Geek Weekly #10

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I had a long time to think about it, too, she left in February of 1999 and I was involved in a big trial at the DOJ. The trial ended in April and I came back — I think I went to visit her once and I decided I wanted to freelance, I can do that now. I have no idea if anybody thought it was a good idea. Everyone was polite. My folks were very civilized about it. It was impressive. I'm sure they thought it was idiotic. To this day they're like, "Grad school! Good idea!" I get that about every six weeks

I guess about six months in I had gotten pretty friendly with a guy called Bret McCabe at The Met, and I was an editor there for about six months, and I would have been an editor there longer, except six months after I started, the paper was purchased and folded by New Times. So we were all out the door. And, you know, on a business level, you can't really blame them, they had the ad market to themselves when we were gone. So we were all out on our asses and I went back to freelancing. At that point I had established a relationship with Jeff Salamon [arts editor at the Austin-American Statesman] through a guy named Tom Carson who is the film critic for Esquire.

So The Met folds, I got married, went on my honeymoon, came back, and a week later my wife got laid off. We moved to Austin in the late summer of 2001 and we were both looking for work, and to his everlasting credit, Jeff really stuck his neck out for me at the Statesman.

I just talked to someone who knows you in Memphis, Andy Earles. S: What were you doing talking to Andy? I think he's a really underrated writer. He's a great writer! That fanzine (the Cimarron Weekend) is amazing. The zine is amazing. And I just called him and told him that I dropped his name to someone at the Voice. He should be a lot more famous than he is. S: He and Dave Dunlap are two of the most hilarious people you'd ever hope to meet. Andy is one of the two rock critics that nobody outside of fanzine people know about. The Cimarron Weekend I think is hysterical. S: And I'd like to know when the next issue is coming out because I bought an ad two Christmases ago for Zamboni Rodeo. I know the answer to that last question — there isn't going to be one. Dave move to Washington to work for the CityPaper and Andy is still in Memphis and he's going to start his own zine, but it isn't going to be the Cimarron Weekend, it's going to be something else. That's the one bit of news I get to break in this interview.

So I have a question about rock criticism. How do you sustain a passion for and find meaning in work that seems so trivial? It's kind of funny that you would ask me that the week leading up to South by Southwest. You never get more tired than right this second. How do I sustain my passion? I think among my colleagues and friends that are rock critics, the

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biggest theoretical bone of contention right now is the argument of mass significance versus cult band stuff. Which is more important to discuss. This is an important formative moment for a music critic. I was ust like a hipster separatist when I got to college. "Major labels are dumb!" I met a critic in college that completely rewrote my thinking about that, a guy named Rob Sheffield. I'm not just saying this because he's my pal, but I'm pretty sure he's the best rock critic alive. The point at which he sort of embarrasses, actually makes writers who are much better than I am sort of read his stuff and say, "Gee, maybe I should be a plumber," is the Pazz and Jop critics Poll. His raw ballots for those are extraordinary. I highly recommend doing a google search for his name and a zine called Radio On. The stuff that he wrote for Radio On in 1997 and 1998 is some of the best writing about art that I have ever seen. I owe him a lot, he introduced me to my wife, so my debt to him cannot ever fully be repaid.

S: But you're working on it by giving him a mention in Geek Weekly. Tha's true. He'll be thrilled. He was a guy who also liked Forced Exposure, and a lot of that stuff, but he was a guy who wrote brilliantly about things like Tiffany and very mainstream music, and it just hadn't occurred to me that people did that. That was a huge revelation to me, this is a fabulous writing about stuff that more than three people have heard. I probably wouldn't be doing this right now if I hadn't met Rob, for a number of reasons, but mostly because I would never have bothered to listen to the radio and that was sort of stupid on my part.

*

I mean, relevancy is another one I end up talking about - I'm really torn as to whether I give a shit if a band is relevant on a mass level or not.

J: But on the other hand, you can't say that a band is on the radio and so they're irrelevant. Even if they're totally irrelevant to you. Hey, I think "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys is one of the best songs of the 1990s without question. Most of the smart, interesting rock critics who I know who are good writers don't have a lot of interest in obscurantist music anymore. They just don't have any interest in it.

S: I hate to think that people don't want to talk about that just because there's a limited audience for it. That's kind of the whole point of fanzines. I mean we had Brian Berger be a guest writer for us. Obviously we're interested in talking about John Fahey reissues and whatnot. We can certainly talk about John Fahey reissues.

S: Isn't it great that those guys [Revenant, Austin-based label jointly founded by the late Fahey] won at the Grammys [three for Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton]? Yeah, I called Dean [Blackwood] like three days later - "How was it?" "I threw up on Nelly's shoes!" I was like, "No you didn't!" "No, I didn't, but we had a

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great time!" You should totally talk to Dean. Dean freely admits that the label doesn't have to support itself, so market considerations don't have to come into it. I mean, they do on some level. He's not going to put out more No-Neck Blues Band records just for the hell of it. I think the difference between indie bands 10 15 years ago and now is that most bands don't have aspirations to mass success.

S: Beat Happening probably never had aspirations of mass success.

J: Yeah, but everybody believed that whether or not they wanted to be like that mainstream or not, they wanted to be the mainstream. Yeah they thought this music deserved to reach a lot of people. And bands now don't necessarily think, I don't know, it's amazing to me that as many bands as did thought, "we're going to try to affect culture in a mass way." And major labels are still the only way to do that. They have access to the market. Though it's gotten to the point where even labels are complaining about things like access to radio. And that's a first. That is something kind of new.

*

S: What about television? Do you watch television? I watch an unfortunate amount of television.

J: How do you find the time?

S: Jennifer doesn't watch television.

J: No, I do.

S: But you don't have shows that you watch, you watch PBS all of the time.

J: Yes, I do have shows - Scientific American Frontier, American Experience! I love those shows. We watch a pretty unfortunate amount of television in our house. We have too much TV.

S: Did you watch the Boomtown marathon the other day? No, that's a line that we simply have not crossed. But we own DVDs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

S: I'd like to state for the record that my knee-jerk reaction to the idea of Buffy being a terrible series was so wrong and my life is so much better ever since I've been watching it. That was another thing I blew, because the show came on when I was in a pretty devout anti-geek period in my life. This plays into the thing we were talking about earlier about mass significnace. I was at work at the Department of Justice, a very mainstream place, and two colleagues of mine were talking about the end of season two, and Buffy killilng Angel, and they were visibly upset. And these were people who were not otherwise nerds in any way, shape or form. They were totally into this show. And then Drema got into it, and it wasn't until about a year later, when Tom Carson was like, you've got to take a look at this because this thing is just genius.

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S: It's mindboggling that somebody that intelligent is doing television. Josh Whedon is a superhero. It's just a great example of extremely well done popular art.

*

S: To wrap up, we usually ask people to give their comments on all the rock critics in Austin, but all the people we used to ask about, so few of them are here. So few of them are here, and I don't know any of them yet.

S: Also, everyone else we've interviewed has lived in Austin for 15 years. I am a pure, unfiltered carpetbagger. You can say many bad things about me, but that absolutely true.

S: You're also younger than everybody else we've interview by about 20 years. We'll not that much.

J: We'll say 40 when we print it. I just left and came back after having been raised here and there are a lot of things I see about Austin that I didn't see before. I'm curious: what are you finding that you didn't expect to find? It's certainly more expensive to live here than I thought.

J: Yeah you were a Slacker fan. I was a religious Slacker fan. I think Slacker actually occupies a really interesting cultural space. Something that I think would make a good double bill with it is the video for "Teenage Riot." It's a montage of just unground cultural stuff that they liked, like a clip of Harvey Pekar and then Pussy Galore, and there's Minor Threat, and Richard Kern, and there's Lydia Lunch, and it just rips through this stuff, and it's just a great snap shot of "what we thought was important - what bohemian culture means to us." And this is pre-internet, when people still communicated with fanzines and letters and packages in the mail. That's just a nice little snapshot of that time, and Slacker's the same thing.

Joe's footnotes to certain elements of this interview will be available on geekweekly.com at a later date.

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LaSUPREMA in L.A. Hello from California June 8-17, 2002

In the summer of 2002, my employer, the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University in Detroit, sent me to the Special Libraries Association annual conference in Los Angeles.

A night before the conference started, I went to the Student Academy Awards ceremony where my high school sweetheart, Thomas, was to be the recipient of an award in the category Documentary Film They screened the first five minutes of the seven-minute film (about the death of the vinyl record in the digital age) at the ceremony. It was real swell.

I attended the conference for several days while staying downtown in a mid-range chain hotel. During this time, the L.A. Lakers won their 3rd championship. Being in a high-rise in downtown L.A. with helicopters everywhere (during the post-game celebrations) was a little creepy, but I was still sort of disappointed that there was no rioting.

After the conference, I stayed for several more days. My dear friend Jackie (who had written for Geek Weekly) had to go out of town that week, so I got to stay in her apartment and drive her car all around town, but I had to miss out on her companionship, so that sucked. I saw my first ocean -- despire having traveled extensively, including over an ocean I drove all around in the hills and saw some neat stuff.

The following is my photo tour of L.A.:

I went for the burlesque, I stayed for the fashion. The dancing was incredible - both onstage and off.

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