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Take Back Your Entertainment
Entertainment is an industry with as much power and influence over our daily lives as any other. There are many ways to reclaim entertainment back from industry; by using local and cultural references and personalizing art, or by learning to use public spaces for educational art, or by creating music venues that are not driven by alcohol sales, etc. We can make our own music, we can write our own comedy, we can support our own venues and agendas. One of the first hurdles an artist usually faces is the dilemma of needing to make money to sustain the art, but dreading making money from things the industry requires artists to do to get paid, such as making "non-offensive" material, or fitting into commercialized conformity. Bar owners want you to sell beer, they do not care what music you use to do it. The same goes for recording industry executives, but they are selling more than beer. I would argue there is a higher calling to art than merely selling a product in capitalism, and we need to liberate that calling, to liberate ourselves.

Reggie Miles, Scarecrow and Robert Almblade in San Francisco, circa 1983

Television, and the music and movie industries, have been staple readily-available entertainment venues throughout my lifetime. But several twists and turns in life, and random experiences, have shown me that DIY and grassroots entertainment is often of a higher quality, and more fulfilling for all involved, from performer to audience, than commercial entertainment products. This may be due to the wider range of artistic freedom allowed in self-made art. Local and cultural art can sometimes pass under the radar of censors, because censors don't understand what is actually being said, which is the beauty of slang. (I remember one tune from the 60's had back up singers using "dit dot dit" background vocals to spell out obscenities via Morse code!) But using slang and other means to evade censorship can add a charge to the audience and performer, knowing that potentially illegal things are happening on stage, but no one is going to tell. Read more in my new book, 21st Century Essays on Street Performing aka Busking, on Kindle!

21st Century Essays on Street Performing aka Busking consists of first-person essays and interviews with contemporary street performers, aka "buskers." Book includes the following chapters: 1) Busker First Times, 2) How to Interact with Buskers, 3) Women Street Performers and Sexual Safety, 4) Using Buildings and Awnings as Microphones, 5) Take Back Your Entertainment, 6) Tips Street Performers Remember, 7) How to Pick a Street Performer Spot, 8) Selling Out as a Street Performer, 9) What Motivates Women Buskers, 10) I Wish Everyone Passed the Hat for Their Pay, 11) Free Speech Costs Money at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, 12) Street Performer Family Tree. If you do not own a Kindle, you can download the same technology that Kindle uses for free to your PC and read Kindle books on your computer, iPhone, etc. instead. I have also published other books on Amazon - just Google "Kirsten Anderberg Amazon" and they should all come up!

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