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October 29, 2007
The residual power of folk
For at least a week now I have envisioned a headline here, "Is Folk Necessary?" but doing so involves footnoting a James Thurber book I never read and never saw after asking mother what it meant when my wandering eyes found it on an untended shelf downstairs.
She did not think her ten-year-old son needed yet to understand her particular affection for Is Sex Necessary? and there was wisdom in her choice. And, anyhow, I'm not much taken with humorists.
But it was she who raised me with folk music. Not, in the main, the real unvarnished stuff, not the Lomax field recordings, nor even the Harry Smith set. She likes beautiful, round voices: Paul Clayton, Jean Richie, Odetta, took Cisco Houston's versions of Woody Guthrie in preference to the originals. She liked the old songs and the traditions they were drawn from, but not the, um, caterwauling -- as she would put it -- of their original recordings. I suppose that's why Billy Faier still stands out for me: His elegant aggression with and around the banjo was unusual in her collection, and striking.
Regardless, I do not much listen to contemporary folk music. A handful of artists, notably Greg Brown, sure. But most of what I hear these days seems without power, a mostly empty form, a series of carefully learned earnest gestures. (And don't get me started about protest music. Now, with public opinion turning against our involvement in Iraq, the songs start to bubble loose. But my hat's off to Steve Earle and Elizabeth Cook and James McMurtry for having the courage to write powerful songs about (and, generally, in opposition to) that war when that wasn't a bankable choice.)
All of which came to mind originally as I listened to Appleseed's Sowing The Seeds -- The 10th Anniversary. This is a label I like and respect. Like Red House and Signature Sounds they're fighting a good fight as honorably as can be managed (and they released my co-editor's Mickey Newberry tribute, a good thing all around). Surviving ten years as a political folk music label is no small thing.
And this, anyway, is the tradition in which I was raised. Or one of them. Disc one of the two-disc package is titled "And Justice For All." And even with Pete Seeger all over it and Jackson Browne and Joan Baez dueting on "Guantanamera," Seeger and Bruce Springsteen pairing up for "Ghost Of Tom Joad" and all the rest, I kept finding myself wondering where the magic had gone. The power of Woody Guthrie's anti-fascist guitar, which, on a t-shirt today still has the power to challenge and offend, apparently.
Wondering if the magic had ever really been there, or if I was simply once too young to know better.
Right up until I began to feel tears forming. Tom Paxton is mostly just a name to me, one of the guys who wasn't quite as good as Dylan, and since I don't much listen to Dylan I've never had occasion to work backwards to Paxton. "The Bravest" isn't original to this compilation (it showed up first on 2002's Looking For The Moon), but it couldn't be. Nobody but a fraud could write this emotional a song about 9/11 from our present distance. It's not political. It's not from the point of view most liberal folk adopts. It's just true, that's all, the story of the men who went up those buildings knowing they'd never come down, and kept going up anyway.
And it hasn't lost its power these years later.
That's what I miss. That's why a great deal of modern folk music often leaves me as cold as last night's first frost; it doesn't come close to that songwriting standard. But it still can. And it's still necessary.
Posted by Grant at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
October 22, 2007
Shameless Self-Promotion
Doc Will tilted an eyebrow when he heard we were going to Disneyworld, and somewhat accurately described the process by which we would be held upside down and shaken until all the change slipped from our pockets into the hands of that needy corporate giant.
He quit laughing when his wife reminded him of his pledge to take their three children in a couple years.
(Peripheral question: Why on earth do people find it necessary to throw money into the water of the "It's A Small World" ride? Do they think the company needs their coins?)
(Far more important question: Who told the Big Mouse that Nescafe was coffee?)
Anyhow, I came home to the usual pile of mail and flurry of e-mails, and one very nice bit of news: No Depression has once again been nominated for the 19th Annual Utne Reader Independent Press Awards, in the broad category "arts coverage."
Our fellow nominees include the international folk art magazine Raw Vision, Art Papers, BlackFlash, Bookforum, Film Comment, New Statesman, and Paste.
ND won for what was then called "Arts & Leisure" some years back, long enough ago that I can't remember when it was but am pretty sure it was a great kindness as we're a much better magazine now than we were when I lived in that house. And we were nominated once, after that. But it's been a while, and it's an honor we appreciate.
The Utne Reader culls through 1,300 magazines to extract content; ND is among 111 titles honored as finalists for their award. Their list of honorees is always interesting and sometimes provocative. And because I like good magazines, and figure some of y'all do as well, here's the full list:
Magazines (General Excellence)
ColorLines
Columbia Journalism Review
Discover
Film Comment
Foreign Policy
Kyoto Journal
The Sun
The Wilson Quarterly
Zines (General Excellence)
Brainscan
Hungover Gourmet
Macaroni
Moonlight Chronicles
Musea
Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore!
Uncle Enos
You Don’t Get There From Here
Best New Publication
The American
Blackfly
Craft
The Crier
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
Make/shift
Meatpaper
Polite
Environmental Coverage
Audubon
E Magazine
Earth Island Journal
Environmental Building News
Orion
Sierra
Sustainable Industries Journal
Terrain
International Coverage
Colors
Cultural Survival Quarterly
Foreign Policy
Middle East Report
NACLA Report on the Americas
New Internationalist
Peace Review
Prospect
Health/Wellness Coverage
Alternative Medicine
CR Magazine
The Human Ecologist
Mothering
POZ
Psychology Today
VegNews
Yoga Journal
Local/Regional Coverage
Alberta Views
East Bay Monthly (Bay Area, CA)
The Independent Weekly (Lafayette, LA)
New England Watershed
Oxford American (Southern U.S.)
Sacramento News & Review
Urbanite (Baltimore)
Westword (Denver)
Political Coverage
The American Prospect
The Chronicle of Higher Education
City Journal
Dissent
Governing
The Nation
The New Republic
Reason
Science/Tech Coverage
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Discover
The Futurist
New Scientist
OnEarth
Science & Spirit
Science News
Technology Review
Social/Cultural Coverage
California
ColorLines
Dollars & Sense
Gastronomica
Greater Good
Guilt & Pleasure
Indian Country Today
The Next American City
Spiritual Coverage
Geez
Islamica
Notre Dame
Parabola
Shambhala Sun
Sojourners
Spirituality & Health
Tikkun
In-Depth/Investigative
Coverage
The Chicago Reporter
Columbia Journalism Review
GeneWatch
High Country News
Intelligence Report
Mother Jones
The Texas Observer
The Village Voice
Best Design
Beyond
Bidoun
Esopus
Heeb
Hyphen
Maisonneuve
Ninth Letter
Theme
Best Writing
The Believer
Geist
L.A. Weekly
Maisonneuve
The New Republic
The Sun
Virginia Quarterly Review
The Wilson Quarterly
Arts Coverage
Art Papers
BlackFlash
Bookforum
Film Comment
New Statesman
No Depression
Paste
Raw Vision
Now if only there were a newsstand in every town where one might find all those fine magazines.
Posted by Grant at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
October 11, 2007
Playing Chicken
At some point today 26 chicks are scheduled to arrive at the Morehead Post Office. Cute little fuzzy things, sure to delight little Maggie, who may or may not understand that it's bad form to name creatures one proposes to eat.
This was not my idea.
Dan came back from holiday and announced that it was time to raise chickens. His daughter -- my wife -- was delighted, for this has been a long-running (ahem) discussion in our household. I maintain you can't raise chickens in town, and you probably can't, even though my old friend Patrick has been doing so in Oakland and now in Portland. But they're going out to the barn by the orchard, and so I don't have much say in the matter. (My mother-in-law, whose father was one of Col. Sanders' early lawyers and who knows more than a thing or two about the killing and eating of fowl, is about as excited as I am.)
We don't eat a lot of meat, but we eat some. And we just put a quarter of a cow on the bottom shelf of our freezer. A local, grain-fed cow that we never met, thank you.
All summer I've been writing that it's important to know where your food comes from, and I believe that. My wife argues that it's hypocritical to eat meat if you're not willing to kill it, and I have no logic with which to counter.
But I have a story.
Back on the west coast a friend of a friend down in the Medford area raised rabbit, and more than once I was happy to dine on rabbit stew at Jack's house. Rabbit stew and Yorkshire pudding. Delightful. His son is all growed up and playing bass in some punk rock band. Funny how time slips away.
More recently, in the years before Maggie, we went to Belgium and ate at least one memorable dinner of rabbit at a small restaurant in a tiny little town accompanied by some of the finest beer known to man or woman. I'm not squeamish about meat, generally. Deer, bear, alligator? Sure, why not? (I don't eat seafood, but that's an entirely different matter.)
So we came back from Belgium and decided to recreate that feast. Susan tracked down an exquisite rabbit stew recipe and we spent most of a day running all over Nashville tracking down ingredients. Our last stop was at the farmer's market, where there used to be a first-rate butcher shop (before the powers that be decided the farmer's market needed to be yuppified and drove out all the good vendors who actually served their community). And, yes, they had rabbit.
It wasn't cut into little bits and pieces of meat.
It was a long, stretched out carcass, the plastic tight like a muscle shirt.
It looked just like one of our cats, skinned and dressed for dinner.
In my family we take our cats seriously. Honestly, we do better with cats than we do with people, for the most part.
I could not do it.
I made Susan put the rabbit back in the freezer. I could not do it. She was, quite properly, furious with me.
But I could not do it.
I don't do real well with heights, either, and occasionally I discover that there is a rung on the ladder past which I may not go.
That's life, and that's what this poor butchered rabbit felt like.
Now, I have no problem deboning a chicken breast, long as I can keep my hands warm. And chicken doesn't look at all like cat when it's huddled in the butcher's counter at the grocery store.
But we now contemplate the prospect of cutting the heads off however many of our 26 little fluffy chicks survive (and none may, rendering the whole discussion moot; there are plenty of predators out by the barn), dropping the carcass in boiling water so as to remove the feathers, then burning off whatever feathers don't come quietly and eviscerating the bird. Or something like that, I don't really know how the whole thing works.
What I'm pretty sure of is that I can't be a party to that process.
I might try, I don't know. Some days I can go further up the ladder than others.
Regardless, I'm pretty sure I won't have any problem eating the processed fowl. Especially if we get the garlic planted.
And I shall try not to become too attached to the little fuzzy things coming in today's mail.
P.S. For whatever reason, none of the chicks survived transportation, and so Dan picked up a very sad little box at the Post Office this morning (I was, apparently, wrong about their scheduled arrival time; we didn't leave them there overnight, not to fear). They're guaranteed, and so I'm confident another box will come our way.
Posted by Grant at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
October 6, 2007
The quickest of silly questions
But, seriously, folks, am I the only one who hears the chorus of Led Zeppelin's "Living Loving Maid" and expects Robert Plant to digress into Neil Diamond's "Kentucky Woman" instead of whatever he's mumbling over Mr. Bonham's drum riff?
Now, why I happen to be listening to Led Zeppelin today is a whole other problem.
Comfort food, I guess.
It's a Seattle thing.
Posted by Grant at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
October 3, 2007
Cover versions and revisions (a contest, of sorts)
Ordinarily each issue's cover is among the first things which gets designed. I use its color choices elsewhere in the magazine, sometimes, and up until fairly recently our main distributor wanted to see the cover early so as to collect orders from retailers. This next issue, the one I'm playing hooky from just now, won't be like that. This time the cover will come crashing down on my head quite late, and while there is a story or two behind that, I'm not intemperate enough to tell it in public. All's well that ends well, and I better not foul this one up.
Meantime, I just cobbled together an advert for next issue in which we announce discovery of...well, the rediscovery of...enough of our oldest issues to put them all back on sale. So this is an early warning for you collectors and completists out there. It is the consequence of Peter moving across the country and Kyla readying a room for her, um, teenager, who was not even walking when we started this magazine. We won't have a lot of those early issues to sell (which, having art directed them at Kinko's, more or less, is a blessing from my point of view), but it looks like we'll have at least a few of each one.
No, I don't know today exactly what day they'll go on sale, but I'd guess November 5, since that's our official street date.
Up until our tenth anniversary, when the logo changed, I have almost all those covers in frames around my office. The rest will go up one of these days, but I've not got around to getting frames for them, and they are starting to crowd the other stuff I like to look at. Back when I lived in Nashville I was visited by a documentary crew from Germany who asked if it wasn't sort of egotistical to have my own work on the wall, and I'd never thought of it that way. It's a tradition I brought with me from the old Rocket, a way to see where we've been and what not to do again.
I have flats for most of those issues stashed in various places; for a long time now I've asked our printer to send me 20 of each one. We use them occasionally, but not often enough, and every once in a while we get them autographed to use as charity auction items. My hope is to get a batch of those trimmed out and packaged and take them to Merlefest to sell at our booth, but we'll see.
Meanwhile, I've been looking at our gallery of covers, which you can do here: http://www.nodepression.net/issues/index.php and contemplating my various sins as a designer.
For various reasons, the cover which still arrests my attention on the wall across the room is #17, and features Emmylou Harris, though you're to be excused for thinking it looks more like a harbor seal, and I mean absolutely no disrespect to Ms. Harris by mentioning that. In fact, I still mean to apologize to her. It is the product of a careful collaboration with Jim Herrington, who had found a riveting Vogue magazine cover in an old book (it's a famous cover, apparently; I found it in one of my old design annuals, as well, and would scan it and post it here if I could figure out how to insert images). It's a duotone image (two duotones, actually), and we were absolutely convinced it was brilliant. That it offered a unique way to present an oft-photographed artist, and that it would connote her ageless, timeless beauty and glamour.
That's what we thought right up until the issue ended in my hands.
And so I look up every once in a while and see those kind eyes looking back at me, reminding me not to think too hard and not ever to make that particular mistake again.
So that's my vote for our worst cover ever. But there are 71 to choose from, so far.
What's yours? Since I have a cover to design in the next couple days, I'm particularly curious. Please keep in mind that this isn't a referendum on the artists we've put on the cover, I'm simply asking about the way they look.
Posted by Grant at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)
October 1, 2007
Just the facts, Jack
It is possible to place the ruination of various generations of 20th century would-be writers at the feet of a handful of powerfully voiced (or well-promoted) authors: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson. Those, anyway, would be the reefs my particular ship foundered upon.
Some of that adds up to what was once called, with hope and honor and no small amount of ego, New Journalism. Which argued, New Journalism did (and I do) that the author is and the choices she/he makes are inevitably part of the story. That objective journalism is less honest than advocacy journalism in which the reader knows precisely where the writer's prejudices are.
I still think that's true. I also believe that nobody in the new journalism movement would have believed all journalism should be conducted according to those principals. Rather, New Journalism seemed to argue for its place at the table of public opinion. Or so I remember it.
Which is to say that we hoped New Journalism -- and I was a pup then, hardly a participant except by way of imitation -- could in some way bring us closer to the truth. And the exploits of Mssrs. Woodward and Bernstein...the heroic exploits of Mssrs. Woodward and Bernstein...clearly argued, to me anyhow, that both forms of journalism could and should have their place.
I am burying my lead, as they say. But, then, my only formal journalism instruction came in high school.
I came across this lead paragraph on page three of this morning's Lexington Herald. It is bylined Charles Babington (Associated Press):
"WASHINGTON -- Congressional Democrats have chosen an unlikely source to pay for the bulk of their proposed $35 billion increase in children's health coverage: people with relatively little money and education."
I should note that the headline reads: SMOKERS WOULD PAY FOR CHILDREN'S HEALTH COVERAGE.
The AP report continues:
"The program expansion passed by the House and Senate last week would be financed by a 156 percent increase in the federal cigarette tax, taking it from the current 39 cents to $1 per pack. Low-income people smoke more heavily than do wealthier people in the United States, making cigarette taxes a regressive form of revenue."
Now, I don't mean to take a position on the political issue at hand. (I presume, if you visit here often, you can guess.) And Kentucky is a tobacco-producing state; the weed is presented as a family tradition, as a lifestyle, as one more example of the decline of rural farm communities.
But those two paragraphs -- and the entire eight paragraphs of the story -- proceed along that path. It is not what I was trained to call objective journalism, nor is it identified as analysis.
Perhaps that's old school.
Dated.
I was baffled to see Jack Cafferty featured on a one-hour special on CNN flogging his new book. Apparently several other talking heads for the network have been accorded that same bully pulpit, and one can only guess how and whether CNN or one of its corporate affiliates participate financially in sales of those books.
It seems wrong to me. Just wrong.
In the early days of this Republic the newspapers were pointedly partisan.
We do not seem well-served to have our media move back in that direction.
I cannot speak to the merits of Dan Rather's suit against CBS, and it seems a rather sad affair in many ways. And yet he seems right: The truth of the "60 Minutes" examination of President Bush's Vietnam war record was subsumed to one particular error (and a glaring error to anybody used to looking at typewriter type, but I suppose there aren't so many of us). Even more to the point, he seems right that it is dangerous to have so much of the media, which shapes so much of whatever public opinion we have, in the hands of so few corporations of such great size.
We are in danger of learning not to believe in the truth.
Posted by Grant at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)