How do you write a successful grant when your primary goal is to destroy the established system?  A foolish question with too-broad parameters, I know, but I bring up the topic in the knowledge of my current lyrical content (mostly blasphemy with a few jabs at militarism and corporate culture*).  It stands to reason that the man lobbing tomatoes at the king will not be invited to the king’s feast.  Fortunately, that metaphor is too small for the real world, and  it would seem that many funding bodies are only too happy to hire the anti-establishment weirdo band for their big Summer festival.  So, gigs are coming in for the LFM horn orchestra, a status of which I am proud.  Grants are another thing altogether.

But the real answer to ‘how-to-write-a-successful-grant-while-evil’ is:  get your wife to do it for you.  Seriously, I’m crap at grant writing.  That’s why I make pretty things to sell to rich people.  That’s why I make myself useful in a collective (hi MOPARRC!) where smart people, like my wife, do the grant writing, and I do the poster designs and the hole digging.

But keep that image of the guy tossing tomatoes at the king in mind for me, would you?  ‘Cause that’s who I am and what I’m doing, on the chance it doesn’t come across right away.  My father used to warn me that, someday, my lifestyle choices would mean ‘there’ll be a day of reckoning’, by which he meant that I would be a poor, destitute, homeless artist instead of an employed, happy man with two acres of lawn.   But I think our day of reckoning will come in many forms:  electoral reforms, limitations of corporate power, the rise of organic food, the payback on investment in renewable power,  and the death of apathy as we begin to awaken ourselves to the real task of finding closed-loop systems of living on a finite planet  I believe the old boys club will fight dirty and to the death, put as many of us in jail as they can, and never admit they are wrong, greedy or foolish to believe in invisible magic super-beings.  But, what are ya gonna do?  We have to work around them, in spite of them.

Well, goodness me, look at all that blather.  Hey, I’m having a show on Wednesday April 18th at the Railway Club.  7:30 – 8:30.  Free!!!!

Note: Legion of Flying Monkeys Horn Orchestral Members may appear differently than pictured above.  Same volume, though.

*You didn’t know that Canada was a post-democratic Theocracy run by the military/industrial complex?  I should have mentioned it earlier.