Happy Halloween

Bluegrass

IF YOU WANT TO GET TO LEBANON, a town of about 3,200, the easiest way is to fly into the Tri-City Airport on the Tennessee side of the Appalachians, then drive about 45 minutes northeast through some of the most gorgeous hill country in America. The back road that leads to Lebanon High School is lined with trailer-size houses on the edge of collapse, their front porches buckling in the sun. But then, as you approach the school, you see a few neat rows of brand new town houses, with prices in the high $200,000s – the unmistakable landscape of the new economy. Lebanon is slowly becoming a symbol of hope for towns all over the region that dream of turning southwestern Virginia, with its abundant land and cheap labor, into the next high-tech hub. Local counties have raised up a half-dozen “shell buildings” – essentially empty warehouses already connected to sewers and broadband lines – to attract businesses looking for ready-made space. Inspired by the influx of tech jobs, officials in the area have started what they call the Return to Roots program, in which they aggressively seek out qualified graduates who have moved away for other jobs and try to lure them back home.Barack Obama came to Lebanon High for a town-hall meeting with voters on the Tuesday after Labor Day, marking the first time any presidential candidate stepped foot in the area since Jimmy Carter came to nearby Castlewood in 1976. The campaign made tickets available to its local offices a few days before the event, and a lot of the roughly 2,400 attendees waited in line to get them. As a result, most of the voters in the school gymnasium seemed to be committed Obama backers already.

The program opened with the validators. This is a critical part of Obama’s small-town strategy – getting respected surrogates to stand up and say that Obama is a guy you can trust. The first person on stage was Ralph Stanley, the 81-year-old legendary bluegrass musician, who was born in nearby Stratton and makes his home in Dickenson County. He unfolded a piece of paper and read, in a shaky voice: “I want to endorse Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Thank you very much!” The gymnasium exploded. (When the candidate met Stanley backstage, Obama told him that he had some of Stanley’s banjo music on his iPod. Stanley nodded appreciatively, but a few minutes later he turned to a friend and asked, “What’s an iPod?”)

Stanley was followed by Cecil Roberts, the white-bearded president of the mineworkers’ union, who preached as if he were at a revival, putting Obama’s early years into a framework that southwestern Virginians could understand. “Moses was a community organizer!” Roberts thundered. “And yes, Jesus was a community organizer!” Then came Rick Boucher, the owlish congressman who represents Lebanon and its surrounding counties in Washington. “Senator Obama is a friend of coal and the thousands of jobs it brings to Southwestern Virginia,” Boucher assured the crowd. In fact, he repeated this line — “Barack Obama is a friend of coal” — no less than five times in 10 minutes.

Working for the Working Class Vote. New York Times

Listen

“John used to tell me how to listen to the music, so that I could get the most out of it. He would say things to me like, ‘You listen to a song five times, Cecilia. Listen to it instrument by instrument. Play that song and listen to the bass all the way through. Listen to it again, and listen to the saxophone. Don’t just listen to it once and then attempt to give it a critique.‘”
John Coltrane’s advice to Cecilia Foster, (Elvin Jones’s cousin and Frank Foster ’s wife).

A critic says thank you

“The moral of “Ratatouille” is delivered by a critic: a gaunt, unsmiling fellow named Anton Ego who composes his acidic notices in a coffin-shaped room and who speaks in the parched baritone of Peter O’Toole. “Not everyone can be a great artist,” Mr. Ego muses. “But a great artist can come from anywhere.” … The hero (and perhaps [writer/director] Mr. Bird’s alter ego) is Remy (Patton Oswalt), a young rat who lives somewhere in the French countryside and conceives a passion for fine cooking. Raised by garbage-eaters, he is drawn toward a more exalted notion of food by the sensitivity of his own palate and by the example of Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett), a famous chef who insists – more in the manner of Julia Child than of his real-life haute cuisine counterparts – that “anyone can cook.” What Remy discovers is that anyone, including his uncultured brother, can be taught to appreciate intense and unusual flavors… At stake in “Ratatouille” is not only Remy’s ambition but also the hallowed legacy of Gusteau, whose ghost occasionally floats before Remy’s eyes and whose restaurant is in decline. Part of the problem is Gusteau’s successor, Skinner (Ian Holm), who is using the master’s name and reputation to market a line of mass-produced frozen dinners. Against him, Remy and Mr. Bird take a stand in defense of an artisanal approach that values both tradition and individual talent: classic recipes renewed by bold, creative execution. The movie’s grand climax, and the source of its title, is the preparation of a rustic dish made of common vegetables – a dish made with ardor and inspiration and placed, as it happens, before a critic. And what, faced with such a ratatouille, is a critic supposed to say? Sometimes the best response is the simplest. Sometimes “thank you” is enough.”
A. O. Scott. New York Times

Bull Market

“Life cannot be assigned a cash value because, simply, it is beyond value.

Yet the Golden Calf syndrome – assigning great value to metal and no value to life – persists in risk management, infecting not just theory but also practice. The record is incontestable. Again and again, market values, rather than human values, have dictated policy decisions.”

Jacques Cousteau. The Human, The Orchid and The Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World.

Wise While Cracking Wise

The story I wrote a couple of months ago about Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron’s relaunch of interview Magazine has had nearly 1,000 readers. Quite a few have come through searches for David Carson’s design work (which I mention), and a lot through a link from a design blog I’m unfamiliar with. But most readers are searching for news about Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron. There was a profile of Fabien Baron in the New York Times on Sunday and it struck me as thin and mean spirited.

 There’s no mention of the manifesto as a conversation between Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron (via their Blackberries) in the current issue of Interview, which talks about Andy Warhol’s inspiration to use the new-at-the-time portable cassette recorders to catch the creative sparks flying between artists. I forget which classic artwork they mentioned, it might have been Paradise Lost. Let’s just say that it WAS Paradise Lost. Glenn and Fabien say there’s nothing new about creative types getting together to shoot the breeze and if they’d been putting out their magazine centuries ago, using Gutenberg’s new-fangled moveable type device, it would have featured Milton and Galileo discussing astronomy. Their inspirations for the magazine are drawn from its traditions, what they refer to as its DNA. What’s radical is that it’s very sexy because it’s formal and cerebral. It’s new, pussycat, by not being novel.

I’ve always been baffled why the sum of Glenn O’Brien’s media skills and activities isn’t more widely appreciated. From him you can draw a line back through every great comic media tradition of twentieth century New York and he’s brought them alive in his own time. The Thurber / Benchley comic sentimental essays in the New Yorker, the droll absurdity Steve Allen brought to tv talk shows, his ads for Barneys had the wild wit guys like Charles Addams brought to ad campaigns. He’s part of a traceable heritage but still his own man.

Extra Armchair by Fabien Baron

My previous story talked about Fabien Baron warming up haute coute and making high glamour goofy, as Audrey Hepburn did in Funny Face. The story in the New York Times gave me a deeper understanding of Fabien Baron’s terrior: “A son of a Parisian newspaper designer, he also brings a journalistic clarity to his pages. That’s what was missing, he said, with French Vogue, where he was art director from 2003 until this year, when he took over Interview. In terms of fashion, French Vogue’s stilettoed editor in chief, Carine Roitfeld, and her team were unbeatable – “they’re killers,” Mr. Baron said. But he felt the magazine lacked order. “I think I sharpened everything,” he said. I think that the new Interview design has the order and elegance of a “serious” European newspaper, it can sit on newsstands with the International Herald Tribune. While newspapers are tending towards being fluffy and celebrity-hungry, Interview has staked a claim on smart features rendered conversationally. I hadn’t followed his furniture and packaging designs but I was interested to read that he’s had a house in a rural European setting designed by John Pawson. I read an essay by Deyan Sudjic talking about the subtle purity of Pawson’s architecture that had a section on stores Pawspn designed for Calvin Klein and their mutual interest in Donald Judd’s furniture and interior spaces. The alternate view to the New York Times’s assertion that Fabien Baron is spreading himself too thin is that he’s drawing multiple finely nuanced projects from within a collaborative community. The confronting of the uncomfortable question of the hazy line between art and business and editorial and advertising and between fashion as art and fashion as commerce is a territory Andy Warhol made his own.

The mainstream journalist’s general discomfort with complexity, easy boredom and obsession with trends is disturbing. Journalists didn’t initially comprehend Al Gore’s re-invention of stewardship or Nick Cave’s scholarly spirit. Now one of our important tasks is to try and understand the enduring value of art, its soul strengthening qualities, rather than be dazzled by its price. One of the most unfortunate consequences of the march to extinction of the newspaper, magazine and record industries is the loss of the collective wisdom of the best journalists and impresarios. Financial forces compel journalists to flash bright shiny new things continually before reader’s eyes and their stories are garlanded with video ads. The frame of reference has become the next five minutes. Journalism now provides a fast food sugar rush that has no nourishment.

The wondrous, exhilarating aspect of the revamped Interview is the sense of ballast that it provides. What’s exciting about the new is seen in the context of the vast sweep of human history. It’s wise while cracking wise. We’ve gotten ourselves into a fine mess, as a species, by embracing novelty unconditionally and being a bit too smug about our ingenuity. We’ve made a lot of bad music with our ingenious financial instruments, for instance. Interview (and Art in America) are taking a harder and longer but ultimately richer view of innovation. It was a smart and sweet gesture to acknowledge Robert Rauschenberg’s passing with his archival Interview conversation with the late Australian art critic, Paul Taylor. Paul’s knowledge was expansive but his heart was bigger. In Melbourne when he began publishing his magazine Art And Text during the punk rock era he recognized the emerging genius in art school dropouts like Nick Cave and folded them back into the art world. He recognised the respect for art that they had that was hidden by their youthful volatility. That generosity of spirit and the ability to be able to see unique connections across disciplines is something Glenn O’Brien has too.

The Internet has given us a faster longer reach as we forage for information but if we’re going to turn it into knowledge we have to resume rather than suspend our capacity for disbelief says the scientist and artist Ken Goldberg, now the Director of Berkeley’s New Media Centre. A navigational feature on Interview’s website encourages one to linger, not surf. The scrollbar moves in a liquid manner and bobs, maintining its place in a text like a buoy on a calm sea. It’s a charming metaphor.
Sent from my iPhone

Treasure

In 1988 the Smithsonian acquired more than three hundred cubic feet of archival materials relating to the career of the great jazz musician Duke Ellington: sound recordings and original manuscripts as well as photographs, scrapbooks, and business records. The collection documents Ellington’s contributions as a composer, performer, orchestra leader, and an ambassador of American music and culture abroad. The Ellington Collection is both an aesthetic treasure and a historical one, used by musicians for performances and by scholars to better understand the man and his music.

 

Listening deeply

 

While I was waiting for my appointment at the Apple Genius Bar factoids were flashed on screens. You could drive from New York to San Francisco twenty five times with a 32 gigabyte ipod and never hear the same song twice, one suggested. This made me incredibly sad. As time goes on I find the patina building up on certain songs, and albums, that hearing them often (though not carelessly, as the aural wallpaper that obliterates silence in almost every public space) is a powerful and wonderful experience. The songs sink more deeply into my soul. I’m finding that about a week’s worth of music, total, is as much as I have room for in my heart.

 

When I was driving around with Nick Cave in Sydney last year, listening to the new Bad Seeds album, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! I talked about encountering his songs as they popped up in shuffle mode in my itunes library. He mentioned finding it distressing that albums aren’t listened to in their entirety, in the order that the artist intended, at least some of the time. I saw the “shuffle” phenomenon from his point of view and I’ve made it a point to listen more discerningly to records, to pay more attention. The first sample bibliostructure in my new range is an homage to Nick’s album Nocturama. The play count feature in itunes shows that in the two years I’ve had my computer I’ve listened to Nocturama and the Grinderman album all the way through more often than any other albums. (Nitin Sawhney’s Beyond Skin, Everybody Digs Bill Evans and Bruce Springsteen’s Devils and Dust and Magic are high on the list, too.)

A Burroughsian Appraisal of a Steely Dan Concert, by William Gibson

A Steely Dan concert is akin to witnessing the passage of a single multiplex vehicle the size of a motorcade or convoy, its various segments comprising limousines, ice-cream wagons, hearses, lunch-carts, ambulances, black marias, and motorcycle outriders, all of it Rolls-grade and lacquered like a tropical beetle. The horns glint, as it rolls majestically past, splendid, a thing of legend, and utterly peculiar unto itself.

William Gibson’s blog

 

A requiem for copy editors

As a child I went on a school trip to a newspaper and was enchanted by the process of printing the paper, the huge rolls of newsprint, the strings of words on lines of metal, the clanking of machinery. When I finally came to write for newspapers I thought of myself as a cog in a manufacturing process, that this was something romantic and Jules-Vernian, not dehumanising.  I valued being edited more than being published, the smoothing out and tidying up of a story as a copy-editor shined it up for publication. I’ve had some great editors during my career. I mourn the loss of editors, generally. There’s a requiem for copy editors in the New York Times today. 

Copy editors work late hours and can get testy. They never sign their work.

As for what they do, here’s the short version: After news happens in the chaos and clutter of the real world, it travels through a reporter’s mind, a photographer’s eye, a notebook and camera lens, into computer files, then through multiple layers of editing. Copy editors handle the final transition to an ink-on-paper object. On the news-factory floor, they do the refining and packaging. They trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions.

But they also do a lot more. Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat. Their goal is to make sure that the day’s work of a newspaper staff becomes an object of lasting beauty and excellence once it hits the presses.

Yeah. Presses. It has probably already struck you how irrelevant many of these skills may seem in the endlessly shifting, eternal glow of the Web.

The copy editor’s job, to the extent possible under deadline, is to slow down, think things through, do the math and ask the irritating question. His or her main creative outlet, writing clever headlines, is problematic online, because allusive wordplay doesn’t necessarily generate Google hits. And Google makes everyone an expert, so the aging copy editor’s trivia-packed brain and synonym collection seem not to count for as much anymore.

The job hasn’t disappeared yet, but it is swiftly evolving, away from an emphasis on style and consistency, from making a physical object perfect the first time. The path to excellence is now through speed, agility and creativity in using multiple expressive outlets for information in all its shapes and sounds.

As newspapers lose money and readers, they have been shedding great swaths of expensive expertise. They have been forced to shrink or eliminate the multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism from what you find on TV, radio and much of the Web. Copy editors are being bought out or forced out; they are dying and not being replaced.

 Lawrence Downes. New York Times