« February 2008 | Main | April 2008 »

March 28, 2008

A quick apology and an update

If I could find a camera, I would take a picture of my office, and maybe that would be sufficient.

But I wanted to write a note to every publicist and band and songwriter who has sent me a CD these last four or five months. Almost certainly I haven't played them, and I haven't answered your e-mail.

I just...can't.

I hope you'll understand, and, perhaps later, when I'm not hiding from this last deadline, I'll be able to explain why.

I will listen to all of it, once the madness settles and I've had enough sleep and the futility of things quits eating at me. And some of it I'll write happily about in this space, the good bits, and no matter that it's late, because I'll be writing for the pleasure of writing then, and nothing else.

But for now, I just can't.

The update is this: Our advertisers have been extraordinarily kind to us for this last issue, and it's a big one. We think you'll like it. (That is, if I don't mess it up.) Or, at least, it'll give you something to talk about.

The other updates, the ones we'd like to be able to post about the website's future and all the rest...we're still working on it. We don't want to over-promise, and we don't want to rush hastily into things which do not work. But there are kinds of hope afoot.

Meanwhile, please know -- everybody -- that I am deeply touched by your many kindnesses. That we are. All of us.

P.S. Before I forget...I didn't go to see President Clinton. It seemed more important to try to get the magazine done, and I didn't fancy standing in line all afternoon.

Posted by Grant at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

March 24, 2008

The coming Clinton

Maggie's favorite ex-babysitter called -- the one who wants me to try to convince the Ass Ponys to reunite because she and her new husband (married recently just a few steps from the Man Hut by the only judge with whom I've ever had a social drink) so love Chuck Cleaver's present band, Wussy -- to tell us President Bill Clinton is coming to Morehead. Tomorrow.

We were driving. Slowly. Through snow we had not anticipated, on our way to East Lansing, MI, where the uncles don't seem particularly concerned that their primary votes won't count. Maybe twenty miles an hour we were driving in Mamaw's white Chevrolet, passing fresh victims in the ditch every half mile or so, wondering how you get sideways when you have four wheel drive and we don't. Worrying. (We got there, and home. Quicker home in the melt.)

That President Clinton is coming to Morehead, Kentucky, to the new convention center behind the dilapidated mainstreet buildings they've demolished for a parking lot (and one wonders if the debris will be cleared by the time the Secret Service arrives), says several things.

It means Kentucky's May 20 primary will maybe count for something, and Senator Clinton is expected to win (though I cannot quickly find a poll online to substantiate that perception).

It also means they think Morehead is far enough away from the national media that President Clinton won't detract from the candidate's message.

And it means that, at 5:45 tomorrow evening (assuming he's on time, coming down from Maysville, and my recollection is that President Clinton was not a timely fellow) we will have a choice. I am not a supporter of Senator Clinton's candidacy for the Democratic nomination to be President of the United States. If necessary, I will vote for her. I probably won't campaign for her, and I probably won't put her bumpersticker on the old red truck.

On the other hand, I've not been in the presence of a former President, and he is generally considered one hell of a speaker when he's on. I went, long ago, to a rally for Senator Anderson, another man from Illinois who wished to be president, though his was a third party challenge in 1980, I think, and he failed. (On that occasion I actually went to the Republican caucus in Washington State, which led to some years of solicitations from the grand old party before I fell off their lists. Oddly I have somehow fallen onto Hillary Rodham Clinton's e-mailing list, though I cannot quite tell where my e-mail address was harvested.)

And I've always liked the fact that he posed for a photograph with my friend(s) in the Presidents of the United States of America, back when Bill Clinton was the president and they hadn't had a hit. (One of their fathers is or was a well-placed Democratic political consultant.) The Presidents, incidentally, have a new album out, and I remain grateful that Jason (the drummer) and I have not had occasion to rekindle our mutual fondness for single malts. Especially since neither of us have an A&R guy's credit card at hand.

But along that dark road in Michigan I entertained dark thoughts.

We might elect Hillary Rodham Clinton or John McCain, but we believe in Barack Obama. That comes at some cost, and with huge responsibility. Should Obama prove not to be the man we think and hope and pray he is, should he prove venal or corrupt or morally bankrupt or whatever...we will be broken. I was, what, 4 years old when John F. Kennedy was shot, and I remember still my mother's tears as the radio slowly told a story I in no way understood. I remember the layout of that living room in Wedgewood, the sound of the tropical fish tank, and mother's quiet tears. She is not a woman given to such displays of emotion.

I have followed politics avidly since I was that tiny. Never have I felt such hope. Never have I so much believed in the possibility of goodness embodied in one particular candidate.

Should he somehow break faith with his supporters, in the sad way the former governor of New York broke faith with his state (or the former President Clinton did with this country, and Nixon far worse before him, and on and on and on...), I cannot imagine the cost. Or, rather, I can. It's a price we cannot pay.

Which is not to say I think he will. Which is simply to say this is a once-in-a-lifetime sea change. Something to be seized, to be treasured, to be honored all around.

Hope is a precious thing.

Maybe I'll go see Bill Clinton speak tomorrow, maybe I'll stay home with my daughter.

Either is fine.

Losing hope is not fine. Not acceptable. Not today, not tomorrow, no time.

P.S. Went out to run an errand and it was snowing. Here. In March. Insert hell freezing over joke at will.

Posted by Grant at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

March 19, 2008

Three things I don't know (and one I'm certain of)

Up until Sunday morning, routed from Austin to Chicago on my way to Lexington and an hour's drive home, up before the revelers had returned to their rooms, in part because the hotel wake-up call came 43 minutes early, I did not know the Wall Street Journal published a weekend edition.

But having crammed in the last row of a small plane, the seats so close together that one could lean neither forward nor backward to rest, well and truly fried from SXSW, and no little bit frightened by the Bear Stearns mess, I found six quarters in my pocket and invested in the WSJ's weekend newspaper.

And so, three mostly unrelated things:

(1) On the bottom of the back page of the first section was a headline "Craigslist Isn't Liable for Biased Postings." The story, by Mylene Mangalindan, begins: "The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said Internet-classifieds company Craigslist Inc. can't be held liable for discriminatory real-estate postings."

Now, Peter and I have both been startled by the ways in which online discourse is unconcerned with truth and accuracy, particularly since we, of late, have been on the receiving end of that habit.

This is an entirely different matter.

This says that you can post a "whites only" real estate ad on Craiglist. (I suppose they'll take it down. I suppose, when it's brought to their attention. But.)

You can't do that in a newspaper, because newspapers are mediated by editors and people whose job it is to keep the playing field honorable, more or less.

This is a huge tactical advantage for web businesses. And it's wrong. It's dead wrong. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that you can extend this logic in various dangerous ways. If we agree this kind of mediation is unavailable and unexpected on the web, then how do writers on the web gain First Amendment protections? And what if they don't? And, then, what kind of hate speech and discrimination and simply evil behavior is now legal (granting that it's long been possible) even on the most reputable websites?

At some point we HAVE to get past the presumption that placing content online immediately is the highest good. It's not. Getting it right is the highest good, and if that means Craigslist postings (and Ebay listings and whatever else) have to be vetted, well, fine.

The internet monetizes in odd ways. But one of the comparative advantages websites have is not hiring fact checkers and copy editors. This makes them less expensive to operate than the much-maligned mainstream media. But that doesn't make the practice right, nor prudent.

It does pave the way, I should think, for some very interesting lawsuits down the road.

(2) Back to the front page, where Bear Stearns reigned. I'd like to make a small bet (with myself) that when this full story is told it will be revealed that other actors in the marketplace knew of Bear Sterns' weakness and actively worked to push the company over the edge. JP Morgan ("Gong Show!") paid one-tenth of the company's value. And were positioned to do so. Heck, the Bear Stearns real estate portfolio will cover JP Morgan's exposure, best I can tell.

There's some nastiness afoot. There almost has to be when that many billions of dollars are at play.

(3) The third thing I don't know is what's next for this little magazine. We had a lot of meetings in Austin, and I think, for the moment, our way forward is clear. But it's a long process, and the answers change daily, and we really don't know. We do know, at least, some things we're not going to do, and that helps. But if we did know we couldn't say, and I need to ask y'all to respect that, even as I wish I could sit here and tell you what's going to happen next. I'm pretty well convinced that whatever is next will be substantially different from what we've been doing. But that, too, may just be crazy talk.

Finally, the one thing I'm certain of: I read Barack Obama's speech yesterday, and watched part of it on YouTube. Those who are irretrievably opposed to his candidacy will not be and cannot be moved. Fair enough. But he wrote all or most of that speech, I gather, and it was a superb job. As a writer, as a former speech nerd, as a reader...I am stunned and moved by the elegance with which he navigated complex and difficult terrain.

I am certain of this: I want him to be our next president. He has the magic. He has the wisdom. He can do the job. He alone can inspire us to be more than we are, even though it is absolutely guaranteed that he will inherit a war without end and an economy so tattered it will hamstring any change he wishes to make.

So be it. The man thinks well and strategically and, as the cliche goes, out of the box. And he's got nerve. And he's a leader.

And, in a few moments, he's getting a few of my dollars. Time to cover up the Kerry-Edwards sticker on the back of the old red pickup.

Posted by Grant at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

March 17, 2008

The Elevator Diaries

Their eyes barely look up from their portable digital devices as they step through the opening doors, and quickly register that the other person or persons in the elevator are too old to be of relevance. They don't even glance down at the SXSW nametag. Instead, their index finger punches the "close doors" command on the elevator.

Three times, they punch that command.

Every single young (that is, under 35) member of the music industry at SXSW with whom I shared an elevator did this.

And they violate the traditional spacial requirements of humans in elevators by standing right on top of the control panel instead of moving to their theoretical half or third or quarter of the available space. They are in control. They are in a hurry. They are plugged in to the unseen world.

I am not.

The doors will shut at about the same time whether they punch the button at all, and punching it three times makes absolutely no difference.

But they are in a hurry. Even though, in fact, they are spending their time productively with their portable digital assistant, they are accustomed to devices bending to their will, better meeting their needs.

And it is becoming their world. It is their world.

Most years the generational transformation at SXSW is marked by music, by the rise and fall of electronic dance music or elephantine metal or whatever. Not this year. This year the transformation is strikingly NOT about music, but about the culture of the music business.

In the ephemeral, transitory path of the online world, it seems necessary to be plugged in constantly so as to know which potential co-branding partner is in ascent, and which is in decline, and what on the horizon would give one leverage to deal with and against either. Everything changes all the time.

Not my world.

And yet it seems in many ways preferable to the hustler's culture it replaces. For years I watched people climb the label food chain, working nowhere long enough to do anything but become attached peripherally to some act or album that did unexpectedly well before taking that perceived competence to another label. This tribe changed jobs every 18 months or less, promoted all the way, despite having actually done little or nothing at any one of those jobs.

I don't guess the hustler has entirely left the field, but my sense is that the brave new world values competence far more than labels once did or could. You either understand the technology and how to market it, or you don't. In the long run it may be even good. In the short run, I hope the elevators don't break under the strain.

And I wonder how many of those ventures will exist next year.

And then there's the music itself, in which the new lottery is "Grey's Anatomy" and the search is for the Darwinian mediocrity necessary to write songs which are simple and memorable and uninteresting enough to play well for twenty seconds behind a scene of fevered groping or the tears after.

Ah, well. That, at least, will pass one of these days.

For our part, we had a lot of meetings. With actual people. Some of which may turn into things we can talk about down the road, and much of which, inevitably, will prove to be vapor trails not worth chasing after.

But if, as I suspect, this was my last SXSW, at least I ate well!

Posted by Grant at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

March 10, 2008

Stuck in the middle

The re-election of Ronald Reagan in 1984 obliged me to confront my stark ignorance of the country in which I lived, for the verdict of that November was inexplicable. A year and a half later, I sold my big blue typesetting machine and bought a 1967 Dodge van, probably from a dope dealer. $600 cash. Curious and emboldened by William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways (I read Kerouac too late, and still don't get it), I outfitted the van with a bed and a camp stove and a place to put my typewriter, and an $800 stereo system. This took some months. Eventually I set out across, well, Canada, first, but it was cold up there and gas was expensive (so was milk), so I slipped back into the U.S. through North Portal, North Dakota.

There, a customs inspector with fingers the size of hot dogs pawed through my single file drawer of essays and failed fiction, utterly perplexed. (He, and every subsequent custom inspector, missed the two hidden compartments I'd built so as to conceal my camera gear, and my laundry.) Finally I explained that I was a writer, which made little sense to him. (I should add that I had long hair and a beard and was a good bit skinnier than I am today, which resulted in an unanticipated ability to pass for Charles Manson's little brother.) And then I added that I was on my way, meandering though I was, to meet a friend who was clerking for a Minnesota Supreme Court Justice. Which, in fact, I was. That served to convince him I was concealing neither currency nor guns.

My trip lasted about six weeks, at which point I was tracked down to a friend's trailer just outside Telluride, where I could not breathe, and summoned home to see a dear friend just before she died.

By the time George Bush was returned to office in 2004, I had spent most of a decade living in the middle of the country, where I had become acquainted with more than a few good people who went regularly to church and might vote Republican. (I knew one of them back in Seattle, and he was a good man about whom I often worry.) Some of those people were and are my friends, and they are kind enough not to mention the Kerry bumpersticker still on the back of my truck.

The election of 2004 was notable principally for its polarity. We were red states and blue states, and I lived (especially having moved from the entertainment mecca of Nashville to the hills of Morehead, Kentucky) in fly-over country. The election seemed to have been decided, in John Stewart's famous words, by two dudes kissing. By peripheral social issues which had nothing much to do with the real political challenges of the moment.

But nothing struck me at the time more than how absolutely perplexing we in the middle of the country were to the media and decision-makers and hipoisie on either coast. What they saw as polarity seemed, on the ground, a far more complicated tapestry of careful and conflicting impulses, most of them held by people of tolerably good will. And some not. For some months I toyed with creating another magazine, as I have done periodically for years. Originally I wanted to call it Middle Ground, but there was a middle school educators' magazine by that name, and so I settled on another. What I had in mind was something like the old Life, a mix of documentary photos and well-tended text that was descriptive of life here in the middle of these United States, without being political.

It is, for example, easy to hate gay people until you find a relative among that tribe. I am still moved by an old Life, across the room on the floor, in which Gordon Parks provided simple, beautiful, enormously complicated documentary evidence of life in the ghetto for an otherwise unknowing white audience. (I'm still convinced that story is where Al Green's ex-wife came upon the idea of putting grits and honey in the boiling water she tossed on the singer. Although maybe it was common lore in that community. I wouldn't know.)

In order to know if I have an idea I have to come up with a name that sticks and know what it looks like, if that makes any sense. This is the cover I cobbled together, and it is necessary for me to apologize to Kathleen Edwards (the subject) and Aldo Mauro (the photographer), neither of whom intended the image be shown in this context. I spent some time in e-mail chat with a graduate student in Washington, D.C., whose day job had something to do with NPR's website, as I recall. He was a Republican, and a smart, reasonable fellow. We fell out of contact, and I came to remember that Life magazine had failed because the era of the general interest magazine was no more. That I had no idea where to get the millions of dollars it would cost to mount such a Quixotic charge, and that no prudent publisher would back me. Or so I convinced myself, anyhow.

I still like that idea, which I suppose is why I've trotted it back out tonight. Though I still don't think it's commercially viable; I'd just like to make the magazine, that's all. And while I'm showing failed publication covers, it occurred to me that some of y'all might enjoy seeing what the mainstream country magazine I played far more seriously with creating would have looked like.

As things worked out (and, really, mostly by chance) Miranda Lambert ended up on the cover of No Depression. And, while I believed in her and in her record, it was also an experiment. A failed experiment, alas; that was, to the best of my knowledge, the worst-selling cover of ND we've put on the newsstand. Ah, well. Neither of my partners, it should be added, favored a more significant move toward mainstream country, and so we didn't.

None of which is entirely the point I meant to drive to, though it is a reminder that I typically have some scatterbrained business idea adrift, particularly when, as now, I should actually be writing something for ND, and that most of them work their way through the...um...vetting...process and fail at some stage of imagination.

What I was driving to tonight, however, was that Middle Ground thing, only in a different context. Increasingly I come to think that my generational segment is forever to be stuck in the middle between two powerful and opposing demographic forces. Though we are technically boomers, we are too young to have landed the good and privileged jobs. Somebody a few years older always had them, and rarely gave them up. And we are too old to come naturally to the constant stream of technological innovation which delight the generations behind us. Too old and too young, both. (And none of us hoping to die before we get old now, eh?)

Some blogs back I wrote that I could staff several fine magazines with really talented people of my rough generation who are presently out of work. And I could. Several blogs back I wrote, too, that I believed strongly in the capacity of people of middle years, and beyond (Kurosawa, Stegner, Mailer...it's a long list) to continue to make important, relevant, powerful art. I believe that. Hell, I have to believe it or quit, and I've no intention of stopping. Nor could I if I wished to.

I don't know what that all adds up to. Maybe just another evening ramble. Maybe something. We'll see. Maybe if young people don't want to read magazines anymore we should quit pretending to make them for their benefit. I dunno. Something to think about on the plane to SXSW. My last time there, I suspect. All things must pass, the song says. Or in the immortal words of John Belushi: "Road trip!"

Posted by Grant at 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

March 7, 2008

Three unrelated (I think) fragments

(1) In a curious extension of the dialogue (happily not a monologue) here on neophilia -- to adopt Ed Ward's fine phrase -- I stumbled upon Michael Hirschorn's essay in the back of the March Atlantic on the future of television.

Under the headline "The Revolution Will Be Televised" Hirschorn, a writer for TV himself, writes, in part:

"The traditional TV-viewing experience doesn't have to die..., but to save it, the media-industrial complex will have to act in nontraditional and uncomfortable ways -- and will also have to rethink what 'TV' is. Currently, it means watching a professionally produced video program -- passively -- on a television console that is fed with content delivered as part of a subscription to a cable or digital service. In the future, TV will mean a cacophony of professional and amateur short- and long-form content shipped via a variety of platforms to a variety of devices, only one of which is the Sony BRAVIA taking up too much space in your living room. Then, that content will be edited, poked at, commented on, parodied, and rebroadcast by you the former viewer -- now 'user' -- to whomever you choose. Who gets paid by whom to deliver what to whom in this new dispensation is, as in every moment of grand tectonic digital shift, the $60 billion question."

Yes, it is.

My wife, who has neither read nor heard me discuss this piece, is already talking about wanting on-demand downloads to watch whatever TV she wants to watch. We are, of course, talking about mitigating our hideous cable bill as we contemplate living with less income in the coming months. But it's easy to watch TV patterns change; we have a garage apartment which is sometimes rented, but which does not have cable (nor broadcast, because we live in a holler) as an option. Our last tenant simply signed up for Netflix and watched her TV a season at a time. And movies. And whatever.

That said, I can't imagine wanting to spend any amount of time watching amateur television -- the professional stuff is bad enough. And, anyway, my interest in the cathode ray tube is principally limited to sports and news.

Hirschorn's piece springs nicely from the implosion of the music industry, and continues:

"...The flip side of the music business's obstinancy is a kind of we -need-to-be-down-with-the-kids type of herd mentality. It dictates that unless you throw everything online, you don't "get it." But "getting it" does not necessarily mean giving in to the braying of the digerati, especially when you will destroy your business in the process....
"But as the music industry learned very quickly (and the newspaper industry before it), this model swiftly turns you from a business to a charity, undermining the value of your product even as it brings your content to a larger audience."

Interesting piece, anyhow.

Somehow I am reminded of the dozens of laser discs my older brother has, a product of his years as a rising executive. I suppose they were an imperfect technology, in that movies had to be stopped and flipped and such, but they were expensive and better than video tape and he has a lot of them. And they're worth nothing on the day that his player quits working. This is the problem the digerati have got to work through: We can't keep suckering consumers into buying music or TV or eBooks or whatever and then make their investment useless in five years.

At some point our threat to disconnect from the TV entirely will begin to make sense.

My thanks, by the way, to all who have expressed interest in and a vision forward for our website. The problem we keep banging into is, Where does the money come from? If anybody knows the answer, please let us in on the secret.

(2) Jed Hilley, executive director of the Americana Music Association, forwarded this blog my way: http://www.the9513.com/jumping-ship-reflections-on-americana-music/
It is a curious argument, made by a writer named Ben Cisneros (whose name is familiar, though I cannot place it). Here's an excerpt:

"The official establishment of an Americana music genre has been devastatingly counterproductive to the cause of advancing worthwhile Country Music. The artistic haven they set out to build has ended up to be nothing but a ghetto, where old acts go out to pasture and new acts languish as non-starters. Gary Allan has called Americana "the starving side" and he's right. In building their fool's kingdom, the AMA made sure that there was a place for Nashville to send all the music that was too mature, too honest, too bold, or too groundbreaking to fit into their plans to be America's foremost providers of musical junk-food."

As one of the 30 people who sat in the room and agreed to form the AMA, I should like to assure Mr. Cisneros that, first, no cigars were involved (although I seem to remember a jar of moonshine). And that, really, our discussion had nothing whatever to do with mainstream country music. We simply wished to build a viable community around music in which mainstream country music had no interest, and was going to have no interest. With the rise of Garth and Shania and the rest, mainstream country moved irrevocably from being a niche business to being a form of pop music. The economics changed. No longer were artists able to sustain careers selling hundreds of thousands of albums; they had to sell millions, or be dropped. We believed -- and I still believe -- that this is a foolish business model. And so we sought to create a trade association for good music that wasn't going to be pop music.

Never was it our job to save country music from itself.

As a byproduct of that, we created a kind of haven for artists who weren't young and beautiful, and, another time, I should like to dwell on the importance -- to me, about to turn 49 -- of fostering the notion that good work can be done by and for people who are of more mature years.

(3) The inevitable political digression. I am struck, as an occasional visitor to Daily Kos, by how vituperative the Obama v. Hillary camps have become. It seems like Senator Clinton has created this dynamic, and it is potentially destructive. And silly.

One of the arguments being made these days is that Obama is too young, too inexperienced, to answer the red phone. But if my math is correct (and it may be a year or two off), if Obama were to take office next January he would be roughly the same age Bill Clinton was when HE took office. At the end of the cold war, with loose nukes all over the place. It's a weird argument to make. That said, if we end up with Obama v. McCain we'll have a generational war on our hands that isn't going to be pretty.

And then there's the NAFTA thing which seems to have won Ohio for Hillary, though it also seems likely she was going to win it anyhow. Apparently, again, if the blogs on Daily Kos are accurate, Senator Clinton's campaign actually had a much more direct dialog with the Canadian government indicating that her NAFTA comments were mere politics, and then had the unmitigated gall to turn a similar but even more muted discussion between Obama's folks and the Canadians into a debacle.

Now...Obama's crew didn't handle the attacks well. They spun the 3 a.m. ad quickly, but probably not hard enough. And they didn't deal with the substance of the NAFTA debate, nor turn it back on Hillary. He's going to have to demonstrate the capacity to deal with the Swiftboating world, and he's going to have to reveal some sharp elbows at some point, or lose this thing.

But, look. They HAVE to figure out a fair way to deal with delegates from Michigan and Florida, and it's not going to be honoring the "votes" which took place in January. Only Hillary campaigned (and Obama wasn't even on the Michigan ballot) in either state, and everybody understood those delegates weren't going to be seated. Now, those are probably Clinton states anyhow, but by what margin remains to be demonstrated.

Somehow -- and without the intercession of the super delegates -- the Democrats have to pick a nominee without pissing off the women who support Hillary and the African Americans who support Obama. And the young people who suddenly are inspired to believe in this weird, wondrous process. And the Democrats have to figure it out in about 48 hours.

Posted by Grant at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 4, 2008

Chicken killing time in Kentucky

The last three great white chickens went out the same way their brethren did: execution style, with a .22 to the back of the head.

Which is not to say that I was anywhere near the killing. They had me spreading fescue seed well away from the plucking and clucking, and I suppose that's in part because the seed needs spreading but it also reflects some concern for my yet-tender heart.

Three of the 24 chickens didn't make it into the pot for one reason or another. One of the final trio had caught fire on the heat lamps, so they had to throw out the hind quarter which had been, um, pre-barbequed. We are having gumbo for lunch, which will use up all the okra we froze last fall.

But in the end they ate too much and were filled with fat, and needed killing. Not much of a lifespan, not much of a life. So the story goes. Went. As dumb animals go, chickens are really dumb.

Another batch of chicks -- a different breed, or breeds; they don't really tell me all that much, and wisely so -- is due in another week or two. They're supposed to eat less, produce eggs, be more mixed use and less meat, although the roosters are still dinner. (Sorry, boys.) And then we'll build a second chicken condominium on the side of the barn next to the garden, and maybe we'll rig it so some of the chickens can get out and feast on bugs and such.

If we get the strawberry beds in. If we get the new trees in the orchard caged and protected from the deer before the green bits show up at the end of their limbs. If we get some string up for the blackberries to climb. If we get the clover seed tossed where it will bring bees to the orchard, but not so close as to entice deer. If my father-in-law gets the plugs and oil changed on the tractor, which he will. If the weather holds, which it might.

Meanwhile, the rooster little Maggie dubbed Survivor #1, the sole representative of our first "barbeque special" (the first 24 chicks we got died on arrival; the replacement batch has been tender eating all winter) has all his tail feathers in, and is fine voice. Lucky him, he's not one of the twelve-pound white monsters. Last night he was placed with the six laying hens my father-in-law and wife traded for, and they ought to give him something to crow about.

The question comes what I will do when the magazine closes, and the answer is that I don't know and I don't have to know yet. After all, I get one more issue to play with, and I shall try to treasure it and not mourn until it's done.

But the garden will keep me busy, and I can use the exercise. The quiet. The solace of a spring sun, and mud.

It is argued that the era of ink on dead trees is coming to a close. Perhaps that is true, though it is far from clear to me that what replaces it comes close to doing the same job. I think magazines have rolled over and played dead when confronted by television and the internet, rather than counting their blessings and playing to their strengths. ND's decision to stop printing is a reflection of changes within the economy of our particular publishing niche; it's not a referendum on magazine publishing. Though I do worry that the barriers to entry for other small publishers are far higher than they were when we began.

More even than the loss of ND what hurts is the suggestion that everything I have spent my entire adult life trying to understand, to...master (or at least achieve bare competence at) is now utterly irrelevant. Nobody cares. Print is dead.

Well, maybe.

In the mid-1980s I sold my typesetting machine, a big blue Compugraphic 7500 that weighed 750 pounds, spun an 8-inch floppy disc and produced fairly blurry type, all things being equal. I saw the Mac coming, knew it would put me out of business, and made a choice not to learn desktop publishing. I spent those years writing, or trying to write, or pretending to write. All of that.

The suggestion now is that print is dead, that I should learn to code websites.

Maybe I should. Maybe in a year or two that will seem like fun.

But I've spent years trying to understand how print works. To understand typography, magazine structure and pacing, to build a file of photographers and illustrators who can more than do whatever job I put before them. (And trying to catch up to the software I once swore not to learn!)

For most readers, I presume, ND was about the music. And that's good; hell, that's the point. But for me it has always been about the ideas the music opened up. And it was about the magazine itself, about the process and pleasure of physically creating this thing that we all held in our hands and fought about.

And, right now, I'd rather cap a chicken than learn to code HTML.

(I do reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow. You do know that, right?)

Posted by Grant at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

March 2, 2008

The reversal of Fortune issue

The phone rang not too many months after I'd moved into one of the apartments above Guy P. Lockwood's three-car garage ("no loud music and no wimmin stayin' overnight") at the edge of Nashville. Said he was an illustrator, the voice on the phone did, and had found No Depression on a newsstand, spotted my address, knew I was new in town. I'm not sure what all Tim Shawl said to convince me to look at his work (probably: that he would work for what we paid at that point), but that he was familiar with my friend and mentor Art Chantry's contributions to graphic design doubtless went a long distance.

We became friends, in the modern way: Over the phone, via e-mail, occasionally in person. We both had children, moved further away.

Tim's always been the guy I went to with the most impossible dreams. Build a folk art construction that looks like Dolly Parton (I made it too small on the cover). Hand-draw awards for the Americana Music Association (you should see the guitar he created for Buddy Miller!), paint me a mandolin in the style of Picasso for the Sam Bush opening spread.

There's a disparaging term in illustration for people who don't have their own style. They get called wrists, and over the years I've worked with some really good wrists. Tim's not a wrist. Back in college I briefly dated a gal who drove a Datsun two-seater MG knock-off with a dual carb and, at the time, a defective water pump. One of my stepbrothers is an especially gifted mechanic, and, now, an engineer. An inventor. He hadn't gone back to college when Rose had her Datsun, but he was headed that way. Anyhow...he stood there one day with a screwdriver in his hand and his ears open and tuned those dual carbs just right. We left the car at the shop where he worked with unknown ailments, and he simply built a new waterpump rather than waste time finding one on the parts market.

Tim's like that. There's not much he can't do, because he understands in real practical terms how things were done, how art was made. How art can now be made.

In the making of this present issue, I knew it was almost certainly to be the next-to-the-last one we would publish. Peter was writing a cover story in which we both believed deeply, one of several occasions on which one of us has found something and the other one has ended up writing about it; he didn't remember, but I pretty much stole the Drive-By Truckers from him, and he was way ahead of me with the Bottle Rockets, though I wrote their first cover story...Peter got the second. Once Peter finally heard Crooked Still, it was time for me to get out of the way.

We had zero chance of a photo with all the various band members in it. I tried, briefly, to get them to submit photo booth images, but nobody did. And so I spent weeks banging around for some kind of visual that worked. I looked at a handful of photographic still-lives, thought of setting one up. Kept thinking. Until one day I found this image online:

Now, I was looking for that image. Not that one, exactly, but I was wading through somebody's online archive of Fortune covers, though I couldn't say why, because in that moment I had the instinct that a solution was to be found there. And it was. Later, in a moment of graveyard whimsy, one of us dubbed this the Reversal of Fortune issue.

Other than the cover, there's not much design inspiration in this present issue. I mean, it's fine. The photos are good, the illustrations are good, even one of the two I did under my pseudonym (I'm not an illustrator, make no mistake) is tolerable. But the weight of the gathering sadness got in the way of anything more than reflex and instinct. Which is why one tends craft and hopes for inspiration.

Not the point. The point is this: It's one of the best things Tim has ever done for me. For us. It's a cover no other magazine on the newsstand would even think about doing, mostly because most designers don't look past yesterday for inspiration and in large part because I'm fairly certain every newsstand consultant in the U.S. would tear it to pieces.

Hit it where they ain't, that's my theory.

(By the way: Tim did it all on his computer. It just looks handmade.)

Our covers have never looked like anything else on the newsstand, and it's not because I can't. It's because I won't. (And maybe because I can't.)

Here's the point, though. Whatever transition to the web happens may be fun and good and interesting and challenging. All those things. But it won't involve Tim. It won't involve the other really gifted illustrators who make our pages interesting to look at. And it won't involve the two heaping handsful of extraordinary photographers who make the magazine look the way it looks every issue.

Maybe figuring out how to produce a podcast will be interesting. Maybe I'll even like it.

But I've been putting things in print since I was in ninth grade, back when I started typing carbon copies of the Streaker's Digest, my junior high school foray into muckraking (let this be an overdue apology to Ann and Joy, who suffered too much at my hands). I believe in print. I believe it's a better way to communicate a range of ideas than the web is. The web is a great way to communicate a fact. A news item. But the full tapestry of the printed page sings to me in ways the web never will.

I'm finally playing the bloody Dan Tyminski album, like hearing an old friend while I type this morning. And I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful beyond words to the photographers and illustrators who have made ND such a distinct magazine and a distinct pleasure to create. I'm grateful for the 75 issues we've had together, and hope I can manage some dignity for #75. Some inspiration to go with the tears you will hopefully never see.

But I know what's being lost. I've spent my entire adult life getting to this point -- assembling these people and this work in this one singular place -- and it's about to be gone. It will not come my way again, and I have been truly fortunate these last many years.

The question, then, is what's to be found in its place?

I don't know.

I don't know.

But I didn't know ND was coming, either, 13 years ago. Hoped, but didn't know. And, per my earlier endorsement of Obama, I'm big on hope this year.

And one never knows who will be on the other end of the phone.

Posted by Grant at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)