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July 28, 2007
Geezerfest, and a bit of fun
It has been suggested, kindly and not inappropriately, that I should spend more time in this space writing about music. Truly, I thought that's what I was doing, but I do understand the point. Not that I'm going to behave better (or differently), but that's sufficient pretext to share the press release I simply can't avoid clipping below.
By way of longer explanation, I come from grunge. I also come from the Berkeley folk traditions my parents brought north when they moved to Seattle shortly after my birth, and I come from the punk/new wave sounds of my late-'70s and early-'80s college days, and from the new traditionalist country music I listened to in the mid-'80s. And blues have woven through all of that, off and on, along with one or two other things.
But, not counting my college years, I come from grunge as a professional writer about music. As I quipped ages ago, I wouldn't have a writing career without Mudhoney. But they're not on this bill. A lot of old -- no, that's unkind -- a lot of familiar names are performing at the Crocodile Cafe these two nights, and one or two might remember me kindly. Alas, I cannot join them, for I live far away and have other plans this weekend.
Ah. And one or two comments from me will appear in italics after the press squib. Just because.
SATURDAY & SUNDAY, AUGUST 25 & 26, 4PM
CROCODILE CAFÉ – 21+
SEATTLE, WA (July 27, 2007) — GEEZERFEST 2007, featuring once-in-a-lifetime reunion shows by bands integral to the pre-Nirvana glory days of Seattle grunge rock (circa 1987-1990), takes place Saturday, August 25th and Sunday, August 26th at the Crocodile Café in downtown Seattle. Don’t miss this historic gathering of the musicians that formed the architecture for what is now globally known as “The Seattle Sound.” Shows on both days start at 4PM and is a 21 and older only event.
For complete information visit www.myspace.com/geezerfest.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 – 4PM
BLOOD CIRCUS
Their thundering debut Sub Pop single, “Two Way Street/Six Feet Under” defined the sound that was soon to take over the world. This will be the first Blood Circus performance in over 10 years. "Six Feet Under" is one of the quintessential grunge songs. Blood Circus could have been the biggest band out of Seattle, but they weren't.
CATBUTT
Geezerfest is proud to present the first Catbutt performance in 17 years. The legendary Catbutt lasted a total of three years, churning out garage rock with a hardcore attitude. As unpredictable as their music, expect the unexpected; However you can expect a new CD in 2008 on Flotation Records.
SWALLOW
Signed to Sub Pop in 1988, Swallow’s first seven-inch single was followed by two full-length albums and an unreleased record. Reunited in 2006, the “lost” Swallow album — Teach Your Bird To Sing — will be out on Flotation Records, just in time for Geezerfest. I wonder who this Flotation Records is? Seems a noble calling, but I hope they have the fortune to back it up.
COFFIN BREAK
Signed to both C/Z and Epitaph records, Coffin Break played its first show in 1987 and went on to tour the states an astonishing fifteen times. Known during that time as “the hardest working band in Seattle,” Coffin Break took their final break in 1994. This will be the band’s first performance in over 13 years. Funny thing is, I can't remember ever having seen them.
LOVE BATTERY
Released by Sub Pop in 1989, the band’s legendary single, "Between the Eyes" cemented Love Battery’s place in the upper echelon of Seattle music. One of the Seattle bands that refuse to quit. New material out in 2008 on Flotation Records. Once an astoundingly good band in the grunge-psychedelic tradition. Some of their records are imperfect reminders of their greatness, and one or two are almost as good as they could have been. And really nice guys. It pains me especially to miss their set.
SNOW BUD & THE FLOWER PEOPLE
With songs like “Grass is Groovy,” “Bong Hit,” and “Uppers Downers Inners Outers,” Portland’s Snow Bud will take the sound of drugs straight into your psyche’s inner sanctum. Featuring Chris Newman of Napalm Beach / Divining Rods.
VALIS
Supergroup of best friends, Dan Peters (Mudhoney), Kurt Danielson (TAD) and Van Conner [Screaming Trees] started what is still rolling today. Kurt and Dan left, but Van and brother Patrick Conner lead this band with hard spaced-out rock and destruction. The Conner brothers! Yeah! I feared they'd quit entirely. Of course there's that third brother, the other one from the Screaming Trees, but two out of three ain't bad.
LAMAR
Enigmatic new band featuring Chad Channing [ex-Nirvana] on drums. Even we don’t know what to expect! This will be the first show for them.
F-HOLES
Only the cool kids knew about the F-Holes. The rest need to find out for themselves. Featuring the legendary Otis P. Otis [ex-Willard] on lead F-hole.
MOS GENERATOR
Call it ‘70s rock…call it stoner rock…call it heavy metal. Fact is, Mos Generator play kick ass, honest, old school heavy rock 'n' roll. Featuring ex-members of Treepeople, Mindfunk and Voodoo Gearshift.
SUNDAY – AUGUST 26 – 4PM
RC5
Says SPIN magazine: “Stripped down essentials-only rock n’ roll for a generation who have forgotten what the real thing is. As a result, RC5 may be the most cool and vital band on the planet.”
GREEN PAJAMAS
Seattle's answer to the Los Angeles Paisley Underground scene, the Pajamas only make a few live appearances each year. Geezerfest is indeed honored.
FROM THE NORTH
“Love Rock” rises again. Malfunkshun guitarist Kevin Wood teams up with Brad/Pigeonhed singer Shawn Smith to complete Andrew Wood’s unsung stories. Could be spectacular, could be spectacularly sad.
BUG NASTIES
Brother James Burdyshaw, also known as the guitarist for Catbutt, Sinister Six and 64 Spiders, gets out his soul singer jones with this swingin’ mod outfit. Their debut CD was just released by Flotation Records.
DOWN WITH PEOPLE
Known in the ‘80s as Room Nine, Down With People features Love Battery singer Ron Nine leading the sonic psych trio back to the future, complete with a light show! Their CD will debut on Flotation Records. More signs of life from Ron Nine. Makes me smile, it does.
ROBERT ROTH
Robert Roth continues to expand on the sonic frontiers he previously claimed as the founder of Seattle's widely acclaimed Truly, who recorded for Sub Pop and Capitol during the ‘90s.
SISTER PSYCHIC
Jack Endino describes Sister Psychic’s music as “pop tunes with big, huge melodies and hooks…so pop I felt my teeth rotting as I mixed it.” Sporting a new lineup, these guys are more powerful than ever. Occasionally a brilliant band, theirs was, in that time and place, the best song about junk. And it wasn't first-person, not that I remember, anyhow.
CAPPING DAY
Formed in 1987, Capping Day got caught up in major label machinations before breaking free, breaking up, and eventually, making up. Powered by sweet girl harmonies, Capping Day brought rays of sun to every dark cavernous club they played.
SPIKE
After Swallow broke up in 1992, singer/guitarist Rod Moody formed Spike, which attempted to play every type of pop music genre imaginable in its five-year existence. The edited version plays at Geezerfest - first show in 10 years.
For media information/materials contact Rod Moody at DMV Presents at (206) 935-5141 / e-mail: rodmoody1@yahoo.com
Tickets are $13.00 advance / $15.00 at the door plus applicable service charges and are on sale now online at www.ticketweb.com. Line-up subject to change.
Posted by Grant at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
July 24, 2007
Punk Planet: Requiem for a Heavyweight
One of the first things I did when assuming my honorary role as magazine buyer for CoffeeTree Books was to add Punk Planet to our small selection of music magazines. It is one of the very few music titles worth reading, whether one listens to today's punk rock or not.
On break this afternoon I stopped by for a fresh glass of cold coffee and reflexively went to the magazine rack to straighten and rearrange. There, waiting for me, was the new issue of Punk Planet, offering a very simple, quite lovely green cover: A photograph of their previous 79 issues, and the first lines of an editor's note that begins, "As much as it breaks our hearts to write these words, the final issue of Punk Planet..."
Theirs is a by now familiar story: A distributor went bankrupt. (Fortunately, that distributor turned us down.) Punk Planet never recovered. They were also, Dan and Anne note (co-editors, I believe), hurt by the decline in independent book and record stores, and by the various market forces buffeting the music industry today.
Though I did not always read Punk Planet, I was always comforted by its presence and encouraged by its intelligence, its bravery, and its passion. And I am mindful that ND and Punk Planet emerged from the same times and the same traditions, and operate in the same marketplace, however different (and how much the same) our focus and missions have been.
Which is not to suggest that we will be following Punk Planet into fond memory any time soon.
They are soliciting donations to pay their writers, a fine and honorable gesture in difficult times. An online community and a book publishing arm will continue, though I fear they will be burdened by the magazine's debt. Following is a link to offer cash and condolences: http://www.punkplanet.com/
The world will be a poorer and less-informed place in their absence, in the absence of the many other small magazines squeezed out of the marketplace these last few years. Our democracy really is at risk. Do not turn a blind eye, nor pretend that the theoretical proliferation of content online is somehow a substitute for good, well-designed and well-edited titles in print. It is not.
And, yes, I do very much appreciate the community which continues to surround and to nurture this little magazine.
I do not pray and have no hat to take off. A moment of silence, then, for Punk Planet. And my thanks for a job well done, if never finished.
Posted by Grant at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
July 18, 2007
Rules for Reasonables: A Draft Manifesto
With apologies to Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals sits mostly unread on a shelf, a reminder of a brief and successful long-ago battle to defeat the erotic music bill in Washington State, what follows is an attempt to move beyond the apocalyptic and powerless despair which runs like white water through much of what I've been typing here.
It was inspired by my friend up east, who wrote a couple nights back that another musician had been screwed by our health care system. Instead of getting tests and a cure a year ago, he waited until his wife got a job with benefits and he qualified for those tests, only to find that he now has a year and a half to live.
What, my friend asked, can we do?
Power to the people. Right on.
That's my answer, and I mean it, man.
We the people have been disenfranchised. We have been sold a perversion of the American dream: Greed is good.
Greed was never the American dream, not for most people, not for most of our history. Enough was our dream. Enough to live, enough for our children to live, enough room and freedom to live as we choose. Greed has taken over and the greedy have, for the moment, triumphed.
This is their triumph: We teeter on chaos, chained by the great unfairness of limited opportunity. We live in a society which does not value physical work, at its peril. You want chaos on a scale Al-Qaeda can only dream of? Get every plumber in the country to take the same week off.
We have known at least since the 1970s that the growing population of humans on this planet was potentially dangerous, and that we would some day run out of petroleum.
So, to borrow from an essay by V.I. Lenin that I once owned but never read, What is to be done?
(1) Fight the power. The most immediately participatory and meaningful democracy available to us each day is economic: That's where our votes are counted, and there are no hanging chads. So every time you shop be conscious of what you're buying, who made it, where it came from, and what its impact on the environment is or will be when you discard it. If you value organic produce and independent local businesses, as I happen to, support them. Yes, it might cost more; it might not. Not everything at Wal-Mart is offered at the lowest price possible; that's how they make their money.
(2) My mentor, the late Maxine Cushing Gray strongly believed that public officials need to know they're being watched. And so for many long years she was the only member of the press or the public regularly to attend meetings of the Seattle Arts Commission. She was affectionately known as the Tweed Hornet. The corollary, courtesy "The West Wing" is this: Decisions are made by the people who show up. This means attending and participating in public meetings held throughout your community. Not all of them, some of them. Find what interests you and what you can manage to keep up with. Participating, by the way, doesn't mean recycling the received wisdom of talk radio or the editorial page; participating means listening and being open to a variety of positions and to the reasonable possibility that other people have different competencies.
(3) Use viral marketing. Not that I quite know what that phrase means, but I know this: Every gay person who comes out makes it that much harder for their extended family to oppose gay rights and gay marriage, because it takes a very particular kind of son of a bitch to hate one's own children. As the baby boom ages, and as we hear more and more stories about the catastrophic disaster that is our health care system, we need to share those stories -- so long as they're accurate. A fellow here who I don't know was recently told his present health emergency would cost him nearly a half million dollars. He is well-loved; there was a fish fry and an auction and it was standing room at the Carl Perkins (not that Carl Perkins) Center. Raised $18,000, which is a lot of money in these parts, and a drop in the bucket.
(4) Break up the monopolies, and if Wal-Mart and the other big box category killers aren't technically monopolies then let's redefine the word. We need a national law or court decision or whatever obliging the major corporations to break up into manageable component parts. This is unAmerican, right? Well, the American dream is not to work as middle management for a large corporation, obliged to move from rootless suburb to rootless suburb until your children are college age and friendless, and then downsized back into the service industry. (OK, so this is a less immediate and achievable goal. But a fella can dream.) In the meantime, don't shop there unless you absolutely have to.
(5) Borrowing now from the Cowboy Junkies, cheap cannot be how we feel. The fundamental law of corporate size is that we consumers care only about how inexpensively we may buy whatever is newly marketed our way. That has to stop. We have to appreciate the long-term economic and ecological costs of what we buy. Saving a penny is not the highest good, and never was. Thrift is the old Yankee virtue. Cheap just ends up landfill and breaks when you need it, anyhow.
(6) Trouble to meet your neighbors. Try living in a real community of people who aren't necessarily just like you, instead of the nicely sanitary and like-minded virtual community we increasingly occupy. If your house is on fire, your tire's flat, or you need that cup of sugar, you'll be grateful to have made their acquaintance.
(7) Learn to grow something you like to eat, even if it's just a windowbox of basil. It helps to know where food comes from and what it tastes like freshly harvested and not delivered from Chile. And if you've bothered to grow it, you'll want to cook it, and maybe invite the neighbors over.
(8) Compost. You will not live on your particular plot of land forever, and it doesn't matter whether you garden or not. Every patch of soil would benefit from the compost you can generate simply by saving out spare vegetable matter (hey, it makes cleaning out the refrigerator a little less guilt-intensive) and finding a way to compost it that fits your lifestyle. I'm still working on our household solution to that challenge, but it doesn't take more than a half-hour online to come up with an inexpensive strategy worth trying. Even if you grow nothing in the soil you create, somebody down the line will appreciate your efforts. And recycle, but that doesn't really still need saying, does it?
(9) Walk somewhere everyday. It's good for your health, physical and mental. It's a good way to meet your neighbors. It'll save a little bit of gas.
(10) Take time out to help somebody out once in a while. By which I do not mean that you should involve yourself in somebody else's soap opera, nor that you should (or shouldn't) take to giving spare change to the homeless. But if you see somebody walking down the highway with a gas can, it might be worth offering them a lift.
And there I will stop, for the moment, aware that I may prove a public fool tilting imaginary windmills. I can live with that.
This is a draft. I'll probably revise and amend over the next little while. I'm open to whatever ideas y'all may wish to share. The comment button works on this blog, more or less.
Posted by Grant at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)
July 16, 2007
Studying war and filing systems
In the end the new CD cabinet got built -- it took nearly a month, all told -- and fit barely into the space it was meant to occupy, in the far corner of what was once the tanning bed room that now plays host to all my vinyl, posters, ephemera, open reel tapes, stray folk art and assorted junk.
We gave the tanning bed away before we moved in, and were lucky to find it a home.
Anyway, though there are six or seven tubs of mail behind me that I should open I've spent the better part of the last three days trying to put CDs where they belong, instead of the tumbling stacks they typically occupy. This is a matter of self-preservation.
It is a culling process, and I haven't time to listen to everything and decide whether it's worth keeping. An acoustic Jethro Tull compilation? Early Al Stewart records? Dionne Warwick? Ah, man. Tons of early jump blues that I've never even opened. This, I think, is why I'm a little testy occasionally when I've had an afternoon of new and uninteresting music.
And there's now a whole shelf of tribute albums, which may prove a happy casualty of the MP3 boom. If I had time and were clever I'd probably dump the one or two good songs on each of those albums onto a hard drive and have done, but it's easier to build another rack to store them than it is to find time to listen.
None of which is what drove me here just now.
It was a song recorded in the late 1950s by Cowboy Roy Brown, about whom I know nothing that isn't in the spartan liner notes offered by the Delmark reissue I was trying to decide whether to file (it's titled Street Singer), and where. The second track is called "Down By The Riverside," but I know it from a Sweet Honey in the Rock version that styled the song "Ain't Gonna Study War No More." Cowboy Roy Brown was apparently a street singer born in 1875, and I'd no idea the song was old enough to fit his repertoire.
$10-billion a month, that's what we're spending in Iraq. Give or take.
Brown isn't necessarily a major talent, nor would he have been a major rediscovery in the 1950s, I'm guessing (apparently not even significant enough that they can date the recordings). But I'm glad to have made his acquaintance.
And, appending later in the day, I'm glad I opened this Cake B-Sides And Rarities (Upbeat Records) to see who did the artwork (somebody working as aesthetic apparatus, but they're clearly familiar with the work of Art Chantry) and noticed their version of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs." They're not a band I much attended to, and this seems a quirky little atypical collection, but I shall have to keep it for just that reason. Nice take on Kenny Rogers' (well Mel Tillis's, but...) "Ruby Don't Take Your Love To Town" as well.
Posted by Grant at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
July 15, 2007
Country Mouse
Except in Wayne's World, there is little honor -- and less artistic status -- to be found in claiming the suburbs for home, but that's where I grew up, eight blocks north of the Seattle city line, in a small and mostly nameless early 1960s subdivision of well-built homes.
If I remember the story right, my parents chose between a big, rambling old house on Capitol Hill that my father wanted and my mother hated, and the newly constructed almost pink house on the hill in the Shoreline School District where I mostly grew up. Today I'd have chosen the old house on Capitol Hill, and taken it on as a renovation project, but we lived then on an associate professor's salary, they were raising two boys, and the suburbs promised safety and a better education. One of which proved true.
I used to have very strong legs from riding my bike around those hills. And, by junior high, it was faster to walk the short-cut through the cemetery than to ride the school bus, even if it sometimes meant climbing the gate on the back side. Mom came from the San Joaquin Valley, and was continually frustrated by the puny tomatoes she was able to grow in our Northwest clay. Seeking to conform to the neighborhood's covenants, we planted dwarf fruit trees with limbs from other species grafted on so as to aid pollination, but nothing much came of them past the blooms, and none survive today. Strawberries did tolerably well, and still do, the ones the birds leave behind. And there used to be a huge blackberry patch that I raided for many summers, right where the apartments my big brother now lives in was erected.
Years ago, now, I read Richard Rhodes' first-rate 1989 book Farm: A Year In The Life Of An American Farmer, and came to grips with how little useful information I really had at my disposal, how few skills I had. Perhaps that was why I began slowly to collect power tools, and to lose my fear of them (there had been an altercation with a chainsaw the summer before I entered eighth grade), or perhaps it was some latent impulse passed on from my maternal grandfather, who died one summer night when I was five, but not before teaching me to drive a nail straight.
Grandpa Shillington had only daughters, but he taught my mom to drive a nail and not to fear tools, so she did some of the finishing work on our basement in the suburbs. My dad has many skills and knows many arcane things, but carpentry is not among them.
During my 16-month exile in Los Angeles, when I finally got shed of Seattle -- and only the dire need of a job and a way out of debt pried me loose from the place I'd sought to leave and then stubbornly refused to abandon during my twenties and thirties -- I found my co-workers mystified that I'd thought to move down with my few tools, and that I'd chosen my apartment as much for its gas stove as for its neighborhood.
All of which is a winding way toward mentioning that we spent most of last week in Chicago, visiting old friends from Nashville, quaffing exotic beer, eating at some of our friends' favorite places on the North Side (and I would particularly commend the cuisine and the beer at the Hop Leaf).
Ordinarily I'd have said I was a city boy, my suburban pedigree to the contrary, and despite the fact that I spent many of the grunge years in a weird exile in a Federal Way tract home 20 miles from the center of anything, even Tacoma. I despise lawns and lawnmower and especially weedeaters. I learned none of my mother's knack for growing things, though, in the end, having sat and watched her cook all those years served better than I'd have imagined while playing solitare on the kitchen table.
But riding the train into Chicago from Midway, walking and listening to the streets, waking and sleeping and attending to the sounds of a strange place, I found that I have begun to lose the ability to make a big city feel natural. I used to go to New York often enough that I could order coffee, ride the subways and, after, half a day, walk at the right pace, know when to cross the streets, and carry myself slightly coiled enough to pass for somebody who belonged there.
Now, I like Chicago. It is the one city we once vaguely imagined we might live in when we sat around talking about where, other than Nashville, we might wish to be. And the Art Institute, though we skipped it this time, is the first major museum I ever visited, and remains among my very favorite places to spend a day. Instead, we moved back to Susan's home in eastern Kentucky, to a small university town without a single good beer on draft and no regular venues for live music.
To a place where I really am a city kid, where tools are expected and the retired doctor knows more about compost than we ever will.
I finally finished Barbara Kingsolver's new book one morning in Chicago, and listened anxiously each day for word of our daughter's happiness and good conduct in our absence, and for updates in the ongoing battle against the Japanese beetles. (Which both sides seem to be winning; they're lacing the upper leaves on the greasy beans, but the beans themselves seem to be flourishing. It's probably a race, but the season of the beetle runs only a couple more weeks and a draw will do.)
In any event, I was struck by how newly fragile the big city seemed to me: How few places there were, especially in the era of urban in-fill, where things might grow; How difficult it might be to house an amateur's collection of power tools there, much less use them, much less find wood in the neighborhood hardware stores; How much different the rituals of space and privacy are; How many people were willfully isolated on the street by their iPod or their cellphone; How little difference ethnic diversity makes if nobody troubles to interact.
By how many people would be trapped like rats in a cage if something bad happened in Chicago.
Which is to say that I felt vaguely confined, that I have come to need the space afforded by our life here in the middle of what is meant to be nowhere (and isn't, but you can get there from here), that I like being around things that grow (even if I'm not much use in aiding the process), and that there is something both inherently human and wonderfully nurturing in living where everybody seems to know both your troubles and your triumphs.
Back in the 1980s I was much moved by Godfrey Reggio's film, Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word translated as "life out of balance." I suppose its message and time-lapse photography has become a bit of a new age cliche today, and it's been years since I've viewed the movie.
But I'll keep hunting for that balance. Right after I get a handle on the incredibly messy office I came home to, and all the mail I still haven't opened.
Posted by Grant at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
July 7, 2007
Shifting units
SoundScan released statistics for the first six months of 2007 last week, and they aren't good for the top end of the music business. Which, if you believe in trickle-down economics, doesn't portend well for the rest of us. Though I wonder, reading that Ryan Adams just had his best first-week sales, if we're seeing what a bond trader friend called "the flight to quality," which happens every time the financial markets get rocky.
Regardless, some highlights, courtesy the Associated Press:
Album sales are down 15 percent from 2006, totaling 229.8-million. Which is still a lot.
Digital tracks increased 49 percent, to 417.3-million. Which is also a lot, but if you figure 10 tracks to an album that's 41.7-million albums downloaded, which doesn't yet make the MP3 the dominant paradigm, no matter the hype.
Factoring digital and physical sales together, sales are down only [sic] 9.2 percent.
Chris Daughtry's self-titled album is the big seller over these six months, at 1.7-million. The fact that I haven't heard a lick should, perhaps, tell me how far out of touch I am. Though I never felt obliged to listen to Hootie & The Blowfish, either.
Gwen Stefani's "Sweet Escape" has sold 1.8-million digital downloads, top downloaded single of the first six months of 2007.
The top-selling country album, Carrie Underwood's Some Hearts, tops out at 1.1-million.
I don't mean to slap too hard at Hootie, but once upon a time they sold 16-million albums. Not so long ago the O Brother soundtrack sold 7-million (and the Eagles greatest hits tops the RIAA all-time chart at 29-million sold, which is alarming).
Doubtless this all reflects a number of interwoven trends, including the increasing diversification of audiences and subgenres and, perhaps, a fallow creative period in mainstream music. And, of course, if the big labels are feeling financially pinched, that means they have less money to spend blowing up our next pop star. (Though I would note that O Brother and no few other albums rose to popularity more organically than did, say, well, Gwen Stefani.)
But I continue to feel as if the industry has foolishly devalued its own product.
And, in particular, we reap the whirlwind of destroying retail.
For most people, music is an impulse purchase, and it's easy to forget about. It's everywhere, anyhow, so why buy it?
Except you used to drive down the street and see these colorful signs for record stores. And their windows, if you were stopped at the light, were filled with these garish posters for artists who you might or might not be familiar with on the radio. At some point all those impressions might succeed in making you interested in buying an album or two, in walking through the doors. Maybe the casual consumer was killing time in the mall while friends or spouses or children were on some other errand. Maybe they just retreated to the music section at Target or (heaven forbid) Wal-Mart. Only today those sections are much smaller, less obviously placed, and have far fewer choices, and there are far fewer reminders that one could and might BUY music than once there were. Or perhaps they glanced upon an advert in their local newspaper or entertainment magazine, paid for by co-op dollars funneled to retail. In today's retail ecology most of those impressions have been lost.
So fewer people are buying recorded music. It will be interesting, at the end of the year, to see what the PollStar numbers reveal about live performance.
The music industry seems to believe the blithe lie that MP3s will make a good replacement for retail. Maybe some day they will, but too many executives seem to forget that not everybody has a computer, not everybody has a high speed internet connection, and not everybody can afford (nor sees reason to afford) a new MP3 device every 18 months when gas is expensive and there are children to feed. And so they keep winnowing down the potential audience. Like, I don't know, maybe by 9 percent?
Online browsing seems to me to be far more intentional and directed than stumbling upon things in an actual store with real people and the freak from high school behind the counter spinning some album you'd never heard before at just the right volume to make you think about buying it. (Do you really want that guy changing your oil because he's lost his job at the record store?)
I hope the book publishing industry is paying attention.
Posted by Grant at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
July 6, 2007
Physical Graffiti
Much as I seek these days to live in the present, in the physical world, doing so plays to few of my strengths. I have bent fingers and sore joints and a shoulder I can't sleep on to show for forty-odd years of recreational athletics, struggling mightily for mediocrity; though my liberal end-times post-petroleum paranoia has me out there in the fields battling drought (and now two days of rain; the beetles were back among the beans yesterday afternoon but I sunk to my ankle in the muck, so they survived to eat another day, most of them); and though I am too cheap and too stubborn to pay somebody else to build a CD cabinet for me...none of that means I'm any good at making more than sawdust.
The truth has always been that I am most comfortable living in and around my own head.
This is why, I think, I am so strongly driven to defend physical culture from the digital world. The Lexington Herald ran a front page story on independence day announcing that the city's only photo lab was closing its doors, down from a dozen employees to the couple who owned it and were finally going to take a vacation. Alice Wheeler just discovered that they've quit making her favorite color film; David Wilds, who resolutely hand-prints the black and white images published in No Depression has spoken of his frustrations with film stock that has the same brand name, but different qualities, and which chemistry that has changed, too. If they still make it.
A with digital music, there may well be ecological benefits to doing away with film and the chemistry which processes it. I wonder how that is offset by the ecological costs of manufacturing and disposing of digital cameras and flash cards and all the rest.
One more example of the devaluation of hand-made, home-made work, regardless. Of personal craft.
As an art director I tend mostly to trust the transition to digital photography when it is made by artists familiar with and expert at creating physical prints. Picasso could draw before he exploded the conventions; those who followed him seem, to my limited eye, less in control of their lines, less able to master the craft before splattering it. Generations which now take up the digital camera as an extension of their computer, innocent of the craft which once preceded it...some of them will produce challenging, deeply resonant work. Eventually.
If photography survives as a real skill. If it doesn't become the base art from which images are manipulated. If stock agencies don't put every young photographer out of work entirely. (We don't use stock photos in ND. We use promotional images, yes, for convenience, cost, and historical record. But no stock photos. I think they're insulting.) The art director is already expected also to be a typographer, and most haven't a clue (don't get me started on kerning again, you'll all be bored silly), nor are they gifted spellers and grammarians. And an illustrator. And a photographer. An interesting study in de-specialization, or the dominance of software. Or the gathering disregard for the printed word.
And yet there has been a knitting craze, there remains a slow food, locally-grown produce movement, house concerts continue to provide sustenance to some musicians, and people will pay $250 to see the reunited Police in some huge, anonymous building with a stage so big the tenuous trio don't really have to bump into each other unless it's scripted.
I was raised to think "cheap" was a pejorative phrase. My mother used it to describe shoddy merchandise and shady women, and she made the word sound dirty. Cheap cannot be the highest virtue of our consumer society, not if quality of life really matters. Not unless we can all be taught that vegetables have no taste and the fastest distance between two points is the only meaningful journey. Not unless we're prepared consciously to cede all our power and choices to major international corporations.
And I'm not.
I'm not ready to grow and slaughter my own chickens, nor to let a gun in the house, nor to hang all of our clothes out on the new line we installed on the back porch.
But I sure am looking forward to picking blackberries this weekend. If there's enough sun.
Posted by Grant at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
July 5, 2007
Meet the beetles
The drought here briefly relented and it finally rained the day before my father-in-law climbed into a Winnebago and drove north to Canada for some catch-and-release fishing, just after we had hand-watered the most fragile of the seedlings in his renovated garden and begun experimenting with a crude irrigation system (gravity works in our favor) between the four long rows of greasy beans he's put in.
He didn't bother with a garden last year, mostly, tired of the deer and the rabbits and the woodchucks eating more than he did. Which is to say: Everything. But the truth seems to be that he likes the work, and he is not insensitive to the desires of his daughter and her husband to learn more about tilling the soil. Whether or not he embraces our long-term concerns — read: William Kunstler's The Long Emergency and Barbara Kingsolver's new Animal, Vegetable, Miracle — doesn't matter. He is, at least, sympathetic. And likes fresh vegetables.
And so he spent a lot of time this spring putting in a new fence, tall and sturdy enough to give his garden a fighting chance. Before he left he asked only that one of us check in on the beans in a few days to make sure the runners didn't jump their rows.
Now, a couple years back we put in an orchard, a bunch of skinny sticks planted 40 feet apart in the hope that they might grow into bearing trees. And then we didn't do much, or at least I didn't. In part this is because there wasn't much to do, in part this is because there was too much to do elsewhere. This year has been better. Most of them are flourishing (we lost one apple and replaced it; he added two chestnutts, and we'll expand again this fall), they've been mulched re-caged and otherwise attended to. The berries are less certain. The raspberries didn't make it to the end of the first year because we didn't pay attention to the mold on their leaves. The blackberries seem not to wish to grow, which is an odd thing for a plant that's little more than a barely trained weed. But the blueberry plants seem to be holding their own.
Anyway, our intention is clearly ahead of our attention.
But we really do not wish to fail this year, not after so much early effort, not when the beans look so promising and the banana peppers are already overwhelming our ability to find uses for them (they'll get frozen in a day or so), and we've finally discovered that the best thing to do with squash is to treat it as if it were tofu. Not when we wish to focus our energies on eating locally as much as possible.
And so we went to the garden only to find an orgy in progress, these black and red beetles perched two or three to a leaf in a fornicating frenzy. Susan stood in the field with her cell phone and called every good gardener whose number she had saved, looking for an organic solution to the problem. I worked around the asparagus, where they were congregating, mastering the art of squishing the little devils with both hands. Sometimes they fly away, sometimes they fall to the earth, and sometimes they leave their guts on the leaves they sought to eat and leave in laced ruin.
I am a pacifist. I do not take the killing of anything lightly. If I did not like the occasional prospect of barbeque so much, and have a niggling sense that we really are meant to eat meat, I'd probably give the stuff up.
And if all the beetles were doing was eating the asparagus, well past harvest stage, we might have come to a peaceful resolution. But they were in the beans. The greasy beans, a heirloom species my father-in-law has preserved from where he grew up down in Hazard County. Perhaps the only greasy beans left in the world, for all we know. And the were nibbling at a couple of our otherwise flourishing trees.
This, anyhow, was our introduction to the ravages of the Japanese beetle.
My father-in-law had already hung traps, which were teeming with the little devils. Some argue the traps attract beetles and make the infestation worse. Hard to say. We went back out the next day with a mini-prep that doesn't get used much in the kitchen and some soapy water. We squished all the beetles we could and dropped them in the water, then ran them through the miniprep — there's power out to the barn — and sprayed them back on the beans. (And, yes, we'll still use the miniprep to make olivatta. The bugs washed out. Really. Though, perhaps sauteed in butter...)
A rangy, weathered fellow in the aisles at Lowe's (Southern States was closed by the time we left the orchard with suggestions in hand) looked up and said, "Sevin." "No," I answered. "Why?" he said, clearly baffled, for we are accustomed to using the simplest and most labor-saving technologies available. "Because we're trying to grow things organically, and because there's an orchard across the field that needs bees. And Sevin kills bees." And, of course, it's real good at killing Japanese beetles. He walked away silently.
But we found some pyrethrum (which I've probably misspelled but if you know enough to care you probably know enough to laugh), which I think is a more or less organic solution (at least it's not Sevin), and which seems, mostly, to be working. Things were much improved two mornings back. We meant to go check this morning, but it's been raining about twelve hours solid, which is good for the crops and means we can go out to the fish hatchery and hunt blackberries this weekend. So we'll wait for it to dry out a bit, not because I mind walking out there instead of driving, but because we may need to apply another layer of spray.
And to the orchard, which we sprayed a couple days back with a copper confection said to keep molds and such off the leaves. One of the cherry trees has turned copper and yellow as if it were already Fall. The helpful gal at Southern States said she thought it might simply be shock (which would account for one of the forsythia in our front yard, too) from the drought and the sun. Or it's some kind of fungus. Either way, I won't be surprised if the tree doesn't make it, but we want to inoculate as much of the orchard as we can against whatever's got that tree in its grip.
Anyhow, that's why I haven't listened to much music these last few days, nor opened my mail. But the CD cabinet did finally get finished and dragged inside, just before the rains hit to celebrate July 4. There were no fireworks last night, and I am grateful for that, too.
Ordinarily I'd have glued the shelves in place before screwing them solidly. But this time I left the glue out. I can pull every other shelf and turn it into a bookcase for paperbacks if this MP3 thing really works out.
Posted by Grant at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
July 1, 2007
Steve Earle and my sense of place
"Tennessee Blues", the opening track to Steve Earle's September 18 release, Washington Square Serenade, offers a surpassingly calm farewell to his longtime base in Nashville ("this ain't never been my home" he sings, but without rancor); many subsequent tracks are a kind of salute to the new home he and Allison Moorer have made for themselves in Manhattan.
Washington Square Serenade arrived within a day or two of the moment when the minimum wage here in Kentucky legally rose to $5.85 an hour.
I lived in Nashville just under a decade. Steve and Allison (and Allison's previous husband) were among the many people who made Music City an enjoyable place, who stirred the creative pot, who were alive with the doing and making of art. Who were committed to their work, and to the ideas behind it. Who were committed to the notion that there should and could be ideas behind songs. I miss very little about Nashville, for I am happy here in Eastern Kentucky. But I do, some nights, miss that community, miss walking into a small club and knowing the best musicians in the world are playing on stage simply for the joy of making music, and that Emmylou Harris just might stop by.
My photographer friend Alice Wheeler called on Friday, just back from a shoot in Portland, Oregon. Alice and I are both grunge survivors from Seattle (she has the distinction of having taken Nirvana's first promotional photo; and rather more than that), and she called with a broad smile having stepped into another vat of creative people. A number of old friends and rivals and acquaintances -- not to mention younger folk -- have sought refuge in Portland, perhaps the last affordable city on the West Coast; and perhaps that no longer, or, at least, not much longer.
Minimum wage when I graduated from high school in 1977, the summer I spent selling Fuller Brush products door to door, was $2.30 an hour. That works out to $7.80 an hour in today's money according to one my favorite and most depressing websites: http://minneapolisfed.org/research/data/us/calc/.
Minnesota, Athens, Washington, D.C., periodically Los Angeles or New York or (yes) Nashville, Austin, Chicago, Seattle, Chapel Hill, now Portland, perhaps Lincoln, Nebraska...the music industry has focused for years on "it" cities where there is a happening scene. Where there is a creative community which has been allowed to develop, to hear its own voice in the silence rather than being drowned out in the voices of what's already happening, or alleged to be happening.
Those places have had two things in common: a convergence of bright and talented people, and cheap rent.
In order for creative work to happen -- and make no mistake, our cultural exports are crucial to the U.S. economy, though I have neither the patience nor the discipline to place a factoid here to prove the passing point -- artistic people must have sufficient free time to imagine, to do, to stare out the window, to chase rabbits down empty holes. To discover.
Perhaps someday somebody will write the hidden history of the indie rock revolution, but I have a hunch -- again, I can't prove this and don't care to try -- that a great deal of the hipster bands we once revered had at least one trust fund in the background.
I don't begrudge Steve and Allison their new home, not at all. Steve is now able to bang heads with the best and the brightest in the world, to see if his prose and his intellect and his energy -- his work -- can be competitive amidst the most powerful voices (and egos) at work in the U.S. today. Moving to Manhattan in the middle of one's life is a brave thing; most of my friends there are trying to figure out how to get out. And, of course, Steve can afford it.
But being young and creative -- without the trust fund or an international reputation -- requires easy, mindless, disposable part-time jobs that pay the rent and food and the odd inexpensive instrument. It means cheap places to stay where nobody else is willing to live, though, now, the developers have gotten wise to the ways of the underground and track artistic communities as a component of real estate investment strategies.
In truth, the community needn't be that large. The rise of Seattle -- grunge -- can be traced back to a handful of very bright, very creative people. Inevitably I'm going to leave some out, but (in alphabetical order): Jeff Ament, Mark Arm, Matt Cameron, Art Chantry, Tad Doyle, Jack Endino, Bruce Pavitt, Dan Peters, Charles Peterson, Jonathan Poneman, and Susan Silver...there are eleven names (I have worried the list a bit), roughly half of them musicians, all in various ways crucial to what happened. Maybe another dozen names belong on that list, but my point is that a powerful creative community -- an artistic movement, if you must -- takes a very small number of people. They just have to be very, very good. And committed.
Those folks all lived and worked in Seattle at a time when Seattle was the end of the end of the road, when nothing important happened there, before Starbucks and Microsoft and Sub Pop put it on the map for good. Before the millionaires took over. Today one of the best graphic designers I know lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. One of the best photographers I know works out of Ashland, Kentucky. One of ND's best writers lived, until recently, in New Auburn, Wisconsin. Even Mr. Earle hasn't yet given up his place in rural Tennessee, nor do I think he ever will.
That's the other choice, I guess: Follow Thoreau's example and live some place cheap and remote and solitary. But most of us are not solitary, not full-time anyhow (curmudgeon though I am, even I need people now and again), and most of the art we make takes collaboration. Requires the sparks which fly when strong-willed and creative people meet, sometimes at random, often at a purpose (or cross-purpose) and try to get something done.
It can happen anywhere, even here in Morehead. Especially here, for this is a college town. But it cannot happen without affordable housing and a livable wage. And it cannot happen if all the avenues of commerce become cul de sacs leading to Wal-Mart.
And, as the song goes, wherever you go, there you are.
Posted by Grant at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)