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Beating a Dead Horse: On Still Blogging as a Subversive Activity

Okay, now I'm pissed. And if you want Cover Lay Down to continue, I'm asking for YOUR help. Here's the deal:

In the last hour, blogger has removed two more posts from this blog.

One of these was the post I put up just this past weekend.

The blogger take-down comes just hours after I received a very nice thank you from the label rep who arranged for me to have those songs available for all of you.

Let me say that again, just to make sure you get it. Here's what happened, in order:

1. Label rep contacts me about awesome new covers.
   
2. I write to label rep thanking her and asking for permission to share those covers.
   
3. Label rep excitedly grants permission to share those covers in a particular way.
   
4. I post those covers in exactly the way specified by the label rep.
   
5. In the same post, I include two other covers which are all over the blogs, and available for FREE on the MySpace page of the artist, who owns her OWN label.
   
6. The label rep writes to thank me for the nice review.
   
7. Blogger takes down the post.

Other than making sure that the entire bloggiverse understands that at no time - not once, in all of this mess over the past few weeks -- has blogger EVER contacted me about taking down posts, even to let me know that the posts have gone down, I'm pretty much at a loss for words. And those who visit Cover Lay Down regularly know, that's really saying something.

I wish I had the heart and the focus to rant a bit right now, but I'm not averse to giving others who have come before me the credit for speaking to my heart. And Any Major Dude with Half A Heart describes my own feelings to a T, I think: defiant but cautious, and, more significantly, exhausted enough by the prospect of this as a way of life that I'm seriously considering compromising how I blog. Here's what he has to say; it goes double for me, too:

I have pledged to continue blogging. I might change platforms – perhaps finding a host in a country where US copyright laws do not have force – or try to double-guess what Blogger will and will not zap. At the same time, I’m feeling a sense of blogging burnout and diminished time. If the rate of my updates decreases, then it will not because I have submitted to The Man, but because I am facing new challenges. Apart from the job which pays me my monthly salary and being engaged in an NGO I helped found*, I have taken on the editorship of a book project, revising another book, and plan to write one myself. And my family would like to remember my face as well. Which means I will not devote as much time to this labour of love as I have previously. But I won’t go.

To me, this is the real blow. Most of us blog with all our heart, and all the time we can give. To suddenly be faced with having to put in a huge amount of work to restart elsewhere is time-consuming, and that time has to come from somewhere, and all I've got left to give is the time I have to write this.

The problem is, unlike AMD, I don't think I have the heart to do this by halves. And right now, it would take a superhuman amount of work and love and energy just to save this place from its looming condemnation.

I'd like to pledge to continue, and have the time to consider options. But unlike Any Major Dude, my host has already notified me that they're giving me the boot. Clearly, I'm not on the same wavelength as blogger, but even if I thought I could second-guess blogger successfully, I don't have the luxury of trying. And so, I have thirteen days -- no more or less -- to find, and fully implement, a solution, lest we become a blog frozen in time, another flying dutchman lost to the ether.

And let's be honest, folks. I just can't do it on my own.

I'm writing midterms for my classes, and about to have to grade them; if I want to keep my day job, I need to spend the next two weeks grading papers and crunching grades for my kids, not spending every waking hour rebuilding this blog on a new platform. My kids miss me, too. It's going to snow any day now, and the wood isn't stacked, the yard isn't raked, and I spend every waking hour either at work or cursing this damn computer, and all the stress it is bringing me. I turned to blogging as a vocational hobby, a true amateur's pursuit, and now it's just making me tired, mad, and worn out.

I thought about just writing this as a final post, and letting go. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that heart can be borrowed. After all, I've lent my own out, when it was warranted. I believe in social media, and this is why:

I could do this if I had patronage.

If someone was willing to step forward to do the bulk of the transfer, making a clean swap of archives and content from blogger to a private domain, maybe help out with the redesign. If some of you were willing to give, maybe just a few bucks each, to the financial cause, via that everpresent and hardly used donate button there on the sidebar, since self-hosting in the way that seems most secure is about ten times more expensive than the model I've been using.

What I can offer is love and time, the same as it ever was, and I don't think that's nothing.

It's just that, right now, it clearly isn't enough.

Look, I love this place. I've got music poised to post, more new artists to tout, streamable and ready, with labels waiting for me to give them the nod. But as the deadline for my host gets closer, all I can do is feel the weight of it pushing down on me. It's time to come forward, and state unequivocally, that I just can't do this right now.

If it turns out that there isn't really a bunch of people out there willing to help out, then I'll crawl back into my hole, and call it a good run. I'll be sad, for a while. The music world will be that much more commercialized and commodified. We'll all lose, just a little bit more. And then we'll move on, and forget, as we always do, and live in that grey world.

But I'm hoping that there are a few folks out there who appreciate what I've tried to bring here just enough to want to help out.

Please.

---

UPDATE 11:11 pm: Several folks have written to ask if there are other ways to help, especially for those with no e-cash solution or hosting to offer. The short answer to this question: absolutely. See the comments below for a few more thoughts on the matter.

Metablog, With Music: On Blogging, Bandwidth, and the Unlimited Archives of the Mind

I've tried to keep the metablogging to a minimum here at Cover Lay Down. I appreciate that people like to know about the man behind the curtain, but writing about technical difficulties smacks of navel-gazing narcissism: you come here for the writing and the music, not blogging about blogging. So if you're coming here for the music, welcome, and feel free to scroll to the end of the post for a few relevant tracks.

But a few of you have asked. And so, in a nutshell: after an incredible month of growth, my habit of keeping the archives eternally open to all comers, combined with a huge influx of new faces (thanks to Boing Boing, and our work with the Denison Witmer Covers Project), bumped me up against the next tier of file hosting cost just as my provider was about to close for the weekend. I regret this weekend's bandwidth max-out, and feel badly for every curious coverfan and folktracker who found his way here only to go away without the song.

But if this weekend's file outage was frustrating, it was also healthy. Being unable to blog this weekend, watching instead the sitetracker pick up echoes looking for something no longer there, forced me to confront some hard truths about what I do here, and why. It's time to pick our battles, folks. And before I do, I feel like I owe my loyal readers some sort of explanation.

You see, like many bloggers, I've come to think of the blog as part of something bigger, something more community-minded and interactive, than just me sitting down in the kitchen, late at night when the kids are in bed, and trying to make sense of just one thing at a time. This, of course, is pure egoism: as a regular reader of over fifty music blogs myself, I know that while such a tone of collaboration is sometimes welcoming, it is also a collusive fiction, a consensual construct. But it is nonetheless true that, as a blogger, I am no more or less a part of the ongoing conversation as every fan that wears the T-shirt, every artist that is truly excited about their review, every label rep that reaches out with a handwritten note. From those perspectives, I am part of their circle, just as they are part of mine.

Still, clearly, I can't be everything to everyone. Though I wish that every new reader could start her journey, if she so desired, by scouring the collection, catching up on what has become over a hundred posts and almost a thousand coversongs, it's hard to deny the strain this causes on our ability to provide constantly new content.

I could just go the ad route, or have a fund drive for that donate button there on the sidebar. I could dig deep, and upgrade past my current Business-class hosting solution to something called the Enterprise-level account, which sounds just big enough and expensive enough to have its own holodeck. But though I appreciate any and all support for the current cost of file-hosting, I don't really feel like I want to get bigger. I like thinking of myself as small, of being a hobbyist, an amateur in the proudest sense. I like being awed by musicians who know my name; I like being part of the crowd. If I have to choose, I'd rather walk the walk, and stay small, like folk itself.

So let us let our journey keep its beginning and end, and choose to live more in the present than the past. If we are to truly consider this an ongoing conversation, I think we need to be willing to let some baggage go, so that we can come to each idea fresh. And if that means letting the songs of older posts turn into ghosts, faint memories to accompany long-written text, then perhaps that is only right, given our ghost in the machine existence.

Over the next week or two, then, I'll be deleting older mp3s from the archives. I'm thinking I'll leave some posts up -- anything linked recently, a good set of the holiday music as the weather grows colder. I might even celebrate by featuring a few old favorites on a sidebar spot, right next to the elseblog posts I continue to crank out faithfully at collaborative theme-blog Star Maker Machine, where this week all song titles consist of an adjective and a noun, in that order. If you've got any favorite posts here on Cover Lay Down which you think merit inclusion in a greatest hits collection, to stay live into eternity, let me know.

But the bulk of the files will fade. Because providing two terabytes of bandwidth in one month is not a hobby anymore. It's not even an obsession. It's just not cost-effective. Our souls are more important.

All writing will remain, of course. The conversation grows, ever onward, exploring the mysteries of how people share song, and why, and how it changes the world. Through it, the music lives on, in new covers and in old recordings, in the hands of the people, where the folk belongs. Our ghosts echo in the ever-present hypemachine slipstream.

When I started here, I was thinking of words; I still struggle to listen with my heart. But if I had named this blog after a song, it might have been one of these.

• Tim O'Brien: Lay Down Your Weary Tune (orig. Bob Dylan)
  
  
• Cowboy Junkies: To Lay Me Down (orig. Grateful Dead)
  
  
• The Mammals: Lay Down Yr Mountain (text Allan Ginsburg)
  
  
• Mississippi Fred McDowell: When I Lay My Burden Down (trad.)

Cover Lay Down will return to our regular schedule later this week. Coming soon: new covers from newcomers, and the year's first Christmas albums begin to hit the market.