A corporate vision statement I can get behind.

This month, I'm helping run mailorder for my friends' label while they're on tour in Japan. This "company story" manifesto thing is from their forthcoming company catalog.

Our company was formed when we decided to have one name and address for all things we made and all the makers. It is an imaginary general store from a time before figuring out all aspects of one's work became a novelty. In 2003 we started writing the brand name on our projects in order to unify our various objects and to jokingly participate on the uneasy commerce that we all live in, but in the simplest, most direct way we could think of.

Not knowing how to best be useful in a world that increasingly seems to need SOMETHING, some kind of massive sweeping broom and warm embrace, and finding ourselves with enough money to live, we are producing frivolous booklets and records and posters.

It is an uneasy life, living in the dark belly of the modern megastate with any kind of awareness, so we sing and write to keep ourselves and our customers aware and uneasy, not too comfy and not too guilty, awake.

No amount of well-intentioned song-products would be enough work, no matter how home-made or deliberately done. We must encourage each other constantly to nurture our literacies, leave our bubbles, increase our knowledge, refuse to accept stupidity, offer love in gentle ways everywhere. We must participate in real life.

I love this statement, and the way it points us to a mature, nuanced theory of the role of culture in this troubled age. Key ideas:
• Culture matters; it's not just about celebrity, commerce, entertainment, or even self-expression, or art for art's sake.
• Choices about methods of production, manufacture, and distribution are as much a potential space of resistance as the work itself. The way the CD or the book or whatever is made and the way it reaches its audience is as important as the information it contains.
• At the same time, cultural products are not enough. Participation in cultures of resistance is best understood as one component of a broader strategy of mindful living.
• We can be self-aware about the limitations of music-making/book-making/art-making/film-making without falling into cynicism or knee-jerk irony. We just have to remember that admonition from the Upanisads, that this cultural stuff we make is "the finger pointing at the moon, and those whose gaze is fixed upon the pointer will never see beyond."