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Howling at the moon and such

Some issues are more fun to produce and come together more easily than others. The one we publish immediately after SXSW is always a bit challenging because we come home tired and filled with music, and our families greet us with the idea that it ought to be their turn. This one was particularly difficult because I simply could not write. Not writer's block, not quite, though ordinarily I write pretty quickly and this was more of a grind. I have been waiting to write about Jon Dee Graham for any number of years, at least since I first saw him (and spoke briefly with him) at the Sutler in Nashville. Almost every time I've been to Austin I've made it a point to see him play, and the effort has always been rewarded.

At the risk of protesting too much, this isn't fanboy stalking. I don't write about music because doing so allows brief proximity to musicians. I write about music because something in the songs, in the work...inspires me. Makes me think. Opens doors. (The best live music makes me lose my sense of self, but never inspires me to dance.) I often struggle within each piece to allow the musician to be heard; often, the music is a jumping-off point to explore ideas that engage ME, and I have to remind myself that the audience came to learn about the musician and the work, not me. There's always a rhythmic jolt to be smoothed out between the idea I'm wrestling with and the business of writing about an artist and their new record.

And, anyway, meeting musicians is no guaranteed bargain. I've long argued that the qualities which make for great art do not necessarily make for decent human beings. One of the tensions I sought to explore with Jon Dee was the full attention required to create art -- the single-minded amorality of the thing -- balanced against the love and respect one's family demands and deserves. (None of which, incidentally, should be construed to suggest that Jon Dee was anything less than splendid company, but I hope I'd have written largely the same piece had he not been. It's about the work.)

Anyway, I tried some things I lacked the skills and depth to pull off. I got stuck -- oh so stuck -- on an opening built around a riff stolen from Ginsberg's "Howl". This is the kind of thing I fall prey to; I'd only read the first few lines of "Howl" before I started, and once I got through the whole poem I realized that past that first batch of words I largely disagreed with its point of view. And I don't write that way, though in the late 1970s I guess I tried. But there I was, stuck polishing words that I could not let go of and which my two readers kindly assured me simply did not work. (I should explain that I tend to have a couple friends vet pieces that I care deeply about before I pass them on to Peter. This is not meant to disrespect my co-editor. Partly it's one of my neuroses and I don't want to waste his time, and partly it's a recognition that he and I are very different writers, and that he isn't going to give me the particular flavor of feedback I need at this stage. Later, he watches my back very carefully and I am deeply grateful for that.) I also got stuck wrestling with some ghosts who did not belong in the piece, but they were more easily banished.

And so things ground on and on and on and the story would not unravel itself, would not finish, would not resolve in any useful way. And I was blowing deadlines badly, all of them, which is simply not my nature, but which admission will no doubt bring cheer to some of the writers I chide regularly for pushing our schedule. On the last possible Sunday morning, with my wife and daughter safely out of the house at church, I drank lots of coffee and stalked around the house, walking laps through our labyrinthian ranch, talking loudly to myself and the cats, dashing to the computer and writing sentences that would be deleted a few moments later.

Finally, I settled onto the futon couch in the quiet room where Susan does yoga, exhausted, and yielded to the best advice I had been given, yielded to the inevitable, gave up all the things I was trying to say and said the things I could. A couple hours later it was done.

All of which is a peculiar preamble to what I came here to write this morning, for the byproduct of all this dithering was that I had almost exactly seven days to design a 144-page magazine (usually I have two weeks, more or less). Ordinarily I go through this kind of mental block on one or more opening spreads each issue, spending hours developing type treatments that are labor intensive but useless, in the end. This issue I hadn't the luxury of such foolishness, so I decided to try an idea I'd been playing with for a couple issues, just to see if it would work. So I invented a quick rule to keep me from messing around and wasting time. I am curious whether anyone will notice, and suspect not, for it's the kind of minutiae of interest only to me. But there you have it.

None of it, I fear, is my best work, and I so wanted all of it to be. And I truly hope none of that shows on the page.

Part two of this morning's thought. A few days back, talking to one of the friends who so patiently reads my drafts, he mentioned that the editorial standards of ND -- that is, that Peter and/or I (and rarely both of us) have to LIKE the music before we'll assign a major piece about it -- were different from how he'd approached a somewhat different job. He assigned pieces that he hoped would produce good writing.

Neither of us is wrong, for we were and are doing different things. And, in fact, with other magazines I have assigned on much the same pattern: Find good writers who know music that you're not drawn to, trust them to make aesthetic choices, and work with them to make the stories sing. (Old readers will recognize my friend Jeff Gilbert's entrance into ND's review section after all these years. He was my heavy metal writer at The Rocket, and remains the best example of this trust.) My answer is this: For any number of years Jim Emerson wrote film criticism for The Rocket. (As it happens, we went to the same high school and college, a few years apart.) And he wrote beautifully, with knowledge and spark and a very clear point of view. But it took me a long time to figure out that he wrote beautifully about indifferent films, or at least about movies I didn't like much when I saw them. An example, though in this case I very much agreed with him: He wrote eloquently about John Carpenter's "They Live" as a metaphor for the Reagan years. It's a great riff, but I've no idea if Carpenter (much less Rowdy Roddy Piper, to get in my obligatory pro wrestling footnote) meant it to be there. His writing was so lyrical that it transformed the text of an avowedly B-movie into something far more luminous. But it's still a B-movie, at best.

Once I figured out how Jim approached criticism, I quit wasting money going to movies he liked. (And the dirty little secret...I started writing a little film criticism myself and getting in for free. But I gave it up, particularly when I moved to LA, which is entirely another story and not one worth telling.) Point being -- and the coffee really will run out shortly -- if there's a significant piece on an artist in ND, it means one or both of the magazine's co-editors really believe the album which provides the excuse to write the piece is worth listening to. Heck, we know our writers will turn in solid and well-informed prose, regardless. But if we don't believe in the music, why bother?

Posted by grant on April 28, 2006 8:29 AM | Permalink