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April 29, 2008

A Juvenile Delinquent & the Blues

It is, hopefully, clear by now that the presence of chickens in my father-in-law's barn was not my idea. Which is not to say that I'm opposed to the eating of their flesh, nor the frying of their eggs. But my knowledge of animal husbandry is suburban and limited to the calling of cats and dogs, and some residual instinct for the caring of tropical fish. Even that didn't serve Maggie's birthday goldfish, one of which leapt to its death its first night here, while the cats -- too busy watching -- missed the fun.

And yet Dan has gone fishing and so it falls to your newly unemployed scribe to go feed the chickens. And make sure they're warm enough, since we have 24 that are less than a month old, all roosters, most of whom are doomed to the pot; it's worth noting that roosters are much cheaper to buy (less than half price, in fact), though I haven't enough feminist theory to go further with that thought. Another dozen juvenile hens (we like eggs), and a half-dozen adults (one rooster, Survivor #1, and five steady but indifferent layers), round out the flock each population housed in separate chicken condominiums. When Dan gets back, we will have to build a new condo for the growing roosters, who are now housed in a wooden box smaller than most televisions.

Midafternoon, having finally opened a batch of mail, I loaded a somewhat randomly chosen CD into the little red truck and headed out. It's a long enough drive that I can get most of an album heard coming and going (at least the old 34-minute album, or enough of a new one to know), though it's not a place, once one arrives, that calls for music. I had plucked up the debut CD by a Tupelo, Mississippi blues trio called the Homemade Jamz Blues Band whose oldest member is 16. They play guitars made out of gas tanks, at least some of the time (the YouTube videos I scanned involved more traditional guitars), which sounds more rural than the pictures within the package suggests. They replaced a Jimmy Reed reissue (the curious 1961 Jimmy Reed At Carnegie Hall, influential in England but not recorded at Carnegie Hall) that had been spinning a few days, and the Homemade Jamz sound nothing like him. A nine year old girl, Miss Taya Perry, plays drums. The 16 year-old singing and playing lead, Mr. Ryan Perry, sounds like a man, but it's hard to imagine that he has lived enough to mean the words his father, Renaud, who apparently goes just by Perry, has written. Songs like "Right Thang Wrong Woman." Mr. Kyle Perry, at 13, handles the bass. A classic power trio. (Oddly, Steve Winwood's newest album was in the day's mail haul, but, as much as I loved the Spencer Davis Group and half of the Blind Faith album, I hadn't the heart for it.)

I was listening to the Jamz' album, titled Pay Me No Mind and to be released June 10 on NorthernBlues, because it came in today's mail, and because a fellow named Roger Stolle wrote some liners to it. Roger was a marketing executive in St. Louis who became friends with Art Chantry, the designer, which meant we met up in Nashville once. Stolle and his wife quit the straight life to open Cat Head Gallery in Clarksdale (my folk art weakness once again) and, I gather booking Ground Zero Blues Club down there. Or maybe he's started another business, I dunno. Maybe they're the same thing.

Anyhow, Roger has put out a couple Big George Brock albums on his own Cat Head imprint that I've listened to but never found any words to write about. But his name was enough to get me to listen to these kids play the blues.

Even if it's a little cold right now to get into the rhythm of that Mississippi thing. It's been unseasonably cold here (this morning, as I rewrite a tiny bit, it's about to get unseasonably hot), and so we were worried yesterday when both lightbulbs heating the roosters were out. We scurried to Southern States and bought more lights and they were fine, but hungry. And, being incredibly stupid animals, thirsty, as they'd knocked their remaining water container over. Incredibly stupid animals, let me underline that.

Oh, and being called chicken? It's way more of an insult than you thought in the schoolyard. In junior high there was a wandering substitute language teacher who promulgated the notion that "unanisumbua" was the worst word you could say in Swahili. It means, he said, "you bug me." Which seems tame, until you consider the size and disposition of insects in Africa. (I have no idea if that was true, nor if I've remembered it exactly right. Nor does it matter.) So trust me when I tell you that chicken are chicken.

Dumb and stupid.

This morning there was a woman in front of me at the gas station, waiting to use the pump. Smoking, with her door open and the car running. Finally she got up, went in, paid for her gas and came back with a Mountain Dew. Turned off the car, at last, and put $4 worth of gas in it.

Anyhow. Out at the farm one of the lights over the juveniles was out, and I tried to replace it. Unsuccessfully, I might add. Halfway in their end of the big chicken coop, when one of the little hens jumped over my leg and fluttered to the ground. Flailed, actually.

This is a problem.

I know how to catch a cat. In fact, if these were cats, we'd be friends by now and it wouldn't have happened. I have a fair idea how to catch a dog. But I've never picked up a chicken, much less caught one on the fly. Er...scurry, for it made straight for the dirt beneath the henhouse.

Noises are being made above it, clucking disapproval, I imagine. Hope. Lessons being learned, perhaps. (No, Grant, these are chickens. They learn nothing.)

This is all a problem, and I am darn lucky that the farm dog is more interested in the city garbage I dumped on the compost heap than in fresh meat on unsure feet. She's a c-minus dog anyhow, and sweet, and hasn't yet connected live chicken with feathers to the bones she gnaws. (And we know you're not supposed to feed dogs chicken; she's a farm dog, get over it.) But I have to keep one eye open for Annie the dog, just in case.

I call my wife to ask how to catch a chicken, but fortunately her phone's not working.

And then it flutters to the air and I make a grab that almost works, but it is immeasurably smaller than I imagine it to be it is when I get my hands on it, and so I let go quickly, afraid to crush the poor bird, which is nothing more than feathers yet, not one of the ten-pound monsters still languishing in our freezer.

So we chase each other around the barn for another couple minutes until it gets tired and even more stupid and traps itself in a corner and I pick it up. If it were a smarter animal, I'd assume it took pity on me. But it's not smart, or I'd not have caught it. Sort of. It's a tiny thing, under all those feathers, and clearly scared. Thankfully not scared shitless.

Back into the coop, and none too politely.

These are the things I now do to feed my family!

By which point, in any event, the hens are in fine feather. They have left us four eggs, which is nice, except they won't lay in the box where they're supposed to, they lay in the far corner of the coop, which means I have to crawl mostly inside the thing if I want breakfast. This is not a clean business. Chickens are not clean, and the bottom of their coop hasn't been cleaned since Dan left. (Happily I have not been trained in this chore yet.) Leaving my behind exposed, but, fortunately, they're chicken and don't take to pecking.

Probably I should have fussed with the lightbulb more, but I'm not going back without backup.

None of which explains the bird I saw on the way home, down the road where goats used to graze. It was songbird-sized, and the color of a newly minted Mary Kay Cadillac. I do not make these things up, nor have I an explanation, though mamaw posited the possibility of an albino cardinal, and then we both laughed.

The Jamz' record outlasted the trip there and back again, but they ain't no damn chickens, that's for sure. They can play. They can sing. And they might grow into something; they might not. It's hard to tell with kids. But they seem to have an instinct for the thing, and to take a joy in playing it. And it's nice to hear somebody living (and scheduled to be living through the next decade) playing the blues.

All of which reminds me that one of the bands Jimmy Reed may or may not have influenced in England was called Chicken Shack, and that once upon a long time ago my friend Cheeseman played their version of Tim Hardin's "If I Were A Carpenter" for me, and it will help to remember that Christine Perfect McVie was singing. Never have found that record. Nor have I figured out why the Legendary Christine Perfect Album (McVie's solo outing between Chicken Shack and Fleetwood Mac) wasn't offered in the glorious reissue frenzy of the last decade.

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One last design deconstruction

This last issue crashed in on me later and harder than we could have guessed, in large part because the advertising community which has supported us these last almost 13 years was gracious enough to allow us to go out in the style to which we were once accustomed. But for various reasons the whole thing was built in something less than two weeks, and no wonder I broke down in the process like an old draft horse.

The unanticipated byproduct of that kindness was to make the issue doubly difficult for me because I was writing the cover story at about the same time those ads came in (and they came to my desktop, where they could not be ignored). Many of them bore nice words about us and about the magazine, and the whole thing -- the writing and the adverts and the finality of it -- would come back to the foreground.

But in some ways it was also comparatively easy, because I knew what I wanted to say: Everything, and goodbye.

Which wasn't, as it turned out, necessarily what my two co-publishers had in mind. But we'll come to that.

I tend to be a pretty laissez faire art director, by which I mean that I hire from a small pool of photographers whose innate sensibilities I trust, who understand both the music and the magazine, and who appreciate the fact that I don't tell them what to do. My belief has always been that we don't pay enough to micromanage shoots (nor had we funds for me to be physically present at shoots, and on those few occasions when I was around I felt singularly useless). And I don't put type on photos, save for the opening spreads and the minimal type placed on the cover. Good photos don't need words to dress them up, and I've been fortunate to work with some terrific photographers over these last years. And it's more fun for me to take their photos and figure out how to work headlines and text around them, than to play it the other way.

Now...our magazine covers have always been spartan affairs, largely free of bulky slabs of text. Partly it's the contrarian in me: if every other magazine does it that way, stand out by going a different way. And partly it was my belief in ND as a brand, which, I suspect, other more bottom-line oriented publishers probably thought foolish. And maybe it was. No matter.

For this last cover, I knew exactly what I wanted. Which rarely happens. And the opening spread, I knew what that looked like, too. So I asked Thomas Petillo, one of my favorite of the Nashville shooters who return my calls, to mimic Richard Avedon; or, rather, to begin there and extemporize. He was kind enough to spend a few sheets of 8x10 Polaroid film to get the cover image (they've discontinued making the film; as several have noted, there's some poetry in that choice), and shot the balance digitally.

I wanted that starkness because it fit my mood, and I liked all the white because it suggested, at least to me, the deep and good spirituality which underpins Buddy's very being. And Thomas -- who has shot Buddy three or four times, once before for us -- concurred.

I hadn't counted on the sequence Thomas provided of Buddy walking through the set, but it was brilliant and provided the connective tissue the piece needed. If I'd written a few less words, I'd have closed with that last photo spread across two pages, and let it speak silently. But I was unwilling to trim that many words, which I may yet come to regret.

All of which was fine until Peter and Kyla saw a PDF of the cover. It wasn't what they wanted. Maybe they feel better about it now, particularly having seen and read the full story which went with it. In hindsight I should have understood that this issue meant different but difficult things to all three of us, and I should have more included them in the process. But they aren't often involved in the design of the magazine, for which I have always been grateful. This last time I think they felt a bit ill-used, though perhaps they came to love this cover as much as I do. And perhaps not. But I approached this final issue as an end point in my career, and it is no such a thing for either of them. (It may not be for me, but it's easier to assume that it is. They are both far more engaged in the possibilities of the web than I suspect I ever will be.)

Past that, I began with the organizing principle that I wanted each of the major features to include a handmade element. Partly because I think it important that the things we make look as if they were touched by human hands, partly because I find most modern design sterile and formal, and partly because it is helpful to limit my options, particularly as I came to realize we were going to have at least 32 more pages than we'd initially planned on. (One issue, and I'm not going to dig through to remember which, I decided -- because all the features were coming in late, and I had some things going on in the bargain -- to make all the headlines out of our default sans serif face, Knockout, which comes in a wide variety of heights and widths.)

And so the James McMurtry feature, the first one finished (and the last one finished, too, as it worked out), is built around some stencil letters Susan's grandmother passed along when she unpacked a few years back. I took an old, worn out marker to them, and then over-exposed the scan. And fought and fought with the letters and the placement and the color, couldn't quite get it to work. At the last minute -- when preparing the file to upload to the printer -- it occurred to me to drop a black shadow of the type beneath the red, and it held together after that. Most issues there's one spread I simply can't make right, and I end up having to live with it. This time I think I saved it. I think.

My old friend, though he's younger than me, Jesse Marinoff Reyes was kind enough to design the Billy Bragg spread from provided photos. We hadn't time, nor access, to Bragg once the piece was assigned, and I knew it would be helpful to farm out some of the work for a change. Jesse and I met at The Rocket; he designed my very first feature for that magazine, and then, after I was done setting the type and trimming out however many words we ended up trimming out, we went to the late and perhaps lamented Dog House to eat and drink a beer and talk about boxing and pro wrestling until our ten bucks ran out and it was well after midnight. Jesse also designed the opening spread for a Merle Haggard feature I wrote with Andy McLenon a few years back; I thought I was too close to the story to get it right. Those are the only four pages in the magazine's history (save ads) that I haven't designed; our mentor, Art Chantry, designed the Lizz Wright cover, the last to use our original logo. Otherwise, blame me, as Chris Knight sings.

Anyway. Jesse's spread is handmade to the significant extent that he uses a complicated stew of computer skills and bad xerox to get the effects he's after, and I swept up the back yard of the piece trying to imitate what he'd accomplished.

I had hoped to use more illustration this last issue -- it's handmade, and out of fashion -- but for various reasons that didn't turn out. Jason Crosby, a good egg from South Carolina, I believe (we've not met, of course), turned in a splendid piece on Robert Forster. I don't know how handmade it actually is, but it looks it. The type went on easily, once I backed away and stopped thinking about it.

Along the winding way of this issue, I'd had an e-mail exchange with one of the Rocket designers who went way before my time, and has had a storied career in New York since, a fellow I've met only once or twice named Robert Newman. He's been AD at Details and Entertainment Weekly and Fortune and Vibe and I don't remember all what, but he's got a portfolio online (here: www.robertnewman.com) that I spent a little time looking at. It made me feel a little better about my work here to note that Bob worked with a staff of 10 or 12, and I was trying to compete (and, really, I was) in solitude. It was also interesting to realize that a number of the design touchstones I've been drawn to were also reflected in his work. Which, I suppose, is The Rocket tradition spun through.

Point being, the Old 97's opening spread is an homage to Bob, of sorts. Not a knock-off of his style, but I was reminded to play a bit more with the type than I sometimes do. Erika Molleck Goldring had been assigned to shoot the Old 97's for us, and, working with limited time and light, did a fine job. But I'd seen the opening shot on Amy Kincheloe's camera right after she took it at the New West party during SXSW. Amy's a friend of our Austin ad rep Trish Wagner, and they're both big Old 97's fans. And it fit the headline. So I used it instead. Sorry, Erika (and that's not flip, I really do feel badly over it).

And then there's Pinetop Perkins. Todd V. Wolfson, one of several aces working in and around Austin, had sent me one of those photos just to say hello. Britt Robson, a writer we'd just recently stumbled upon (too late, almost), had pitched Peter on that piece, but we didn't think there'd be room. I simply wanted to use those images, and argued that we'd find room. And then room found us. The lettering comes from my collection of vintage press type. Heh. Wonder what I'll do with all that now...

(A digression about computer-assisted distressed lettering: If you look at it, each letter is identical in its distress. Not mine, darn it. It's individual in its distress. As, I suppose, am I! Accept no fakes.)

A couple other notes about photo shoots. Alice Wheeler, who also goes back to The Rocket and was kind enough to show at my short-lived (co-owned, with Carl Carlson) gallery, Vox Populi, was also kind enough to shoot Sera Cahoone when we assigned that piece at the last moment, and wanted it made clear that Ms. Cahoone didn't have dandruff, that was an unseasonable Seattle snowfall. Though it snowed there some weeks after, as well.

The Dan Tyminski shoot, courtesy Milwaukee-based photographer Deone Jahnke, who was willing to drive to Nashville for this small commission (and, I hope, for other work!), ended up being a different kind of problem. Deone had shot Dan with his mandolin as a courtesy, as an extra, because he has a new sponsorship deal with the mando maker. It occurred to nobody, until the magazine was already on press, that we shouldn't use those shots since he doesn't play mandolin on his new album. Adam Steffey does that. Now...I'd chosen that photo because it was so at odds with his "Man Of Constant Sorrow" fame and the dreary seriousness of most bluegrass photos. And because this was an issue which could use some leavening. Management wasn't happy, and I'm sorry about that, but it was too late to fix it and I had managed to so over-use my mouse hand as to be unable even to contemplate redesigning such a simple spread, much less fighting the printer to stop the presses.

In the process of creating this last issue (and trying to date a handful of my old photos which intruded upon the pages as historical records, if not examples of good photography), I paged through a lot of our back issues. To which end an apology: I sucked as a designer, for years, and I handled photos badly, for years. I never could shoot a decent halftone on a stat camera, but had somehow been taught it was important to gray them back because the press would add ink and darken them back in. Only the press never did, and somehow I never learned better.

When we finally grew the magazine to sufficient size to get on a big, four-color press, and on the paper I'd always wanted us to be printed on (the thin stuff of a few years back, not the shinier paper these last six issues or so have been printed on), I was finally a tolerably adequate designer, and left the photos alone. And they look better for it. I'm astonished Jim Herrington, in particular, but all of my old crew, stuck with me through that.

And now, having achieved a level of tolerable mediocrity, I have a sore right arm and the lingering question of whether I'll ever design another magazine. Maybe I will, maybe not. Maybe print really is dying, but I didn't believe it when RayGun designer David Carson said it, and I don't believe it now.

But what matters now is that it's time to feed the chickens and hope for a few fresh eggs.

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April 27, 2008

Garlic Cheese Grits (the recipe)

OK...I've written at some length about the evils of torture carried out on behalf of the security of the United States of America, about the carnage of mountaintop removal, and one or two things about music and the music business. But what's gotten the most audience response, this last little while, is garlic cheese grits.

So, in fairness to all, allow me to publish the recipe we use down here. And a correction: My father e-mailed to note that his fondness for grits began at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, South Carolina, October 1967, where he was reading his first paper on the Jesuits (his historical specialty is the economic history of the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Portuguese empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, which makes my modest foray into roots music seem positively mainstream; although at present he's working on a book on Barbary Pirates and their prisoners).

The recipe, then, comes from Mrs. Betty Philley, who lives still next to the home where my wife and brother-in-law were raised. My hunch is that it's pretty typical. And, as Peter's mom noted, you don't need the garlic cheese roll, it's quite possible to substitute velveeta and garlic powder, or garlic salt. Since we tend to keep unsalted butter around (it's somewhat sweeter and typically fresher than salted butter), we would probably use garlic salt. No matter. This is good stuff, sure to harden your arteries if eaten regularly. Susan is making two batches just now for Maggie's fifth birthday party, from which event I am temporarily playing hookie.

GARLIC CHEESE GRITS

4 cups water
1 cup Quaker quick cook grits (not instant)
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 pound oleo (margarine, for you young folks; butter for we purists)
1 roll Kraft Garlic Cheese
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk and Tabasco sauce (mixed together, a few shakes will do, more will do better if, like me, you like hot spices)
1 cup cornflakes, crushed

Cook grits according to directions on the package. Remove from heat and let cool for 15 minutes. Cut up garlic cheese and butter, add to cooling grits. Stir well. Add eggs and milk beaten together. Pour on 2 quart greased baking dish. Top with crushed cornflakes. Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees.

If you're making it in advance it can be frozen, so long as you add the cornflakes when you thaw and bake.

And now back to the NFL draft...and trying to read the Titans' tea leaves...about which, perhaps, I shall bore you anon.

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April 25, 2008

A brief note on the decline of Southern culture

All I knew about grits growing up was that mother used them as binder when she made cat food, which she did once every two weeks or so in a kettle filled with kidneys and other organs most western humans don't eat, but to which our three to five cats became addicted. The house smelled, and we all absented ourselves on cat food days. And we only had grits around in the first place because my father would occasionally get into a mood and fancy them for breakfast, though how he acquired that taste in Glendale, CA, I don't know. Probably the Navy. Blame them.

And so I acquired the notion that grits were fit only for animals and eccentric parents.

It is probable that my acquaintance with Southern cuisine began during my exile in Los Angeles, where I took to eating at Rosco's Chicken & Waffles whenever possible. Certainly my fondness for cheese grits dates to the first time Susan, who would become my wife, cooked for a whole bunch of friends.

The key ingredient in her cheese grits recipe (other than butter) is a 6-ounce tube Kraft produces that reads: GARLIC pasteurized process cheese food. Which is to say, garlic-flavored velveeta. Now, as the health food guy working parts of most days in the family garden, I realize it's a little...out of character...to embrace garlic pasteurized cheese foods, but cheese grits are good eating, even if only on very special occasions.

And so, in advance of little Maggie's fifth birthday, I went shopping, for we will be serving Fleming County cow burgers and turkey hot dogs to a few friends. And cheese grits.

The helpful man in the dairy department pointed me toward the garlic cheese food, and then added that the three boxes on display were the last we might ever see, for, apparently, it's being discontinued. I resisted the temptation to horde some, for it's not all that hard to toss garlic salt into velveeta.

But once again we have been victimized by the tyranny of the urban masses, who do not cook, who do not eat cheese grits, who are immune to the pleasures of this form of processed cheese food. Small town Southern life just lost another crucial flavor.

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April 23, 2008

The new economics of music criticism

Not unexpectedly I ran into a couple familiar faces when we drove cross-state to Louisville to see the opening night of the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss tour. One of whom was reviewing the show for...let's just say it's a major entertainment conglomerate, with tendrils throughout the print and online world. For $50.

Which, by way of reference, is rather less than No Depression would have paid to review the show for our print edition, and we never were able to pay our writers near what they were worth, nor what they (at least once upon a time) commanded based on their experience and skill. (Your co-editors, as co-owners with staff positions, have never been paid additionally for what they write.)

Now...setting aside the two free tickets critics typically receive, though in the old days those tickets would have been paid for by the media organization so as to avoid conflicts of interest...let's see how this works out as a way to make a living. The tickets don't count because you can't eat them unless you scalp them, which is really unethical. And wrong. Just plain wrong. And the tickets don't count because we're talking here about making a living, and not even the IRS counts free tickets as income. At least I'm pretty sure they don't.

So. Let's say our reviewer lives near to the venue and it takes only a gallon of gas to get to the concert. That's $4. Parking across the street was $5. Let's assume no beer was purchased at the show, because we're trying to make a living here. You had to get to the box office before 8 p.m. to collect those free tickets, and the concert got out something after 11 p.m. So that's three...three and a half, maybe four if traffic stunk (hey, plumbers charge for travel from the time they leave until the time they return to their shop). And then let's say this writer, a professional who actually took notes (as opposed to your humble and error-ridden scribe), spent only another hour writing the actual review. Which doesn't count thinking time, and would be pretty quick for most of us. So that's four and a half hours of work, and I know it may seem funny to talk about sitting in good seats watching terrific music as work, but it is work when you're reviewing, and, again, this is how we make our living, we music critics.

The math works like this, then:
$9 gas and parking, which makes the net freelance income $41.
Divide 41 by 4.5 hours of work, comes out to $9.11 an hour. As of July 1 minimum wage in Kentucky will be $6.55. So it's nice to know that a college education, and decades of experience, is worth something.

This, perhaps, is how you make money in the new online ecology: By exploiting content providers. Let's see...the music is free, the writing about it might as well be free, but the people who make the boxes the music plays on and the sites on which it is discussed, they're getting paid, and some of them quite handsomely.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Only a bit worse, from the perspective of the caste I have proudly belonged to these last 21 years.

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April 17, 2008

Happy anniversary, baby

For the last 21 years I have had a really cool job: I have been a music critic. To varying degrees this peculiar job has fed me (occasionally lavishly), and clothed me (though the stream of free t-shirts has trickled to an unsteady drip, along with everything else), and even sent me to exotic locations at the expense of those old, broken, evil major labels (Dublin, Barcelona, Little Rock, etc.), back when I couldn't afford the ethics journalists are supposed to have, and when it was important to leave Los Angeles as often as possible.

It is probably not a good sign when one of Mary Gauthier's songs runs through your head, though I am misapplying this one to my 49th birthday, on which arrived -- not unexpectedly -- two boxes of the final print edition of ND. Yours will come soon enough, if you're a subscriber, and it's worth finding on the newsstand if you're not, for it really is as good a magazine as we've published.

I shouldn't have opened a box, since I knew what was inside, but I did. Doing so gave me a bad couple hours, until I left the compound and went out to plant strawberries. Which helped. It was a beautiful day in Eastern Kentucky, and today is another, which is also good because we have another 50 strawberry plants to get in the ground.

Now... I need to be careful here, because ND will continue online, and the brand will continue in at least one other way that we'll be talking about just as soon as Peter and Kyla and I make sure the note we're going to post says what we want it to say.

But there's a lot of me in this last issue, almost certainly too much. Too much, at least, for my right arm, which typed 9,000-odd words (not counting two interview transcriptions) and designed all but the ads and two editorial pages in a 144-page magazine. That arm is now hors d'combat with repetitive stress syndrome which will, I'm told, eventually subside, and would behave better if I quit typing these things, but I won't just yet. There's a lot of me because it felt very much like my last chance, my final statement as a professional music critic. Quite possibly my last magazine to design.

Quite possibly it's all over-wrought; certainly it's the most emotional thing I can remember putting in print since, really, the first piece of mine The Rocket printed all those years back, a long essay on the process of getting my friend Judy sober, and it's about her anniversary just now, though I can't remember how many years it's been. Twenty-three, maybe?

Which is not to say I'm going to quit writing, nor about music. But which is to say that I see no way forward but to admit that this particular career has come to an end. There are no jobs, and too many of my writer friends are already out of work. And I have marginalized myself these last twelve or thirteen years, disconnected almost entirely from the star making machine, indulging only in the music which spoke to me, and not the music which spoke to the marketplace. So everything which comes after, that's a hobby. And I'll do it for fun, and whatever profit remains to be wrung from the doing.

Which is also not to say I'm going to quit designing, though with the layoffs and drumbeat for the end of print, I'm hard-pressed to imagine what magazine I might be allowed to design.

All of which leaves hanging the question: What am I to do with all these things I've learned, all this stuff I've accumulated with the single-minded obsession of being the best designer I could be, learning everything about music I could absorb?

I don't know. And so the office will remain a mess a few more weeks while we plant and I work on the family businesses, and practice sleeping eight hours through the night again. Maybe even nine, if such decadence is permitted.

For thirteen years I have been allowed a wonderful, constantly renewing canvas on which to paint. For the last three or four, as a designer, it's even been a tolerable painting. Maybe my writing has gotten better, maybe not. But now, abruptly (though I have known it was coming for some months), I have neither paint nor canvas, nor the prospect of renewing either. Which is an entirely inadequate metaphor, unfair to real painters, but so it goes.

And I am deeply grateful for your collective indulgence in this small matter, particularly to Peter and Kyla (and Mary, who has known and put up with me all those 21 years; and to Trish, the best ad rep I've ever worked with). To our writers, photographers, and illustrators. And to all y'all. Thanks.

It's been a hell of a lot of fun, and I will miss it far more than even these words may suggest. The internet and MP3 files, they're the future and all, but I can't imagine them ever being all that much fun for me.

Strawberries, as it happens, were my favorite fruit growing up. Time to quit picking at these keys and get some work done.

Be well.

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April 12, 2008

The best festival deal of the year

Five bucks. Dr. Ralph Stanley, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Steeldrivers, and the Clack Mountain String Band. Five bucks. Saturday, June 7, downtown Morehead, Kentucky. Five bucks.

And, yes, this is shameless shilling for an event in which I have some very small part. Shortly after I moved here I was asked to join the organizing committee for a festival, then called Bluegrass & More, which had evolved from the Appalachian Celebration and some other trace memories with which I am not acquainted. Truth to tell, I don't do all that much, and it's always fallen on our production weekend, so I've not been able to go most of the time. This year, at least, it was scheduled not to fall on our production weekend. And, then, we stopped producing, so...ah, well...

A couple years ago Bluegrass & More absorbed folk artist Minnie Atkins' "Day In The Country" celebration and sale, which makes it one of the lesser-known folk art festivals in the country but, if (like me) you collect such things, well worth the trip. In particular, it is worth the trip to see the work of Lavon Williams, a comparatively young Kentucky carver who also played basketball -- not much, I gather -- for Joe B. Hall. Williams is as good and important a young (that is, not retirement-age) figure in folk/outsider/whatever art as I've seen in years, though there's a painter from North Carolina who comes up here whose name I can't seem to find (which is a pity, since one of his paintings is on the living room wall) who's a close second.

Add onto that a craft fair, and a small kind of midway (which is to say: kettle korn), and, this year, apparently, beer and wine sales to augment the brown bags wandering out of the historic Freight Station, now a liquor store, and it's a nice little thing. Ah. We've added a band contest this year, too. For which I am one of the judges, and I think I've lured my old compadre Hayseed down from Ohio to judge, as well.

Not a big thing. An all-volunteer operation funded through small patches of money found in various budgets across the university and from the tourism commission and from local businesses. The performers are on a small wooden stage, next to the moonlight school where adult education began in Kentucky, across the street from the library, down the street a fair piece from the Fuzzy Duck Coffeeshop and CoffeeTree Books. In a parking lot, if you must know, and it can get hot if the weather means it. Booked, I should add, by the head of the Center for Traditional Music, Don Rigsby (a solo artist and member of Longview) and his second in command, Jesse Wells, who happens to play fiddle for the Clack Mountain String Band. Which is not why they're booked (they're just good, that's why they're booked, and if I ever finished designing their album cover...), and it's not why the festival is named Clack Mountain -- that's the best-known geographic thing we could find handy, and we like the ring of it.

Which is not the point. None of that's the point.

The point is that it's a lot of fun. And this is the first year we're charging any kind of admission. At all. The university system has been asked to make 3% cuts all around, which cuts into funding, and so does the recession. But mostly we're convinced this is a good event and people ought to be willing to pay for it.

And mostly I'm convinced it's the best deal of festival season. It's not a lineup we'll be able to repeat, but if enough folks show up it is an event we can keep moving forward with. And we'd like that. So come on down. Morehead is on I-64 equidistant between Lexington, KY, and Huntington, WV, and two hours south of Cincinnati on the AA Highway.

Here's the link:
http://www.myspace.com/clackmountainfest

End of shameless sales pitch. But, hey, there's good music in my backyard, what's a guy to do?

Posted by Grant at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

April 8, 2008

You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd

My first official day of unemployment (though I've no notion of actually going on the dole) was well-spent out at my father-in-law's place, readying bits of the garden to do the job of feeding us, as it did so well this last winter. We have learned that one cannot can too many tomatoes, that we don't really use the jalapenos we froze (or at least as many as we kept), and that we actually did use all that okra. One particular publicist seems always to call when I'm out there, checking on one record or another, and to her delight the rooster went off right on cue.

All of which is to say I was pretty tired when I walked in to campus to give my apparently annual guest lecture to a library class that is, I think, meant to be about media and how we take in information. Over the years, I suspect because I've been in proximity to one kind of celebrity or another, I have been asked to speak to classes at Middle Tennessee State, at William & Mary, and here in town at Morehead State. As the adult child of an academic, it's a painless way to revisit my decision not to pursue higher education, if nothing else.

Now, Morehead State isn't the toniest university in Kentucky. A lot of the 10,000 some kids who attend each year are the first from their family to go to college, and some of them don't make it. On the other hand, they put an extraordinary number of students into medical school, and the music department is first-rate. A number of my friends around town teach in one department or another, and my theory about education remains that you get out of it what you put into it as a student. Which I finally figured out my senior year of college. Better late than not.

Anyhow...at three different universities over six or eight years I've had the same reaction from students: bland obedience. They don't ask anything more than the most obvious and obviously polite questions. They don't challenge anything one might say, and I'm fairly confident that several of my listeners today didn't appreciate for a moment the political digression which preceded my suggestion that our society presently doesn't value knowledge and expertise. But they didn't say a word. Not a bloody word.

Now...maybe I'm an intimidating presence. Maybe. And it's true that nobody taking this class intends to work hard at it; that's not the purpose of the class, which is taught each year by one of a rotating crew of reference librarians who have somehow been dragooned into teaching because it's a state university on a budget. One of whom, the one I know, my friend up the street, is leaving here for Middle Tennessee State, as it happens. The class is meant to be easy, a break, and every smart student's schedule is filled with at least one such class each year.

But in the old days, when I was in school, we questioned authority. By reflex. At the end of each quarter my senior year, when I knew who I was and where I was going, and it wasn't to graduate school, and it wasn't to law school (albeit I never did finish the wretched novel, but that's not just at this moment the point), I wrote a summary paper in at least one class arguing that the professor was fundamentally wrong about something. I remember particularly arguing that "The Rape of the Lock" was written in an awkward, adolescent phase of the development of the English language, and some other stuff (which I still believe, I guess). I got As anyhow.

But my experience, and my discussions with professors here and elsewhere, suggests our students today are somehow wired differently. They don't question. They absorb like hard earth taking on rain, retaining just enough of the water of knowledge to get whatever grade they're motivated to try for, and they move on. Their passport to the next life task duly stamped. The notion of learning for the sake of knowing seems utterly lost. The Socratic method is, apparently, an artifact of another time. Challenging authority...nah, why bother? Get along, graduate, move on.

I guess.

Of course I have a theory. We keep trying to quantify education. We have standardized tests to prove that we are (or are not) teaching our children all the things they need to know. And in order to succeed as a teacher or a student, your attention must be focused on pleasing the test-writers.

This is going to be a problem.

We need to teach our children -- this society -- to think. To value thinking. To explore ideas, not simply to take the advertised wisdom of Taco Bell as the gospel. To remember that the written word is not the inviolable truth, but the product of flawed human beings trying to come to the truth. And on, and on.

Tests measure only the skill at taking tests, and the ability of everybody involved to master an array of dumb human tricks. We need to teach thinking, and the active quest for knowledge.

Look where it's gotten me!

Posted by Grant at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

April 7, 2008

There stands the glass

It's empty, now, in the kitchen sink along with the rest of the dirty dishes, but a few moments before midnight last night there was a pint glass filled with a tolerable but undistinguished IPA and hoisted in your general direction, by way of saying thanks, by way of acknowledging another passage.

The last issue of ND wasn't quite done, then (I just uploaded the final files a moment ago), but I was, and Peter was back in North Carolina choosing his final words more carefully than I had managed.

But, save for the inevitable technical corrections, it's done.

In one of our many e-mail exchanges this last week Peter noted that he thought it was one of our three or four best issues, and he's right. Or at least I agree with him, which is close enough to being the same thing. It's big and juicy and filled with good music, and probably too many of my words.

I am deeply grateful to our advertisers for the kind words they paid to put into print this last time, for their support over the years, and for helping us to finish as much of this job as we could in the grandest style we could imagine.

Peter wasn't terribly keen on my cover design, and, at one point, said it reminded him of Harp. With all due respect to my friendly rival, Harp's co-editor and art director Scott Crawford, I had George Lois in mind, not him, when I was copping ideas. If I had anything in mind. But the folks at Harp didn't get to say goodbye, and I haven't had a chance to write about their passing. They were good folks and they meant well, and as much as their intrusion into the marketplace created some business frustrations, I always liked and respected them. If, in some small and inadvertent way, my last cover design is a nod in their direction, well, that's another glass I can raise.

It hurts to lose these things you love.

I have in mind Ted Hawkins' reading of the Webb Pierce classic, by the way.

For thirteen years this has been my canvas, and for the last couple of them I've finally felt like a halfway decent art director.

I don't know if I'll get another canvas.

I just don't know.

But in the meantime, I'm going to go spend some time with my little girl, and count the chickens and see how the cherry trees are doing out at the orchard.

And, to borrow the words of another great country song, I'll spend as much time as it takes to figure out what I'm supposed to do with the rest of my life.

Posted by Grant at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)