😊
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You’re just ready to hit the ground running!
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> Editors who won’t blow smoke, coddle, hand out semi-colons and way-to-gos for starting and ending but will force line-item consideration, paragraph logic and consistency.
Your clones, then?
Me? What business would I start and build? I can’t think of one fucking thing. One has to give a shit to want to begin such a journey. OK, I thought of one: an international terrorist group to destroy the world’s wealthy.
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Without them where would be around to throw money at new stuff. I know! All that leftover cash from pay equity. Like jocks getting paid what teachers and nurses get paid. Cap anything an executive makes over $150k and throw the excess at conservancy. That’ll work. Use the terrorists to take it global, turn the sheik yachts into hospitals and schools. And maybe homes for all the fucking refugees they generate.
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Further, not clones of me. I know PhD lit, rhetoric, creative writing and film professors. And famous musical prodigies. Those people’s threshold for half assed is so low – how do you think I got this way?
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