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May 25, 2008

Blue Highways, revisited

Every year until Grandma died in the mid-1970s, and the cancer took so long it's difficult to remember the actual year it ended, we drove from Seattle to Merced, California. It took two and a half days, best I can remember, and maybe some of that was because we sometimes took 101 down the Oregon Coast, and maybe some of it was because there were two squirmy boys in the back seat always looking for the next Sambos, a now-forgotten pancake chain (better, at least, than Coon Chicken Inn, which I know only from the collectible world my brother's first wife dabbled in), or Dennys, where grilled cheese could be dinner.

The last year, just mom and me, it took a day and a half. In the same car, a 1964 Chevelle, I believe, and not the faster 1967 Dodge. That's how much the roads got better.

Over the years I've driven a good bit of this country, the main roads and the back roads. Back in the mid-1980s, emboldened in part by William Least Heat Moon's book, I sold my first business and fixed up a 1967 Dodge van with the engine next to the driver's seat and a stereo that cost more than the van itself, and went out to try to find the America which had voted for Ronald Reagan.

I didn't.

I do remember leaving Austin with Timbuk 3 playing on the college radio station, though I'm not entirely certain the timeline makes this memory possible, and thinking that would be a cool town to move to, and moving somewhere out of Seattle was on my agenda, though it would take another decade before I would finally leave. A good decade. Grunge. The Rocket. The bare beginnings of No Depression.

But this trip, driving my wife to her yoga retreat in Woodstock, IL, northwest of Chicago, I have been struck by how bad our main roads have become, by how we've lost faith even with the fundamentals of our society.

I wrote this originally for daily kos from an indifferent hotel in the suburbs of Chicago. (I hadn't the passwords to my own site, which explains a lot.) No CNN, no ESPN, a Mexican restaurant next door that thought I might be la migra and was cold at best. We passed beautiful old barns that are about to be turned into housing developments, the cattle already sold, one last corn crop in the ground. We passed new and old -- but unoccupied at a rate that speaks to the deterioration of our economy -- retail and manufacturing strip malls.

And we did it on roads that should have been repaired long ago. Now, I know the weather up here is rough and that road maintenance is expensive. But even Grandma, assistant to the county clerk except during the war, and then she gave his job back, even Grandma said you get what you pay for.

Some day we're going to run out of gas, and it may well be during my lifetime. Certainly its rising price will change my travel habits, making these trips far more of a luxury than they have been. It will become more of a struggle for my daughter to know her relatives on the West Coast.

But the roads are a symptom.

And they're plumb awful. Broken. Fragmented. Dangerous. Crowded, yes, but the pavement is in terrible shape.

If I were a touring band, I would worry afresh about the increasing possibility of severe accident, about the damage done to tires and suspension systems, about the wear and tear and the economy of rock 'n' roll at $4 or $5 or $10 a gallon.

Travel is now, for us, a luxury item, for which we budget.

But the point, here and now, is this: We have suffered a fundamental breakdown of our social contract. We have changed our relationship to taxes and to civic duty. The sainted Ronald Reagan (though I don't remember him having been so beloved during his terms in office) and his followers have recast taxation as theft. Rather than believing government can and should work to better the lives of citizens, they infused political discourse with the notion that government could not work.

This is not a new observation. See: Katrina. See: health care. See: public education.

When we stop believing in this country, when we stop believing things can and should be improved, when we stop being willing to pay for the society we say we wish to live in, and when we start believing that we are all nothing more than specific and discrete interest groups, we have failed. We have failed ourselves, our children, and the patriots who founded this land. (Which is not to say their aim was pure, but that's not the point; their words were.)

We face a lot of choices. This next election, it could be about race, or the economy, or the war(s), or, with any luck, it could be about energy and ecology. But the bottom line is that it's about the roads we travel together.

Posted by Grant at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 14, 2008

The continuing confessions of a newborn redneck

Actually, my neck's been red for about a month now, because I keep forgetting to use sunscreen and I cut my hair off last summer when the heat finally outweighed the benefits of pretending I hadn't begun to have a comb-over problem.

Generations of ancestors who tried desperately to free themselves from the toil of the soil would probably be saddened by how I've been spending these last few weeks, but the sunburn and the work boots and all my talk of chickens and worry about the weather. For most of my 49 years I have changed channels when the weather came on, and ignored its presence in the newspaper. In part this is because I spent 30-odd years in Seattle, and there's really no point in having a weather forecast most days there. It's gray, and dripping, and I miss that soothing sky. I look at the weather every morning, now, trying to guess when it's going to be dry enough to plant beans.

Still, I have been thinking some about that pejorative, "redneck," and not so much about the Randy Newman song (although some of the silliness being spit at Barack Obama does remind me how desperately we could use Newman's wit just now; his old wit, that is, not the elder statesman making soundtracks). My neck got red because I was out in the field, really only for a couple hours for a series of afternoons, trying to get the ground ready and the plants in the ground so that we could eat local food grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Maybe there's something effete in all that, but it's harder, and it's work, and it tastes good when it's done.

Point being that the neck only gets red when you're outside working, because if you're playing you probably have suntan lotion on, and if you're dozing it's probably in the shade. And there's been a lot of talk during this inning of the presidential election about the white, working-class voter in Appalachia. I can't pretend to be one, but a lot of that talk was still hurtful and shamefully ignorant.

Doubtless all my chat about chickens and crops seems odd, particularly on a music site, particularly coming from a middle-aged child of the suburbs. Fine, it's odd. But when I listen to Larry Sparks sing "John Deere Tractor" (as I have been; Rebel sent out a compilation disc that's been spinning in the little red pickup, once I brought Duffy's debut back inside to write about it), I have a little more context than I did the first few times I heard the song. Sparks has a lot of nostalgia in his songs, a lot of looking backward. I'm not immune to that temptation, but it's far more useful to look forward.

I spent most of today out in the barn, waiting for a chicken to die. It didn't, at least not yet. I got there early this morning, caught up with Dan while he was walking from the little pen where the motley assemblage of month-old roosters live, cradling an almost unmoving bundle of feathers. He set it down in one of the compartments in our unfinished chicken condominium, and shrugged. The night before he'd turned the heat lights off on the little ones, and, in their scrum to stay warm, this one had been hurt. He didn't figure it had long, but on the chance that it was sick (and not hurt), he wanted it segregated.

So we sawed and built and stapled chickenwire over the second set of condos, and the little rooster kept breathing. We moved the half-grown hens into their new quarters, and I spent a few minutes chasing the one that got away with a fishing net, which works better than bare hands. And then we moved the month-old roosters into their remodeled quarters. Which meant I held a bunch of chickens today, on purpose. And then we fed them, and, since it hadn't died yet, Dan fed and watered the bedraggled rooster. My guess is it got pecked on its back something fierce, or stepped on hard, because it couldn't raise its head. But, to our surprise, it drank, and then ate. So maybe it'll make it.

Dan looked at it eating, and shrugged again. "If you live, I'll kill you," he said.

I live -- we mostly live -- pretty isolated from death. Death happens in hospitals and hospices, and I've been very lucky that it hasn't been a presence in my family for a good long time. I am far from the first to note that there's something about knowing what you're eating, where it came from, and how it lived. What it ate. How it died.

I find it easier not to be a vegetarian now that I'm involved in some of the meat we eat. It's a little more honest, anyhow.

And ferrying the little birds, it made me smile. Scared, timid little things, with sharp feet and beating hearts. If they live, we will kill them. That's a hard truth for a life-long pacifist to embrace, but I'm getting there. It comes with obligations, that food. Our food.

Posted by Grant at 8:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

May 13, 2008

The idiocy of the new, revisited

Last week arrived on my desk the latest issue of Folio, the trade magazine serving the magazine industry. Glued to its cover is a one-page advert which proclaims "We're Giving Away a Kindle! (And updating our database...)," illustrated by a photograph of Amazon's new book surrogate gadget, placed atop a bound volume of an actual book.

Folio serves a broad spectrum of magazine publishers, many of them business-to-business titles for whom the magazines they publish are really long-form adverts for the tradeshows they produce, which are their real profit centers. Folio has also just spun off a new title devoted to the proposition that magazines will find new and exciting profits and possibilities online.

Which, y'know, is either a sore subject or an opportunity, depending on what part of what day you talk to me.

At the same time I have just this morning been reading a diary entry on the daily kos website talking about West Virginia politics and sociology, the extent to which cable TV and high-speed internet access does and does not penetrate that and other largely poor places.

Under any circumstances I think it's kind of idiotic for Folio to be giving away and embracing a piece of technology which has as its avowed aim the end of print as we know it (with apologies to one-time RayGun magazine art director David Carson).

But far more to the point I am endlessly frustrated by the herd mentality within the American business community. We have constantly downgraded magazines (and publications in general) ever since MTV and Spy and USA Today introduced short-attention-span journalism. With pretty pictures.

Fine.

That doesn't mean everybody has to be like that. It doesn't mean you have to design publications only for the lowest possible common denominator. It surely doesn't mean people should be encouraged to read -- and think -- less.

And, one more time: the digital music revolution has done nothing more than transfer the profits made from the production of music from record labels and into the hands of the manufacturers of the playback machinery, who have in their favor planned obsolescence and the unplanned certainty that new technology will quickly make outmoded whatever gadget they presently sell, forcing consumers to buy yet another fancier gadget.

Anything else we pretend the digital music revolution has accomplished is either temporary or propaganda.

I'm not saying the web is irrelevant. I'm just saying it's different, that it performs a separate and distinct function which -- if publishers tend to their knitting -- can mesh with the printed word, but should not be permitted by the unthinking bean counters with corner offices to gut the publishing industry.

Discuss at your leisure.

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May 5, 2008

A quick query of the tea leaves

More or less at the moment the final edition went off to the printer I quit keeping the log of incoming CDs I have maintained since December 7, 2004. My last entry was March 17, 2008, and there it will stop. With, as it happens, Fred Eaglesmith. It runs 207 pages, though it was never complete. I never bothered to enter the urban music or electronic dance music or heavy metal titles which came accidentally to my mailbox.

If I remember some numbers Chris Morris ran off a few years back, the total number of releases in distribution (which is a subset of all releases, in that a number of local bands and home-bound artists sent their music out for review in our pages, though it was not nationally available) had trebled in the last decade, from 20-odd thousand to 60-odd thousand.

My sense is that number has slowed to a trickle. But it's also likely that a number of publicists have quickly removed me from their mailing lists, and that I've neglected to count all the links to downloadable albums which I still ignore because I continue to view such things as the spawn of a particularly evil demon. (See: previous posts at this site. Too many of 'em, in fact, I'm sure.)

So I'm tossing this out to my more active colleagues: Have release schedules slowed down as much as I think they have?

It would make sense. The economy is in tatters, and no matter what election fix goes in, it's going to be a mess for a while because the whole structure is no better than the structure of the music industry. And while bands of a certain profile (or with trust funds) can continue to release albums, with $4-a-gallon gas and a bad economy and no record retail and little, if any, label structure (not to mention radio, which is mostly unmentionable), it seems like a lot of musicians from whom we once heard regularly are sitting on their hands. Staying out of the studio. Touring Europe.

Some winnowing would be good, based on all the CDs I have yet to listen to from acts I've never heard of (and I am, slowly, doing that, just for the sport of it; if I find something good, happily, I have this nice little website on which to trumpet the discovery) from musicians who ought to be able to hear that they're not ready for the national stage.

But I fear we're in for more than winnowing.

The last cash cow left (aside from TV) has been touring. And I'll be real curious to see how the summer festivals do. Local bands in big cities will probably do bang-up business. But those of our friends who can tour one or two major regions of the country and play to 60-200 fans each night...I bet they have a tough time this summer. Next fall.

Not wishing any of that. Just tossing it out to see if that's what the world looks like to the rest of y'all.

Posted by Grant at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

May 4, 2008

Fear of television

Under different circumstances, the quotation with which Peter chose to introduce his piece on the Weepies might have been a provocation, but he wasn't trying to poke at the grumpy bear on the next computer, not this time:

"I don't differentiate all that much between movies, music, TV -- it's like all these companion pieces that go along with your life," says Steven Tannen.

Not my life.

We weren't raised with television in my house, not until dad and I took to watching football at the home of an economics professor who also owned a vineyard, which I imagine led to mother's relenting and finally acquiring a 12-inch black and white and hooking up the cable. To this day I cannot walk into a room with a TV on and ignore it, and this may explain -- this and a timely chainsaw accident -- how I came to watch the entire Watergate hearings.

My co-editor had a more normal raising, which doubtless reveals why he found it necessary to thank "Gilligan's Island" in the staffbox of our first issue.

Apparently, if you are a musician, television is the new lottery ticket that buys your way out of the day job you just lost. Apparently, if you are a fan of unknown artists, it is necessary to watch "Grey's Anatomy" or "Scrubs" to hear needle drops of new songs that radio is too ossified to play. It is one of the few ways musicians are well-paid in the new economy, but I refuse to watch either show because they bore me to tears. As does the music they play, which is chosen for its ability to serve as supporting wallpaper to a scene, not for its lasting creative merits as a song.

Same with movies. Or film. None of which is to minimize the virtues of good music placement (I still remember a short-lived '50s detective series that Joe Jackson did music for, and the fun I had realizing he'd placed Link Wray's "Rumble" atop a barfight), nor of being paid for same.

But the narrative structures of film and television are different, one from the other (so is the screen dimension, though that appears to be changing somewhat), and music is too important to me to allow to become nothing more than the supporting tear jerk of an already over-calculated screen moment.

Blame it on radio. They quit caring about artists, quit back-announcing songs, and were so busy buying and selling each other that they owe the bank so much money that music is only fit in among commercials and satellite-fed banter from absent DJs.

Blame it on MTV. Do I have to write more than that sentence? I didn't think so.

Blame it on the decline in record retail.

But it does little good to assign blame, for it changes nothing, fixes nothing.

There has to be a better way. There has to be a way to re-establish communities now linked only by their ability to type at each other from great distances. There has to be a way to sustain the work of musicians without whoring out their songs to film and TV and commercial spots because that's the only paying work, and the only way to be heard against the din of this over-plugged society.

I know all this writing about chickens seems obscure and remote to a great number of readers. "Green Acres" and all. But it's real. It's a beautiful day today, filled with bird calls and green everywhere and the smell of things growing which one day we will eat, except for the chicken shit. I am not nurtured by text messages and knowing where the moment's most important blog is to be found, what everybody else is listening to or thinking about. What fabulous new widget might be used to spend even more time playing on the computer.

Television is this stupid box in the livingroom that I sink into when incapable of anything else, or when there's a football or basketball game on. It's not my life. It's not real life. And real life is where art comes from.

Posted by Grant at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)