South 12th

…here is a favorite anecdote from the past year. 

At the end of August, Sergio Vucci and I held our final Common Room event of the year, which involved taking a group of around 30-60 people on bicycle to see four sites around the city that everyone often speaks fondly of, but that even many longtime residents have never actually experienced themselves. I’ll post the full list later. There’s some good photos.

One of these was a trip to the observation deck at the Foshay Tower, to see the city at night. Cheryl Wilgren Clyne, the curator of the museum up there, had made arrangements to let us in, and provided party hats in celebration of the building’s birthday the day before.

It was a beautiful, warm summer night, and people milled around the deck, looking out at the city lights coming on just as the sun was setting around 8 p.m. On my walk around, noted friend of S. 12th Brad Zellar stood at one of the four viewfinders on the deck, looking at some object in the distance.

“My gosh, Andy, come here, quick!” he yelled at me, voice bubbling with enthusiasm and gesturing wildly. “You will not believe this!“ 

“What? What is it?” I asked. Brad has a great eye for the amazing and the sublime, so I knew whatever he’d come across would be worthwhile.

“You have to see this! This…this…wow! It’s like we’re not even in Minneapolis! It’s like being…in…LONDON or something!”

“Oh my gosh, wow!”

“It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen!” 

I was getting impatient. “C’mon, man, lemme see!”

He stepped aside, and I looked into the peephole, ready to have my mind blown. Here is an artist’s rendition of what I saw, perfectly lined up the center of the viewfinder:

I looked back up at Brad, with what I’m sure was an expression of bewilderment and probably mild disgust.

He had the broadest grin I’ve ever seen on his face. It was and remains my favorite joke of the 2011 calendar year.

Based on the limited figures I have at my disposal, I’d guess that this here blog has only around sixty regular, dedicated, engaged readers. Which perhaps isn’t many compared to some other blogs, but you all are the right sixty readers. Whenever I pose a question here, I am always amazed at the range of thoughtful answers I recieve.

In reference to l’affaire fiducie de fonds kids of several weeks ago (that is French for “the affair of the kids with the funds of trust,” according to Google Translate), I got a few interesting comments and emails. The first, from my old friend Brady Bergeson, a writer in Fargo-Moorhead and my favorite activity partner for a lively round of that classic hotel bar game, Can You Draw a Fairly Accurate Sketch of Vice President Henry A. Wallace From Memory? Brady says:

I was going to suggest you start a band called Trust Fund Kids. But then there’s this:

https://www.facebook.com/pages…

Brett, a friend from Minneapolis that’s roughly the same age as me (and an MCAD alumnus), adds some insight into the mindset of the typical college student in those post-Pets.com years:

I hypothesize that the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s may have been crucial to propagating the nationwide scare that trust-funded kids were lurking in and around every coffee shop and campus corner. Between ‘99 and ‘03, there were three different instances where I learned that a friend who had a decent apartment was seemingly supporting themselves via an online  entrepreneurial venture or freelance web work. Eventually in conversation it would slip out that the freelancing work or web site was actually unsuccessful. And in fact, that person’s family owned eight apartment buildings in Boston, or a chain of grocery stores in Colorado. Once a juicy nugget like that hits a college town’s gossip chain, it spreads like wild fire, causing everyone to wonder who else may in fact be a secretly funded via a trust.

But here’s the real bombshell, from an anonymous reader named “Murk.” Murk proves him- or herself to be the Deep Throat of this whole “Trust Fund Kid” episode:

Not to muddy the etymological waters here, but, if my murky memory serves at all, I believe the term originated first as “trust fund babies,” before aging up a bit to the “kid” level. I seem to vaguely recall hearing the former term some time in the mid-80s. I place it there because my best friend from high school was literally one (receiving a trust from his grandparents at age 18), and I recall a light bulb going on about said friend once I’d heard the term (he eventually blew the entire fund on LPs  top-end stereo equipment, and a generally profligate lifestyle while in college in Cambridge). Maybe your search should include tracking down this earlier term and theorizing why it may have aged through the years?

Of course! “Trust fund babies”! Using the same questionable research methods (Google Books and nGram), I explored the origins of that particular phrase.

Surprisingly, “trust fund baby” first turns up about the same time, maybe a little bit earlier, during the ‘84-‘86 period. “Places like Woodstock, NY, Taos, NM, and the Hotel Chelsea were filled with these Trust-Fund Babies,” reports New York City novelist Carole Berge’s 1984 Secrets, Gossip and Slander.

However, between 1984 and 1987, there’s almost double the references in print compared to “trust fund kid.” It seems to be in more mainstream use in the early to mid-1980s, turning up in everything from nonfiction sociology books to Mademoiselle articles, and even in a work entitled Fringe Benefits: The Fifty Best Career Opportunities for Meeting Men. (Unfortunately, the entire text of this landmark volume was not available online, so I can’t tell you what the results are, other than, in many respects, aren’t you glad it’s not the 1980s anymore?) 

All of this would lead me to believe that “trust fund baby” is the older of the two phrases, and the one from which the now more common “trust fund kid” is derived. 

As mentioned in my previous post on the subject, I am still giving credit to photographer Abby Robinson for coining the actual phrase “trust fund kid” in her semi-autobiographical 1985 Künstlerroman The Dick and Jane. Again, I can’t really prove this in any real, academic way, other than to say two things: 1.) there is no earlier instance on Google Books, and 2.) since I last wrote about this, I’ve purchased The Dick and Jane, and read it, and loved it, and it confirms my suspicions that Robinson may have been the coiner, for one specific reason. The book is a funny, thoughtful combination of the old, mythical world of the seedy, pre-WWII New York City and the then-contemporary world of seedy, pre-Giuliani New York City — a New York City that is now just as mythical as the old hardboiled New York City of Raymond Chandler. So it’s myth doubling back on myth, a fact reflected in the language in the book, a really inventive blend of ’80s downtown artspeak and ’40s hardboiled pulp fiction. One of the hallmarks of this type of writing is taking common phrases and punching them up a little bit; making them a little more colorful. I believe Robinson may have taken the then-current phrase “trust find baby,” and roughed it up, Bogart-style, into “trust fund kid.” Because “kid” is more hard-boiled than “baby,” right?

Again, I cannot totally prove this. I am not an authority on this subject. But Robinson was nice enough to exchange a few emails with me, and though she said she doesn’t think she coined the term, I told her I’m giving her credit anyhow. Someone had to coin it, after all. Why not her?

Many thanks to Brady, Brett and Murk for prompting me to further investigate this topic, and to Abby Robinson for indulging me. This is what South 12th is all about, my dear sixty readers: making crazed, unfounded speculations on things that happened 30 years ago that no one is really worried about. Well, most people aren’t worried about them: maybe me and you and the other fifty-eight are, and that’s why we’re all in this together.

(Post-script: Robinson’s favorite variation, “trustafarian,” seems unsurprisingly to be a pure product of the 1990s.)

(Double post-script: The French term for “trust fund babies” is “fiducie de fonds pour bébés.” According to Google Translate.)

Since I haven’t used this space for much else recently, I figure it’s time for you to hear another boring story from my youth. I spent the weekend in Louisville, my hometown, and on Saturday, my brother Danny lent me a bicycle. I took Saturday afternoon to bicycle around the coffee shops and bookstores of the Highlands, where I lived in my early 20s. This boring story from my youth in particular is prompted by the large concentration of tattoo parlors in my old neighborhood.

On September 20, 2002, Kentucky Governor Paul Patton held a press conference admitting to an extramarital affair with a nursing home operator that he may or may not have bestowed with political favors. He had spent the past several weeks denying the affair after the Louisville Courier-Journal broke the story, but finally came clean, and came clean in a manner befitting the hammy, overwrought quality of politics in the South: with big, fat tears streaming down his face. The next day, the Courier-Journal ran a half-page, full-color photograph by AP photographer Ed Reinke on the front page of Governor Patton’s tear-streaked visage. Here it is:

I remember the glistening in the nostrils quite vividly. 

The next morning, I saw the photograph (online? or in a physical newspaper? I don’t remember). I immediately thought what any heartless 22-year-old painter would think: wow, this would make a great painting.

(A pre-Sheperd Fairey side note: now that I think about it, at no point did it occur to me to credit Ed Reinke, or even significantly alter the image, though I used his exact cropping in the finished piece. I don’t know what you were learning in art school in the early 2000s, but I sure never heard a word about copyright and fair use until my schooling was well over. Then again, maybe you went to a better art school than I did.)

Working fast, in order to keep up with breaking events, I stretched a 4’x4’ canvas, gridded the drawing on top of it, and then impasto’d the hell out of a bunch of cadmium reds and yellows and zinc whites until I had a messy, meaty sub-Francis Bacon portrait of the governor’s tear-drenched face completed. I carried the enormous painting from my apartment on Gaulbert Avenue to my school’s art studio on foot. The whole way, cars stopped on the street to honk and people shouted their approval. It felt great, though also quite weird, as I wasn’t sure what, precisely, passers-by were approving so vocally. Presumably they just approved of the bloodsport of the whole thing.

The painting went over well with the art school crowd, and was subsequently forgotten as I forged ahead in my work and began painting series of cigarette butts and coffee stains. It languished in storage until I graduated a few semesters later, in early 2004, where I transferred it the studio I was renting in Butchertown (so named for the nearby hog butchering plants that made the rents in the neighborhood so affordable — at night you could literally hear thousands of pigs screaming as they were sent to their deaths a few blocks away).

It was in Butchertown a fellow visiting the studio saw the painting and decided he had to buy it. Amazingly, Patton had refused to resign, and remained governor until 2003, so the following year, memories of his scandal were still fresh in people’s minds. This fellow, like most Kentuckians, would still immediately recognize the image. He contacted me, expressed his interest in purchasing the piece, and asked for a price.

Besides not learning about fair use, another thing I didn’t learn in undergrad was how to price work. Honestly, the problem with painting as a medium is that you’re stuck with them if you don’t sell them, and 4’x4’ paintings take up a great deal of space. So I was happy to move this one to what seemed to be a good home. I gave him an arbitrary number: $500. Five-hundred dollars in that place and time would have covered my studio rent for almost half a year.

He didn’t blink at the number — it is a fair price, and in fact, a little on the low side, which I believe he knew. The problem was, my patron didn’t have that kind of disposable income. He instead wondered about the possibility of an in-kind trade of some kind. Professional services, perhaps. Labor for art.

My patron was the proprietor of a well-respected tattoo parlor. “Do you like tattoos?” he asked me.

“Uh, sure,” I said.

“Do you have any tattoo work?” he asked.

“Uh, no.” I said.

“Well, tell you what,” he told me. “I would like to offer you $500 worth of tattoo work.”

I knew almost nothing about tattoo art at that time. I did know, however, that $500 worth of tattoo work was an enormous amount. A few hours, at least. I believe that’s a sleeve’s worth. Or if not a whole sleeve, a lot of one.

Of course, I accepted. I was mostly just happy someone was interested enough in my work to offer money, goods or services in exchange for it.

The problem now was I had $500 worth of credit at a tattoo parlor I had no idea what to do with. As I told him, I had no tattoos. I didn’t really ever consider it.

Lots of people had ideas for me. My friend Dave wanted me, my brother, and his brother to get four matching tattoos. This seemed like sort of a good idea, but no one could agree on a design. Dave’s idea was to commemorate the neighborhood we grew up in, but the problem with that was the neighborhood we grew up in was quite boring, and I was less eager to commemorate it the more I thought about it. After all, if my parents didn’t still live there, I’d never have a reason to go back. The idea eventually fell away. 

The possibility of $500’s worth of fleur-de-lis tattoos for a whole gang of Louisville friends was also floated. A fleur-de-lis tattoo is de rigeur for any Louisville native worth a damn.

My girlfriend at the time told me she thought I should give the credit to her, since I didn’t apparently need it.

“No way,” I told her.

Our relationship was then in its waning days — she was preparing to take a job in a rural part of an adjacent state, and I had no intentions of following her there (nor, frankly, did she have any intentions of inviting me). We would break up within a few weeks.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because,” I said, “I don’t want you to think of me every time you look at your tattoo.” Listen: I don’t have any tattoos, so I really don’t know how they work, emotionally. I figured whenever you looked at your tattoo, you would reflect on the circumstances through which you came to have it. I figured if she got one using the $500 credit, she would think of me whenever she saw it, and feel sad, or angry, or however it is ex-girlfriends feel when they think about me. That seemed unfair and a little creepy.

She was not happy. “That is absolutely ridiculous,” she told me. A few years later, I came across her blog during one of those late-night regret binges and discovered a post making fun of me for selling a painting for $500 worth of tattoo credit, and then not giving it to her, and then justifying that decision in a manner befitting the hammy, overwrought quality of relationship politics in the South. I still think that’s completely ridiculous, but it’s likely she did have a solid point. She would, after all, have a pretty thorough tattoo now if I’d given her the credit, as opposed to no one having the tattoo.

I sat on the patron’s business card, not knowing quite what to do with it. He’d told me to come in anytime to have the work done, and I think for a while I planned to, though I never figured out what exactly I’d have done. About nine months later, I moved to Minneapolis. The business card is long gone, and though I am sure the offer still stands, I don’t remember the fellow’s name, or what the tattoo parlor was, or where it is, or really any other details.  

A good deal of your early thirties is spent coming to terms with the questionable behavior of your early twenties. There are a few lessons here, I believe, I’d be wise to reflect on.

First of all, it’s not right to rip off the work of photojournalists. If I owe anyone an apology, it’s AP photographer Ed Reinke. The fact that I did not profit from his work is merely a byproduct of my own inaction, and certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. If anyone deserves the $500 tattoo credit, it’s him. Unfortunately, Ed Reinke passed away just last month in Louisville following an accident sustained covering a motor race.

Secondly, there’s the tattoo artist, to whom I also probably owe an apology. If he still owns the paintings and has it hanging somewhere and looks at it, he must feel pangs of guilt, knowing he obtained it without compensating the artist. And not even as a result of his own actions! He tried to compensate me! I inadvertently undervalued his work by not taking him up on his offer, which seems almost like a slap in the face. I still am not sure what would have been the best course of action here: should I refused to take compensation, knowing well I’d likely not have use for that amount of tattoo work? Or should I have gotten the tattoo, using the opportunity to do something I might not have otherwise? I don’t know where that painting would be if he’d not come into possession of it. Probably at my parents’ house, in the basement, in that neighborhood I didn’t want immortalized in ink on my forearm.

I wonder what the tattoo artist’s guests make of the painting now: ten years on, the Patton scandal and its subsequent tears are a little-remembered footnote in Kentucky political history. I wonder how many remember the story. I’d only remembered it biking around this weekend, and seeing a plaque on a building commemorating the former governor. 

Maybe, all things considered, the girlfriend was right. Perhaps I should have just given her the credit as a gift and let her do as she wanted with it. Perhaps tattoos don’t work that way, emotionally — perhaps at some point the tattoo’s origin is divorced from the tattoo itself. My patron willed a $500 tattoo into existence when he purchased my painting, a tattoo that does not exist anywhere. All would be better, perhaps, if it did exist somewhere. As it stands now, all that remains is a 4’x4’ painting hanging somewhere, the meaty impasto teardrops reminding all who see them of the painful emotional economies of artmaking in the Upper South in the waning days of the Patton administration.

Thus concludes another boring story of my youth

The problem with the Internet has been, for a long time, there was no one good place to take care of all your Andy Sturdevant-related needs. Apparently he was doing all this crap all over the place, art stuff, but also writing stuff, but also ??????. Some of it was on Tumblr, I guess. But also on Facebook? And, like, maybe at the Salon Saloon website? Wasn’t there stuff somewhere else, too? Who even knows?

Now that question has an answer: you do.

You want to know the names of the books to which I have contributed essays? No problem. You want to know where to buy those books? Also no problem. Photos of Common Room tours? You got it. Dates and topics for upcoming Salon Saloon shows? There it is. Photos of openings from 2009? I got your back. Some sort of artist’s statement of some kind? It’s on there, too. It’s all there. 

It’s fun to blather on like this (uh, probably more fun to write than read), but actually, I am really excited. Cargo Collective is a really excellent platform for creating and hosting a pretty good-looking website. It’s really wonderful to have images, lists, contact info, archives and everything else in one place, presented more or less coherently. I am still tweaking things and adding information, but for the most part, the website’s a pretty good snapshot of most of the work I’ve done for the past several years.

Here it is: www.andysturdevant.com. Enjoy!

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Jeremy William Dunn (b. 18 June 1979), American actor, stunt performer, model and dancer, “also performing motion capture for various video games”

“Dunn was also an expert for the Spartans in Spike TV’s, Deadliest Warrior, in ‘Episode 3: Spartan vs. Ninja.’”

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Dana DeArmond (b. 18 June, 1979), pornographic actress

“She admits to having social anxiety saying ‘I made my life so I don’t have to come into contact with lots of people except for once or twice a year when I sign.’ … After DeArmond’s house and belongings were destroyed in a fire in January 2007, the adult industry participated in several fundraising activities to help replace what she lost.”

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Stacy Prammanasudh (born September 23, 1979), American golfer

“Until 2007, Prammanasudh’s father, Pravat, a native of Thailand known as ‘Lou’, served as her caddie. He retired in 2007 and her husband Pete Upton now caddies for her.”

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Jim Geovedi (b. 28 June 1979), IT security expert

“He holds no university degree. From 1998-1999, after graduating high school, he found himself living on the street without steady work. Media often use him as an example for people can become famous in IT industry by relying on their brains, even without holding college degrees.”

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Nolan Watson (born August 1, 1979), Canadian entrepreneur 

“Watson also currently sits on the board of directors for Bear Creek Mining Corp and Blue Gold Mining Inc. His success in the industry has earned him the nickname ‘Incredibeard.’”

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Kimberly “Kim” Susan Rhode (born July 16, 1979), double trap and skeet shooter

“On September 11, 2008, Rhode’s competition shotgun was stolen from her pickup; she had been using it in competition for eighteen years. The gun was returned to her in January 2009 after it was discovered during an unrelated search of a parolee’s home; the parolee was charged with possession of stolen property.”

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Bobo Chan (b. 18 Sept., 1979), former Hong Kong singer and model

“In January and February 2008, explicit photos were found online involving Chan and Edison Chen. Compromising photos of Chan skillfully fellating Chen were leaked over the internet … Bobo had quietly left the industry and used the remains of her credibility to create a private business in beauty products.”

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Tatyana Polnova (born 20 April 1979), Russian pole vaulter

“Between 1998 and 2002 she competed for Turkey under the Turkish name Tana Köstem.”

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Brad Ference (born April 2, 1979), retired Canadian professional ice hockey player

“Ference retired from professional hockey in 2008, returned to Calgary, and began a new career as a firefighter in 2009.”

Recently, I’d read Rush Limbaugh invoking on a mass scale the sort of cheap class warfare rhetoric that gets tossed around art schools, rock clubs, and other places where youth come together to take drugs and collectively sort out questions of privilege and authenticity among themselves. That is, referring to Occupy protestors as “trust fund kids.”

This was a phrase I heard a lot by the time I’d got to college, and I knew by the time I was twenty it was essentially meaningless, because none of the artists, musicians or scene people I knew socially had a “trust fund” in the formal sense. It was a term used to refer to “kids” — that is, people younger than twenty-four or so — that may have had well-to-do parents paying for their Orange amplifiers or their private education. But that’s not quite the same as having access to the enormous amount of family money implied by “trust fund.”

I am sure it was different in New York City. But rich people in Louisville were not rich to the degree that people on the East Coast are rich, and if they were on that level, they certainly weren’t sending their dumb kids to college in Louisville, where I’d be hanging out with them. Louisville is a city with only two schools: one incredibly crappy private Catholic college, and one sprawling, commuter basketball camp disguised as a land-grant research institution (I studied at both, running out of money to attend to the former and earning my degree from the latter). Any kid with an actual trust fund was being educated somewhere else. “Trust fund kid” was just a blanket term meaning “mom and dad pay their rent and the costs relating to upkeep of their Jeep.” It’s effective as an insult because it suggests sinister machinations of old money and lawyers, of hidden bank accounts and secrecy. In addition to that, it’s agreeably infantilizing. “Kid.”

The private college in question. Rich kids? Maybe. “Trust funds”? I doubt it.

My suspicion is that this term began gaining currency in the flyover states with the advent of the Internet, and the ability of people to read about “scenes” of various kinds in New York City, and then project the class conflicts of that arena onto their own local class conflicts. Louisville is an intensely class-conscious city — if you meet anyone from Louisville, the first thing they’ll demand to know is where you grew up and what high school you went to, and then mentally assign you to a socioeconomic bracket based on your answer. So any language that can be used to talk about class and privilege, whether it’s accurate or not, is easily co-opted. I imagine a bunch of pretty canny scene kids in Louisville reading whatever NYC-based blogs people read in 1999-2000 (I don’t even remember myself) and coming across some griping about “trust fund kids” fucking up the music or art or lit scenes there, and thinking, “ah ha!” and then sneering in public the next evening that what does so-and-so know anyway, he/she is just a trust fund kid.

Very unlikely that any “trust funds” were involved here, either. Image courtesy here.

Anyway, it’s a ridiculous term that’s been drained of any meaning it may have once had. It was ridiculous when I was twenty-one and used it to describe upper middle-class peers, and it’s even more ridiculous when used to describe the vastly heterogenous mass of people that have committed to the Occupy movement. I’ve known Rush Limbaugh was stupid since I was thirteen years old, but I didn’t realize he was stupid enough to co-opt the language of art school students from the early 2000s. I didn’t think anyone was that stupid. It really makes you consider just how crude this “class warfare” bullshit him and the rest of the Right are peddling. 

All of this made me wonder where the term came from. This is going to sound like one those made-up things I post here sometimes, but this is all completely true. I am not really much of a journalist or a researcher except in the most amateurish, dilettante sense, so I really couldn’t think of any way to proceed except by doing a Google Books search for the phrase. That would, at least, pinpoint it somewhere in time.

There’s a smattering of references from the late 1980s, and quite a few from the 1990s, mostly in reference to rock bands and in articles in New York.

However, the very earliest reference to the exact phrase “trust fund kid” dates from 1985.  It’s used few times in a novel by Abby Robinson called The Dick and Jane, published in February 1985 by Doubleday. Robinson is a photographer, and writes that the book was “loosely based on my experiences working for a private detective.” From page 26 of the novel:

Parker was a tall, skinny, horsefaced trust fund kid. He had so much dough, he was a retiree from birth.

There is a trust fund in this novel, though!

Abby Robinson has worked on a lot of really fascinating projects; she has the sort of polymath career I dream of having. As I noted, her work is primarily as a photographer, though she write this semi-autobiographical novel in the mid-1980s, and has also written extensively on photography in Southeast Asia, and has contributed to The New York Times and Ms.  Currently, she’s in the graphic design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is working on a photographic residency in China. 

All of this is on her website, as is her email. So I emailed her, asking as delicately as I could where she might have heard the term or, if, you know, she invented it. (There’s no not-dumb way to ask that kind of question, but I did my best.) She was kind of enough to send a nice response, saying in part:

Alas, I don’t think that the term’s earliest use was in The Dick and Jane, though it’s fun to think that it was. I think it was already common parlance by then. 

The term I like even better is “trustafarians.”  

So there you go. It was already out there in the mid-1980s. If you have any ideas for how one might investigate the phrase’s exact origins further, I am open to hear them. But it’s unsurprising to me that the earliest usage comes out of the New York City of that time period. 

It seemed certain to me that the self-promotional possibilities inherent to the Internet must mean it is positively crawling with people calling themselves “Hundred Dollar Bill” — used car salesmen, event promoters, smalltime playboys, aging radio DJs, corrupt government functionaries, anyone named “William” whose career or lifestyle might be burnished by associating themselves with the idea of having immediate access to $100.

Who were these men? I wanted to find out.

I thought a Google search for “faces” with a “pink” dominant color choice would turn up rows and rows of portraits of smiling Bills, all winking or giving a thumbs-up sign or holding up etchings of Benjamin Franklin and seeming to say, “You bet I’ve got a hundred dollars, son. That’s why they call me Hundred Dollar Bill.”

Like forgotten 1990s alternative rock bands, however, Hundred Dollar Bills belong to those class of people whose chosen names render them invisible to the all-seeing eye of Google. Because I didn’t turn up a single one. There’s lots of free photo clipart of guys holding up hundred-dollar bills and winking and snorting and guffawing, but they don’t seem to directly represent people who’ve chosen to call themselves “Hundred Dollar Bill.” There’s also lots of people whose work involves hundred dollar bills in one capacity or another, but none choosing the exact sobriquet I was looking for. The closest I found is “Dollar Bill” Lawson, an Alabama radio DJ. But nicknaming yourself after a dollar is different than nicknaming yourself after a hundred. 

I hoped to look closely at these men and the name they’ve chosen for themselves. What makes a man call himself “Hundred Dollar Bill”? How has it helped his career? How has it hindered it? In one of those painful ironies of the electronic age, though, the name they chose to make them stand out from the rest of their field has rendered them completely undetectable. The hungry young entrepreneurs that have been snapping at Hundred Dollar Bill’s heels for the past decade or so know that you’ve got to find a personal brand that lands you at the top of the Google Search food chain. His young competitors know that driving in those web hits is the way to rise to the top of the field. Barely anything else matters. The only thing that matters is being easy to find on Google.

Hundred Dollar Bill is still living in a world where good word-of-mouth and a corny, winking gimmick were all you needed to make a name for yourself.

Hundred Dollar Bill is getting tired. Hundred Dollar Bill is getting really tired. After all, what does a hundred dollars even get you in this day and age?