2010-04-07 11:50:49

PETER BLACKSTOCK: A Few Thoughts On The Life, Death And Resurrection Of American Roots Music

Filed under: Alejandro Escovedo, Bob Dylan, Calexico, Emmylou Harris, Featured, Johnny Cash, Music, Neko Case, No Depression, Old 97's, Peter Blackstock, Son Volt, The Purple Interview, allison moorer
Posted by: John

What does the future hold for American roots music? In the following Purple Interview, No Depression co-founder and editor Peter Blackstock gives us his take. Though the magazine that he started is gone, the music he loves survives and thrives, even under adverse conditions.

Lately, we’ve been lucky to have Peter as our new music columnist, but we never really gave him a proper introduction to our readers, so here goes, a rerun of an interview in which he lays out the state of the art.

The best introduction to the magazine is the No Depression archive, a trove of coverage on an extraordinary era in American music, when the greats of the past, like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Solomon Burke, Loretta Lynn and Emmylou Harris made records with and inspired a new generation of younger artists like Ryan Adams, Lucinda Williams, Jack White, Gillian Welch and Alejandro Escovedo. The music is there, but so are the stories, reported and written by some of the best in the business of music journalism (I admit. I wrote one, too, but wouldn’t count myself in that company).

You can check the archive out here at No Depression, which lives on as a website, and in the meantime hunker down for a chat with one of the great chroniclers of American popular music.

Peter, you and I have talked about the origins of the name “No Depression”. It sort of is and sort of isn’t related to the old Carter Family song, right?

It is directly related to that song, just channeled through more modern reference-points. The Carter Family song was covered in 1990 on the debut album by Uncle Tupelo (whose members later split into Wilco and Son Volt), and they used the song title as the album title as well. A few years later, in 1994, a discussion forum on America Online which started out as an Uncle Tupelo fan board ended up morphing into a more general alternative-country forum, and its patrons re-christened it “No Depression”. I became a regular visitor to that board in the fall of ‘94, and when Grant and I started talking about creating a roots-focused magazine the following spring, my sense was that the phrase “No Depression” had already begun to develop a certain identity-stamp among the more fervent followers of the music we were seeking to cover.

How did the original team that started the magazine come together? You, Grant Alden and Kyla Fairchild?

Grant and I founded the magazine in the summer/fall of 1995 (the first issue came out in mid-September of that year). He and I had worked together at a Seattle biweekly music publication called The Rocket, and had come to respect each other’s journalistic abilities. As we were putting together the first issue, Kyla (who neither of us really knew at that point) dropped off an advertisement for a local band she was managing, and asked if she might be able to help. She worked on distribution when that first issue hit the stands, and took over advertising a year later (when our original ad-rep left to become Whiskeytown’s manager). She became a partner in the business when we incorporated in 1998. (In the present-day, post-print incarnation of No Depression on the web, Kyla’s the majority owner, having bought Grant’s share; I’m essentially a minority silent-partner.)

Can you give a sense for what the music industry was like when you started the magazine back in 1995? Is it safe to say that it was a less volatile, slightly more predictable business? Or am I romanticizing?

I think it was volatile and unpredictable at that time too, but in different ways, and probably not as unstable at its very core as it is today. The key difference — and I think this has affected the publishing industry in pretty much precisely the same way as it has affected the music industry — is that the incredibly streamlined ease of information-exchange brought about by the digital age has ultimately (and somewhat ironically) served to devalue all creative works which can be rendered and transmitted in digital form. Whether the object in question is a song, or a manuscript, or a photograph, or a film — assigning it to a container-form which is effortlessly simple to distribute and display will almost inevitably have the side-effect of reducing its value. Stated simply, if something’s really easy to get, folks tend to think it’s not worth as much.

Your magazine helped to give a name to a particular genre of music, but that name was disputed ever after. What were the parameters of the genre? How did you define it in your own mind?

Grant and I always liked to say that we defined alternative-country by not defining it. When we started, we had more of a specific focus to what we would cover or not cover, in large part because the magazine was quite small early on (32 pages for our first issue, compared to 180 at our peak many years later). Less pages naturally meant a narrower focus. But as we grew, it seemed very obvious to us to push the horizons outward. If we started with the more specific notion of younger punk-rock-influenced artists drawing upon the classic-country traditions of previous generations, it was pretty easy to connect the dots to similar roots forms such as bluegrass and old-time folk, and inextricably related genres such as blues and jazz, and regional offshoots such as Cajun and western swing. It all made sense to us under a larger umbrella.

What brought about that particular moment when a group of musicians began to make enough of the same kind of music to give birth to a new sound? Or was it new?

I’d definitely contend that it wasn’t new, and I’ve no doubt that the artists themselves would concur. What has happened with these intersections of country and rock music is that they tend to repeatedly come and go over the decades, with a fairly regular ebb-and-flow, really. The late-’60s work of the Byrds and Gram Parsons and a handful of others is a fairly clear seminal point (and led directly to the SoCal country-rock boom of the early ’70s with the Eagles and such). Things came around again in the early ’80s in the wake of punk’s ascendance, with bands such as Jason & the Scorchers and X applying that music’s energy to roots traditions. When Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks and a few others started working similar turf around 1990, it was really just the cycle coming back around again. As it inevitably will continue to do in the future, far as I can tell.

Can you give us one or two of your most cherished memories in your years running the magazine?

One that definitely comes to mind is spending a long night’s journey into day walking the mile-or-so stretch of Hillsborough Street in Raleigh in the spring of ‘97 with Ryan Adams, stopping along the way at various spots such as Sadlack’s, the Rathskeller and the Comet to turn on the tape recorder and get interview dialogue for what became the ND #10 cover story on Whiskeytown. (If he ever talks you into going bowling, I’d recommend against allowing him to keep score.) … And in the fall of 2000, my friends Chris and Carla (from Seattle band the Walkabouts) drove with me from Seattle down to Springfield, Oregon, to hand-deliver a copy of a Mickey Newbury tribute album that Chris and I had produced to Newbury himself. We really expected to just say hello and drop it off — Newbury was rather ill at that point with smoking-related lung problems (and would be gone two years later) — but instead he invited us in and spent the entire afternoon talking to us about the craft and the art of songwriting. He recited lyrics to us and played songs for us on his guitar, even as the oxygen tubes which helped him breathe stretched across the living-room floor to a tank in his bedroom.

One or two of the greatest shows you ever saw?

There was a series of shows that Alejandro Escovedo did during the 1990s to close out South By Southwest at La Zona Rosa on Sunday night every year which may never be surpassed in my own memory. These “orchestra” performances featured around 15 musicians, including strings, percussion, horns and steel guitar; Escovedo’s emotional expressiveness, and his direction of the sonic maelstrom, was the kind of thing that put him in a league with the great bandleaders of that century, in my opinion. … And I still have a very vivid recollection of ND’s fourth-anniversary party at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle, when Buddy Miller headlined the show playing solo. He’d been in town to play at a big festival earlier in the day with Emmylou Harris, and halfway through his set at the Tractor, he was joined onstage by Emmylou for three songs — including “Don’t Tell Me”, which may be Emmylou’s greatest backing-vocal performance since her days with Gram.

One or two or even three records that stand out in your mind as exemplifying the best in the sound of American roots music?

Impossible to fairly narrow things down to three of course, and so I won’t by any means suggest that these are “definitive” selections in any way — but thinking about it in this particular moment, I’ll say Gram Parsons’ Return Of The Grievous Angel, T Bone Burnett’s 1986 self-titled album, and the Jayhawks’ Tomorrow The Green Grass. Ask me again in about five minutes, and I’ll give you three different answers, probably.

Why did you close shop?

Advertising took a precipitous nosedive in the early part of 2008, and we felt like we were seeing the writing on the wall; the concurrent or subsequent demise of not only other niche magazines (such as Harp, Bluegrass Now and Punk Planet) but even some very large music periodicals (Blender and Vibe) seems to have borne out our impressions of what was happening. Essentially the long-established business-model for music magazines has ceased to function; with both the publishing industry AND the music industry in phases of major upheaval and downsizing, there just does not appear to be any way to generate the income required to sustain things even on the very modest level at which we operated No Depression all these years. We never really lost readership in any substantial way — for most of the decade (including when we shuttered in 2008), we were around 30,000 circulation — but the shrinking ad-base (related not just to the present recession/depression, but to the fundamental changes in the media and music industries) made our business model unviable for the future.

Looking back at the state of the music industry when you started, what are the biggest changes?

The main thing is that I think it’s getting increasingly hard for artists to attain any sort of critical mass. In the mid-’90s, a big-selling album’s debut-week sales figures — say, Pearl Jam’s Vs. or a new Garth Brooks album — would be very near a million copies. Nowadays, artists such as the Arcade Fire or Neko Case can actually debut in the Billboard Top 5 — not because they’ve managed to break through to a level where they sell at those numbers, but because you can sell in the tens of thousands in your debut week and reach those kinds of lofty chart-positions now. That’s not really a problem for Arcade Fire or Neko Case — on the contrary, they can sustain themselves quite well at that level — but if that’s the HIGH end at this point, it means the middle to low ends have pretty much fallen off a cliff. In the past, neverminding the million-selling Madonnas and Guns N Roses and Green Days at the top of the charts, you could find real treasures amid the artists selling in the lower tens of thousands, from Steve Forbert to Syd Straw to Matthew Ryan, and those artists generally could get by all right (not rich, but sustainable). Nowadays, it just seems increasingly impossible for those mid-lower-level artists to support themselves with their music. Certainly a greater quantity of people are MAKING records now than ever before, but I feel certain that considerably fewer artists are able to avoid having at least part-time if not full-time day jobs.

What does the future look like for music journalism?

Almost EXACTLY the same as what I just outlined for the music industry above: The mid-lower-level journalists (essentially, everyone who’s not working for a Yahoo/MSNBC-level media conglomerate) better find another line of work. I’m not sure that there actually IS music journalism in the future; there is simply music commentary, by all manner of informed and uninformed sources, with almost no editing or oversight involved in the process. This may sound like I’m saying it’s all terrible, and I don’t really mean it that way — there are some advantages to this non-journalistic future, in certain respects — but I do think there are huge elements of the form which we take for granted that are being lost, and at this point there is not really any envisionable plan to save or revive those elements.

And the future for American roots music?

Well, that’s the good news — roots music itself with never fade or even wither. Regardless of the economic viability of art, it will ALWAYS be produced by creative types, whether they’re being compensated for their work or not. And American roots music is far too ingrained in the national cultural landscape to just disappear. I think that as a society we’ll have less common reference-points for the music’s identity — your favorite roots-music act may more likely become the band you can catch regularly at the club or coffeehouse across town, as opposed to the one you stumbled upon at the record store (R.I.P.), or read about in some magazine (adios), or heard on the cool radio station (good luck with that). Presumably there are MORE discovery outlets now, with MySpace and YouTube and message-boards out the wazoo, but we’ve pretty much jettisoned the gatekeepers at this point, and the result will be an audience that’s increasingly splintered rather than galvanized. Within that framework, though, songwriters will still write songs, players will still strum and pick and bow along, and voices will carry the music above and beyond the bounds of commerce. Of that, we can be assured.

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2009-07-13 10:04:00

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MUSIC JOURNALISM IN AMERICA: THE PURPLE INTERVIEW

Filed under: Alejandro Escovedo, Emmylou Harris, Music, No Depression, Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, X
Posted by: John

Two weeks ago, when I read the sad news about the closing of Vibe magazine, I had a flashback. I couldn’t help thinking about a much less widely reported shutdown just over a year ago, a very quiet but clear signal that all music industry publications were in trouble. I’m talking about the closing of No Depression, a magazine dedicated for more than a decade to American roots music.

The comparison may seem overdrawn. When it closed, Vibe had a circulation of 800,000. On its best day, ND only had about 30,000. Vibe was a glossy, founded by Quincy Jones, and always had a certain cache of celebrity. It was hip and about hip-hop, and therefore mainstream in a way that ND never was. Yet the same music industry provided for the health of both endeavors, and in each case the collapse of that industry accounts for the demise. The mags started in the same boom and died in the same bust. They had a similar run of years: Vibe died at 16, No Depression at 13.

Is there any reason to hope for better things? In the following Purple Interview, No Depression co-founder and editor Peter Blackstock says there is. Though the magazines are gone, the music they covered survives and thrives even under adverse conditions.

In the case of No Depression, we have a superb remnant, a newly opened archive of every piece that ever appeared in its pages, a trove of coverage on an extraordinary era in American music, when the greats of the past, like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Solomon Burke, Loretta Lynn and Emmylou Harris made records with and inspired a new generation of younger artists like Ryan Adams, Lucinda Williams, Jack White, Gillian Welch and Alejandro Escovedo. The music is there, but so are the stories, reported and written by some of the best in the business of music journalism (I admit. I wrote one, too).

You can check it out here at No Depression, which lives on as a website, and in the meantime hunker down for a chat with one of the great chroniclers of American popular music.

Peter, you and I have talked about the origins of the name “No Depression”. It sort of is and sort of isn’t related to the old Carter Family song, right?

It is directly related to that song, just channeled through more modern reference-points. The Carter Family song was covered in 1990 on the debut album by Uncle Tupelo (whose members later split into Wilco and Son Volt), and they used the song title as the album title as well. A few years later, in 1994, a discussion forum on America Online which started out as an Uncle Tupelo fan board ended up morphing into a more general alternative-country forum, and its patrons re-christened it “No Depression”. I became a regular visitor to that board in the fall of ‘94, and when Grant and I started talking about creating a roots-focused magazine the following spring, my sense was that the phrase “No Depression” had already begun to develop a certain identity-stamp among the more fervent followers of the music we were seeking to cover.

How did the original team that started the magazine come together? You, Grant Alden and Kyla Fairchild?

Grant and I founded the magazine in the summer/fall of 1995 (the first issue came out in mid-September of that year). He and I had worked together at a Seattle biweekly music publication called The Rocket, and had come to respect each other’s journalistic abilities. As we were putting together the first issue, Kyla (who neither of us really knew at that point) dropped off an advertisement for a local band she was managing, and asked if she might be able to help. She worked on distribution when that first issue hit the stands, and took over advertising a year later (when our original ad-rep left to become Whiskeytown’s manager). She became a partner in the business when we incorporated in 1998. (In the present-day, post-print incarnation of No Depression on the web, Kyla’s the majority owner, having bought Grant’s share; I’m essentially a minority silent-partner.)

Can you give a sense for what the music industry was like when you started the magazine back in 1995? Is it safe to say that it was a less volatile, slightly more predictable business? Or am I romanticizing?

I think it was volatile and unpredictable at that time too, but in different ways, and probably not as unstable at its very core as it is today. The key difference — and I think this has affected the publishing industry in pretty much precisely the same way as it has affected the music industry — is that the incredibly streamlined ease of information-exchange brought about by the digital age has ultimately (and somewhat ironically) served to devalue all creative works which can be rendered and transmitted in digital form. Whether the object in question is a song, or a manuscript, or a photograph, or a film — assigning it to a container-form which is effortlessly simple to distribute and display will almost inevitably have the side-effect of reducing its value. Stated simply, if something’s really easy to get, folks tend to think it’s not worth as much.

Your magazine helped to give a name to a particular genre of music, but that name was disputed ever after. What were the parameters of the genre? How did you define it in your own mind?

Grant and I always liked to say that we defined alternative-country by not defining it. When we started, we had more of a specific focus to what we would cover or not cover, in large part because the magazine was quite small early on (32 pages for our first issue, compared to 180 at our peak many years later). Less pages naturally meant a narrower focus. But as we grew, it seemed very obvious to us to push the horizons outward. If we started with the more specific notion of younger punk-rock-influenced artists drawing upon the classic-country traditions of previous generations, it was pretty easy to connect the dots to similar roots forms such as bluegrass and old-time folk, and inextricably related genres such as blues and jazz, and regional offshoots such as Cajun and western swing. It all made sense to us under a larger umbrella.

What brought about that particular moment when a group of musicians began to make enough of the same kind of music to give birth to a new sound? Or was it new?

I’d definitely contend that it wasn’t new, and I’ve no doubt that the artists themselves would concur. What has happened with these intersections of country and rock music is that they tend to repeatedly come and go over the decades, with a fairly regular ebb-and-flow, really. The late-’60s work of the Byrds and Gram Parsons and a handful of others is a fairly clear seminal point (and led directly to the SoCal country-rock boom of the early ’70s with the Eagles and such). Things came around again in the early ’80s in the wake of punk’s ascendance, with bands such as Jason & the Scorchers and X applying that music’s energy to roots traditions. When Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks and a few others started working similar turf around 1990, it was really just the cycle coming back around again. As it inevitably will continue to do in the future, far as I can tell.

Can you give us one or two of your most cherished memories in your years running the magazine?

One that definitely comes to mind is spending a long night’s journey into day walking the mile-or-so stretch of Hillsborough Street in Raleigh in the spring of ‘97 with Ryan Adams, stopping along the way at various spots such as Sadlack’s, the Rathskeller and the Comet to turn on the tape recorder and get interview dialogue for what became the ND #10 cover story on Whiskeytown. (If he ever talks you into going bowling, I’d recommend against allowing him to keep score.) … And in the fall of 2000, my friends Chris and Carla (from Seattle band the Walkabouts) drove with me from Seattle down to Springfield, Oregon, to hand-deliver a copy of a Mickey Newbury tribute album that Chris and I had produced to Newbury himself. We really expected to just say hello and drop it off — Newbury was rather ill at that point with smoking-related lung problems (and would be gone two years later) — but instead he invited us in and spent the entire afternoon talking to us about the craft and the art of songwriting. He recited lyrics to us and played songs for us on his guitar, even as the oxygen tubes which helped him breathe stretched across the living-room floor to a tank in his bedroom.

One or two of the greatest shows you ever saw?

There was a series of shows that Alejandro Escovedo did during the 1990s to close out South By Southwest at La Zona Rosa on Sunday night every year which may never be surpassed in my own memory. These “orchestra” performances featured around 15 musicians, including strings, percussion, horns and steel guitar; Escovedo’s emotional expressiveness, and his direction of the sonic maelstrom, was the kind of thing that put him in a league with the great bandleaders of that century, in my opinion. … And I still have a very vivid recollection of ND’s fourth-anniversary party at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle, when Buddy Miller headlined the show playing solo. He’d been in town to play at a big festival earlier in the day with Emmylou Harris, and halfway through his set at the Tractor, he was joined onstage by Emmylou for three songs — including “Don’t Tell Me”, which may be Emmylou’s greatest backing-vocal performance since her days with Gram.

One or two or even three records that stand out in your mind as exemplifying the best in the sound of American roots music?

Impossible to fairly narrow things down to three of course, and so I won’t by any means suggest that these are “definitive” selections in any way — but thinking about it in this particular moment, I’ll say Gram Parsons’ Return Of The Grievous Angel, T Bone Burnett’s 1986 self-titled album, and the Jayhawks’ Tomorrow The Green Grass. Ask me again in about five minutes, and I’ll give you three different answers, probably.

Why did you close shop?

Advertising took a precipitous nosedive in the early part of 2008, and we felt like we were seeing the writing on the wall; the concurrent or subsequent demise of not only other niche magazines (such as Harp, Bluegrass Now and Punk Planet) but even some very large music periodicals (Blender and Vibe) seems to have borne out our impressions of what was happening. Essentially the long-established business-model for music magazines has ceased to function; with both the publishing industry AND the music industry in phases of major upheaval and downsizing, there just does not appear to be any way to generate the income required to sustain things even on the very modest level at which we operated No Depression all these years. We never really lost readership in any substantial way — for most of the decade (including when we shuttered in 2008), we were around 30,000 circulation — but the shrinking ad-base (related not just to the present recession/depression, but to the fundamental changes in the media and music industries) made our business model unviable for the future.

Looking back at the state of the music industry when you started, what are the biggest changes?

The main thing is that I think it’s getting increasingly hard for artists to attain any sort of critical mass. In the mid-’90s, a big-selling album’s debut-week sales figures — say, Pearl Jam’s Vs. or a new Garth Brooks album — would be very near a million copies. Nowadays, artists such as the Arcade Fire or Neko Case can actually debut in the Billboard Top 5 — not because they’ve managed to break through to a level where they sell at those numbers, but because you can sell in the tens of thousands in your debut week and reach those kinds of lofty chart-positions now. That’s not really a problem for Arcade Fire or Neko Case — on the contrary, they can sustain themselves quite well at that level — but if that’s the HIGH end at this point, it means the middle to low ends have pretty much fallen off a cliff. In the past, neverminding the million-selling Madonnas and Guns N Roses and Green Days at the top of the charts, you could find real treasures amid the artists selling in the lower tens of thousands, from Steve Forbert to Syd Straw to Matthew Ryan, and those artists generally could get by all right (not rich, but sustainable). Nowadays, it just seems increasingly impossible for those mid-lower-level artists to support themselves with their music. Certainly a greater quantity of people are MAKING records now than ever before, but I feel certain that considerably fewer artists are able to avoid having at least part-time if not full-time day jobs.

What does the future look like for music journalism?

Almost EXACTLY the same as what I just outlined for the music industry above: The mid-lower-level journalists (essentially, everyone who’s not working for a Yahoo/MSNBC-level media conglomerate) better find another line of work. I’m not sure that there actually IS music journalism in the future; there is simply music commentary, by all manner of informed and uninformed sources, with almost no editing or oversight involved in the process. This may sound like I’m saying it’s all terrible, and I don’t really mean it that way — there are some advantages to this non-journalistic future, in certain respects — but I do think there are huge elements of the form which we take for granted that are being lost, and at this point there is not really any envisionable plan to save or revive those elements.

And the future for American roots music?

Well, that’s the good news — roots music itself with never fade or even wither. Regardless of the economic viability of art, it will ALWAYS be produced by creative types, whether they’re being compensated for their work or not. And American roots music is far too ingrained in the national cultural landscape to just disappear. I think that as a society we’ll have less common reference-points for the music’s identity — your favorite roots-music act may more likely become the band you can catch regularly at the club or coffeehouse across town, as opposed to the one you stumbled upon at the record store (R.I.P.), or read about in some magazine (adios), or heard on the cool radio station (good luck with that). Presumably there are MORE discovery outlets now, with MySpace and YouTube and message-boards out the wazoo, but we’ve pretty much jettisoned the gatekeepers at this point, and the result will be an audience that’s increasingly splintered rather than galvanized. Within that framework, though, songwriters will still write songs, players will still strum and pick and bow along, and voices will carry the music above and beyond the bounds of commerce. Of that, we can be assured.

Comments (1)

2008-12-24 16:22:11

TOP TEN CULTURALLY CONFLICTED MOMENTS OF 2008

Filed under: Alejandro Escovedo, Barack Obama, Bob Dylan, Books, Bruce Springsteen, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Calexico, Clint Eastwood, Cloverfield, Colbert Report, Craig Detweiler, Daily Show, Eilen Jewell, Emmylou Harris, Europe, Freddy Fender, Jesus Christ, John Marks, Movies, Music, No Depression, Peter Matthiessen, Quarantine, Reasons To Believe, Rec, Sarah Palin, Saturday Night Live, Stephenie Meyer, Television, The Dark Knight, The Ruins, The Strangers, The Wall, The Wire, Tony Judt, True Blood, Twilight, Vampires, War Torn, allison moorer, appaloosa, australia, politics, purple state roadshow
Posted by: John

The decision to make a list of favorite movies, books or music involves a stunning act of confidence, though the act is hardly appreciated as a feat of bravado. In fact, list-making has become so common that it’s hard to come across words in late December that don’t fall in some kind of rank order.

For my part, I can’t muster much confidence this year. Everything about the selections on offer and my own response to them feels asymmetrical, thwarted, ambivalent, torn. Instead of a favorites list, then, in the spirit of my own personal conflicts, I offered those moments in the general culture that most reflected my own split sense of allegiance and taste. I doubt that it will send anyone to the movie theaters or I Tunes, but it my make other lost souls feel better about their predicament.

1)DARK KNIGHT OF THE SOUL—It’s no surprise at all that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems unlikely to give its highest honor to the year’s most popular movie. The Dark Knight was never that good, but it felt right for a few hours; a one-night stand that hits all the right buttons at midnight but starts to look grim well before dawn. Of course, the Oscar vote isn’t really about quality. Rank and file Academy voters are faux snobs and don’t like to be caught endorsing their bread and butter as art, lest the Oscar come to be seen as an endorsement of industry well-being. That’s why we so often get high-minded fluff this time of year, pretend art like Doubt that makes the business feel deep.

On this one, however, members are right to withold their blessing. The delusional critical response to The Dark Knight mirrored a whole set of delusions in the country as a whole: the delusion of solvency and stability, the delusion of international power, the absolute and total delusion of grandeur. The movie seemed at first glance to be a meditation on our own moral bankruptcy. It turned out to be a reflection of the culture’s debasement, the rave reviews a symbol of the corruption of critical judgment rather than a commentary on the film’s genius.

I’m torn because I wanted to like the film so much. I loved the trailer. I shivered at the poster. I prepared myself for the ultimate ambiguous comic book movie, one I’d been waiting for all my life. Instead, watching the screen with increasing boredom, I began to see the coming death of American movies. In our movies, we are living through an aesthetic bubble every bit as fragile as the economic one, and when the bubble bursts, when people come to see that our studios increasingly produce nothing at all and call it entertainment, we will lose one more of our fantasies–the delusion that our pop culture still entertains the world. Our politics are now much more inspiring than our movies, which is probably how it should be. Which brings me to a somewhat more cheerful conflict.

2)PALIN AWAY—I miss her, dammit. She was a telegraph from another America, one that everyone knows about, that is everywhere and at all times lampooned and bowdlerized on television, and yet one that has its own complex structure and ecology. Let me be clear. I don’t miss her in politics. I don’t care if I never see her on the stump again. As a politician, she’s a dystopian American nightmare, the know-nothing religious zealot willing to summon up any demon necessary to advance her cause. Maybe someone urged her into that stance, and her next bid at higher office will reflect a greater maturity.

Be that as it may, I miss Palin the person. She was a woman whose brains were always better than her words, who found herself forced to turn on a dime into a major national figure, running as the last best hope for an utterly exhausted and wickedly cynical Republican Party. I challenge anyone to turn that lemon into lemonade.

Here’s the best that I can say about her. In another age, she would have been the rifle-toting lady rancher in an Anthony Mann western, self-sufficient, sexually active, tougher than most men, beautifully conniving, prepared for violence but eager for peace In our own, she became nothing more than a political joke. I would like to live in an era in which she might be culturally better appreciated and politically unnecessary, which gets me to thinking about comedy.

3)THE FEY CHARMS OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE—Never has one performer so completely carried that show on her back, particularly ironic given that she is no longer a member of the cast. Tina Fey’s dead-on impersonation of Sarah Palin made the show a must-watch phenomenon again. Too bad most of the rest of the program felt like the milk at the bottom of the cereal bowl. In fact, if you watch back to back episodes of the Daily Show and The Colbert Report, it’s easy to see how retarded most of the comedy writing on SNL has become. The latter show can’t hold a candle to the former two.

Take the strange case of Kristen Wiig, one of the funniest women in show biz. Wiig stole every one of her scenes as a passive aggressive television news executive in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, but her overwrought depictions of dysfunctional women are unwatchably unfunny. Clearly, Lorne Michaels is in love with her talents, if not with her physical attributes, and under normal circumstances, I would suggest that he hire fresher talent to write for Wiig. Unfortunately, Michaels is the problem. He needs to go. Every so often, the SNL cast changes, and we get a breath of fresh air. Imagine that first draft of sweet oxygen after Lorne departs. Even the last skit of the night might start to work. Hire Fey, for instance. She already plays Lorne Michaels on 30 Rock, so she knows what the job involves, which brings me to the great unwanted departure in American television.

4)DAMN YOU, DAVID SIMON, FOR NOT REPORTING ON THE BALTIMORE ORIOLES FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS—Need I say more? HBO’s The Wire ended this year, and with it went the last great show of television’s much bally-hooed Golden Age. I’m not saying that we won’t get another, but when Simon’s show ended, the wasteland left behind left no room for illusion. There wasn’t anythying else of that caliber to watch on television. There still isn’t.

Simon made clear that he and his writers and cast would stop making the series when they could no longer create drama rooted in their own reporting and experience. As everyone who cares about TV knows by now, Simon reported on crime and police for many years before he wrote Homicide, the book on which the Tom Fontana NBC series was based. The Wire stems from the same experience, roughly, and the writer-reporter-producer was honest enough to know when he’d tapped the last vein in the arm. His miniseries Generation Kill, a drama about the Iraq War co-created with partner Ed Burns, had its moments, but it was thin compared to the series, and for obvious reasons. Embed Simon and Burns in Baghdad for the remaining five years of the wat, and you will have a masterpiece on your hands.

I’m conflicted because Season Five was the worst of the bunch. Simon’s journalists were the least interesting, least credible professional class in his work, probably because he knew them too well, and because HBO gave him a shorter episode count, meaning less time to develop these people in the same granular way that he built the world of the docks in Season Two. Did we spent more than a couple of minutes at home with anyone at the Baltimore Sun? Oh well. We’ve bene lucky these past few years, and it seems petty to complain about the overall quality of a season that nevertheless gave us the stunning death of Omar Little, one of the great episodes in all American television, and the final episode of the whole series, which made up for most of what was lost on the front end. Speaking of mediums in decline, the end of The Wire has got me thinking about the end of the publishing business.

5)CUE THE CELLOS AS ONCE MORE THE BOOK INDUSTRY SLOUCHES TOWARDS ITS LONG DOOM—I can’t be bothered to hear one more lament about this business. Finish it, or stop doing Nostradamus impersonations. My own suspicion is that books will be the last of print medium to survive. Isn’t that Biblical? And the last shall be first? Books are one of the arguments for the value of the human race, a perfect medium in the same way that sharks are supposed to be the perfect killing machines. They can’t be bettered. They can only be intentionally buried to make way for other technologies.

I am now reading my way through my favorite novel of the year, Peter Mattheissen’s Shadow Country, and I can’t imagine doing it on Kindle. I won’t. I can’t find the indispensable solitude of the act of reading on a computer screen. The screen itself is an intrusion. Its light can be seen by others. Its manuscript is a copy inside a machine. A book is the thing itself, with the tumbprints and bloodstains and tears and wrinkles. I could leave behind my vinyl for CD’s and celluloid for digital, but I will be laid to rest in the paper that is the foundation of my livelihood, my art and so much of my worldly pleasure.

None of this bears on the fate of publishing, which won’t go away. It will simply become digital, but in that shift we will have a new business, and a new understanding of the art once produced by the business. This Christmas, the hottest work of fiction in stores is a vampire novel for teenage girls, Twilight, which brings me to the next internal division.

6)BANISHING BUFFY (AND OURSELVES)—Why oh why is it necessary that, for vampires to live on in the popular culture, Buffy the Vampire Slayer die? Who decreed the sacrilege? Spike? In a now infamous Salon interview–infamous among Buffy-heads, anyway—Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke made clear that she had never seen a single episode of Joss Whedon’t seven season masterpiece, and she seemed almost proud of the fact. Insecure is more like it.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer casts a long shadow. The show was never as popular as Gossip Girls, but it brought together an unlikely battery of fans of all ages and made them a nation, and it did so on the basis of a genius concept, an energetic and sexy cast and the best writing in television until the advent of The Wire and The Sopranos. Buffy was the comic book movie that The Dark Knight never came close to being, a study in ambiguity, desire, violence and loss in the primary colors and whiz-bang panels of Marvel and DC.

In Twilight, the human girl pines for the vampire boy and wants to lose herself in him, but can’t without dying, and the vampire boy longs for the human girl, but can’t without eating her alive, or so I’m told by a fan of the movie. Her love for him, and his love for her, is the heart of the saga. In Buffy, the same holds roughly true, except that the mostly human girl is even more powerful than the vampire boy, and that sets up a tragedy. She can never be with him, ultimately, because her sole role on earth is to kill him and his kind. He can never be with her, because she will ultimately have to take his life. But that’s only the beginning.

Buffy is an ambiguous figure, not fully in control of herself. Her lover is equally ambiguous, a lover who turns evil as soon as he has sex with the woman he loves. The entire show existed to deepen the complexities of comic book simplicity. Twilight is a sad reversion. Luckily, unseen by most, we have the Swedish vamp masterpiece Let The Right One In to remind us of the Buff that was.

7)WOMEN OF THE WEST UNITE—Speaking of women, why can’t we get at least one great new western in which the women are half as good as the characters in Anthony Mann’s The Furies, released this year on DVD by the Criterion Collection? In that movie, Barbara Stanwyck goes line for line against Walter Huston, and the results are spectacular. The movie proved to me yet again that our modern, revisionist westerns took a wrong turn when they essentially banished females from the frontier. I would lay that crime on a lot of factors, the most obvious being a culture in which both the western genre and the womens picture no longer really exist. The Furies was clearly a 1950’s attempt to merge the two.

But I’d also blame my beloved Sam Peckinpah, who had the right idea by casting Katy Jurado for all of five seconds on Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid before throwing her away. Eastwood did better, but not much. This year’s Appaloosa and Australia offer intriguing glimpses of what might be, but we’v e got a long way to go, baby, till the skirt returns in force to the West of the Imagination, speaking of which, I wanted to say a word about Ed Watson, murdered and dead these ninety nine years.

8)EDGAR WATSON, AMERICAN HERO—In October 1910, in the wake of one of the most destructive hurricanes in Florida history, a mob of men from the Ten Thousand Islands in southwest Florida shot to death one of their own as he got off a boat at Chokoloskee. The man’s name was E.J. Watson, and he was a businessman and a killer.

The post office where his widow watched his execution still stands, and the shallows where he came ashore is marked. The crime is still remembered in the Ten Thousand Islands, which is still one of the most remote corners of this country, and it has been turned into the bloody center of a magnificent work of American narrative art, surely the greatest achievement in Southern fiction since the days of Faulkner, a surprising accomplishment for a quintessential Yankee like Peter Mattheissen.

I was on Chokoloskee in February and had a chance to soak up a small bit of the atmosphere of the world that the author recreates, and I can say that the memory of that old murder is still there. Am I being unnecessarily pessimistic when I draw the conclusion that our ugly history in Guantanamo, about which we know yet so very little, will endure at least as long. The Ten Thousand Islands aren’t so far from Cuba, and I can see a continuity in Amerrican ideas of frontier justice in the unlawful murder of the killer Ed Watson and the illegal detention of a bunch of men suspected of being terrorists.

The place names alone make a particular kind of American poetry: Lost Man’s River, Rabbit Key, Chatham’s Bend, Caxambas, Marco Key, Chevelier Bay. They are also a doorway to a buried memory of conquest and devastation, of primal beauty and lordly desire. I urge everyone to read this great book and get to know your national self a little better, which may sound like a horror movie, and that brings me to my next internal division.

9)THE FRAGILITY OF THE LENS WHEN CONFRONTED BY MONSTERS—While our big budget fantasies lapsed into dotage, our little horrors became transcendent. Both Cloverfield and Quarantine shamed more standard genre efforts like The Ruins and The Strangers. How did they do it?

It’s the camera work, stupid. In both movies, we are stuck with a lens held by living human beings faced with their own mortal end, and two things drive the plot. The desperation of the will to live in the characters merges with the delusion that the objectivity of the camera will somehow save them. It’s a superb conceit based in an incontrovertible reality. Screen and lens are sword and shield against madness and chaos, except when they shatter. These movies embody that principle and transform a genre.

How can we ever go back?

10)THE DEMISE AND RESURRECTION OF NO DEPRESSION—And finally, while the greatest story of the year, the victory of Barack Obama at the polls, unfolds against an economic disaster that everyone recognizes as Katrina-bad, the whole thing, victory and meltdown, unfolds to the sound of an amazing soundtrack, the music of what was once called the Americana or alt-country or No Depression movement. Isn’t it strange that the movement seemed to come to an end with the demise of the magazine No Depression, that championed the sound, at precisely the moment when we may have entered a new Depression?

In the songs of Calexico, Alejandro Escovedo, Lucinda Williams, Solomon Burke, Buddy Miller, Kelly Willis, Iron and Wine, Freakwater and countless others, we have always heard the stealthy approach of the era now dawning. Maybe that music wasn’t just about a roots sound. Maybe it was also about the privation and hardship buried in so much of that sound. Maybe we were being readied for a great test, and we didn’t even know it. Listen hard to the music of these artists, and you will hear a constant reckoning with sorrow and loss. For the last fifteen years, as No Depression scene waxed and waned, it always seemed out of tune with the times, which were about wealth and growth and boom.

With the entrance of Obama, a young and untested black president, in the era of collapse, we are now in the landscape of ultimate hope and sorrow, the place where the music of No Depression plays all night long, spilling out of homes and bars, spooking the pilgrims on the road, steeped in dark religion and holy sex. As perilous as the way forward now seems, I’m conflicted, because I feel so much extravagant possibility in the air. A certain kind of illusion has passed away, and there will be a lot of howling and moaning and rending of flesh, but that illusion, which belonged neither to the left nor right but to everyone, hid the next world, the approaching world, and it was high time for the curtain to drop.

I don’t think the immediate future will be easy. Neither do I believe it will be monstrous or utopian.

It will be tense and wild and bone-shaking. It will be a lash and a spark. I can’t say more, and I can’t frigging wait.

That’s my last post for this remarkable year. See you in 2009.

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