A friend of mine - who once wrote an article comparing my flute making with the entirety of Wall Street - and I are considering starting a new Substack blog together where minimally twice a month he and I would discuss the economy and what we each have observed, including reporting on how it has been misreported, who to read and who to avoid like the plague. I will basically be interviewing him and it will be something like this:
I know nothing about the economy except what I see it reflected in flute sales, usually a month or two before it hits the news, and the sticker shock when I pay $83 for a bag of basic groceries. My brilliant friend, on the other hand, predicted in detail the crash of 2007-2008 some 5 years before it happened. He predicted many other things.
I would pester people like David Brancaccio on APR’s Marketplace with an email usually entitled “Report from the Flute Mines” describing the ups and downs in my flute orders compared with the economic news, not to mention the Lunar Cycles. Money always seemed to just after the New Moon!
My friend was the only one who responded, and added that his daughter was a flute player.
So this could be interesting and fun and he is sleeping on the idea currently. Thus it may also not happen. If we do this, we will most definitely go off topic. The thing about these Substack blogs such as these is that these are real.
Our page will be free unless you want to ask questions too or bloviate although we will have our bullshit detectors turned on High. maybe we will just limit it to questions only or short one paragraph comments. For this privilege you will pay the $5 subscription fee. We may or may not get around to reading or responding to questions. We hope to become the Heather Cox Richardson of Economic Reporting.
My friend’s former host for his blog was one of these gold bug sites where most of the readership ponders “Should I move my money today into the Stock Market, Stolen Muffler Polonium or Shitcoin”? Our audience will be more the people who actually work for a living, especially craftspeople, teachers, the underemployed and the overworked. It will be like the WS Journal for the remaining 99%.
My friend’s economic observing is brilliant. His day job which he’s soon retiring from is providing a necessary service for the municipality he lives in. I know nothing about economics. Our collaboration will be like the book Honest Business by Phillips and Rasberry.
Salli Rasberry, the Queen of the Hippies was a countercultural icon who lived at Wheeler’s Ranch, a large commune outside of Sebastopol, according to someone I knew. My former housemate and landlord Spencer Bentley who has disappeared into the southern Oregon mists after he and his partner won the Oregon Quinto lottery, also lived there and was friends with her. Spencer was a wonderful, patient, tolerant, and very lousy slumlord who would start remodeling the house and then leave for 6 months, expecting us to fix everything. He once headed off and left us without a functioning toilet. Or privacy as all the bathroom walls were gone, along with the floor. The toilet was there and I suppose one could have flushed it with a bucket, once one climbed up the leaky and disgusting drain pipe from the crawlspace floor.
One time the building inspector, having tried the front door, showed up around back in the alley way asking for a “Richard Bentley” and then looked in the workshop (former garage). I was working on some of my first flutes or sound post setters while Mick Doherty and Steve Einhorn were making hammer dulcimers. There was one outlet for all of our tools. The inspector, shaking some papers in his hand, said “Mr. Bentley has had a building permit here since 1978. You know - that isn’t exactly yesterday.” Then he looked at our mess and especially all the extension cords going into one outlet and asked “What is going on here?”
Mick, with a big grin, stepped over and put his arm around the inspector’s shoulder and said in his lovely southern Virginian accent “Sir, you’re looking at Poverty!” The inspector laughed and was never heard from again. The house on SE Raymond is a piece of work and of course looks nothing like it did when we lived there. Mick’s partner Deb Chase started her puppetry theater there (google Oregon Shadow Theater). 40 years ago this April I started making tools using a piece of railroad iron as an anvil and the wood stove for my heat. I once hardened some tool steel to Rockwell 65 (C Scale which is as hard as one can get it. The local machine shop that did heat treating couldn’t believe it. Soon after I started making flutes here, after an overnight workshop on Ankeny Hill in Doug Steinke’s oboe workshop.
My dear friend Mickie Zekley who ran Lark in the Morning for years as well as Lark Camp was at the famous Hog Farm. He was the King of the Hippies. I am very close to Royalty and have friends in High place.
Everyone was friends with Salli.
Her coauthor Michael Phillips was one of the inventors of the Mastercard. Together the two wrote this wonderful book called Honest Business (1981) about how to run a small business and most of their wisdom applies today. I followed all of their reccomendations when I could afford to. It was much better than the crappy and naive Do what you love, the money will follow book that came years after 1989. One can find Honest Business on Abebooks frequently.
Mick, Steve and Dan Compton would practice there frequently. The house was full of music. It was also full of fleas and once, opossums who decided to live in the wall between my bedroom and the bath tub. Once Dan arrived while Mick was in the shower. The woodstove was going strong. Mick comes out without a towel and sort of flicks his swinging his hanging nether regions towards the woodstove, which then hisses from all the splashed water and he says “Ah! Catholic Guilt!”
Dan, who had been subjected to such abuse from Mick his whole life (they grew up together outside DC and in Argentina) kind of blanched a sickly green while I died laughing. Dan and Fran moved to Amsterdam last year to finally escape from this guy!
See https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/salli-rasberry-a-counterculture-trailblazer-from-west-county-dies-at-the/
Wheeler’s Ranch: https://www.sonomamag.com/50-years-later-sonomas-summer-love/