CSotD: In which I offend everyone on Facebook
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Lots of little things today, starting with Non Sequitur. Wiley has bailed out of Facebook, but apparently has not managed to duck knowing about all the selfies on the Internet.
If only every selfie had such a happy ending!
I'll admit that it's kind of pointless to expect something called "Facebook" not to contain a lot of faces. But, still, what is conveyed about your trip to Grand Canyon if what you post is a big picture of your face with some rocks lurking in the corner?
And it's just an extension of the tiresome "Stop! Everybody line up!" school of photography. Though it's part of their initial training, I still have to remind our young reporters from time to time that, when a real reporter interviews someone, the newspaper doesn't run a picture of the two of them standing side-by-side grinning at the camera.
Meanwhile, the biggest photobomb of all is not the person picking his nose in the background; it's the person who, just as you are about to get a candid shot of kids playing, calls to them, "Everybody smile!" and ruins both the photo and the moment.
At least on-line mockery appears to have killed off the duckface.
I'll take small victories in the absence of larger ones.
Brother, can you spare some kale?
Not sure where Ed Stein is going with this, but, as someone who is, himself, Freshly Squeezed by the recession, the weekly Farmer's Market a block from my house is a place to wander through, not to shop.
Fortunately, in a semi-rural place like this, you don't have to drive far to find a for-real farm stand with free range, small batch, dark-yellow-yoke, laid-that-morning eggs for two bucks a dozen instead of $4.50. I guess city folks don't have that option, so we'll see how these Denverites play it out.
I try to be conscious and I'm certainly sympathetic with the idea of local farms, but I've gotta pick my shots. That's a 13-year-old Camry I'm driving out to the farm stands. I'll let the Prius owners support the downtown farmers.
Meanwhile, the grocery stores name their local farmers when they've got'em, and that's good, and, while they don't grow coffee around here, I do what I can.
There are many ways you can swap around that old saying, "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" and have fun with it, but it's pretty clear from this vantage point that, if you ain't rich, you'd better be plenty smart.
What? The client wants to call the shots?
Real Life Adventures earns its name today.
A lot of what you see on Facebook is governed by who you have in your newsfeed. Mine, predictably, includes a lot of artists and other creative types, and something I see a lot of, and which is becoming nearly as annoying as duckface selfies, is clever graphics whining about would-be clients who don't understand the business.
A little goes a long way, and it's fair game to complain about people who want freebies. Well, depending. Garry Trudeau does the buttons for the Winter Carnival each year in his hometown of Saranac Lake, and I'm sure he's not the only pro who does a little pro bono.
I don't write for free either, as a policy, and, when I had my Irish ballad group, we had a policy that we had to be paid something. If it was some event we really cared about and that promised to be fun, we'd take $25, but some money had to change hands. And we even made an exception to that fig-leaf of a rule when the Cardinal came to town raising money for a school in Ulster. For him, no charge.
Here's the deal: While I like the saying, "People die of exposure," you bet your sweet bippy that I did some work for free when I was starting out, and another saying I like is that from Mark Twain: "Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for."
Once you are established, if someone you don't know comes to you asking for a freebie for a cause you're not involved in, you can say, "Sorry. I don't work for free." Go ahead. But then shake the dust from your sandals and keep walking.
I understand the urge to blow off a little steam on Facebook when you keep getting those requests. But two things, folks:
1. I'm now seeing people bitch about being asked to come up with some preliminary sketches. If it's a blanket pitch to all artists, well, you don't have to play. But if it's targeted to a couple of selected people, that's sometimes how it works. A major agency will pay for the sketches, but, once you get to working for major clients, you should be over the pissing-and-moaning stage of your career.
I've freelanced for an ad agency and I've done other advertising work as well, and sometimes — emphasis on "sometimes" and see above for discussion of "sometimes" — you create spec work to try to land a client.
Once you have an ample portfolio, you should be able to select previous work to show what you can do for a particular client, but when I was in TV, we'd occasionally shoot commercials on spec, if we thought we could land a big enough account, and I designed spec ads regularly during a sojourn in that part of the newspaper.
2. If you have time to create clever graphics about clients you don't want to work with, well, there are better ways to invest shoe leather and elbow grease than in complaining, and maybe you should ignore the people who don't want to pay for your work and expend all that free time in finding some who do.
Maybe even dummy up some spec work, if it won't take too much time away from your lucrative job creating Facebook memes.
And if you find some clients who don't feel that, as the people paying the bills, they should be able to get more or less what they wanted, please let the rest of us know who they are.
Finally, here's today's earworm:
Okay, okay, here's the remedy. Just sing along with the cute, and, yes, left-handed, one:
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