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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.

Posted by grant on April 17, 2008 11:52 AM | Permalink

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