I happened upon this inexplicably depressing website, These Americans.
(Okay, actually it’s perfectly explicable, the images are all very sad and creepy, at least to me.)
Here are some of the weird, lonely images from Detroit, mostly from the 20th century.
Image via Wikipedia
According to a recent study by Rice and Duke Universities, the best way to combat music piracy is to give up combating it in any formal manner, such as via digital rights management systems. Steve Jobs said of iTunes,
“Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.”
Researchers Dinah Vernik, Devavrat Purohit, and Preyas Desai used,
“…analytical modeling to examine how piracy is influenced by the presence or absence of DRM restrictions.
They found that while these restrictions make piracy more costly and difficult, the restrictions also have a negative impact on legal users who have no intention of doing anything illegal.
…
Because a DRM-restricted product will only be purchased by a legal user, …”only the legal users pay the price and suffer from the restrictions,” the study said. “Illegal users are not affected because the pirated product does not have DRM restrictions.”
“In many cases, DRM restrictions prevent legal users from doing something as normal as making backup copies of their music,” said Vernik, assistant professor of marketing at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. “Because of these inconveniences, some consumers choose to pirate.”
The research challenges conventional wisdom that removal of DRM restrictions increases piracy levels; the study shows that piracy can actually decrease when a company allows restriction-free downloads.”
This makes intuitive sense to me, but many musicians and artists balk at the idea of not protecting their property as well as how they will ever make money as artists. Of course, that was my next question, so how does anyone make The Money?”
“Removal of these restrictions makes the product more convenient to use and intensifies competition with the traditional format (CDs), which has no DRM restrictions,” Vernik said. “This increased competition results in decreased prices for both downloadable and CD music and makes it more likely that consumers will move from stealing music to buying legal downloads.”
You have heard from Hubert Sawyers III on this blog before and this time he is telling the story about a hip hop artist he is working with personally to build a grassroots campaign to fund his debut album via Kickstarter. From “Progress Report: Using Social Capital to Generate Startup Capital,”
When I first met David Allie Strauss aka D. Allie, I was not aware that he would become someone that I would be in constant contact with years down the road. Back then, D. was just another dude that I would share the occasional microphone. I have since retired my dreams of hip hop supremacy, but I am glad to see Dave still at it. He has impressed me with his growing cachet from years of performing, bartending and overall hustle to make his dream a reality. As a former brother-in-the-struggle in the realm of music, I realize music is mainly seen as just entertainment to the end-user and most artists aka entertainers rarely have the end-user in mind. These days, me and D. are on the verge of becoming business partners, mainly because he understands the end-user aka YOU are his boss(es). (Emphasis mine.)
Ah, if only every artist thought like this. It is important to embrace the fact that your audience is your customer, and your customer is your boss. Your job is to make them feel special, wanted, needed, (and if you are Justin Bieber), loved.
I met Dallie a year or two ago at a Tweetup as well as seeing him around town and I remember him distinctly, mostly because he was a nice person. He remembered me and bothered to take time to chat. Maybe he was thinking ahead, maybe he knew, two years ago, the importance of social capital, maybe the fact that he did not blow me off like a lot of cooler-than-though artists do is the reason I donated to his Kickstarter campaign and genuinely want to see him succeed.
Maybe? Absolutely.
A common theme I see creeping up in arts blogs as well as conversations “in the field” is a very us vs. them mentality. From the tone of the writing to the ideas expressed, there is very little that makes me want to be a part of the arts community online, despite the fact that I have every reason in the world to be wholly invested: I consider myself an artist, I come from a family of fine artists, musicians, composers, dancers, and actresses, and uh, I write a blog dedicated to the arts. And to be perfectly honest, most art blogs turn me off. There is so much complaining, so much name-calling, so much blaming for the state of affairs the arts are in, and little responsibility, little genuine community-building, and little problem-solving. (I may be missing something – so please, leave links in the comments.)
So, when I see this project, from someone I’ve met, who was nice to me, who isn’t a complainer…but a doer…I’m all about it, and you should be too.
We all should have seen this coming, and many artists probably thought of it.
Death + Taxes writes,
What does Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, Twitter’s creator Jack Dorsey and Rupert Murdoch’s wife have in common? They have all become financial backers for the most nonexclusive online art gallery in the world.
Founded by 24-year-old Cleveland Carter, a computer science major at Princeton, Art.sy will attempt to connect art galleries all over the world to provide not just a database but a database personalized to your taste. The website is attempting to do for fine art what Pandora did for music.
While all artists cannot also be computer science innovators who know how to get venture capital funding, they can certainly do what they can to understand more about how technology and innovation can attract funding on whatever scale they are working in.
What New Audiences are Expecting
Via Andrew Taylor at The Artful Manager,
During the ‘lightening round’ session at the Arts Presenters conference, performing arts facility consultant David Taylor pointed us to the challenge of traditionally designed and constructed performing arts spaces, particularly in the face of evolving consumer trends. At the heart of his presentation was the ‘Ten Trends of 20-Somethings” identified by Marian Salzman in the Huffington Post last year…they are:
1. Real-time expectations
2. More intensely local lives
3. Radical transparency
4. Expecting cheap or free everything
5. Demanding entertainment
6. Worrying about the planet
7. Seeing luxuries as standard
8. Pro-business, anti-multinational stance
9. Wanting to regulate the heck out of media bias
10. Naturally Me but aspiring to WeAmong the most compelling for the performing arts are 1, 3, and 4, that challenge the traditional professional performing arts organization — which is highly scheduled, opaque in administration and process, and costly to run.
Reading this, I immediately thought of two performing arts experiences that I thought fit the “What a 20-Something Wants” bill. The first was a 2009 Met live broadcast of La Sonnambula featuring Natalie Dessay (with brilliant Mary Zimmerman direction, I might add), the second was an interactive modern dance performance choreographed by Peter Sparling, where dancers performed via live feed from a remote studio, “controlled” by Sparling’s hands manipulating them from the live stage. (By the way, it seems Sparling has evolved this concept over the years and fully embraces new technology and its interplay with his art and audiences.)
What both had in common was “live feed” and a “behind the scenes” feel. As an audience member, I felt more intensely connected to the stage action than if the third wall was more rigidly constructed such as during a more “traditional” opera or dance performance. Philistine that I am, I actually prefer the Met broadcasts to being at the Met. Not only is the price tag cheaper, you can see more stage details, to the point you feel like you might just be a lucky chorus member participating in the action. Close-ups revealed the labored breathing and singing of what sounded like a vocally struggling Dessay (my fellow audience members mused about whether an understudy would take over after intermission.) During the Sparling performance, an all-black clad videographer was on stage, shooting the choreographer’s hands, which appeared on the walls of the Kresge Auditorium in Ann Arbor, inspiring the remote dancer’s movements from afar. In short – the effect was super cool, conceptually, and artistically. Again, I was reminded of the days of being behind the scenes myself, and the prototypical “tech guys” who always wore all-black to blend in with the darkened stage during scene changes.
Why Connecting with Audiences Is Critically Important, and Why (I think) Artists are Bad at It
Audiences do not want to be treated as somehow beneath the artists. Indeed, we do not want to get the impression we actually are philistines, which artists could do a much better job at. Is it just me, or do artists often-times appear remote and snobbish? I say appear because it is so rarely the case that they are (with the exception of the primi donne e uomini who are amusingly full of themselves). I believe that more often than not, artists are not narcissists, parading on stages to self-glorify, but to glorify the art. They may seem remote off-stage because they may have just spent every ounce of their energy, and post-performance have very little left to give, or because their on-stage personality is truly pretend, an outlet, and they could be quite shy in real life.
I am focusing on this no-really-artists-aren’t-snobs issue, because I know that I usually wanted nothing more than to duck out the back door after a performance, rather than do the requisite meet-and-greet of the audience. I was usually experiencing an exhausted kind of buzz, you know the kind, like when you’ve had too much caffeine? My body would feel like it was on fire, my mind would be completely blank, and I would have to plaster a smile on my face, turn back into Milena, and somehow muster charm? Not only that, I would begin to feel guilty accepting any compliments that came my way because I never really felt responsible for whatever talent I happened to be acknowledged for, and I think many artists would share this opinion with me – we feel inspired by something greater, and that our talents are just a gift, our bodies simply the receptacle through which that talent is miraculously allowed to flow.
So, What Can Artists Do?
As always, I try to emphasize that if you hope to make a living in the arts – business must come first, and you should not harbor any delusions that your talent alone can carry you. Artists need to recognize the above issues and find a way to overcome the challenges of performing in the 21st century, particularly if they practice old world arts. Often times, the way to stay relevant is to stay connected, and for today’s audiences, that might mean reaching beyond your limitations as well as your personal autonomous zone. You need to let audiences in, in a way that will likely make you very uncomfortable. You may have to take this quite literally and reveal far more personal aspects of yourself than you would like: start a blog, post YouTube videos of your practice sessions, accept all the friend requests you can on Facebook and Twitter, admit your faults, your fears. Audiences respond to this like a child might if their favorite doll came to life, with enthusiasm and eager for more.
If this all sounds exhausting, well, it is. If it sounds largely unnecessary, well, it’s not. It’s just what people are demanding these days. You have to muster all the energy you can, not only for your art, but for the longevity of the business side of your career or for the organization you represent.
A state representative in Michigan, and former professional singer proposes a tri-county (Oakland, Wayne, Macomb) vote to use taxes to support the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
[Vicki] Barnett said the DSO is an endangered cultural gem that adds to the region’s quality of life and can help attract new businesses.
She said she was asked by DSO musicians who live in her district to consider a public tax to keep the orchestra viable and competitive with other major U.S. symphony orchestras.
I’m just curious, how many other orchestras are funded with tax dollars? I’m assuming this is not uncommon.
My father and me
I recently stumbled across this article in the Guardian, “The parent trap: art after children” by author Frank Cottrell Boyce, father of seven. I was intrigued and inspired seeing as I am very (as in, post due date) pregnant and have been wondering to myself, “What is going to happen to my life after this baby is born?” More specifically, “Will I have to give up singing?”
Of course this sense of despair is unfounded, but it feels legitimate. I would venture to guess anyone who has a child on the way mourns their loss of independence. But for the artist, the unknown could be a bit more frightening. We know how unstable the life of an artist is, believing it requires a singular devotion. We worry that the introduction of a commitment like marriage or parenthood could easily topple what we’ve been building. We may believe that in order to maintain a certain way of life for our art, we must sacrifice family, or if we want family, we must sacrifice art.
Boyce shares he once had similar feelings,
We were still students when we got married and had our first baby. It must have been hard work…Friends were mostly delighted, but also slightly appalled. From the first they’d take me aside and commiserate. “That’s it now, Frank, the pram is in the hallway.”
The full quote – from Cyril Connolly – is: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” In fact, we didn’t have a pram or a hallway, but in the dark watches of the night I would sometimes look at the Maclaren Dreamer buggy in the corner of the tiny kitchen and think, is that it then? Will I have to go and get a proper job and never write again?
Fathers and artists: my father, dancer; my grandfather, painter
After graduating college, I had arranged a voice lesson with a famous soprano. At the end of our lesson she had some encouraging things to say about my voice and grilled me on why I was not yet in graduate school and “just what was I doing with my life.” I feebly explained I needed to make some money first, was just testing the waters with different teachers, and was not ready for grad school yet.
Exasperated, she asked, “Do you want to get married? Have children?” As if these would be the only reasons someone like me would not follow the same career path every other “serious” music school undergrad was following. She said, “You know the divorce rate among opera singers is over 50%? I have seen a lot of cheating in my day. You will have to make tremendous sacrifices and a solid marriage is possible, but not easy. I’m married, but may not see my husband for months while on tour. We decided we could never have children, given the traveling schedules we have as performers. We don’t have 401Ks, so you’ll also have to figure out how to save for retirement.”
37 weeks pregnant
Today, 8 years later, 9 months pregnant, just two weeks shy of my 30th birthday, having sacrificed a possible career dedicated solely to music (maybe, who knows, really) I believe my life and my career and far are more rich and wonderful than I could have ever planned for myself after that voice lesson, had I taken the soprano’s warnings seriously. In fact, I am grateful for the series of events that kept me in Michigan. I am grateful that I doubted there was one way to becoming the artist I was, and am, meant to become.
Boyce touches on the reasons why I believe committing to family life can be so much more frightening, challenging, and rewarding than (exclusively) committing to one’s work as an artist,
It’s very powerful to be surrounded by people who love you for something other than your work, who are unaware of the daily, painful fluctuations of your reputation. I discovered recently that my youngest child thought I spent my days typing out more and more copies of my book Millions, so that everyone could have one.
I love this insight. I have noticed that sometimes family members may not be interested in or may not understand my artistic endeavors. This is not to say they are unsupportive, but they cannot inhabit my world. It is not only selfish of me to expect them to, but unnecessary.
Boyce continues,
Jonathan Franzen has said that “it is doubtful that anyone with an internet connection in his workplace is writing good fiction”. Family is, of course, the most potent distraction, and probably the only distraction that makes you feel virtuous when you surrender to it.
My heart aches reading that last statement because I have experienced it. Why is surrendering to one’s family so difficult and so rewarding? Is it because the rewards are often so private? Is it because they cannot be measured in an artist’s preferred currency: money or fame? You don’t build any artistic street cred by advertising on your blog, “I loved someone with all my heart today.” It won’t get you a job, make a sale, or win an audition. And while the distraction of family can be tiresome, draining, and in some cases, something you legitimately need to distance yourself from, what Boyce says next struck a chord with me,
There’s a belief that to do great work you need tranquility and control, that the pram is cluttering up the hallway; life needs to be neat and tidy. This isn’t the case. Tranquility and control provide the best conditions for completing the work you imagined. But surely the real trick is to produce the work that you never imagined. The great creative moments in our history are almost all stories of distraction and daydreaming – Archimedes in the bath, Einstein dreaming of riding a sunbeam – of alert minds open to the grace of chaos.
Writers have produced great work in the face of things far more stressful than the school run: being shot at, in the case of Wilfred Owen; being banged up in jail, in the case of Cervantes or John Bunyan. Yet that pram is lodged in our imaginations, like a secret parasite sucking on our juices.
In fact, if you go back to Connolly’s terrific book, you’ll see that the pram is only one of the many Enemies of Promise. Others include a public school education (so emotionally overwhelming you can’t move on) and success, surely the greatest enemy of all. But no one warns you about these. It’s just the pram.
Why does it retain its power to chill? I don’t think it’s about fear of distraction or domesticity. I think it’s a fear of babies. Being a parent – or really loving someone other than yourself, whether that’s your children, parents or your lover – forces you to confront a horrible truth: the fact that we get older. The amazing boy who was born when I was still a student is a man now. There is no way that I can still think of myself as “quite young, really” or “a child at heart”. Parenthood confronts us with our own mortality, every day.
To me, the pram is a metaphor for “all family life” and I might extend Boyce’s analysis to include “all family life confronts us with our own mortality, every day.”
It was not until I met my now-husband, was planning my wedding, and my father was dying of cancer, that I realized just how little I cared for a Great Big Career in music. How grateful I was that I never followed the soprano’s advice about my career path. How little I cared that my “creativity” was put on hold because I was growing my family and losing it at the same time.
I think what I am getting at, is that artists need to be open to life. They need to be open to the possibility that family life need not be sacrificed for art’s sake. That in fact, it can make you the artist you are meant to be.
Last dance with my father before his death
Are you interested in ideas to liberalize the music industry? Do you ever wonder why it is so difficult to get airplay or make a meager living as a musician? Do you shake your fist and curse at the skies because it seems like the only artists signed to the largest music labels have sub-par talent that is appealing mostly to tweens worldwide? Do you believe, as Mick Jagger does, that making money in music was just a passing fancy for about 40 years and that the Internet, piracy, cheap recording and publishing technology, and the difficulties of being a touring musician means you are doomed to never be recognized financially for your talents, and your ego will just have to survive on accolades from your mom and best friends forever?
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, I highly suggest you read this July 2010 discussion paper written by Ivan Reidel of Harvard Law School, “The Price of Fame: The Antitrust Law and Economics of Broadcasting, Music, and Advertising.” He makes this complex topic accessible (seriously, just skim the jargon-y parts if you feel lost), his arguments are well thought out, and he provides concrete solutions. For example, he suggests that radio advertising takes valuable airtime away (and therefore earning potential) from hopeful musicians,
Indeed, that global leisure time [spent listening to the radio] is impoverished by ads also means that valuable talent that would have otherwise replaced those annoying commercials is instead squandered by societies’ inability to reward it. If ads could be replaced by the content audiences enjoy the most—songs for instance—the incomes lost and impoverished livelihoods of countless songwriters—the vast majority of which currently can’t make a living out of the public performance of their songs alone — would be able to receive a substantial boost from all the freed airtime.
While I have little knowledge of antitrust law, I am wary of supporting Reidel’s approach to using such laws as a defense against government regulation of the music industry. Although I wholeheartedly agree with the claim that musician and audience welfare is reduced by government intervention in pricing music licensing agreements, it would seem any call for removing government infringement upon the rights of artists to set their own prices for music can stand (strongly) on its own, without looking to another set of arbitrary rules which could one day be overturned. In other words – if we can agree a man owns himself, it follows he owns the product of his creative labors, and he therefore has the right to price that product as he wishes – end of story.
In any case, Reidel presents a thoughtful and thorough introduction to this topic as well as analysis of how the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have created a government-enabled monopoly in the music industry. He identifies important roadblocks and inefficiencies as well as suggests solutions – and they are all things most artists are probably unaware of.
His chief complaint is that government-mandated use of blanket license fees effectively “prices fame no differently than obscurity.” How is this so? The blanket fee sets an artificial price floor for all music licenses, regardless of what the artist wishes to charge or what a consumer wishes to pay. This creates a system many artists cannot compete with because they wouldn’t mind pricing their music lower and others won’t buy at a higher price, and there is simply no recourse to change the system given the current restrictive laws ironically meant to protect musicians. What is really happening is pricing everyone but the most lucrative performers out of the market. I think it could be agreed upon that the most lucrative performers tend to be the most watered down artistically because they need to have the widest appeal to the largest buying population, which is usually teenage girls. Sigh.
The other unwanted outcome of this system most people do not consider is that these artificially high blanket prices make advertising (the other airtime component of broadcasting) artificially cheap by comparison, which is why consumers are then subjected to a disproportionately larger share of advertising than entertainment if the market was liberalized. This may not sound significant, but think about it – how irritated do you get that you either have to sit through tons of commercials on radio or TV or pay extra fees for services that remove them for you?
Reidel calls this diminished audience welfare, and I agree,
In the U.S. alone for instance the average person listens to 19 hours of radio each week, and radio reaches 93% of U.S. consumers each week,14 and 72% every day. By 1999 Anderson and Coate report that non-programme minutes exceeded “20 min per hour on some network television programs and 30 min per hour on certain radio programmes.” Multiply those ad spins by the number of listeners times the number of hours they spent on such unpleasant an activity, and this massive waste of time by audiences provides not only dramatic measure of diminished audience welfare but a proxy for the large toll imposed by ads on songwriters in the case of radio, and an even bigger pool of artists in the case of television.
He gives the example of record-breaking pop-phenom Taylor Swift’s 19,361 spins (number of times played) of her song “You Belong To Me” in 2009. He then points out that she was actually out-spun – but no one seems to have taken note.
As much as audiences like Swift however, when counting the number of plays of all performances on those same radios, Swift hardly even makes the top ten list of those with the most “spins” or plays. During the first week of August 2009, it was insurance company “Geico” that took the number one spot, with 42,544 spins or more than twice the number of plays Swift received. Home Depot came in second with 41,371 and Mac Donald’s third with 34,593. In that week, in fact, Swift only scratched the number ten spot slightly behind AT&T which obtained 19,574.
Reidel argues that the main factor stifling much-needed competition and liberalization of the music industry as well as the over-emphasis on advertising has been caused by government-enabled monopoly in favor of copyright “collectives,” and anti-payola laws which bar musicians from competitively pricing their music to gain radio play. Reidel supports auction-style platforms in place of the conventional “collectives” to create,
…a truly competitive payola market), where the price of songs can be determined through auctions as either negative or positive, solely on the basis of competition between radio stations offering airtime (advertising spots) and songwriters offering songs—which are simultaneously an input for broadcasters and a form to promote CDs, song downloads, concerts, and the like, for songwriters.
This paper is so good I’d end up just quoting the whole thing, so here is the link for your own reading pleasure.
The Guardian reports Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood will be scoring a film based on the novel by Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood, which was inspired by The Beatles’ song of the same name.
Now this is all fine, and full of contemporary art goodness, but what I find most interesting is the pop art collision with high art. We tend to think of Japanese novelists and Vietnamese-French art film directors as creating “high art” and The Beatles’ and Radiohead’s music as “pop art.”
Though I know more than one professional musicologist who would argue vehemently against my last statement (and I would not put up a fight) – the reality is – The Beatles and Radiohead are stunning popular and commercial success stories and household names, whereas the same cannot be said for novelist Haruki Murakami and film director Tran Anh Hung.
So does it follow that Greenwood’s forays into the high art world of film scoring has proven that a pop artist can successfully transition to the high arts and perhaps do even a little something to generate interest among Radiohead fans (let’s arbitrarily group them into the pop art fan category for the sake of argument) in new, high art forms (film scores, novels, and art films)? Greenwood won critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination for his scoring of There Will Be Blood, which seems to me to be evidence of more blurring.
Or perhaps this isn’t so much a “blurring” of pop and high art – but just another iteration of what successful high art and artist have always done – find ways to remain accessible to wide audiences. Even Mozart’s father urged him to write beautiful, simple pieces the layperson could play at home, “If you write anything for publication, make it popular and easy for amateurs.” Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier does something similar for a more proficient player, exhibiting a wide range of musical styles.
Arts advocates are constantly lamenting how high art is not reaching modern man – and lists among the causes a lack of public funding, to the commodification/commercialization of the arts, to lack of classical educational models, to plain old bad taste. Whatever the reason – I think it is important to recognize that examples of high art’s ability to reach the masses without watering down technique and artistry are still out there – and perhaps those of us that find them should try to do more to promote them.
Hat tip: Opera Chic
*Just curious: where were you when you first heard OK Computer? I was in high school, having been dragged to a house party full of under-age drinking by my then-boyfriend, having escaped to the basement to find the album playing and I sat and listened to the whole thing by myself.
Via History News Network,
Filthy lucre, booze and high drama – and that was behind the scenes. Archaeologists digging in East London have unearthed compelling new evidence of the seamier side of life at London’s oldest playhouse.
Excavations at the site of The Theatre in Shoreditch, which hosted premieres of several Shakespeare plays and which pre-dates The Globe, is shedding new light on a theatre that was called a “school for all wickedness and vice”.
Archaeologists, led Heather Knight of the Museum of London, have discovered not only traces of the original Shakespearean playhouse, built in 1576, but the remains of the ceramic money boxes where the earnings from each performance were temporarily kept before being emptied into a “common box”.
The broken, ceramic money boxes, which had to be smashed to give up their contents, have been traced to the playhouse’s accounts office. The earnings were the subject of dozens of lawsuits involving the actor and manager, James Burbage, and The Theatre’s other co-owner, John Brayne.
Burbage, originally a carpenter, had first become an actor and then a businessman and investor. Despite, or perhaps because of, his crooked, violent and ruthless ways, he made a modest fortune and died a relatively rich man.
Brayne, probably originally a grocer, initially provided most of the finance for The Theatre but he ended up being deprived of his share in the venture by Burbage and was finally reduced to bankruptcy, eventually dying penniless. The saga had all the ingredients of a Shakespearian drama…
What I love about this story is that it reveals this dark side of the arts. We love to chastise Big Business for being uncreative, money-grabbing, and soulless. We look to the arts to entertain, enrich, and enliven and presume that the makers of art remain innocently blameless in matters of money, scandal, and fraud.
In my experience, it seems people often mistakenly associate the arts and artists with being “above the frey” when it comes to things like how they deal with money and ethics. This type of conventional wisdom was expounded by arts advocate Ian David Moss on this very blog during a conversation about the likelihood of arts organizations following government mandates for fair pay of arts interns, “I say arts organizations, being nonprofits, are likely to be more sensitive to the spirit, not just the letter, of the law than fast food giants…”
I come across his type of opinion often. But I happen to think the motivations of man – whether artist or businessman – are both similar in that they both have the capacity for great generosity and honesty as well as deceit and thievery!
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