Joel Schalit

Goodbye to All That

Yesterday’s announcement that Punk Planet was closing its doors did not come as a surprise. Still personally close to the magazine that I helped edit for over seven years (between 1997 and 2004 I served as the periodical’s associate editor and books editor, in addition to writing a column), I was entirely clear about PP’s situation. That does not mean, however, that the news was not upsetting. Yes, I was intellectually prepared for it. But emotionally, I was not. I’ve spent the better part of today dragging, going grocery shopping instead of writing. Coming home from Trader Joe’s an hour ago, I even missed my exit, and had to drive several extra miles to rectify the error.

Over the course of the last 24 hours, press coverage of Punk Planet’s closure has been intense. From an  SF Bay Guardian piece (GW Schulz waxing about the days when Annalee Newitz wrote for us) to the Village Voice (a critical overview of the magazine’s history, by Tom Breihan) the entire alt.press world seems to have gone into mourning with us. It all very much reminds me of the fact that Punk Planet was really a writer’s magazine – staffed by serious, young writers, and admired by left-of-center journalists in the rest of the U.S. press. As a young editor, that always meant an enormous amount to me. The journalistic focus on the magazine was a deep and lasting complement that helped us all get by under less than ideal economic circumstances.

But that’s only half the story. Punk Planet was a cultural event as much as it was a magazine. Unlike other similar events associated with youth culture, it was a product of immense ingenuity and tireless, hard work too. Thus, when its talented writers started to get offers from other periodical and book publishers, and record labels saw Punk Planet as an important place to break artists, the reason was obvious: Because the work PP was commissioning was insightful, well-written and passionate. During an era in which every ‘punk’ career move was considered suspect, imagine what a wrench this threw in the so-called works. For once, or so we felt, our subculture was being recognized for non-musical achievements, like political writing, which there was no point in feeling conflicted about.

Punk Planet allowed us to live ‘punk’ lives without the fear – or the anxiety – of selling out. Sure, we might end up working for a New Times periodical, or sell in excess of 60,000 copies of a novel. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s still chump change compared to the ’sinful’ kinds of music-derived incomes that punks always complained about. What giving its staff such opportunities entailed was a right to be equally culturally influential without any of the ideological excess associated with the so-called culture of careerism. By itself, that is an absolutely immense achievement, particularly considering how we defined success. The proof is in the pudding: thirteen years of successive issues, a first class book imprint, and thousands of ex-contributors in every wing of publishing.

I could write more about PP, but I’ve done it before, and I think I’ve said enough. If you’d like to read an earlier piece about working at PP, which details a bit more about what I personally think about the magazine, check out Punk Planet Forever in Stylus. Written after the first IPA-induced storm clouds began to gather in late 2005, it does a much better job of saying what I’ve already said above, if not a bit more.

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.

Source Material

Not the best time writing-wise this past week. I’ve been finishing the bibliographical work that I’ve needed to complete for my book, and have spent a lot of time gathering together any remaining news articles I can find in order to bring myself totally up-to-date. I feel pretty good about what I’ve pulled together so far, though, as with other book projects I’ve worked on (this is my fifth), I’ve had to set severe limits to my source material so I don’t find myself overwhelmed.

As a rule of thumb, once I’ve acquired everything I need to start writing, I focus on covering only the most representative instances of my subject matter and comment on them until there’s hopefully nothing left to discuss. If I have material left over that I might find useful later, voila, its always there. I hold on to everything. I can’t tell you how many times over the years that I’ve found myself grateful for my packrat habits. Sometimes I wish I’d become a librarian.

Despite this self-congratulatory pat on the back, there are two standout occasions in which I’ve failed to live up to my archivist’s ethos. The first was during high school, when my then-classmate John Whitson gave me a copy of a live soundboard tape of a Husker Du show in Walla Walla, Washington. Unmarked, I recorded over the cassette, thinking that it was a blank. Talk about stupid. Even then, in the spring of ’86, I knew I’d committed a horrible mistake.

The second time was equally profound. In the fall of 2005, director Julien Temple contacted me, explaining that he was making a documentary about the life and times of his old friend, Joe Strummer. He wanted to know if I could give him a copy of a recording of an interview I’d done with Joe, which had been the cover story of the January/February 2000 edition of Punk Planet, (and had just been reprinted in Let Fury Have the Hour, an anthology of writings about the late Clash frontman edited by Antonino D’Ambrosio.) Temple explained that he wanted to use the recording in his film, and was hoping I would allow him to do so.

Several hours later, as I searched through boxes of cassettes in my basement looking for the interview, I found the tape. Unfortunately, along with a number of recordings of my old radio shows at my alma mater, Reed College, the cassette had been damaged by water, and was in an advanced state of deterioration. Even though Temple’s crew kindly offered to try to restore it, the recording engineer that I am knew that the tape was beyond repair.

Clearly, I should have known better. It would have been great to have been able to give the Strummer interview its proper due. It was a terrific recording, and Joe was in absolutely marvelous form. As much as I like the written transcription of the interview, nothing comes close to how charming and witty he sounded on the phone. Even Strummer’s coughs (was there a bong nearby?) were hilarious.

Pimping Product

One of the many responsibilities I ended up assuming at Tikkun was writing six 100 word book reviews which we always printed on the interior back page of each new issue. Titled Tikkun Recommends (my last TR can be found in the present edition – Jan/Feb 2007) the purpose of the section was to promote books and publishers that we felt ought to receive special consideration, above and beyond the publications we’d review in the Books section of the magazine.

I particularly enjoyed writing these reviews, because, as Tikkun‘s culture editor,  there were always books I wanted to cover which we neither had the room nor the writers to tackle. As one of those many editors who wished they had more time to write, penning these short pieces always gave me something of an outlet for this frustrated desire. Having written numerous book reviews over the years – for the San Francisco Bay Guardian‘s Lit supplement and Punk Planet - this also allowed me to keep my review writing chops somewhat fresh.

The reason I mention all of this is because yesterday I wrote my first TR-style reviews for Zeek, the periodical that I recently joined as a contributing editor. As burnt out as I still am, it was nice to re-inhabit this style of writing, and push a few books which deserve attention. If you were to ask me precisely why I like to do these things, that pretty much nails it. There is so much excellent culture being produced right now – by writers, musicians, film directors, software designers, the works – that it feels almost like a categorical imperative to continue to support it all somehow.

This was always the modus operandi we worked with in terms of the bands and writers we covered when I was Punk Planet‘s associate editor. As a culture magazine, we channelled this ideological sensibility religiously, to a point that we treated our cultural coverage as though it were a political endeavor. By pointing our readers to productions that we felt were important, like many punks, we genuinely believed that we were creating some kind of cultural front out of which a better politics would emerge.

Upon sending out my reviews late yesterday afternoon, I recalled this political impulse and asked myself whether, ten years later, I still believed in it.  “Yes,” I muttered to myself, giggling. “If only because I’m still being asked to write the same things I’ve always written.”  Wondering if I was talking to them (and not myself), our two dogs got up from the carpet and started nuzzling my knees with their small furry heads, thinking that I was telling them it was time for dinner.

Currently in Rotation: Various Artists, Tectonic Plates (Tectonic Recordings/Baked Goods)

And We All Fall Down

By now, you’ve probably heard the news: America’s biggest boutique magazine distributor closed its doors on December 27th. By no means a surprise, the closure of the Indy Press Newsstand Services (formerly known as Big Top) remains a big blow to independent periodicals in the US. A significant number of its former clients remain owed substantial sums of money – including my former magazine, Tikkun. While Tikkun will be fine (we left the IPA a year ago), it remains unclear whether many of its former clients are going to survive.

In the interim, the IPA’s inability to pay its titles have resulted in the closure of a number of outstanding national magazines, including the award-winning Clamor, and the end of the print edition of one of America’s best up-and-coming music publications, Grooves. (Interesting to note that in all of the online discussions of the IPA’s closure, no one has said anything about this specific periodical’s status.) One of the first  reported casualties of the IPA’s financial misanthropy, Grooves stopped appearing on newsstands in 2005. In 2006, it relaunched as a web magazine.

As a publisher, the most important lesson I learned from the IPA debacle is how much it underlined the continuing crisis of professionalization in indie culture. For example, every time I’d go to the IPA’s office to attend a sales meeting, I was continually reminded to be ‘more professional’ regarding design and editorial considerations. For a brief while, I found myself grateful for these talks. I already had a strong background in distribution, and had been hired in part to help shore up the business end of things.

But, as time wore on and the issue was increasingly invoked, I began to wonder whether the subject’s continuous reappearance in our business discussions was symptomatic of something far more worrysome. When our regular sales statements and payments  eventually halted, and allegations of poor accounting and distro fee collections emerged, I finally understood what all of this talk about  being ‘more professional’ was all about. The IPA was failing to perform its most basic functions as a distributor. To put it bluntly, the company could barely tie its own shoelaces.

For any firm, administrative incompetence is always a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, such imperfections are common to many independent businesses, and have more often than not led to their downfall. What troubles me most is not the fact that the IPA was not an exception to the rule, but the cultural consequences of its failings. Through its mismanagement, the IPA put an entire wing of the American periodical business in crisis. Some would even go so far as to say that the IPA killed it. I’m not just talking about any community either. I’m speaking about the countless number of publications which grew up in the turn of the century indie publishing scene.

For the past thirty plus years, America has witnessed the growth of one of the most creative periodical industries in its history. Despite the fact that this business has weathered numerous ups and downs, it was not until the ‘zine explosion of the 1990s that independent periodical publishing in the US fully flowered, creating numerous special interest political and cultural titles expressing the enormous ingenuity and literary talent of an entire generation of artists, writers and designers. Not only did this milieu produce something culturally valid; it also created a market, which despite its small size, was sustainable, significant, and most importantly, politically influential.

And that is precisely the problem. The IPA’s ultimate crime was that it never took this milieu seriously enough to understand what it was putting at risk through its administrative incompetence. By failing to live up to its mandate to be a responsible “antidote to media monopoly,” the IPA helped irreperably damage a counterculture that was a proven platform for distributing alternative information and ideas. That is a horrible legacy to be responsible for. But it is one which ought to serve as a burning reminder of why the left still has to learn how to do business properly.