More or less at the moment the final edition went off to the printer I quit keeping the log of incoming CDs I have maintained since December 7, 2004. My last entry was March 17, 2008, and there it will stop. With, as it happens, Fred Eaglesmith. It runs 207 pages, though it was never complete. I never bothered to enter the urban music or electronic dance music or heavy metal titles which came accidentally to my mailbox.
If I remember some numbers Chris Morris ran off a few years back, the total number of releases in distribution (which is a subset of all releases, in that a number of local bands and home-bound artists sent their music out for review in our pages, though it was not nationally available) had trebled in the last decade, from 20-odd thousand to 60-odd thousand.
My sense is that number has slowed to a trickle. But it's also likely that a number of publicists have quickly removed me from their mailing lists, and that I've neglected to count all the links to downloadable albums which I still ignore because I continue to view such things as the spawn of a particularly evil demon. (See: previous posts at this site. Too many of 'em, in fact, I'm sure.)
So I'm tossing this out to my more active colleagues: Have release schedules slowed down as much as I think they have?
It would make sense. The economy is in tatters, and no matter what election fix goes in, it's going to be a mess for a while because the whole structure is no better than the structure of the music industry. And while bands of a certain profile (or with trust funds) can continue to release albums, with $4-a-gallon gas and a bad economy and no record retail and little, if any, label structure (not to mention radio, which is mostly unmentionable), it seems like a lot of musicians from whom we once heard regularly are sitting on their hands. Staying out of the studio. Touring Europe.
Some winnowing would be good, based on all the CDs I have yet to listen to from acts I've never heard of (and I am, slowly, doing that, just for the sport of it; if I find something good, happily, I have this nice little website on which to trumpet the discovery) from musicians who ought to be able to hear that they're not ready for the national stage.
But I fear we're in for more than winnowing.
The last cash cow left (aside from TV) has been touring. And I'll be real curious to see how the summer festivals do. Local bands in big cities will probably do bang-up business. But those of our friends who can tour one or two major regions of the country and play to 60-200 fans each night...I bet they have a tough time this summer. Next fall.
Not wishing any of that. Just tossing it out to see if that's what the world looks like to the rest of y'all.
Under different circumstances, the quotation with which Peter chose to introduce his piece on the Weepies might have been a provocation, but he wasn't trying to poke at the grumpy bear on the next computer, not this time:
"I don't differentiate all that much between movies, music, TV -- it's like all these companion pieces that go along with your life," says Steven Tannen.
Not my life.
We weren't raised with television in my house, not until dad and I took to watching football at the home of an economics professor who also owned a vineyard, which I imagine led to mother's relenting and finally acquiring a 12-inch black and white and hooking up the cable. To this day I cannot walk into a room with a TV on and ignore it, and this may explain -- this and a timely chainsaw accident -- how I came to watch the entire Watergate hearings.
My co-editor had a more normal raising, which doubtless reveals why he found it necessary to thank "Gilligan's Island" in the staffbox of our first issue.
Apparently, if you are a musician, television is the new lottery ticket that buys your way out of the day job you just lost. Apparently, if you are a fan of unknown artists, it is necessary to watch "Grey's Anatomy" or "Scrubs" to hear needle drops of new songs that radio is too ossified to play. It is one of the few ways musicians are well-paid in the new economy, but I refuse to watch either show because they bore me to tears. As does the music they play, which is chosen for its ability to serve as supporting wallpaper to a scene, not for its lasting creative merits as a song.
Same with movies. Or film. None of which is to minimize the virtues of good music placement (I still remember a short-lived '50s detective series that Joe Jackson did music for, and the fun I had realizing he'd placed Link Wray's "Rumble" atop a barfight), nor of being paid for same.
But the narrative structures of film and television are different, one from the other (so is the screen dimension, though that appears to be changing somewhat), and music is too important to me to allow to become nothing more than the supporting tear jerk of an already over-calculated screen moment.
Blame it on radio. They quit caring about artists, quit back-announcing songs, and were so busy buying and selling each other that they owe the bank so much money that music is only fit in among commercials and satellite-fed banter from absent DJs.
Blame it on MTV. Do I have to write more than that sentence? I didn't think so.
Blame it on the decline in record retail.
But it does little good to assign blame, for it changes nothing, fixes nothing.
There has to be a better way. There has to be a way to re-establish communities now linked only by their ability to type at each other from great distances. There has to be a way to sustain the work of musicians without whoring out their songs to film and TV and commercial spots because that's the only paying work, and the only way to be heard against the din of this over-plugged society.
I know all this writing about chickens seems obscure and remote to a great number of readers. "Green Acres" and all. But it's real. It's a beautiful day today, filled with bird calls and green everywhere and the smell of things growing which one day we will eat, except for the chicken shit. I am not nurtured by text messages and knowing where the moment's most important blog is to be found, what everybody else is listening to or thinking about. What fabulous new widget might be used to spend even more time playing on the computer.
Television is this stupid box in the livingroom that I sink into when incapable of anything else, or when there's a football or basketball game on. It's not my life. It's not real life. And real life is where art comes from.
It is, hopefully, clear by now that the presence of chickens in my father-in-law's barn was not my idea. Which is not to say that I'm opposed to the eating of their flesh, nor the frying of their eggs. But my knowledge of animal husbandry is suburban and limited to the calling of cats and dogs, and some residual instinct for the caring of tropical fish. Even that didn't serve Maggie's birthday goldfish, one of which leapt to its death its first night here, while the cats -- too busy watching -- missed the fun.
And yet Dan has gone fishing and so it falls to your newly unemployed scribe to go feed the chickens. And make sure they're warm enough, since we have 24 that are less than a month old, all roosters, most of whom are doomed to the pot; it's worth noting that roosters are much cheaper to buy (less than half price, in fact), though I haven't enough feminist theory to go further with that thought. Another dozen juvenile hens (we like eggs), and a half-dozen adults (one rooster, Survivor #1, and five steady but indifferent layers), round out the flock each population housed in separate chicken condominiums. When Dan gets back, we will have to build a new condo for the growing roosters, who are now housed in a wooden box smaller than most televisions.
Midafternoon, having finally opened a batch of mail, I loaded a somewhat randomly chosen CD into the little red truck and headed out. It's a long enough drive that I can get most of an album heard coming and going (at least the old 34-minute album, or enough of a new one to know), though it's not a place, once one arrives, that calls for music. I had plucked up the debut CD by a Tupelo, Mississippi blues trio called the Homemade Jamz Blues Band whose oldest member is 16. They play guitars made out of gas tanks, at least some of the time (the YouTube videos I scanned involved more traditional guitars), which sounds more rural than the pictures within the package suggests. They replaced a Jimmy Reed reissue (the curious 1961 Jimmy Reed At Carnegie Hall, influential in England but not recorded at Carnegie Hall) that had been spinning a few days, and the Homemade Jamz sound nothing like him. A nine year old girl, Miss Taya Perry, plays drums. The 16 year-old singing and playing lead, Mr. Ryan Perry, sounds like a man, but it's hard to imagine that he has lived enough to mean the words his father, Renaud, who apparently goes just by Perry, has written. Songs like "Right Thang Wrong Woman." Mr. Kyle Perry, at 13, handles the bass. A classic power trio. (Oddly, Steve Winwood's newest album was in the day's mail haul, but, as much as I loved the Spencer Davis Group and half of the Blind Faith album, I hadn't the heart for it.)
I was listening to the Jamz' album, titled Pay Me No Mind and to be released June 10 on NorthernBlues, because it came in today's mail, and because a fellow named Roger Stolle wrote some liners to it. Roger was a marketing executive in St. Louis who became friends with Art Chantry, the designer, which meant we met up in Nashville once. Stolle and his wife quit the straight life to open Cat Head Gallery in Clarksdale (my folk art weakness once again) and, I gather booking Ground Zero Blues Club down there. Or maybe he's started another business, I dunno. Maybe they're the same thing.
Anyhow, Roger has put out a couple Big George Brock albums on his own Cat Head imprint that I've listened to but never found any words to write about. But his name was enough to get me to listen to these kids play the blues.
Even if it's a little cold right now to get into the rhythm of that Mississippi thing. It's been unseasonably cold here (this morning, as I rewrite a tiny bit, it's about to get unseasonably hot), and so we were worried yesterday when both lightbulbs heating the roosters were out. We scurried to Southern States and bought more lights and they were fine, but hungry. And, being incredibly stupid animals, thirsty, as they'd knocked their remaining water container over. Incredibly stupid animals, let me underline that.
Oh, and being called chicken? It's way more of an insult than you thought in the schoolyard. In junior high there was a wandering substitute language teacher who promulgated the notion that "unanisumbua" was the worst word you could say in Swahili. It means, he said, "you bug me." Which seems tame, until you consider the size and disposition of insects in Africa. (I have no idea if that was true, nor if I've remembered it exactly right. Nor does it matter.) So trust me when I tell you that chicken are chicken.
Dumb and stupid.
This morning there was a woman in front of me at the gas station, waiting to use the pump. Smoking, with her door open and the car running. Finally she got up, went in, paid for her gas and came back with a Mountain Dew. Turned off the car, at last, and put $4 worth of gas in it.
Anyhow. Out at the farm one of the lights over the juveniles was out, and I tried to replace it. Unsuccessfully, I might add. Halfway in their end of the big chicken coop, when one of the little hens jumped over my leg and fluttered to the ground. Flailed, actually.
This is a problem.
I know how to catch a cat. In fact, if these were cats, we'd be friends by now and it wouldn't have happened. I have a fair idea how to catch a dog. But I've never picked up a chicken, much less caught one on the fly. Er...scurry, for it made straight for the dirt beneath the henhouse.
Noises are being made above it, clucking disapproval, I imagine. Hope. Lessons being learned, perhaps. (No, Grant, these are chickens. They learn nothing.)
This is all a problem, and I am darn lucky that the farm dog is more interested in the city garbage I dumped on the compost heap than in fresh meat on unsure feet. She's a c-minus dog anyhow, and sweet, and hasn't yet connected live chicken with feathers to the bones she gnaws. (And we know you're not supposed to feed dogs chicken; she's a farm dog, get over it.) But I have to keep one eye open for Annie the dog, just in case.
I call my wife to ask how to catch a chicken, but fortunately her phone's not working.
And then it flutters to the air and I make a grab that almost works, but it is immeasurably smaller than I imagine it to be it is when I get my hands on it, and so I let go quickly, afraid to crush the poor bird, which is nothing more than feathers yet, not one of the ten-pound monsters still languishing in our freezer.
So we chase each other around the barn for another couple minutes until it gets tired and even more stupid and traps itself in a corner and I pick it up. If it were a smarter animal, I'd assume it took pity on me. But it's not smart, or I'd not have caught it. Sort of. It's a tiny thing, under all those feathers, and clearly scared. Thankfully not scared shitless.
Back into the coop, and none too politely.
These are the things I now do to feed my family!
By which point, in any event, the hens are in fine feather. They have left us four eggs, which is nice, except they won't lay in the box where they're supposed to, they lay in the far corner of the coop, which means I have to crawl mostly inside the thing if I want breakfast. This is not a clean business. Chickens are not clean, and the bottom of their coop hasn't been cleaned since Dan left. (Happily I have not been trained in this chore yet.) Leaving my behind exposed, but, fortunately, they're chicken and don't take to pecking.
Probably I should have fussed with the lightbulb more, but I'm not going back without backup.
None of which explains the bird I saw on the way home, down the road where goats used to graze. It was songbird-sized, and the color of a newly minted Mary Kay Cadillac. I do not make these things up, nor have I an explanation, though mamaw posited the possibility of an albino cardinal, and then we both laughed.
The Jamz' record outlasted the trip there and back again, but they ain't no damn chickens, that's for sure. They can play. They can sing. And they might grow into something; they might not. It's hard to tell with kids. But they seem to have an instinct for the thing, and to take a joy in playing it. And it's nice to hear somebody living (and scheduled to be living through the next decade) playing the blues.
All of which reminds me that one of the bands Jimmy Reed may or may not have influenced in England was called Chicken Shack, and that once upon a long time ago my friend Cheeseman played their version of Tim Hardin's "If I Were A Carpenter" for me, and it will help to remember that Christine Perfect McVie was singing. Never have found that record. Nor have I figured out why the Legendary Christine Perfect Album (McVie's solo outing between Chicken Shack and Fleetwood Mac) wasn't offered in the glorious reissue frenzy of the last decade.
This last issue crashed in on me later and harder than we could have guessed, in large part because the advertising community which has supported us these last almost 13 years was gracious enough to allow us to go out in the style to which we were once accustomed. But for various reasons the whole thing was built in something less than two weeks, and no wonder I broke down in the process like an old draft horse.
The unanticipated byproduct of that kindness was to make the issue doubly difficult for me because I was writing the cover story at about the same time those ads came in (and they came to my desktop, where they could not be ignored). Many of them bore nice words about us and about the magazine, and the whole thing -- the writing and the adverts and the finality of it -- would come back to the foreground.
But in some ways it was also comparatively easy, because I knew what I wanted to say: Everything, and goodbye.
Which wasn't, as it turned out, necessarily what my two co-publishers had in mind. But we'll come to that.
I tend to be a pretty laissez faire art director, by which I mean that I hire from a small pool of photographers whose innate sensibilities I trust, who understand both the music and the magazine, and who appreciate the fact that I don't tell them what to do. My belief has always been that we don't pay enough to micromanage shoots (nor had we funds for me to be physically present at shoots, and on those few occasions when I was around I felt singularly useless). And I don't put type on photos, save for the opening spreads and the minimal type placed on the cover. Good photos don't need words to dress them up, and I've been fortunate to work with some terrific photographers over these last years. And it's more fun for me to take their photos and figure out how to work headlines and text around them, than to play it the other way.
Now...our magazine covers have always been spartan affairs, largely free of bulky slabs of text. Partly it's the contrarian in me: if every other magazine does it that way, stand out by going a different way. And partly it was my belief in ND as a brand, which, I suspect, other more bottom-line oriented publishers probably thought foolish. And maybe it was. No matter.
For this last cover, I knew exactly what I wanted. Which rarely happens. And the opening spread, I knew what that looked like, too. So I asked Thomas Petillo, one of my favorite of the Nashville shooters who return my calls, to mimic Richard Avedon; or, rather, to begin there and extemporize. He was kind enough to spend a few sheets of 8x10 Polaroid film to get the cover image (they've discontinued making the film; as several have noted, there's some poetry in that choice), and shot the balance digitally.
I wanted that starkness because it fit my mood, and I liked all the white because it suggested, at least to me, the deep and good spirituality which underpins Buddy's very being. And Thomas -- who has shot Buddy three or four times, once before for us -- concurred.
I hadn't counted on the sequence Thomas provided of Buddy walking through the set, but it was brilliant and provided the connective tissue the piece needed. If I'd written a few less words, I'd have closed with that last photo spread across two pages, and let it speak silently. But I was unwilling to trim that many words, which I may yet come to regret.
All of which was fine until Peter and Kyla saw a PDF of the cover. It wasn't what they wanted. Maybe they feel better about it now, particularly having seen and read the full story which went with it. In hindsight I should have understood that this issue meant different but difficult things to all three of us, and I should have more included them in the process. But they aren't often involved in the design of the magazine, for which I have always been grateful. This last time I think they felt a bit ill-used, though perhaps they came to love this cover as much as I do. And perhaps not. But I approached this final issue as an end point in my career, and it is no such a thing for either of them. (It may not be for me, but it's easier to assume that it is. They are both far more engaged in the possibilities of the web than I suspect I ever will be.)
Past that, I began with the organizing principle that I wanted each of the major features to include a handmade element. Partly because I think it important that the things we make look as if they were touched by human hands, partly because I find most modern design sterile and formal, and partly because it is helpful to limit my options, particularly as I came to realize we were going to have at least 32 more pages than we'd initially planned on. (One issue, and I'm not going to dig through to remember which, I decided -- because all the features were coming in late, and I had some things going on in the bargain -- to make all the headlines out of our default sans serif face, Knockout, which comes in a wide variety of heights and widths.)
And so the James McMurtry feature, the first one finished (and the last one finished, too, as it worked out), is built around some stencil letters Susan's grandmother passed along when she unpacked a few years back. I took an old, worn out marker to them, and then over-exposed the scan. And fought and fought with the letters and the placement and the color, couldn't quite get it to work. At the last minute -- when preparing the file to upload to the printer -- it occurred to me to drop a black shadow of the type beneath the red, and it held together after that. Most issues there's one spread I simply can't make right, and I end up having to live with it. This time I think I saved it. I think.
My old friend, though he's younger than me, Jesse Marinoff Reyes was kind enough to design the Billy Bragg spread from provided photos. We hadn't time, nor access, to Bragg once the piece was assigned, and I knew it would be helpful to farm out some of the work for a change. Jesse and I met at The Rocket; he designed my very first feature for that magazine, and then, after I was done setting the type and trimming out however many words we ended up trimming out, we went to the late and perhaps lamented Dog House to eat and drink a beer and talk about boxing and pro wrestling until our ten bucks ran out and it was well after midnight. Jesse also designed the opening spread for a Merle Haggard feature I wrote with Andy McLenon a few years back; I thought I was too close to the story to get it right. Those are the only four pages in the magazine's history (save ads) that I haven't designed; our mentor, Art Chantry, designed the Lizz Wright cover, the last to use our original logo. Otherwise, blame me, as Chris Knight sings.
Anyway. Jesse's spread is handmade to the significant extent that he uses a complicated stew of computer skills and bad xerox to get the effects he's after, and I swept up the back yard of the piece trying to imitate what he'd accomplished.
I had hoped to use more illustration this last issue -- it's handmade, and out of fashion -- but for various reasons that didn't turn out. Jason Crosby, a good egg from South Carolina, I believe (we've not met, of course), turned in a splendid piece on Robert Forster. I don't know how handmade it actually is, but it looks it. The type went on easily, once I backed away and stopped thinking about it.
Along the winding way of this issue, I'd had an e-mail exchange with one of the Rocket designers who went way before my time, and has had a storied career in New York since, a fellow I've met only once or twice named Robert Newman. He's been AD at Details and Entertainment Weekly and Fortune and Vibe and I don't remember all what, but he's got a portfolio online (here: www.robertnewman.com) that I spent a little time looking at. It made me feel a little better about my work here to note that Bob worked with a staff of 10 or 12, and I was trying to compete (and, really, I was) in solitude. It was also interesting to realize that a number of the design touchstones I've been drawn to were also reflected in his work. Which, I suppose, is The Rocket tradition spun through.
Point being, the Old 97's opening spread is an homage to Bob, of sorts. Not a knock-off of his style, but I was reminded to play a bit more with the type than I sometimes do. Erika Molleck Goldring had been assigned to shoot the Old 97's for us, and, working with limited time and light, did a fine job. But I'd seen the opening shot on Amy Kincheloe's camera right after she took it at the New West party during SXSW. Amy's a friend of our Austin ad rep Trish Wagner, and they're both big Old 97's fans. And it fit the headline. So I used it instead. Sorry, Erika (and that's not flip, I really do feel badly over it).
And then there's Pinetop Perkins. Todd V. Wolfson, one of several aces working in and around Austin, had sent me one of those photos just to say hello. Britt Robson, a writer we'd just recently stumbled upon (too late, almost), had pitched Peter on that piece, but we didn't think there'd be room. I simply wanted to use those images, and argued that we'd find room. And then room found us. The lettering comes from my collection of vintage press type. Heh. Wonder what I'll do with all that now...
(A digression about computer-assisted distressed lettering: If you look at it, each letter is identical in its distress. Not mine, darn it. It's individual in its distress. As, I suppose, am I! Accept no fakes.)
A couple other notes about photo shoots. Alice Wheeler, who also goes back to The Rocket and was kind enough to show at my short-lived (co-owned, with Carl Carlson) gallery, Vox Populi, was also kind enough to shoot Sera Cahoone when we assigned that piece at the last moment, and wanted it made clear that Ms. Cahoone didn't have dandruff, that was an unseasonable Seattle snowfall. Though it snowed there some weeks after, as well.
The Dan Tyminski shoot, courtesy Milwaukee-based photographer Deone Jahnke, who was willing to drive to Nashville for this small commission (and, I hope, for other work!), ended up being a different kind of problem. Deone had shot Dan with his mandolin as a courtesy, as an extra, because he has a new sponsorship deal with the mando maker. It occurred to nobody, until the magazine was already on press, that we shouldn't use those shots since he doesn't play mandolin on his new album. Adam Steffey does that. Now...I'd chosen that photo because it was so at odds with his "Man Of Constant Sorrow" fame and the dreary seriousness of most bluegrass photos. And because this was an issue which could use some leavening. Management wasn't happy, and I'm sorry about that, but it was too late to fix it and I had managed to so over-use my mouse hand as to be unable even to contemplate redesigning such a simple spread, much less fighting the printer to stop the presses.
In the process of creating this last issue (and trying to date a handful of my old photos which intruded upon the pages as historical records, if not examples of good photography), I paged through a lot of our back issues. To which end an apology: I sucked as a designer, for years, and I handled photos badly, for years. I never could shoot a decent halftone on a stat camera, but had somehow been taught it was important to gray them back because the press would add ink and darken them back in. Only the press never did, and somehow I never learned better.
When we finally grew the magazine to sufficient size to get on a big, four-color press, and on the paper I'd always wanted us to be printed on (the thin stuff of a few years back, not the shinier paper these last six issues or so have been printed on), I was finally a tolerably adequate designer, and left the photos alone. And they look better for it. I'm astonished Jim Herrington, in particular, but all of my old crew, stuck with me through that.
And now, having achieved a level of tolerable mediocrity, I have a sore right arm and the lingering question of whether I'll ever design another magazine. Maybe I will, maybe not. Maybe print really is dying, but I didn't believe it when RayGun designer David Carson said it, and I don't believe it now.
But what matters now is that it's time to feed the chickens and hope for a few fresh eggs.
OK...I've written at some length about the evils of torture carried out on behalf of the security of the United States of America, about the carnage of mountaintop removal, and one or two things about music and the music business. But what's gotten the most audience response, this last little while, is garlic cheese grits.
So, in fairness to all, allow me to publish the recipe we use down here. And a correction: My father e-mailed to note that his fondness for grits began at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, South Carolina, October 1967, where he was reading his first paper on the Jesuits (his historical specialty is the economic history of the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Portuguese empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, which makes my modest foray into roots music seem positively mainstream; although at present he's working on a book on Barbary Pirates and their prisoners).
The recipe, then, comes from Mrs. Betty Philley, who lives still next to the home where my wife and brother-in-law were raised. My hunch is that it's pretty typical. And, as Peter's mom noted, you don't need the garlic cheese roll, it's quite possible to substitute velveeta and garlic powder, or garlic salt. Since we tend to keep unsalted butter around (it's somewhat sweeter and typically fresher than salted butter), we would probably use garlic salt. No matter. This is good stuff, sure to harden your arteries if eaten regularly. Susan is making two batches just now for Maggie's fifth birthday party, from which event I am temporarily playing hookie.
GARLIC CHEESE GRITS
4 cups water
1 cup Quaker quick cook grits (not instant)
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 pound oleo (margarine, for you young folks; butter for we purists)
1 roll Kraft Garlic Cheese
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk and Tabasco sauce (mixed together, a few shakes will do, more will do better if, like me, you like hot spices)
1 cup cornflakes, crushed
Cook grits according to directions on the package. Remove from heat and let cool for 15 minutes. Cut up garlic cheese and butter, add to cooling grits. Stir well. Add eggs and milk beaten together. Pour on 2 quart greased baking dish. Top with crushed cornflakes. Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees.
If you're making it in advance it can be frozen, so long as you add the cornflakes when you thaw and bake.
And now back to the NFL draft...and trying to read the Titans' tea leaves...about which, perhaps, I shall bore you anon.
All I knew about grits growing up was that mother used them as binder when she made cat food, which she did once every two weeks or so in a kettle filled with kidneys and other organs most western humans don't eat, but to which our three to five cats became addicted. The house smelled, and we all absented ourselves on cat food days. And we only had grits around in the first place because my father would occasionally get into a mood and fancy them for breakfast, though how he acquired that taste in Glendale, CA, I don't know. Probably the Navy. Blame them.
And so I acquired the notion that grits were fit only for animals and eccentric parents.
It is probable that my acquaintance with Southern cuisine began during my exile in Los Angeles, where I took to eating at Rosco's Chicken & Waffles whenever possible. Certainly my fondness for cheese grits dates to the first time Susan, who would become my wife, cooked for a whole bunch of friends.
The key ingredient in her cheese grits recipe (other than butter) is a 6-ounce tube Kraft produces that reads: GARLIC pasteurized process cheese food. Which is to say, garlic-flavored velveeta. Now, as the health food guy working parts of most days in the family garden, I realize it's a little...out of character...to embrace garlic pasteurized cheese foods, but cheese grits are good eating, even if only on very special occasions.
And so, in advance of little Maggie's fifth birthday, I went shopping, for we will be serving Fleming County cow burgers and turkey hot dogs to a few friends. And cheese grits.
The helpful man in the dairy department pointed me toward the garlic cheese food, and then added that the three boxes on display were the last we might ever see, for, apparently, it's being discontinued. I resisted the temptation to horde some, for it's not all that hard to toss garlic salt into velveeta.
But once again we have been victimized by the tyranny of the urban masses, who do not cook, who do not eat cheese grits, who are immune to the pleasures of this form of processed cheese food. Small town Southern life just lost another crucial flavor.
Not unexpectedly I ran into a couple familiar faces when we drove cross-state to Louisville to see the opening night of the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss tour. One of whom was reviewing the show for...let's just say it's a major entertainment conglomerate, with tendrils throughout the print and online world. For $50.
Which, by way of reference, is rather less than No Depression would have paid to review the show for our print edition, and we never were able to pay our writers near what they were worth, nor what they (at least once upon a time) commanded based on their experience and skill. (Your co-editors, as co-owners with staff positions, have never been paid additionally for what they write.)
Now...setting aside the two free tickets critics typically receive, though in the old days those tickets would have been paid for by the media organization so as to avoid conflicts of interest...let's see how this works out as a way to make a living. The tickets don't count because you can't eat them unless you scalp them, which is really unethical. And wrong. Just plain wrong. And the tickets don't count because we're talking here about making a living, and not even the IRS counts free tickets as income. At least I'm pretty sure they don't.
So. Let's say our reviewer lives near to the venue and it takes only a gallon of gas to get to the concert. That's $4. Parking across the street was $5. Let's assume no beer was purchased at the show, because we're trying to make a living here. You had to get to the box office before 8 p.m. to collect those free tickets, and the concert got out something after 11 p.m. So that's three...three and a half, maybe four if traffic stunk (hey, plumbers charge for travel from the time they leave until the time they return to their shop). And then let's say this writer, a professional who actually took notes (as opposed to your humble and error-ridden scribe), spent only another hour writing the actual review. Which doesn't count thinking time, and would be pretty quick for most of us. So that's four and a half hours of work, and I know it may seem funny to talk about sitting in good seats watching terrific music as work, but it is work when you're reviewing, and, again, this is how we make our living, we music critics.
The math works like this, then:
$9 gas and parking, which makes the net freelance income $41.
Divide 41 by 4.5 hours of work, comes out to $9.11 an hour. As of July 1 minimum wage in Kentucky will be $6.55. So it's nice to know that a college education, and decades of experience, is worth something.
This, perhaps, is how you make money in the new online ecology: By exploiting content providers. Let's see...the music is free, the writing about it might as well be free, but the people who make the boxes the music plays on and the sites on which it is discussed, they're getting paid, and some of them quite handsomely.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Only a bit worse, from the perspective of the caste I have proudly belonged to these last 21 years.
