Masterminds, Slave Wages
Lately, as I scour craigslist each day, it seems I’ve been casting my net more widely than I should. So after responding to a posting for a minimum wage opening at a ceramics shop 8 miles away, I biked down to the interview at Songbird Ocarinas. It was far, and the pay was bad, but the woman on the phone had called her boss “a mastermind.”
Past downtown, past Korea town, past the hulking and anonymous warehouses of S. Alameda. Past the wholesale produce market for all Los Angeles, past wrecking yards, and past the American Apparel factory. Past a pallet distributor and a paper recycler, and then, on the other side of the LA river, I biked past the Sears building and around a corner to the parking lot of a tiny warehouse. I locked my bike to a shopping cart with tomato plants growing in it. Kale, zucchini, beets, and chard protruded from various other receptacles around the yard, and a sign next to the door read “Zelda Parking Only.”
Mr. Songbird makes beautiful ocarinas, small, ceramic egg-like flutes that originated in Mesoamerica thousands of years BCE, making them some of the world’s oldest instruments. Popular with the hippie set the world over, they have since been made in nearly every conceivable shape. Still, the market for ocarinas was relatively small until recently. Ten years ago, demand exploded with the release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a new version of the classic video game. The internet has helped: nowadays you can stream videos of people like Mr. Songbird playing ocarinas shaped like strawberries or Venus de Milo on Youtube. But it has also brought American ocarina-makers into competition with India and Taiwan, which explains—Mr. Songbird says—why he is unwilling to pay more than $8/hr for a job advertised as “fine, detailed, craft work.” (And, if you’re good at sales and office work, then…)
I waited for a few minutes outside pondering the odd videos of my boss-to-be I’d seen online, and then he showed up. He stepped out of a candy red Pontiac Aztek with leaves and boughs adorning the dashboard and left the car running. Mr. Songbird, who is in his early forties, wears his hair in a closely-cropped shock of steel and brown that makes his head look more aerodynamic. The day I met him, his arms hung at his sides and he wore a T-shirt that faded from orange down into light blue, as if to prepare you for the jeans below. He introduced himself as Darryn.
After chatting about the challenges of container-gardening for a minute, he showed me inside. The shelves around us held ceremonial swords and musical trifles from around the globe. He stood like a signpost before boxes overflowing with ocarinas and asked me a few pointed questions while I struggled to mold my life story into something resembling ocarina-related experience.
“Have you ever played an ocarina before?”
“I’ve, uh, played a bamboo flute…”
“…How’s your pitch?” “It’s all right, I mean, I don’t have perfect pitch, but—”
“Like, could you tell if something’s flat and say ‘oh, that’s a little flat?’”
“Yes,” I said, worried he might test me out on a few defective ocarinas.
But he didn’t. Instead, Mr. Songbird simply told me that “what worries me about people like you”—we’d discussed my recent move to LA and travels preceding it—“is that you have no roots. I could spend a couple months teaching you all this valuable stuff about how to make ocarinas, and then you’ll just go where the wind blows you.” Untrue, I thought, but I held my tongue. It seemed strange to hear someone fret so sincerely about lack of loyalty to a job that pays minimum wage, especially this someone. After all, Mr. Songbird himself honed the art with craftsmen in India, Turkey, and Palestine, after learning to make ocarinas on a beach outside San Francisco. He travelled the world for a decade selling ocarinas to tourists and working for a circus before he decided to settle down in Los Angeles. Such a wanderer, I thought, wouldn’t balk at a bit of wanderlust among his employees. But I was off, way off. Par for the course, you might say, on craigslist.
