Archived entries for
Milestones and Memories
Milestones
I delivered the first chapter of Israel vs. Utopia on Tuesday, and received the first feedback about the book today. Everything was absolutely right on, and extremely helpful. I can’t over-emphasize what a different experience it is being edited again after the last three years of being the so-called editor. Very cool. Instructions are all systems go: continue writing and sending in the chapters.
A big shoutout to my longtime publisher and friend, Johnny Temple. We first met by email in the Fall of ’99, over an article in Punk Planet about indie labels and health care which, as a member of Girls Against Boys, he’d been interviewed for. I’m not sure what occasioned this first exchange. Here’s to banging out more dissenting product together. I can’t think of a better editor to be working with – as always.
Memories
In 1996-1997, I formed incredible friendships with two extremely gifted and inspiring individuals: Dan Sinker, the publisher of Chicago’s Punk Planet magazine (and now, Punk Planet Books, which Dan runs in collaboration with Johnny), and Rich Jensen, who was then the COO of Sub Pop records in Seattle, and the co-owner of Up Records, which put out the first Modest Mouse and Quasi albums.
For nearly seven years, I served as Dan’s second, in the capacity of PP’s Associate Editor, in addition to producing copious amounts of copy as a contributor. For a little over three years, I put out Christal Methodists records with Rich on our own little stealth imprint, Kolazhnikov after the band was dropped from a manufacturing and distribution deal by Sub Pop over sample clearance concerns.
Over the course of the past two weeks, I managed to spend two of the best days in recent memory with both gentlemen. Dan came over last week, together with his two year-old son, Roosevelt. Visiting the Bay Area for personal reasons, it was the first time we’d seen each other since the spring of 2002, when I spent a week in Chicago giving book readings and worked out of the Punk Planet office.
Yesterday morning, I met Rich at the 24th street BART station, and spent the day walking around San Francisco together. Stopping over here for a few hours en route to a business event in LA, it was the first time we’d seen each other since November 2003, when Rich curated a series of readings and events in the Bay Area on behalf of his publishing house, Clear Cut Press.
Very special to have had the opportunity to hang out with both Dan and Rich after all this time. Things are changing so much in our cultural end of the world. Its beyond poetic to spend time with these two specific folks at such a significant juncture. Even better, given what a tremendous sense of community connecting with all three of these guys continues to provide.
Tanya Reinhart RIP
I just received word that Tanya Reinhart passed away this weekend in New York. She was sixty-three. What a terrible tragedy. My condolences go out to her family and friends. It was only today that I learned she’d moved to Manhattan towards the end of last year, in order to assume a teaching position at NYU.
Though I didn’t agree with all of her positions, Reinhart’s tireless efforts to end the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are worthy of the utmost respect. In the last issue of Tikkun that I edited (Jan/Feb 2007), Jerome Slater wrote an absolutely outstanding meditation on Reinhart’s most recent book, The Road Map to Nowhere. You can read it here.
Aside from a brief email exchange we’d had in the Spring of 2005, the last time I talked to Reinhart was almost exactly three years ago, when I interviewed her for LiP Magazine. An eight hundred word excerpt ended up running in the Summer 2004 issue. I just found a copy of the unedited transcript, and thought these following words would be good to remember Reinhart by:
LiP: Is there an Israeli left at this point?
Reinhart: What’s been extremely encouraging – my ray of light in these bleak days – is to observe that in the young generation there is a movement of resistance that is completely new and courageous. It’s the same generation that got its roots in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. You first noticed it with the draft resistance movement, which is now bigger than it ever was.
Another amazing new development is that there is a whole new popular resistance movement initiated by Palestinian farmers along the line of the new fence whose land is being stolen by Israelis for the fence. Along that line, in village after village, you’ll find the entire village sitting on the ground in front of the bulldozers. Together with them you’ll find young Israelis.
For the first time in the history of the Occupation, you’ll find the Israeli army facing Palestinians and Israelis together sitting together defending Palestinian land. For me, it’s a big source of hope.
This blog entry can also be found on Alternet.
Authors, Friends
The nicest thing about being an editor are the relationships you forge with authors. By no means the first time I was reminded of this, (but definitely the first since I left Tikkun,) my former film editor decided to pay me a visit on Monday. The first time we’d actually met (after nearly three years of exchanging email and phone calls), Shai Ginsburg was out here on a brief break, determined to finally get together.
One of the best critics of Israeli film writing in English (in fact, the top right now), Shai added the kind of depth to our Israel coverage at Tikkun, which, in the form of film reviews, helped me obviate the magazine’s never-ending problems with being deemed too ‘anti-colonialist’ (to quote a right-wing friend of mine), in its historical emphasis on the occupation, to the exclusion of other forms of Israel analysis.
Much to my delight, as Shai and I walked down to San Francisco’s best Middle Eastern joint, the Old Jerusalem Restaurant, we ran into one of my longtime contributors, Other publisher and Choir Boy author Charlie Anders, whose work I’ve printed in both Punk Planet and Tikkun, as well as The Anti-Capitalism Reader. Strolling quickly by on Mission Street in one of her signature outfits, we almost missed her.
Thankfully, Charlie noticed us, and flagged me down. Introducing her to Shai, I explained that Charlie was the author of one of the more controversial religious pieces I commissioned at Tikkun, an article on transgendered Jews. Long in the making, Charlie’s piece was a terrific read, and had a kind of secular quality to it which is so lacking in most Jewish periodical coverage of the new queer spirituality scene.
Speaking of Tikkun, the magazine’s webmasters were kind enough to consolidate my infrequent blog entries into one URL. Not exactly god’s gift to the blogosphere, there’s still some stuff of interest. My last entry was in late December, when, despite my crazy schedule, I attempted to jot down some final thoughts on our Israel/Palestine coverage. Check it out. I’m sure I’ll be writing more on this greater subject in the future.
Bring the Noise: Drunks with Guns: Second Verses (Intellectual Convulsion, 1990)
Congratulations, Abba!
Elie Schalit, Tiberias, 2006.
This is my father. He was born in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound on March 13th, 1921. Elie still works 12 hour days. At this very moment, he’s calling colleagues in Europe and sending out faxes in several different languages. Respect.
Instant Lamb Couscous
Ingredients below different from above image:
1 pound of ground lamb, grilled
2 diced zucchinis, sauteed in olive oil and pickled shallots
1 box of couscous, with garlic mix
1 jar of Pelopenese brand sweet red pepper sauce*
*Apply the pepper sauce to the finished dish.
What’s Been Lost
From a letter to a friend, discussing the social consequences of recent changes in music distribution
Music consumption has become more of a monadological experience. With increasing frequency, it is both bought and listened to in isolation. This has both beneficial and negative aspects. Beneficial, in the sense that without the pressure of community influences (aside from user-generated reviews of product,) online, listeners make freer choices in terms of artist and genre than they may have made in the past based on CD packaging, the limited selections offered by brick and mortar stores, reviews in music magazines, and the tastes of one’s peers.
The negative aspect of being ‘freed’ to consume in this manner is that it completely isolates individual listening experiences so that one may not be able to identify or connect with the community out of which the work one consumes was made in, such as a record label, which in indie terms, was always the commercial front end for a particular scene or milieu of artists. (Dischord records is a great example of this, being a Washington DC-artist only label.)
Though recreating that experience can be done online through links, listening suggestions, blogs, music-based social networking services and listservs, getting socialized by the communities out of which music emerges requires a great deal more effort. Deliberate communities have to be created around shared taste preferences in order to help facilitate the social aspect of music consumption that was lost in the movement to online distribution. Thus, community is recreated, for lack of a better term, through programming.
Interestingly enough, the need for a less mediated version of this experience – that which existed prior to the emergence of online retailing – has, in my understanding, been replaced by a higher attendance rate for concerts for any number of artists, big and small. So, in a club or a concert hall, one finds collective attempts to get back to the social experience that consumers may have once had listening to music with friends, or hanging out at a record store.
Granted, fans have always fetishized concerts for exactly these kinds of reasons. But now, it appears, live events have become more important for these reasons than ever. In many respects, while concerts remain promotional events for artists that help sell their recorded music, the ‘label’ experience that was once such an important aspects of buying music in a retail environment (remember when there used to be Sub Pop and SST sections in indie shops?), is not recreated at a live event.
At a concert, labels, and what they represent communally, are pushed to the side in favor of the personality of the artist, and what it represents. Live, the artist is always the center of attention. However, even more importantly, since retail sales have dramatically slowed for everyone, concerts are the new brick and mortar stores. Artists act as their own label, selling their work directly to fans, in keeping with the online ethos that every content creator is their own vendor.
Perhaps the greatest thing that has been lost in all of this is the status of an artist as a representative of a larger community. Live, the artist is reduced to the status of their own isolated laborer, generating their own income in a entrepeneurial fashion, without any context other than their audience. Subsequently, the artist has become the mirror image of their listeners. Isolated, except in relation to those who immediately consume them.
New A/V: Otomo Yoshihide: Multiple Otomo CD/DVD (Asphodel)
Eretz Manhattan
A piece of the Berlin Wall, midtown.
The Zeek editorial meetings which brought me to New York are now over. After a ten hour-long session that began with a tasty Indian lunch on 96th street and Amsterdam avenue, I’m free to enjoy my last two days here. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. On the agenda is lunch at a small hummus place around the corner, a stop at my favorite local record store, Other Music, and then a short walk up to 12th and Broadway to meet my family for dinner.
The nice thing about this trip is that it’s introduced me to a part of the city I overlooked as a child, when my father and I lived here in the early ’80s. After fifteen years in the suburbs, my brother sold his home, and bought a place on the border between Chinatown and Little Italy last summer. A beautiful, two bedroom apartment in a brand new, four story building, David’s pad looks out at three Italian restaurants, and is a stone’s throw away from the best Malaysian restaurant and tacqueria in the city. On nearly every nearby block, there’s a deli replete with cans of Lavazza espresso and freshly baked breads on display in the window.
Before going into yesterday’s meetings, I went to the new MOMA for the first time with my former Tikkun co-editor, Jo Ellen. Though we did not have too much time to spare, we saw a few photographs by Gerhard Richter, which were spectacular, as well as a small exhibit of Emigre magazine covers. As magazine editors, this was perhaps the most interesting of everything we looked at. Design-wise the most influential periodical of the first wave of “desktop-publishing,” Emigre’s influence remains vast and under-appreciated. Thus, it was incredibly gratifying to see the periodical on display at an institution like the MOMA.
The only problem with this trip is how little time it has afforded Jennifer to relax. Hard at work at her company’s Manhattan office, she slaved away until eight last night, and then hung out here with my brother until I came in at eleven. Nevertheless, it was immensely cool to see how comfortable both she and David were with each other when I walked through the door. Their second time meeting each other (their first and last meeting to date was at our wedding party last year), the two of them seem to have found much in common with each other very quickly.
Because my family is so spread out – in Israel, France, New York and Maine – I’ve always lamented how difficult it’s been to facilitate this kind of intimacy. But, given moments like this, its clear that we’re all learning how to overcome the geographies that separate us. Whereas in the past, I would go up to four years at a time without seeing my parents, over the course of the past sixteen months, Jennifer and I have been to Israel twice to see them, and they’ve returned the gesture with two visits to the US. Now, with David in the same loop, things could not be better.
Longtail Music Appreciation Moment: Can: Future Days (1973)