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September 25, 2006
When mountains cry
Mine are a rootless people, and I am certainly not from here. Everybody knows it. Alden has been my family name for only two generations, and it isn't common to Rowan County. I do not presume to know the first thing about coal mining, save that rising energy prices and what is explained as the uncertainty of foreign supplies have enhanced the demand for coal.
But I know one or two things about mountains. For most of the formative years that mattered, I sought solace and excitement in a small, enclosed valley in the North Cascades, surrounded by three mountains of such insignificance I can remember only that we called one Frog Mountain, that we climbed another heedless and liquored up, and that mountain goats were occasionally to be seen on the high face of the third. The North Fork of the Skykomish River ran around the edge of this valley, and sometimes (when the loggers upstream did their job poorly) spilled over the valley and flooded most of the cabins.
My best friend of that and several eras had to hike out one Thanksgiving when we both were in college, and it took a helicopter to get his mother home. Her Thunderbird didn't make it out for three or four years.
I do not miss Seattle, save for my family and the few friends who remain there. I do not miss the buildings, the places, nor even the memories the old buildings and places stir up, those few which remain. But I miss that valley, the smell of snow in the air, the silence which follows, the stark blues and greens. The peace and beauty of the place. The last time I went back the road had been moved, and though I could have worked my way back in, I no longer am welcome there, for the land is in new hands.
I tease my wife and friends that these Appalachian mountains are hardly foothills by comparison to my sweeping Cascades, but that in no way diminishes their beauty.
There is a new hell afoot in these Appalachian Mountains. The demons of industry have found something worse than strip mining. Now they just tear the whole god damn mountain off, pull the coal out, flatten it down, and hope mother nature solves the problem by some time in the next millennium.
The coal companies, of course, have another story for what is called mountaintop removal. It is said to be safer for the miners (if not for the neighbors), and, inevitably, it is said to be necessary for our national survival.
But plainly said, it is a kind of rape, and that is not a word I use lightly.
One has but to look at pictures.
Try this one: http://www.kftc.org/our-work/canary-project/campaigns/mtr/MTR-generalinfo
And so I hurried back from the Americana Music Association conference in Nashville so as to be in Morehead in time for a fund-raising event held at the family bookstore on behalf of the long-running activist group, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth. (Google them; I still haven't figured out how to place a URL in here.) Which meant missing breakfast with friends and losing more sleep, and so I explained myself to almost everybody I met.
And none of them knew what I was talking about. A bright, well-informed bunch from all over the country, and they had no idea that whole mountains were being reduced to rubble, entire communities destroyed, so that coal might be extracted and the lights left on.
Maybe they care, maybe they don't, my friends from elsewhere.
Maybe, as Bob Edwards said a few months ago, Appalachia is a sacrificial zone in these United States, a place where education is modest, work is damnably hard, and the landscape is subject to destruction at the whim of landowners far, far away.
But I know to a certainty that if this treatment were proposed for my old friend, Frog Mountain, the whole of the Northwest would be up in arms. The Sierra Club would lobby fiercely. Major media would attend. High-powered lawyers would be heard speaking eloquently and stridently in the halls of Congress.
Instead we have a still, deathly silence on a subject about which nobody speaks, nobody cares. Except here, where a small coalition of writers (including Wendell Berry and Silas House), the least potent of political figures, bear witness to the devastation. Perhaps they will invite me to join them, perhaps not. I do not know what can be done.
And so I will start here: Please help. This land is being killed; it will not recover, nor will the people who hold it in trust.
Please help.
Please.
Posted by Grant at 7:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
September 17, 2006
What is to be done?
The moral high ground in Iraq remains unoccupied, and nobody seems willing or able to fight for it. Only to talk about it.
The president of the United States now has the audacity to argue that if the CIA and other murky branches of government are not allowed to, what? PRETEND to torture alleged terrorists...and to suspend troublesome aspects of the Bill of Rights so as to better spy on U.S. citizens, then we will be unable to defend our shores against the next terrorist attack.
That's far too high a price to pay. It's a fool's bargain. It's the worst kind of cop-out. And it is illogical, for we have been told time and again that there will be another attack.
What is at stake here is not our security, but, rather more importantly, our sense of self. Our belief in purpose. Our faith that our nation, the most powerful in the world, stands for what is good and right.
If it does not, our two-century experiment in democracy has failed.
Imagine, for a moment, that you come from a culture in which torture is a regular component of police interrogation. And that you are tied to a wooden board suspended over water. With a group of people in very loud voices demanding answers to questions that you may or may not understand, and threatening to hold you under that water unless you answer to their satisfaction. And that you have been denied sleep for days and bombarded with noise. How does the fact that they know they're not planning to kill you change the stark reality that you are threatened with death? How is that not torture?
And never mind that torture seems, according to the experts, a particularly unreliable method for producing accurate intelligence.
This is the U.S. government. Our government. Embracing torture (or outsourcing it) and suspending the Bill of Rights as it serves them, sneering even at the possibility of oversight.
We went into Iraq on the demonstrably false premise that there was a connection between the events of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, and on the basis of clearly wrong (and very probably skewed) intelligence that Hussein possessed and would employ weapons of mass destruction.
It does no good for the Administration to argue that Congress saw the same intelligence, because Congress didn't. Nobody did. We saw what they allowed us to see, and, so long as the Republicans control both houses there will be no proper investigation of that process.
We argued to the world court of public opinion that we were right and certain and that the moral thing for us to do was to invade Iraq. We argued that the certainty of our sophisticated intelligence gave us the right to invade a soverign country that had not attacked us. Our information was wrong.
And then we did a bad job of it.
Which is worse.
The war party now argues that if three of its own senators (all of whom have rather more experience of war than do the present decision-makers) block legislation allowing this behavior to continue, they will then be responsible for the defeat of the Republican Party this fall.
And the people saying this in print and on this morning's chat shows (I presume; I haven't the heart to watch), they're avowedly Christians.
If we are not allowed to simulate torture, we cannot defend ourselves, that's the argument being made.
The Democrats have no answers. They have nothing. They advance only poll-tested platitudes, or policies that might divide the electorate in such a way as to put them into office.
Iraq is a mess, and Afghanistan (where we did have the moral high ground) looks little better just now. Maybe there is no way out that doesn't lead to anarchy and civil war and mass misery.
But surely we can (or should at least try) to do better.
What would happen if one of our leaders -- and I don't care what party affiliation he or she might have -- stood up and said it plain: This is a mess. We were wrong. It's our job to fix it. It's going to cost a lot of money and some more lives and we're going to need help from every country in the world still willing to talk to us. But we don't have a choice, not morally and not strategically, for if we fail here, we will run a much higher risk of failing in North Korea and Iran and Darfur and every other hungry place watching how we behave in public, and modelling our actions.
Maybe they'd lose. But somehow we need to transform politics once again into the process of deciding who might offer the best leadership and solutions to our collective problems, and not simply a winner-take-all celebrity death match.
My heading, incidentally, comes from a tract written by Lenin that I once owned but never read. I am not now nor have I ever been a communist. But I do suspect Marx (who I did once read) is best understood within the context of 19th century utopian experiments. And I wish today that we believed so fervently in the power and potential improving the human condition, and not simply in the proprietary exercise of power.
And does anybody really think the price of gas hasn't dropped in time for the next election; that it won't rise again come mid-November?
Posted by Grant at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
September 13, 2006
Bragging about my baby
It has not escaped notice that children were born long before our little girl arrived, and that they were also cute and adorable to those who held them. On the other hand, as our friends Mike & Terri warned us before she was born, "You plant corn, you get corn."
For various reasons, mostly habit now, Maggie goes to sleep with her boombox playing. In part this is our attempt to expose her to music, but mostly the sound is meant to be soothing and to mask whatever else we might be doing (like clattering dishes or opening a bottle of wine) around the house. She has the attention span of her age, which means apparently that she can watch or listen to the same thing over and over and over and over again, and then no more. This is how I know Norah Jones to be a more durable talent than her detractors suggest, for example.
Anyway, we finally got a booster seat for my little red truck, so Maggie's been proudly riding around with daddy the last week or so. Which is the only explanation I have to offer for our discussion last night when she announced she was (finally; at last) tired of an over-alliterated children's book performed on CD called "Leo The Lightning Bug" and would I put some music on. What did she want? She furrowed her brow. The Duhks? she asked. Then, no. Ali Farka Toure, she announced brightly, though her pronunciation is closer to words we don't speak in public than one might wish.
She has been listening to both rather a lot recently. The Duhks have even the power to quell a tired and irrational child, though I suspect part of the attraction is that her grandparents' coffeeshop is called the Fuzzy Duck. Knowing Ali Farka Toure comes from Africa (where the lions and elephants live) is at least part of his attraction.
Still, it makes a father proud.
It also gives me a brief opportunity to sing the praises of the Duhks' new album, Migration, which entered stores yesterday. In hindsight, and having been compelled by my toddler to listen to the album over and over again, I wish I had lobbied for more than a review in our current issue, for it features three or four of the best songs I've heard this year: "Ol' Cook Pot," "Mountain Of Things," "Heaven's My Home," "Who Will Take My Place," and "Moses Don't Get Lost"; but especially "Heaven's My Home."
Much of this has to do with the spectacular (but rarely showy) vocals of Jessee Havey, and I suspect that her gifts may one day outstrip the egalitarian impulses of her band. I also suspect that some of the album's unevenness is an attempt to keep the peace, though it could as easily be the case that I am simply responding to only one of the band's several virtues. Whatever the case, I shall look forward to seeing them (and some of you) at the AMA convention in Nashville next week.
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September 10, 2006
September 11
This anniversary should not be used -- by anybody, least of all those with whom I agree -- to political advantage. Not this year. Not any year.
A moment of silence and a pause for decency, please.
Posted by Grant at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
September 7, 2006
A little respect for Robert Christgau, please
Having sacked Chuck Eddy, the new owners of the Village Voice paused only a few months before (as expected) discharging Robert Christgau, one of the most esteemed and well-rounded critics popular music has produced.
We are not friends, and neither of them has written for me, best I can recall (though the door is always open); nor I for them. Both men are provocative and intelligent writers with whom I often disagree. Which is to say they are first-rate critics. Doubtless they will find jobs, perhaps they received nice parting gifts. Maybe their replacements will do better work, but my suspicion is the chief virtue of the new staff will be youth and a glib aversion to substance.
The Village Voice and its chain of alternative weeklies has now been absorbed into the (once upon a time Phoenix) New Times stable, and what that portends for the quality of alternative journalism in these United States I shudder to think. I'm sure good people work for New Times, but nobody ever accused that chain of putting quality before profits. And they would appear now to control the alternative weekly press in every major market in the United States. Which means we should probably be talking about creating alternatives.
Among Christgau's contributions to our national critical dialogue was his stewardship of the Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. We who write about various flavors of popular music are all honored to be invited to contribute to that poll, and some thousand or more writers do so each year.
But at the suggestion of my colleague from New Mexico, Stephen Terrell, I will pass this time. And I would urge my fellow critics to do the same. Pazz & Jop without Christgau is a travesty. Perhaps new management won't bother with this annual tradition, or (more likely) they'll be delighted to see another middle aged critic leave the field of battle. But if enough of us decline to participate, perhaps it will mean something. At least to Mr. Christgau and Mr. Eddy.
Posted by Grant at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
September 3, 2006
Type and the impermanence of new things
It has long been my conviction that editorial design should be contextual (that is, that the design, like the article, should be ABOUT something, and that they should seek to be about the same something) and not purely decorative, as is the current messy fashion. Purely decorative design is tedious and self-indulgent, a willfully know-nothing approach to displaying text completely in step with our times. The triumph of designers who don't read over text which, increasingly, is so brief and glib as to be worth not reading. (David Carson's designs were ABOUT something, even if you couldn't read the words. I'll give the devil that much due.)
That doesn't mean that I expect most readers to decipher the typographic codes behind designs in ND (though I'm not good enough for them to be all that subtle), but it does mean that I believe those meanings are conveyed subtextually and that they enhance — however marginally — the message of each article.
Sometimes they're an intentional commentary on and counterpoint to the text. Every once in a great while, for example, I will set a feature in Bookman as a waggish homage to the artist's origins in the 1970s, when Bookman was a dominant text face. (I have foregone the temptation to tweak artists who came to prominence in the early 1980s with Souvenir, Eras, Goudy Oldstyle, or Korinna, but someday...)
But mostly I select text and headline faces for our features based on intuitive feel and some kind of connection to the text. And all the typefaces I use in ND (save one) were first drawn at least half a century ago. We write about rooted music, and I choose from among familiar families of type whose origins and display will suggest and link to those roots. The exception is one sans serif family, a knock-off of vintage boxing posters. Which isn't much of an exception.
What I mean to say, oddly though it will read (but you've already come this far) is that different typefaces MEAN different things to me, and I therefore presume they have some of that resonance, however distantly, to our readers.
But I have recently been playing with a project which might oblige me to approach typography quite differently, for it is intentionally unrooted in the past, very aware of the present, looking forward with as much anticipation as I tend to look backwards. I am an indifferent historian of type (only recently have I discovered that Franklin Gothic is half a century older than Univers; I'd have guessed quite the opposite), and am largely habituated to the typefaces with which I became acquainted in the halcyon days of Compugraphic. But this new dabbling has proved an unexpected challenge, almost like learning a new language in middle age.
As with many things, software has made the design of new typefaces considerably easier, at least judging by their proliferation. But in trying to pick a text face from among the myriad contemporary choices, I am, for the moment, at a loss. What do they MEAN? What do they SIGNIFY? What resonance do they carry? Have I been paying so little attention as to be ignorant of these innovations?
Type didn't use to be introduced to the market with so little context. I was never a big fan of Herbert Lubalin's type, but he (and others) used the old U&LC to showcase their new designs and established a kind of context for their future use. Most of those fonts have faded from fashion (when was the last time you chose Zapf Medium or Benguiat Gothic?). Emigre mostly existed at the edge of my knowing, and their fonts always seemed experimental for the sake of being experimental, limited in context and application to the specific use for which they were originally constructed. And of no use, to me.
But we are now flooded with fresh text faces (not to mention decorative types) and I find myself at a loss picking among them. They are all technically pretty and functional, at least the ones with which I have been dabbling, but they also seem passionless and inert, and they don't swing. Most of them won't last, inevitably; that's the marketplace talking, not your friendly curmudgeon typing. And because there are so bloody many of them, I suspect none will be so generally adopted as to define a moment in time in the way that, say, Avant Garde so clearly echoes the 1960s and 1970s.
I can look at my daughter's books and guess, based on the text face, when the older ones were designed, and come up right most of the time. I wonder if these new families of type will wear that well, or if they're built in the same way the half-million dollar mansions dotting the edge of our towns and cities are built, with prefab pressboard, cheap pine, and plastic. Only the granite countertops seem built to endure. It all seems terribly wasteful. Or, to quote once again from the great fraud, Carlos Casteneda, it seems a path without heart.
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