Big Schemin

(to the melody of Big Pimpin .. Spendin cheese..ok?)

Yesss, eventually we suspected Indyish might have to face the big questions that come with that curious breed of people known as Investors.

We’ve had a few sort of popping up and poking around here lately, and we’ve been riding the whole rollercoaster emotional swing from “AH excited! Maybe we won’t have to be making-something-with-nothing all the time!” to “AH freaked out! We made it this far on our own and almost a million hits last month and now they’re gonna chaaange us!” So we’re going slow, basically.

For the past few days I’ve been emailing and calling all kinds of family and acquaintences in various businessy fields, getting advice on how to deal with the sudden small husstling of interest in our “business” with it’s accompanying talk of shareholders, angels, VC’s and equity.

Oy. All I know is, we need to protect our brain space and the little shoots and links that are building here and around the world between independent artists. The worst way to do that is to stifle an organic emergence in money and misunderstanding; but to be able to devote all your energy to a honey like the Indyish Artist Network is sooo the dream. So it’s a pickle.

I had a great talk with Dave Cool of What is Indie? yesterday morning. We were comparing grants to investors, and how both can bias your organization’s evolution in different ways. About how grants can be quite soul sucking during the application process, and distracting and ultimately unsustainable, since you usually have to go back a askin every year. Though they’re sooo temping, and as he said - when people use them as seed funding for a larger plan they can really work.

Dave’s resounding advice, along with my lawyer friend Sylvia, and my aunt and uncle who’ve been through it, is to “get it in writing.” Now this becomes an interesting task… “the task of finding what will suffice” almost (little Wallace Stevens there for ya).

“Get it in Writing” turns out to mean, boldly and specifically declare what your project means to you, what you want for it in the future, what will suffice for you to be able to be happy in a contract, and then see if they’ll actually sign it. Or what they’ll try to change it to. And vice versa - get what they’re proposing given to you in writing and then pick through it with your bullshit radar on.

We’re in a similar situation right now with the 48 Hour Film Project, in terms of having to look closely at a contract and imagine what it could mean for our little love labour waaay down the line. It’s an act of balancing your imagination with your projections against other people’s planets and their gravitational pull, almost, and it makes you look closely at what’s been crucial to you so far. Though my tendency is to leap messily for the yay and hifive, I’m really trying to slllooowww it down for some perspective. And not just because my horoscope said so. =)

Anyway, just checkin in. We’ll keep letting you know how it’s going. You keep being awesome.