I sat down this weekend with Andrew and Breezy, who run the pretty amazing shop Needles and Pens in San Francisco. We talked for a little bit, I shot a bunch of video, and I put it together into this little four minute profile, accompanied by the musical stylings of Dianogah.
Watch by clicking here, because my own site can't embed this video!
Today's announcement that No Depression magazine is folding up shop after the publication of their next issue is dredging up a lot of painful old memories for me. Last year felt like a bloodbath for independent publishers and the few that were able to hang on through it, I hoped would be able to persevere forever, defiant against what seemed like an inevitability.
But now No Depression, a magazine that I've always felt a kinship towards, has bent against the crosswinds that blew Punk Planet down as well. While No Depression didn't have a distributor bankruptcy to speed the downturn like we did, they still came up across the difficulties of being a publication supported in large part by the ads of record labels during a time when record labels are struggling on their own. As a result, the magazine saw its advertiser base dwindle:
CHICAGO--The street just outside the old Punk Planet office collapsed yesterday, after nearly six months of missing the magazine. 80 feet of street and sidewalk gave way, and the street's tears flooded nearby businesses and parked cars. A spokesperson from the former magazine apologized for the inconvenience caused by the brokenhearted roadway.
At one point in history, someone thought this was a wonderful way to sell cigarettes--exotic and worldly.
Whoops.
Seriously, that's the name of a blog entry by web designer Jeffery Zeldman.
Welcome to the party Zeldman, but there's nothing left but little chip crumbs at the bottom of the bowl. You should have come earlier--Seth Friedman was doing cannonballs into the pool and Darby Romeo was passing out jello shots.
As if the Ferraris you see on a daily basis aren't reminder enough that this world is one that I'll never really get a handle on, I have to wake up in the morning and see this:
So the verdict is in for the woman who killed Silkworm drummer Michael Dahlquist, John Glick, and Doug Meis by smashing into their car at 87 mph while they were stopped at light. She was, to remind you of that awful day, attempting to commit suicide after an argument with her mother.
She got eight years.
She'll be out in four if she behaves herself inside. She'll be 29 then, younger than the three men she killed were when they died.
Eight years.
It hardly seems fair, but nothing ever does when lives are taken away. Mostly it feels numbing, trying to find logic in a math that makes lives worth so little. You fumble for an answer and, like attempting to open a lock with heavy mittens on, all the effort is for naught.
Lance Hahn, the force behind the band J Church and one of the most prolific musicians in punk rock, has died. Lance had been battling health issues for some time, and the kidney disease he'd been very publicly fighting took a turn for the worst.
Lance was a songwriter with virtually no peer--writing hundreds of songs in his time. He was also an incredibly warm and friendly person, who always treated even the most tangential of acquaintances like they were old friends.
He will be sorely missed.
A dark day in Chicago's music scene is being replayed over and over now that the trial has finally begun for the woman who killed Michael Dahlquist, John Glick, and Douglas Meis back in 2005. It was a horrible death and a terrible day for anyone that knew those that died. I knew Michael only through others but I remember the fog I wandered through for days after he was killed. Out here in California, so removed from the tight-knit Chicago scene I called home for almost two decades, today feels especially lonely.
While those of us that truly believe in independent culture may not give a shit, the New York Times is reporting today that Madonna's going to leave Warner Music for the Clear Channel spinoff Live Nation which, up until this announcement, has been involved only in live music promotion, not the recorded kind.
So what? Well, what is that they're paying $100 million for Madonna's next three albums, which is a big-ass chunk of change and which clearly signals that they're going to be moving into the record label market as well. And thus a new major label--one with ties to a huge radio monopoly and a massive concert venue holding to boot. Meet the new model.
out now