Stay In Your Lane

When You Learn New Things It's Always Too Late

Mark Rushton’s Perseverance in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.

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This email is brought to you by:

Mark Rushton Gallery - for original paintings, metal prints, and tote bags.

License my music, sound fx, and illustrations at Pond5 for your creative project.

I’m on Bandcamp. And all the usual streaming services. I do all my streaming listening via Qobuz, a service that actually sounds great and pays artists.

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This week’s topics:

• Stay In Your Lane

• When You Learn New Things It’s Always Too Late

• Prefab Sprout - “Cars and Girls”

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Stay In Your Lane

I’ve been reworking the Mark Rushton Gallery.

From now on, everything offered is from my original designs, but sublimated onto metal, printed on a tote bag or t-shirt, or applied to a magnet for your fridge.

Or licensing my artwork for other creative uses at Pond5.

I’m done with offering original artwork. My inability to find a suitable physical location put an end to that idea. I’m not interested in playing the tent or table circuit.

Now I can get back to the fun part of being an artist: making stuff.

The phrase “Stay In Your Lane” may seem restrictive to artists, but maybe it’s OK to recognize your limitations and work within them.

I must single out the excellent customer service I received from Art Storefronts, the company my Gallery has been with for the past three years or so.

I wanted to change some things about my site, but couldn’t figure out how to configure it. The customer service agent sent back a narrated, three minute video, and used my site as the example. Let that sink in! That level of customer service today is exceptionally rare! And it worked. I totally understood how to achieve the visual change I wanted with my site.

Most companies think chatbots or robotic emails or talking to Malaysia after enduring a nightmare phone menu is efficient and provides customer value. Or maybe companies simply don’t care about customer support. They look at it as a cost center rather than as a business partner. Art Storefronts is not like that. Anyway, I think it’s good to recognize and support businesses that provide this level of efficient, personalized support for their customers.

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When You Learn New Things It's Always Too Late

Edited Notes from the past week:

I knew about the Chicago fire of October 8, 1871. But I didn't know about all the numerous towns in the Midwest on fire that night. Hundreds of miles away. Thousands dead. Don't go to Ickypedia for answers.

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Ickypedia. That’s my new nickname for it. I’m gonna stop looking at that mess. I’ve seen enough.

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When I was in HS, I wrote for the school newspaper. Our teacher was exactly like the caseworker in the first Beetlejuice. In other words, awesome. One time, she forgot her cigarettes, and she gave me her house keys and asked me to drive over and get them during class, which I did.

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“Stay in Your Lane” - I’m sure a lot of artists don’t like that phrase. Holger Czukay used to say (I’m paraphrasing…) if you want to change something about your art, just change one thing and see how it goes. I think that’s a good philosophy. So I tried that recently and it was a dead end, but that’s OK. Back to my lane. It’s a good lane. Always be open to experimenting every now and then.

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“Stay in Your Lane, Pt 2” - last night, just before I went to sleep, I devised an idea for restructuring the Mark Rushton Gallery. Sketching out the plan in 3-2-1…

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What is the difference between “music” and a “sound effect”? That’s a good question. I make “film music” but some people want to classify some of my works as “sound effect”. These are works with a rhythm, with musical elements (but not a melody or chord progressions), and are longer than 60 seconds.

Here’s my thoughts. I’ll split it into two distinct categories. 1. There’s “music”. 2. Then there’s also “non-musical works”, like field recordings and most “foley” sounds. Some field recordings and foley can sound musical, but I suppose that’s for another discussion.

So what constitutes “music”? Something with a beat or rhythm or tempo, but not always. Something with musical sound, produced by an instrument (constructed, electronic, or through voice). I think one note is enough. I don’t think it needs a melody or chord progressions. I don’t think music requires notation.

What about length? Here’s where it gets tricky. A few seconds might be considered “foley” or “sound effect”, and I’m OK with that. But what if it has a melody? Like Brian Eno’s Windows 95 theme song? Is that music? Yes, it is. That’s kind of an outlier.

What if it’s underscore? Is that music? Yes, I think so. Tension music? Yes, I think so. Indistinct talking? No, that’s not music.

Am I missing anything here? I’m not saying we should have a rubric to follow for strict categorization. I do think there is a lot of bias in others when it comes to ambient and avant-garde music. As you can see, I classify it as “music”.

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I think I’m done creating original visual artworks. Oh, I’ll keep making new artworks, but they’ll be scanned. I like dye sublimation on metal. I like being able to “scale up” that way. I like art merch: t-shirts, tote bags, and magnets for the fridge. Most people don’t have the money for “art/art”. I also like offering my visuals for licensing and am doing more of that now. So that’s the path I’m on now.

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Briefly in the company gym this morning, listening to Prefab Sprout on my earbuds. “What adds up the way it did when we were young? Look at us now…” Did some chin-ups, walked a lap, more chin-ups, walked a lap. I did my first chin-up a year ago. “(…start counting…)”

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I saw a guy at work getting into an elevator wearing a scuba tank and carrying fins. I'm like, “We don't have a pool…”. Then I saw a witch and woke up.

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Jay Leno looks healthy again. Saw the Jerrari episode. When a spouse has health issues, you can lose your way. Leno did a Doritos ad that Bill Hicks gave him crap about. It’s a valid criticism: “If you do a commercial, …there’s a price on your head. Everything you say is suspect.” But the thing I like about Jay Leno is that he’s into old tech. He seems to have a new lease on life.

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Prefab Sprout - “Cars and Girls”

This was deep in a playlist I built a long time ago but heard this week.

I wasn’t into Prefab Sprout at all during the 80s. I’m pretty sure I didn’t start listening to any of Paddy McAloon’s music until I picked up a used CD of Jordan: The Comeback in the early 90s.

Paddy’s a brilliant songwriter with a golden voice and a romantic wit. But he just didn’t like playing the album tour album game, and the band disintegrated in the 90s. Then his hearing disintegrated. Problems with his eyesight. Now he looks like the Canadian guy who runs the Cold War Motors channel on YouTube, another favorite of mine.

A lot of the Sprout’s catalog was produced by Thomas Dolby, who I always felt made the songs a bit too slick. I think enough time has passed where it’s OK to appreciate that slick mid-to-late 80s production technique. I do like that era more than the modern day, auto-tuned, jizzed-out, quantized, sweary bullshit that is every lauded pop song today.

Right off the bat in the lyrics, Paddy’s dissing on Bruce Springsteen, which a lot of critics misinterpreted. Paddy just didn’t agree with Bruce’s perspective. And then he spends the rest of the song asking questions like, “What adds up the way it did when we were young?” That’s a monster of a lyric. Paddy McAloon was only in his early 30s at the time.

In a revisionist way, this is the sound of 1988 for me. I probably heard this song on MTV once or twice, but I didn’t own it. That was a hot summer, and it extended well into the fall. Definitely by late October. I remember driving down Fleur Drive in Des Moines in mid to late October 1988 with the windows down, and encountering people I hadn’t seen for years in the lane next to me, and saying Hello. They were headed downtown. I was headed elsewhere.

Start counting… Quit driving… Look at us now…

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Listen to “Cars & Girls” by Prefab Sprout on Qobuz.

Wear good headphones. I like Grados.

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