Whooping Llama

Vanessa and I produced one issue the spring Leah left, a way for her to slowly hand over the reigns and give us a safety net (an experienced hand hanging around). With that issue, we provided a sort of “trailer” for what was to come.

Leah had steered The Eagle toward becoming a magazine. Magazine writing was Leah’s forte, the kind of stuff she enjoyed. Her reasoning was good: college kids don’t read newspapers, they respond better to magazines and magazine-style writing. The paper was also working on a once-a-month print schedule, and she figured it was too difficult to run a real news publication with that kind of cycle (and she was right about that). Under her leadership The Eagle was filled with columns, entertainment reviews, Homeric poem parodies, and a little bit of sports and campus news. Our first issue ran with only a couple reviews in it, the finale of the Homeric parody, and lots of bad graphic design (my fault).

Over the summer, Vanessa and I talked and talked about our plans for The Eagle. We decided that in order to accomplish our vision, in order to make our paper a real news outlet, several things would have to be accomplished.

1. Change the content. No more reviews would be published (unless we were desperately in need of copy), no more parodies (which relieved Vanessa, the pseudonymed author of the epic poem). Most importantly of all, no more columns about how hard it is to leave mommy and daddy and strike out on your own. Vanessa and I wanted news and nothing but news. We just hoped everyone else would share our enthusiasm.
2. Change the philosophy. When I worked on UCOTM, we functioned as a PR machine (one professor dubbed it “propaganda,” but I think that may be too harsh). We felt that our program was too new to report any real news, point out any of the school’s flaws. Looking back, I think we were too timid. I mean, for goodness sakes, we submitted ourselves to prior review by the university’s public relations office before sending our tape off to the television station…even though the school provided no funding whatsoever to the program, besides letting us borrow video gear long-term from the AV department. When I decided to take over as editor of The Eagle, I vowed to never submit so willingly. No matter what, Vanessa and I agreed that our newspaper would report the news, good or bad.
3. Change the production schedule. You can’t cover news when your paper only comes out once a month…so let’s bring the thing out twice a month. That posed some budget problems, so we decided to just cut the paper in half (4 pages instead of 8). Everything would equal out.
4. Change the design. The Eagle had looked the same for as long as we’d known it.–curly fonts with a picture of our school mascot (a golden eagle named MoHarv). It looked pretty good, but I wasn’t crazy about it.  I drew up a new banner in InDesign (recently purchased with some student loan money and installed on my new laptop), black and spartan. MoHarv disappeared and was replaced by the university logo.  The curly fonts were replaced by big block letters. It was a no-nonsense masthead, and a perfect reflection of our new philosophy.

I sent out an email over the campus system to our staff, making sure they were all on board with this new strategy. A couple reporters had problems–and both soon became too busy to work for us anymore. By and large, though, everyone was supportive and excited.

I’m beginning something here. Pretty soon, I’m going to start blogging about running a college paper (hence the name switch from “Whooping Llama”) but I figured I should get all of you up to date first. This is part one.

I’ve finished my seventh issue of the University of Charleston Eagle…and I must say it looks pretty good. I’m really not trying to blow my own horn, but we’ve been doing some good stuff this semester. We’ve turned the paper around, made it much more “newsy,” and have had pretty good success. Our issue-before-last, featuring President-elect Barack Obama(!) smack-dab in the center of the front page, went like hot-cakes. People are responding to the new format…I think they’re excited they have a real, honest-to-God campus newspaper.

Vanessa (my co-editor) and I are planning a really big story for next semester. It’s something that’s been brewing in the back of my mind since sophmore year–something I’ve always wished someone would write, and now I’m going to. You can bet it’ll be on here as soon as it rolls off the presses.

I’m having a lot of fun running this newpaper. A couple years ago, I started working on and co-anchoring the campus television show, UC on the Move (some videos from it are posted on this blog). It was a brand-new project for the university and I really enjoyed the whole TV news thing.

The videography, the editing, the script writing, the thrill of seeing your work on television…it was all really fun for a while. But UC on the Move, didn’t have a budget or much of a staff to speak of. Most of the workload was shouldered by me, my co-anchor, and our communications professor (both gone now–one works for the university, the other’s in Deleware). Our other reporters and videographers were inept at best. Some just needed more experience. Some just needed to change majors.

We were constantly banging our heads against the wall trying to get these “newbies” whipped into shape (when we only had a couple months’ experience ourselves). We fretted over upsetting the administration. We fretted over constant equipment screw-ups and delayed deadlines. Fun was soon replaced by stress, and I burned out. Big time.

I hated working on that TV show. I hated all those headaches, all those frustrations. I just froze. I stopped working, left all kinds of loose ends untied. I left an entire episode half-made. My comrades were mad at me, and I can understand why.  I dropped the ball on them, something I have never done in my entire life. If I tell you I’m going to do something, I’m probably going to do it (God willin’ and the creek don’t rise). I’m ashamed of the way I acted.

During a particularly dark period I even (seriously) considered changing my major to English and then heading off to grad school for a Master’s in education. My better senses and lack of enthusiasm for complex literary theory convinced me otherwise.

Anyway, I took a semester off from any kind of school-related activities besides writing book, movie, and music review for The Eagle. When the outgoing editor Leah Bowes needed someone to fill her shoes I eagerly raised my hand, taking my good friend Vanessa with me as copy editor. I had kinda wanted to edit the paper since I was a freshman…you could call it a dream come true, if it was one of those dreams where you fall toward the water and then jerk yourself awake within two seconds.

I had to write this screenplay back in the fall for a class I took. It’s been sitting around on my thumb drive ever since, so I figured…what the heck, I’ll post the thing. So, for your reading enjoyment, I present to you One Last Time. It’s a western, with an honest-to-God, Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood-style anti-hero with a heart of gold, named after a Protestant theologian. There are guns, there are horses, there are prostitutes…and they’re all wrapped up in a handy little PDF file.

One Last Time (PDF, 77.8kb)

NOTE: The middle part is in treatment (as in, I just tell you what goes on without any dialogue or camera shots or anything) because Dr. Weiss said it could be…so there.

NOTE #2: If any Hollywood execs or enterprising indie filmmakers out there want to make this thing, lemme know.

Music projects released by people already famous for things other than music always scare me a little. You just never know what to expect. I mean, sure, there’s the all-time Patrick Swayze classic “She’s Like the Wind”…but for every such musical gem we get a Paris Hilton cover of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.”

Fortunately, She & Him’s debut CD, Volume One, is nothing like any “celebrity album” I’ve ever heard. Comprised of Zooey Deschanel (of Almost Famous, Elf, and Bridge to Terabithia fame) and her singer-songwriter pal M. Ward, She & Him sounds like something Phil Spector would have made if he’d been born in Nashville, raised in Portland by two rabid Beach Boys fans, and fell into an indie rock scene while studying at UC Berkley. Volume One has walls of sound, steel guitars, solid songwriting, infectious melodies, and harmonies galore…and I love it.

Forgive my gushing, but songs like “Sweet Darlin’” restore my faith in modern music. First of all, it has hand-claps. Modern music needs more hand-claps. Second, there are girl-group harmonies. The Beatles and Brian Wilson loved them, and so do I. Third, there’s Zooey Deschanel’s voice. It’s sweet and smooth, almost crooning, and it works wonderfully with Ward’s backing tracks.

Any of the songs on this disc would fit perfectly on any AM pop radio forty years ago. Deschanel wrote most of the album’s lyrics, and it turns out she’s a promising talent in this area as well. Her songs are tightly written and fun…just like the Brill Building pop that inspired this CD. Neil Sedaka would be proud.

Deschanel and Ward also do two great covers on this debut. “I Should’ve Known Better” (originally performed by the Beatles) and “You Really Got a Hold On Me” (originally performed by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles)…the latter being the better of the two.

The song is broken down to two voices and a clunky-sounding acoustic guitar is just a little out-of-tune. This sparse arrangement could have easily made the song seem out-of-place on the record, but instead it shows off the talents of these two musicians in a way that no other song on Volume One does. She & Him doesn’t need walls of sound to sound good…all they need is a Sears-Robuck guitar, a cheap microphone, and a Smokey Robinson song.

I do have one complaint about this CD, however, and it’s purely aesthetic. I purchase most of my music from iTunes anymore, but I made an exception with this disc because I figured it would have all kinds of cool pictures and stuff in the CD booklet. It did not. I should have saved four dollars and just downloaded it.

I recommend She & Him’s debut for anyone who wants to hear the next big thing in indie pop. Frankly, I can’t wait for Volume Two.

The world of music journalism is becoming a lonelier place for roots music fans. No Depression, the best music magazine in the game, has announced that it will cease publication after its 75th issue, coming out this May.

ND (which borrows its name from an Uncle Tupelo album and a Carter Family song) went into print way back in 1995 covering “alternative country…whatever that is” on a quarterly and then bi-monthly basis. I didn’t discover the magazine until September of 2006, when I came upon it while browsing the periodical rack at Taylor Books. That particular edition had the Old Crow Medicine Show on the cover so I thumbed through the magazine a little, moseyed over to the counter, and plopped down my $5.95.

When I got home that night I devoured the cover article…a whopping six-page piece, much longer than anything I’d read in other music magazines like Spin or Rolling Stone. The length didn’t deter me, however, because the writing was so engaging. Before long I’d read the entire magazine. I got a subscription right away.

I’ve read every subsequent No Depression from cover-to-cover, and I’ve never been disappointed. The breadth and depth of their music coverage constantly astonishes me—it’s nothing for ND to write about a classic artist like Mavis Staples or Porter Wagoner only to switch gears and cover bluegrass-punks like the Avett Brothers or Mandy Moore’s new folk album. I’ve learned about artists I never would have otherwise, and I’ve been reminded that country music can be cool.

According to the editors, ND won’t be going away completely. They’re planning on expanding their website, NoDepression.net. Still, there’s just nothing like reading ink on paper and that probably means the long-form journalism that No Depression does so well may fall by the wayside (people just don’t want to read ten-thousand-word articles on a computer screen). This may not be the death of the magazine, but it certainly won’t exist in the form faithful readers like me have come to know and love.

So what happened? It’s not that No Depression suddenly has fewer subscribers. That’s certainly not the case. The problem lies with the record industry bigwigs in Nashville, L.A., and New York, who are scrambling to save their fat behinds as profits dwindle. Subsequently, they’ve cut advertising budgets—something that magazines big and small depend on. Add to that rising postal costs and the ever-falling number of independent bookstores in this country and you’ve got a crisis for music magazines like No Depression. A loyal fan base just isn’t enough anymore.

So hurry, before the presses stop rolling…get yourself out to Books-a-Million or Taylor Books (both stock ND) and pick up the last couple issues. Experience music journalism at its best before you can’t anymore.

I love my No Depression, and losing it so soon in our relationship has caused me no small amount of grief. My only regret is not telling all of you about this magazine sooner. I’ve failed you.