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February 28, 2008

The guitar's pull: a cautionary tale

For the better part of two weeks I have been unable or unwilling to listen to music. This happens every once in a while, but not for this long. And I know why it's happening, but that makes it no less bizarre, and it does nothing to make the mess of my office act like it's going to improve any time soon.

I mean, there's a new Dan Tyminski album on my desk. I'm sure it's good; how could it NOT be good? But I can't play it. Just can't turn the system on and push the CD in. Cannot do it.

So I can't think of any reason I decided to change the strings on the guitar today.

I don't really play the thing, but I was looking for a piece of rope for Maggie in the closet where it languishes, and it's too cold and I'm still a bit too sick to go anywhere and do anything, so I pulled the guitar out because Maggie likes to hit the strings and such.

Since I have spare strings here, and the guitar came with Susan and hasn't been played much in the last nine years, I thought, gee, I'll change the strings. I used to play a banjo (not well, just played it), I used to break strings all the time, I should be able to do this.

Yeah, well. With Maggie watching on a snow day.

Easy enough to unwind the sixth string, but then I couldn't figure out the other end, which turns out to have a cheap plastic plug holding it in place. Quality instrument the first husband left behind, eh? Pair of needlenose solved that.

And now I'm stuck. Somehow in changing phones I've lost a couple numbers, but I did e-mail a musician friend and call my brother to beg help. And there is a guitar shop in town, but I'm not going there because it's a small town and I'm supposed to know something about music, and this is just silly. So I'm waiting.

See...I can't figure out how to wind the dratted string. I used to know how to do this, but it's probably been 35 years. There are, of course, five other still functional strings for me to stare at, but they're no help. And then, of course, I tried too much. Snap!

Ah, well. Best to put the guitar back in the closet.

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February 27, 2008

Not books, too!

Paging through e-mail I missed while sick this week, I stumbled back upon a note from a publicist for Random House that simply sends chills. Now, I realize what's on offer on this particular release has to do only with audio books, but it reminds me of the next thing I fear most.

It reads:

Random House has announced that it will cease using DRM (digital rights management) on all of its digital audiobooks, a major reversal with huge implications for the publishing industry. After testing DRM-free downloads on eMusic (www.emusic.com ), Random House decided that the universal MP3 format, which is championed by eMusic, is the best option for audiobook customers. You can read Random House's letter, which outlines its decision, here. What does this mean for audiobook listeners? By downloading DRM-free audiobooks from eMusic, they avoid the restrictions that come bundled with downloads from, say, Audible.com/iTunes. They can play the MP3 on a host of digital media players, not just iPods, and can burn to a disc if they so choose. DRM has long been publishers' (and the record industry's) answer to piracy prevention. But, as Random House discovered after testing DRM-free downloads on eMusic, giving the customer freedom to do whatever they want with their downloads does not result in piracy. eMusic has been a pioneer in offering digital music in the MP3 format since 1998 and in offering consumers lower pricing for digital media. Both have come to pass as major record labels, and now audiobooks publishers, are dropping DRM, and Amazon and ad-supported music services offer lower digital music prices. Random House's decision is strong proof that eMusic is leveraging change in the media industry with its persistent focus on the customer, and increasing sales to those industries as a result.

I have intentionally not fashioned the links because I see no good coming from assisting this enterprise.

Add to the mix the Amazon Ken Doll (which I'm sure is not an original construction, but I don't remember and don't care how the evil device is properly spelled), and I am driven to implore the book publishing industry to take a good, hard look at what digital files have done to the music industry.

The thing is, folks, you don't have to make them available. Nobody is going to scan and make PDFs of entire bound volumes of prose and put that online. So if the book business decides to go full-force into the digital world -- to commit suicide -- it does so forewarned and forearmed.

But the unfettered digital distribution of music has virtually destroyed an entire category of brick and mortar retail, and all but undone the entire business of making and selling music. And let's be clear that arguing the free dissemination of music now makes possible more touring success is a reality for comparatively few bands, even now, and with rising gas prices will serve fewer and fewer musicians well in the long term.

If content is free (see: the present Wired story making the rounds, and, again, I refuse to link), who pays for the content? I realize this is unfashionably old school talk, but until somebody shows me in clear language with dollars and center where the money flows from in this new model (and not in marketing gobble gobble), I don't believe in it. I believe it's a way to exploit people, but I don't believe it's a way to further the writing and creation of durable language and music.

I know. Books are checked out of libraries; so are records and CDs. (And magazines.) Not the point.

If the book publishing industry dismantles its entire structure to satisfy the perceived need of the digital world -- that is, if it does so willy nilly without learning hard lessons from the recording industry -- it will destroy itself. It will destroy one more final glimmer of independent retail in a Wal-Mart world. It will continue to reduce the number of free and independent voices in the marketplace.

Irrational? Maybe. I don't handle being sick well.

But just because things are new (to paraphrase Mr. Ward) doesn't make them better. Just because that's what all the kids are doing doesn't make it right. Just because you could (as mom taught us) doesn't mean you should.

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February 25, 2008

All right, then, let's design this thing

When we wrote, in the press release announcing the coming end of our print edition, that the website would continue on, we did so without much of a firm plan. Before that decision was made we were working to expand ND's review sections (new releases, reissues, live shows, books) and obituaries online. Some of which we managed to get done in a rudimentary form at the same time we posted our closing letter.

But the outpouring of support and good ideas we have received -- that and the fact that I have ended up too sick to work today -- emboldens me to try a bit of market research in this space. We don't know what is possible, not technologically nor financially. But we (that is, for the most part, our long-suffering business-side partner, Kyla) are talking with various people who seem to know what they're doing (and some who don't) to explore a wider range of options than we had, perhaps, considered.

So let me toss this open: Y'all read this magazine. You know what we're about. So tell us what you'd like to see the website be able to do. Keep in mind that it has to be technically possible and we have to be able to pay to have it done, whatever it might be. Try to forget that I'm a known technophobe, but keep it simple so I can follow along, please.

And now back to bed.

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February 22, 2008

Getting our words' worth

Funny how this works. Yesterday Peter and I were interviewed by the kind folks at National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" for their evening broadcast; Kyla's turn comes on "Weekend Edition."

You can hear it here, just so's to pretend I understand how the world wide interweb works: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19246307.

Which is not my point.

Four reader/listeners have responded (to me, anyhow) to our comments that we don't think ND's signature long-form articles (which have run, on occasion, rather past 10,000 words) will translate well onto the web. Three of them suggested we consider podcasting those long pieces, with NPR's long-running "This American Life" as a kind of model. (Here I must confess that I've not heard the show, but, perhaps, I should go find a podcast of it!)

My immediate reaction is a knee-jerk luddite response: good god, not more software to try to learn, not more technology to embrace.

But even I can work a step or two past that.

Something about the idea interests me, but, perhaps, not what's intended. People don't want to read, but they want to be read to? Really. See, I don't live what would seem a normal life. I don't commute anywhere, can walk into town and get coffee, a new book, and whatever the downtown [sic] grocery store has by way of emergency ingredients for whatever dinner is to be, although usually I have to drive to do that because dinner is half-cooked when we find something missing. So I don't have a commuter's need to profitably spend that time in the car or on the train or whatever; nor do I work out at a gym, not anymore. Not ever again, I think, but one never knows.

Read to...hmmm.

My first year of college I took a dreary intro to communications theory class that was in no way as interesting as my apprenticeship at SeaGraphics, learning to set type on paper tape and wax galleys for the many student and semi-pro newspapers published in that shop off Stone Way in Wallingford, Seattle. But I walked away with one nugget which has ever after brought focus to what I do professionally.

People misunderstand at least 50 percent of what is written.

I have used this example for years and years, so if you've heard me go on this rap...sorry. Take a three-letter word: C-A-T. A simple, normative noun, right?

So if I write a sentence like this -- "The cat walked in" -- it should mean the same thing to everybody, right? Except it doesn't, of course. If you're allergic to cats it does not mean what it suggest to me, the fellow who sometimes writes these blogs with one purring on his lap. And if you're a new mother who believes what I suspect to be an old wive's tale (oops, I typed "tail," and almost left it for the sport), that the cat will sleep on the new baby's face and smother the child, that simple sentence with a three-letter noun is fraught with fear.

Now, I am a somewhat combative fellow in verbal settings. The word "curmudgeon" gets used to describe me, particularly by friends. But I like the conflict of ideas, not the kinds of interpersonal flare-ups that make "Jerry Springer" rich. I like for people to get along while they're arguing, if that makes any sense. And one of the things which really frustrates me is that people use language sloppily and listen poorly. Most fights -- most conflicts -- in my view come down to people simply not understanding what the other person has to say, is trying to say.

(See: The Middle East, but I won't digress there today.)

I write for a living. Or, rather, the thing which I am first and foremost is a writer.

That apprenticeship at SeaGraphics and that communications class formed in my head, however, the notion that I could and should try to achieve some greater control over the context in which words were presented. I have nourished this long hope, for the thirty years or more that I have designed one publication or another, that if I could learn the deep and complex visual language of American popular discourse I could better control the context in which the words I wrote (or edited, or whatever) on the page were viewed and understood.

Every typeface in every context in ND is chosen with care. Sometimes caprice, sometimes irony, often with a smile nobody else sees or knows. But they are meant to resonate a kind of meaning that I've spent years trying to figure out. I don't expect anybody to know what I'm on about; it's all subliminal. But it's there, it's on the page, and I think (I hope; I've agonized for decades to try) it helps to shape the way the words on the page are read.

No doubt an actor could read those words into a podcast and achieve some other kind of control (and, to be clear, I realize "This American Life" is narrated by a writer/radio journalist), and I can't guess whether it would be more or less. I do have a distant background in speech (not that you could tell on the radio last night), and so maybe I could achieve some kind of adequacy in that context. And it's very much the case that what I write is meant to sound as if I were speaking to you, though I should also note very carefully that that's an illusion I work to create, that spoken and written language are quite different. As any writer who has transcribed an interview can attest.

I don't mean to suggest the long-form podcast isn't interesting, because it is. Maybe even a way forward. And challenging. But the ways we are transforming (or having transformed) our experience of acquiring ideas...of reading and listening...that's fascinating. And, yes, alarming, because apparently I don't handle change all that well. (Shocking. "Sing! Fear is a man's best friend!")

See...the context in which words are presented is now changing so rapidly that we who seek to create those words have less and less control (and less and less time to control) how they're received.

A fourth writer wrote to argue we should give our readers more credit, that there was a kind of flourishing fiction world online, that people would read past the first page of a multi-page online story.

Maybe. Something to look at, perhaps.

But one of my many frustrations with the world wide tower of babel is that I can't even control what typeface you're reading this blog in. I can't control how the text appears on your screen except in the most crude ways (I can choose bold or italics or what size the type is, sort of).

And then there is the pragmatic publisher on the other side wondering how it all, um, monetizes (bad word, but it's helpful to pretend to know the jargon). See, writers get paid by the word. So a 10,000 word article costs a lot more to publish than does a 100-word review. If, as I suspect online, the review is going to get more eyeballs (sorry, more jargon; I'm trying to adapt), why on earth would you invest money in the long piece?

A number of commentators have chalked ND's coming demise up to another example of the end of print, and the glorious rise of the interweb. And they're probably right, if only because the collective wisdom has already said it's so.

Just now I can't imagine where that leaves a guy like me. I realize that I'm meant to adapt and all, but I've spent 30 years barely achieving competence with the printed word.

On my shelves are a number of old magazines, going back into the 1930s. I use them to swipe clip art occasionally, and as a reference into the design moods of various traditions. It's an odd thing to collect these days, and I wonder if there's been any systematic effort to archive such things. I suspect the universities and public libraries have thrown them out, figuring microfilm and its successors are sufficient. Maybe.

But because they're a physical object, they exist.

Will this blog, in a decade? In three decades?

P.S. Just after I posted this I looked at my morning e-newsletter from Folio, the magazine trade journal. Here's the headline which caught my eye: Meredith Editor: 'We Don't Hire Editors Anymore'. The secondary head reads: Hobbled Jack Griffin at FPS: 'We hire content strategists.'

Reading down, Mr. Griffin is hobbled by a knee injury, not his professional choices. And their ad revenues are still down 8 percent. After spending $600-million on launches and relaunches and web technology.

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February 21, 2008

"We can't make it here"

Lucinda Williams' mysterious friend Dub Cornett used to tell young musicians that they should license their artistic properties "commercial." Which, now that I've typed it, sounded better when Dub said it than it reads, but...folk wisdom doesn't always translate.

I never thought Dub meant one should sell out, only that one should try to sell. (Although he was behind that aborted "Beverly Hillbillies" reality show, so maybe the jury's still out!)

And, since even fine art is a commercial art form (in the end; or a hobby, in which case...not a road I wish to travel this morning), it seemed decent counsel.

Among the many kind comments we have received these last couple days -- all a bit like attending one's funeral, but welcome, nevertheless -- have been a number of suggestions that magazines and/or criticism would inevitably move to the world wide tower of babel. Or has already done.

Perhaps so. Perhaps inevitably so.

But James McMurtry's best song occurred to me in the shower (and, no, I didn't sing along; no need to wake the dead). We don't make much in the U.S. anymore, but one of the things we do still export ferociously is intellectual property: music, film, and television content, software, pharmaceuticals (which complicates the number I found quickly online) to the tune of, in 1995, $27-billion.

If music is increasingly to be given away for free (one way or another); if books are to be digitized and inevitably to follow the same sad path (please, publishing industry, pay attention to the mistakes we in the music business have made), if film is to be made increasingly available online for download...all those businesses are suddenly going to have trouble monetizing themselves. One of the few places musicians can make money these days is placing songs in a film. If films suddenly ceased to have such ready pots of cash (or television, for that matter), what would that do to the rising stars of independent (or dependent; or trust fund) music?

If nobody is paying for this commercial art -- the art of writing and photographing and illustrating and making music and all of that, much less making film and such -- who will create work? Who will speak for us? The big companies? The trust funders? Nobody?

Not to mention the coming real damage to the U.S. trade deficit should all that intellectual property somehow become, um, unlicensed.

And then there's the residual damage of our increasingly know-nothing pop culture in which expertise and bare competence are no longer valued. The absurd arrogance that complicated, nuanced ideas can and should be limited to a few paragraphs of instant expression, and then abandoned for the next chain of snark.

But I'm feeling my age this week, and so I'll pause there. But not stop.

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February 19, 2008

"Sing! Fear is a man's best friend!"

Perhaps the kindest advice I can offer younger readers is to be careful what lyric fragments stick in your head, and how you choose to live them out. John Cale was only temporarily a moving force in my listening, but that one song -- that one line -- has served surprisingly well.

Six years ago, now, when I had briefly resumed running short distances. My body quickly voted otherwise, which is still a pity, though, middle age being what it apparently is, long walks seem to do much the same job. Anyway, I was meditating hard on the choice we then faced: whether to have a child. It had never been one of my goals, and yet...and yet...and so I ran and meditated and ran and stalled and ran until I came around the corner where the crack house had been burned to the ground, two blocks from my front door (12th South in Nashville gentrified quickly, once it got started), and that phrase kicked in.

Translated as: Do the thing you're most afraid of. And so we have Maggie, who is just now raging in her bedroom against the necessity of sleep. Which she is not afraid of. She's afraid of missing something, which I quite understand.

Flying back to Seattle last week, my family safely in Morehead while my business partners and I contemplated the ends and beginnings of things, I caught up on some reading, which is how I came to be startled by a paragraph in the January/February Atlantic Monthly, part of their state of the union package. This paragraph, buried midway through a piece titled "No Country For Young Men" by Megan McArdle:

"Somewhere around the age of 45 or 50, the experience of losing a job seems to change dramatically. Whatever the reason behind the job loss, long-term unemployment becomes a much more likely prospect. People older than this are somehow unwilling to accept a new, lower-paying or lower-status position, even if that refusal causes substantial economic hardship. Instead, they may label themselves consultants and wait for a job comparable to the one they lost, one that, in all too many cases, never comes along; or go on disability; or simply exit the workforce altogether."

I will turn 49 a few days after the final issue of ND is published. Some days later, Maggie will turn five.

Talking to friends these last few months, I have learned the truth of that. My generation, or, at least, those of us who followed a path similar to mine and sought to master a semi-commercial kind of art and to work with a fair degree of independence, we're out of work. I could run a fleet of magazines with the talented designers, writers, photographers, illustrators, and editors in my general circle of friends who no longer have dependable employment. A fleet of really good magazines, at least by the standards we all grew up with.

That's just my circle of friends. I bet that same story flies through dozens of other industries.

Thirty years I have spent learning to do this job, never doing it well enough.

I do not know that I will ever be allowed to do this particular job again: To make a magazine. To make a magazine about a subject I love, with people I respect deeply, and with virtually complete creative freedom, but for those moments when Peter and I disagreed about the merits of this act, or that. But even to make a magazine.

This has been a sad day. These have been sad days, leading up, and as much as I look forward to seeing and saying goodbye to old friends in Austin this SXSW, I dread it. I know that at some wonderfully inopportune moment I will fall to pieces. And I know that's part of it.

Another phrase comes to mind, from a Sterling North book I read as a young person and cannot find just now, though I think it comes from Seth and was spoken by the boy's grandmother when he bridled at doing what he thought women's work: "Work," she said, "doesn't care who does it."

Please understand: Many kind things have been said about and to us today, and we are all grateful. It is not my purpose here (nor ever) to seek sympathy, but it is always my purpose to be as direct and as honest as I can make the words. No matter what.

"Sing! Fear is a man's best friend!"

I do not know what is next, and, for the moment, that is OK. But I know keenly what is being lost.

Not what is being lost by me, by we have been deeply involved with ND these last 13 years. What is being lost if the market continues to dumb down our discourse, and if the marketplace decides that the knowledge and experience of my generation -- and we still think and feel young, despite our knees, damnit! -- is to be cast to some dungheap.

I don't know what any of this means, save that there's a tall, cool glass in the next room, and that I married a very good woman. The rest will take care of itself. And, anyway, I sing so badly Maggie hits me after the first line, and she's right to do so!

Y'all be good. I'll be back another time.

And one of these days I'll figure out what the next thing I'm most afraid of is, this time.

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February 18, 2008

Green Initiatives

Some folks within the BMG family of record labels appear to be trying one last scheme to sell some form of physical product in a brick and mortar setting: The download gift card.

I have now received two as promotional mailings, one for Brad Paisley's newest album, 5th Gear, and another offering 30 of Elvis Presley's #1 hits. They would appear to hang on a spinner rack at retail, and, like gift cards, require activation at check-out. The list price on both is a pre-printed $12.99. Brad Paisley's value added is two bonus videos, a bonus song, and a digital booklet; with Elvis, you get 30 #1 hits, one of those digital booklets (I can't even begin to guess what such a thing looks like, and if I were slightly more curious I'd download one just for the spectacle of the thing), and a "bonus track" that I don't know nearly enough about Elvis to decipher.

The cards themselves have been designed, as much as one can design on something the size of a credit card, and I suppose the hope is that people will keep and collect the cards themselves once they've downloaded the files. No, surely they can't hope that, can they? Anyway. Here's what the front of the Elvis card LOOKS like. You tell me...

I suppose I will keep these soon-to-be artifacts somewhere, perhaps in the box in the backroom where I have a nice stash of pre-recorded open reel tapes. Which, one of these days, need to go up on eBay rather than taking up closet space, but no matter. And I can't believe this will work, though I am sympathetic to the impulse. Too little (far too little), and way too late, I fear.

But it is a more environmentally friendly form of music retail, at least in theory, and by some margin.

Word of a more troubling "green initiative" came from Folio, the publishing trade magazine, while I was traveling last week. WalMart's green initiative task force has decided to cut their newsstand by 800-1000 magazines (system-wide, I'm sure; I can't imagine any one WalMart has that many titles, but, then, I don't frequent the place), retaining only those titles which sell 50% or better.

This, they say, is driven by an environmental concern, a desire not to waste paper. Which, if one believed it for a heartbeat, would be commendable.

But the only green WalMart recognizes has dead presidents on it. That's a powerful motivator for environmental good, make no mistake.

Here's the context, though. Twenty-odd years ago, when I began a short stint as a regular contributor to Guitar World, a 25% sell-through was considered normal, and the staff (as I remember it; I wasn't staff, so this was second-hand) got a bonus if an issue sold over 30%. That means if three out of ten copies on the newsstand sold, the publisher was so happy he parted with money. And that was a publisher who did not foolishly separate himself from his checkbook.

That percentage has changed some over the years, but (keeping in mind that I rack -- or re-rack -- the newsstand at the family bookstore) very few titles regularly sell 50%. Our circulation consultant used to tell us we needed to push retailers who regularly sold that many copies of ND to increase their draw. Some of this is psychological: You can't sell the last piece of pie at a coffeeshop if it's sitting alone on the plate. And nobody wants to buy the last, dog-eared copy of a magazine. Go into a bookstore and look at how many copies of a new title they have stacked on the tables by the front door. It's not simply that they hope to sell that many...something about having that big stack out there inspires people to buy.

Now...magazines take up space, they're labor-intensive (we have to work the shelves every couple days to keep them where they're supposed to be, though we rarely have time to do it that often), and they're not a huge profit center. And, of course, they're made of dead trees, and there's a certain contingent of younger people who turn up their nose at the prospect of ink splattered on dead trees.

Despite all the chat that print is dead (designer David Carson's pronouncement during RayGun magazine's heady early days), print is not dead. (No Monty Python joke here, please.) Print is being redefined, sure enough. But what print does best does not play well online. Print does long, wordy, thoughtful pieces well. The interweb is good at quick jabs of news and snarky opinion. But my blogs are almost always too long, and they'd be very short pieces within the pages of ND.

That means, at least to me, that it's important to provide homes for magazines which offer up ideas, for we need an informed democracy if we're to continue having anything which resembles a democracy. And to have WalMart cut a thousand titles, plus or minus, when WalMart is the dominant retailer (and others will, inevitably, follow its lead), even without looking to see how many of them are Guns & Ammo annuals or whatever...that's just not good for the flow of ideas throughout our culture.

Which isn't to say that we should be telling WalMart what to do, but which is to say that you would be well advised to support your local, independent newsstand.

And be not deceived: WalMart is cutting magazines because it makes financial sense for them to do so. Perhaps that argues that the business model underpinning the magazine industry is faulty (and perhaps it is). But mostly it argues that WalMart thinks they can make more money using that retail space for some other purpose. It has nothing to do with the environment. The fact that I mistrust their motives and fear they're using this simply to justify not carrying magazines with which they might disagree...nah, they wouldn't do that, would they?

And, no, ND has never been in WalMart. We don't have a dog in this fight, not directly.

Once again: Cheap is not the highest good.

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February 9, 2008

Another Top-Shelf Discovery: The Sojourners

In truth, I had stumbled upon a couple other albums worth spending a few words on when Hope Nunnery overwhelmed me (blogged and blabbed about last week; you can find it easy enough, and you should find her CD pretty much immediately, if only to remind yourself what it's like to disagree with a critic...).

Vancouver, B.C.'s Sojourners -- not to be confused with the find magazine of the same name) -- aren't as striking a discovery as Ms. Nunnery. They are a trio (Marcus Mosely, Will Sanders, Ron Small) pulled from a larger group, the Vancouver Good News Gospel Choir. They also tour with Jim Byrnes, who had a role on a TV show about a mob infiltrator, but I can only remember that it was one of the early shows filmed in Vancouver, and that it wasn't bad. Byrnes has soldiered on as a bluesman, and a pretty fair one, though I've never quite succeeded in convincing my co-editor we needed to cover him. Byrnes has been right on the cusp with me a couple times.

Anyhow. Byrnes appears on the Sojourners' debut, Hold On, released on the Canadian label Black Hen. The too-facile comparison is to the Nylons, another African-American group (mostly, anyhow, and I'm relying on memory, always a dangerous friend in such times) resurrecting a form of American traditional music. The Nylons went for doo-wop, and quite well, though they were always a little pretty played up against the originals. The Sojourners -- whose members can claim some peripheral ties to Golden Age gospel (Small appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1958 as a member of the Fabulous Pearls, their press page says; the other two have crossed back and forth across various stages) -- have made a fair toss at hitting the sounds of Gospel's post-WWII golden age. Songs like "Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb" and the closing "Farther Along" are deeply rooted, and they have pleasing voices. Pleasing voices, though without quite the rough and ready character of those Golden Agers, and not quite as pretty as, say, Take 6. Which is about as far as I can go into the subject without exposing too much ignorance.

The thing is, I really like a couple of those Nylons albums. And I like the Sojourners for many of the same reasons. It's easy music to listen to, filled with joy, and sung without artifice. Steve Dawson's production is simple, easy, and entirely acoustic. Not easy listening music, but easy music to listen to. Our hipster friends won't be drawn in because there isn't a hint of feral fury to this work; it's just really good singing and first-rate gospel songs. And you can't listen to songs like "Satisfied With Jesus" and not know how much fun these guys are having singing together.

And that's enough. That's plenty, actually. Heck, it's not even Sunday yet.

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February 8, 2008

Back To The Garden (redux)

Tangential to what I mean to prattle on about, I do still miss and respect the sheer unadulterated optimism of CSN&Y. That generation -- which is almost, but not quite my generation -- which sought to change the world...did, but not, I fear, in the way they had hoped. I suppose each generation changes the world, and never according to plan. As if we could agree.

No matter.

We went back to the garden today. A nice clear, blue afternoon, cold enough to work in a sweatshirt and almost warm enough to regret that extra layer. It's not yet Valentine's Day and yet it's already time, I'm told, to plant peas. My father-in-law has already been out building two beds for potatoes and Survivor No. 1 -- the chicken who lived -- has grown into full rooster-hood. He has a fine voice, and is quite proud of it.

The other roosters haven't, um, survived the winter. Whatever breed we ordered grows to enormous size -- something over 10 pounds, when harvested. They taste good, but -- despite being raised without evil stuff in their systems -- they're really too big and too stupid to walk. One, apparently, spent too much time near the heat lamp and caught on fire. Singed itself. Which would've been a really stupid way to lose a barn.

Oddly enough, Maggie, who nearing five can read well enough to work through chapter books, and can certainly count, has chosen not to notice the shrinking numbers of great white chickens, nor the many times the big pot has come out. So long as Survivor No. 1 is there, she seems content. Or as content as a five-year-old can be.

Planting peas involves hoeing along the fence-line furthest from the barn, tearing up the dry grasses which were once two feet high. It's comparatively easy work. The soil is stiff and wet and soft all at once, depending on where you step, but the grass comes out easily. One must be careful not to slip on the corpse of an enormous squash. We hope to put strawberry beds on the other side of the fence, and then drape netting from the fence down so as to keep the deer out of the peas. (I don't even really like peas, but that's not the point.) Both sides of the fence-line need hoeing. Susan did the inside, I did the outside, and then we -- she, mostly -- planted peas. If a tolerable number come up, we'll be overwhelmed with 'em. And so it begins.

All this took about an hour, which was about all the exercise I could take. I used to be in tolerable shape, used to go to the gym and play street ball and all that. Pushing 50, I'm still fond of a long walk, but get too few of them. The hoe...that's work. And it's been a long, sedentary winter, all three months of it. I'll probably be sore tomorrow. Or tonight, for that matter. But the fruits (vegetables, that is) of last year's garden have fed us all winter. The freezer is full, but only because there are a couple chickens and a fair bit of our quarter-cow left. We're almost out of tomatoes, we've eaten through a goodly portion of the green beans, and lord knows when and if we'll use up all the jalapenos.

It's all good. A wood duck is nesting down at the pond. But we've got to get wire cages around the new trees before new growth starts, or the deer will run amok.

Hope springs. Or floats, if you're a duck.

And, yes, that's two successive entries centering on hope. Go figure.

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February 4, 2008

A modest endorsement for Senator Obama

I used to listen to an old Chinese gentleman who was as astute a judge of politics and of political character as I have ever known. To paraphrase the wisdom of John, they're all bought and paid for or they wouldn't have gotten where they are.

I would like to argue that point. I would like to be able to argue that point, but the evidence seems irrefutable and John had seen power wielded from the muzzle of a gun and the depths of the ballot box.

That they are all bought and paid for argues for campaign reform, which solves nothing for the moment.

For the moment, we head into this Super Tuesday madness. Living in Kentucky I have no vote, and I will give none of them my money. Perhaps later. Perhaps.

For the moment I seek to navigate a peculiar emotional landscape, somewhere between fear and hope. We fear what is coming, or at least I do. The war, the economy, the environment. Plenty to fear there.

But if we concede the premise that our choices for president are all bought and paid for, what then? Is our vote anything more than a text message to "American Idol"?

Maybe.

Maybe we are electing a symbol. Maybe that's what it's come to. Maybe that's enough, for the moment.

And so, though I mistrust his energy policy and fear the hope he brings, I have come to rest on the hope entrusted Senator Barack Hussein Obama.

I will choose hope over Hope, Arkansas.

My wife, a more ardent feminist than I, will stay with Senator Hillary Clinton. I can live with either; I can possibly live even with Senator John McCain, should it come to that (and should he not saddle himself with an unacceptable vice presidential nominee; his age is and should be a factor, and we cannot have another Spiro Agnew nor another Dan Quayle; not now).

But I wish, today, to choose hope. To believe that something is still possible in this country.

I will admit to being manipulated by the MoveOn.org video being sent around.

Fine. Manipulate me to hope instead of to fear. Here's the link. It's a music video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY&eurl=http://pol.moveon.org/endorse-o-thon/video.html?id=12034-1917439-wSsVaM&t=1015

Posted by Grant at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)