“This one’s a classic,” Old-Timer Al said to us, sternly examining our VW Bus parked across three spaces in the Wal-Mart lot, yellow in the sun as a sea lion carcass. Tendrils of rust crept from the wheel wells. It was far from a classic.

Kevin responded, “sure is”.

“All we need to do is sign over the title and it’s yours,” Cody said.

“I couldn’t let you boys do that,” Al said to us. “How much do you want for her?”

“Seriously, you can just have it for free if you take over the title.” All we wanted was to be rid of this damned bus, which we’d bought off an acquaintance a month earlier for $800. Still, Al wanted to haggle.

“Okay, how about $300″ Cody said.

“$150″ Al said. “It’s a deal.”

We’d finally found a taker. Stuck in the tiny town of Yreka, ten miles south of the Oregon-California border, we were selling our only form of transportation for $150, and it was the best news of the day. Kevin, Cody and I were in the last legs of a two-week tour of the Pacific Northwest with our band Mule Train, which I’d formed a year before, in 2004. After a decade of writing songs and playing bars and house parties solo, I had finally developed the self-confidence to form a band. We were an unlikely crew: myself, a 27-year-old coffee-shop worker, pursuing a musical career as my thirties loomed. Kevin, our drummer, was a hippie with an unlikely love of punk rock, who traipsed around his commune in flip-flops and ripped-up hand-me-downs. My co-worker Cody was the bassist, an imposing gentle giant who had never played an instrument before, who was chosen more for his personality than his musical skill.

We had garnered a decent following in our home town. Our amalgam of folk and punk rock won over crowds of college students, grizzled old punks and folk-listening hippies alike, and we’d even opened at the largest club in town, a cavernous 1000-seat hall. After a mere year of paying our dues, we had a full-length CD, satisfyingly covered in shrink-wrap. At the CD release show that launched the tour, we sold 200 copies before embarking on a ten-stop tour up and down the legendary hotbed of indie rock that was the Pacific Northwest. We were feeling pretty damn good about ourselves: that last night in our hometown, as I played guitar before a swirling mass of sweaty, dancing bodies, I felt vindicated. I felt, for once, that I’d made the right choices with my life. I felt like a rock star.

The next night we played the first show of our tour in Eugene, OR, for an audience of 10. We wrote it off as a first-night fluke. Next up was two nights in Portland: the first found us clanging loudly through a busted PA for studying students at an anarchist coffee shop, the second night at an empty bar underneath a freeway overpass. Off to Olympia WA, the birthplace of Sleater-Kinney, where we performed to a disinterested waitress in a vegan cafe. By this point, Cody and Kevin had resigned themselves to gallows humor, joking about the show turnouts.

I wasn’t laughing.

Our next destination was Seattle, another bar under a highway overpass. The tour reached its lowest point the following night, at a honky-tonk in a small town outside of Seattle. The audience emptied out after our second song, because the meth-addled sound guy couldn’t stop the feedback peeling from the P.A. speakers.

Our trip came to an end after a marathon driving stint through the mountains of Southern Oregon. Racing past the Oregon border, driving up a steep incline, the bus let out a bleating wail as we lost power to the engine. The transmission died as the August sun settled into 10am convection mode. Kevin and I got out and stood on the side of the road. My hangover was reaching full blossom, the hot gravel radiating nausea back at me. Cody slid underneath the bus to investigate.

As I stood by the side of the highway, I thought about how I’d convinced Cody and Kevin to go on tour: sitting on the back deck of Kevin’s commune, saying, “if we want to take ourselves seriously as a band, we have to go on tour. I’m not interested in being a big fish in a small pond.” Kevin had been up for it, more for the adventure than for career advancement, while Cody was dubious, but relented. Now I was having hung over panic attacks on the side of a rural highway while Cody tried to figure out why our van had died.

“I think it’s the tranny” Cody yelled. “Shit,” I responded. “Think we can push it into second and get into town?” Cody thought we could. Kevin and I pushed the bus off while Cody grinded the clutch, and we were gone–Kevin and I jumping in, Little Miss Sunshine-style, heading for Yreka at 20 miles an hour.

We exited at the first turnoff and sped into the nearest lot, belonging to a giant strip-mall including a Wal-Mart, fabric store, a Subway, and a DMV.

We came to an inelegant stop across three parking spots, sat there, and assessed our situation. “Hurting,” Cody said. “Hurting” was Cody’s response to most things. Over the course of the tour, I had come to resent the fake adjective, applied every time we entered an empty bar with our unnecessarily large amps. But this time, we agreed. “Yep, hurting,” Kevin said. “Totally fucking hurting,” I agreed.

We locked the van and walked to the pay phone to find a mechanic in the yellow pages. Flipping through the thin volume, we settled on Dave’s Auto Repair. I called from Cody’s cell phone. “Yeah, we’ve got a ’73 VW Bus with a busted transmission, how much would it be to replace it?” “We can get a replacement tranny next Tuesday for your vehicle. It’ll run you $1400.” “Next Tuesday?” I asked, clarifying that it would, indeed, take a week to get a replacement. “Yeah, next week.”

It was clear to me that we had to cut-and-run: we had $400 between the three of us, jobs we were expected at, and we sure as hell weren’t going to stay in Yreka for eight days. We’d find a ride home–somehow–but that bus wasn’t going anywhere. Clearly, we had to abandon it. Kevin and Cody were less eager, but acknowledged that there was no other option. We couldn’t leave it, though: steep fines would eventually make their way to Cody’s mailbox. We had to find someone to take the title.

Giving away a vehicle is harder than it seems. For two hours, we walked up and down the aisles of Wal-Mart, trying to find someone who would to take a bus with a busted transmission. People responded as if we were offering bargain-basement meth cooked in the dumpster out back.

Granted, we looked unsavory: me, tattooed and emaciated, in overly tight pants; Kevin, in a ripped t-shirt and sandals, with a beard that looked like it might sprout shoots of wheat grass; and Cody, a hulking 6’2″ Argentinian in a sea of white people. We approached couples, teenagers, old folks–most of them wouldn’t give us a chance. A middle-aged white trash couple listened. The husband was game, but his wife just scowled at us. “Ed, the last thing we need is another broke-down car.” An 18 year old high school dropout showed some interest, but he became uneasy. “I don’t think I can take it. My Mom would get pissed. Good luck,” he said to us in the fish and tackle aisle. “No, dude, she won’t mind,” Cody argued, as if he knew the kid’s mother. “No, she’d be pissed,” the kid said as he turned and walked away.

Two hours later, we were getting suspicious looks from the Wal-Mart staff and were no closer to getting rid of this bus. It was then that we were approached by our knight in ruffled flannel: the man we’d later refer to affectionately as “Old-Timer Al”. Al and his wife had been watching us since we arrived, and she had finally forced him to come over and investigate.

“You boys have been walking around here for hours. What’s the problem?” he asked. We explained our situation.

He nodded his head and invited us into his RV. “Let’s see if we can figure out a solution,” he said. We were wary, unaware of America’s nomadic Wal-Mart underground. Al and his wife were members of a class of retirees who sell their houses, buy RV’s, and travel the country, wandering from one Wal-Mart parking lot to the next, establishing small societies in big-box-store parking lots. As we entered the RV, we were greeted by Al’s wife. “Al, I’m not going out there today,” she said. “Elaine’s just sitting there on her lawn chair.She cheats at poker–I saw her doing it last night!”

She offered us some lemonade. Kevin, Cody and I, stinking of beer-soaked couches and smoky bars sat in the well-appointed RV of our hosts, as they told us their lives’ stories: they were from the Southwest, after retirement they sold their house to travel around the country in their RV, living as strip-mall vagabonds. Their kids thought that they were crazy, but they didn’t care.

“I used to have a bus just like that back in the early ’80s,” Al said to us. “Great,” replied Cody. Morale was clearly low if Cody was responding indifferently to a man offering to help us out. Cody was the face of the band–the member willing to chat with whoever came up to the stage after we finished playing, no matter how drunk or insane they might appear. “Sure did,” Al went on, “same color as the one you have there.”

He waxed on about his old ’70s VW bus. I tried to respond as enthusiastically as I could, avoiding the defeated faces of my band mates. In our small hometown, we felt like a big deal. We’d released our first CD, 14 songs that I had written, 14 songs pressed on a thousand plastic discs. A thousand plastic discs the three of us had spent $3000 on manufacturing. Now, 800 of those CD’s were baking in the back of a broken-down VW in a dead-end mountain town. I sipped the lemonade, and a sour pit stuck in my throat.

“Now why do you want to get rid of that bus again? You can’t do that! It’s a classic, I’m telling you!” Kevin explained our situation to Al once again. “Well, let’s go take a look at it.”

As we stood there, watching Old Timer Al assess the van, haggling with him over the free bus and agreeing that it, was, in fact, a classic, I just missed my coffee shop job that I hated, the dank bedroom that I would cocoon myself in and drink and smoke and write songs, the reliable audience of friends and acquaintances and hometown fans that would come out to every show and dance, not merely glower at us from the corner of the bar. Cody turned to me and said, “the cafe doesn’t seem so bad right now.” I nodded.

“You know there’s a DMV over there, right,” Al asked. “Sure do,” Kevin said. “We have the paperwork right here. All we need to do is sign over the title and it’s yours.” Finally, Al relented.

“Okay,” Cody said, “now we just have to find a way to get home.” I called every friend and acquaintance in Northern California who owned a large vehicle, and finally reached our friend Chris in Sacramento, who was willing to pull a ten-hour round trip in his pickup. When he arrived that evening, we emptied the bus and loaded our instruments, amps, sleeping bags, backpacks, and boxes of Mule Train CD’s into the bed of his truck. It was so packed, I worried it would overturn.

Chris drove us into the pitch-black Sierra Nevada mountains, four men cramped into the front cab of a Ford pickup on a five-hour drive through the black void. A sliver of light from the moon reflected on the still lakes.

As we sat in silence, I stared at the dark outlines where the lakes gave way to mountains, towering on an inhuman scale. The world seemed unfathomably large, and we knew very little of it.

A couple more thoughts that came to mind since I wrote this post for Shareable about The Daily, and how it completely misses the point of the iPad and social media.

The question you’ve got to ask with any new technology is, what problem does it solve? The problem the iPad solves is 1) most of our reading is now done on a screen and 2) reading large bodies of text while sitting at a computer fucking sucks. Computers still suffer from the vestigial design limitations of the unwieldy terminals that spawned them–they’re devices to enter commands and data into, not read on. Sure, they’ve evolved to do other things (poorly), but they’re still only a stopgap solution for consuming text/audio/video online. The iPad, with its tactile interface and slim, magazine-like form factor is an imperfect but improved device for reading text on the Internet.

So what problem does The Daily and Conde Nast’s apps-as-glorified-PDF’s solve for the user? They offer less functionality than comparable news websites, which already look great in Mobile Safari. Instapaper already offers the definitive offline reading solution (as far s I can tell, The Daily doesn’t even have an offline mode, rendering it particularly pointless.) The problems they theoretically solve exist entirely on the publishers’ side: it’s easy to repurpose content, control its use, and cling to the old media business models. But in what way are any of these things advantageous to the user? They’re not, yet the publishers are charging a premium for a substandard product that is easily bested by free web content through Mobile Safari and cheap or free archiving or aggregation apps like Flipboard, Instapaper and Reeder.

Aside from Murdoch’s octogenarian peers who bring iPads to Davos but don’t know how to use them, for whom is The Daily compelling or useful?

Just got back from a group workshop meeting for 2nd Story. If you’re not familiar, 2nd Story is a theater collective I’ve been working with that produces readings at wine bars around Chicago. The process is what sets it apart from other reading series: 2nd Story pull actors and directors from the theater world to workshop pieces of short narrative nonfiction with writers, to craft the stories and their performances into something that people at a wine bar will actually want to engage with while imbibing.

It’s challenging for me: frustrating, rewarding. All of my prior performance experience comes from playing in bands, where the only verbal interaction with the audience was short quips in-between songs. While performing the songs, the guitar served as a crutch separating myself from the audience, and I was performing practiced, relatively polished songs with a group of other people. We were delivering loud, complete products with clearly delineated beginnings and ends, barreling over chatter and indifference with unnecessarily loud amps.

Performing a ten-minute short story, alone on a stage with a spotlight on you, there’s none of that contract that separates band from audience; instead, you’re having an intimate experience with an audience that demands you respect the give and take of the room. You need to be agile and comfortable enough with to riff off the audience and the unexpected, to feel the ebbs and flows of the room in the moment. A band has to consider this, but is far less agile: once you’re locked into a song, you’re committed to finishing that song, and there’s little course-correction to be made.

If they’re not going your way, you steamroll your way through it. In a reading, it’s a much more delicate give and take with the audience. This is terrifying. From the writing standpoint, it’s also challenging: I’m still finding my voice for narrative nonfiction, a far different form from feature articles or half-baked culture punditry or satirical riffs or fantastic/satirical short fiction, all forms I’m a lot more familiar and comfortable with. Certain skills can be transposed, but there are a whole load of new ones to develop. Particularly, writing for a live audience, not readers.

It’s tough and scary and frustrating, but worthwhile. I also suspect that a lot of what I’m getting from this can be used to inform my other writing. Seems like in the current new media/publishing climate, honing your writing so it can hold the attention of a groups of drunks in bars, well, that’s a skill that would serve me well to consider when writing for the web audience.

Anyway, this is already TL;DR, but a few notes from today’s meeting about writing with performing in mind, that I found particularly useful:

Have an hypothetical, ideal audience member in your mind that you are specifically speaking to—I know this is a writing trick—to have a hypothetical reader you’re writing for. It’s one that I’ve deployed in the past. I hadn’t thought about doing something similar when performing for an audience.

Not every response to an unexpected audience action needs to be a witty zinger. A genuine response is just as valid and effective.

Live in the scene – create eye contact with the character you’re speaking to, when speaking those lines – have first scene and last scene memorized – memorize first sentence of each paragraph

Trust your instinctual reaction to the stimuli around you. Unless of course, your immediate instinctual reaction is, as it is for me: “FLEE!”

Crossposted from my Tumblr, Eventual Ghost

The zombie apocalypse began on a frigid February morning in Chicago when Mildred Cavanagh, age 82, slipped and fell while attempting to step around bum’s puke that crystallized on the sidewalk. When Cavanagh came to a few moments later, she raised herself from the ground, gathered the groceries that had fallen out of her cart, and faintly murmured the word “brains”. Cavanagh was shot six hours later by Officer Mike Kowalski as she attempted to suck her son-in-law’s brain through a straw she’d bored in his skull. The apocalypse took decades longer than it does in the movies: three weeks after Cavanagh’s fall, only 23% of Chicago’s population had joined the undead. The zombies continued with their day-to-day tasks, harvesting brains under the cover of night. Undead teachers went to school, CTA employees continued to drive their buses, and city workers drank coffee on the side of blocked streets during rush hour. In the early days, it was difficult to tell who was or was not a zombie: there were polite zombies, asshole zombies, plumber zombies and day-trading zombies, Jew zombies and goy zombies, gruff meatpacking zombies on the South Side and college-student zombies who brained their roommates with bongs.

Read the rest (on your mobile device) at Cellstories.

UPDATE 4/30/10: This story is also now up on Is Greater Than. Read it here.

I’m often amused, tickled, etc about things I come across while walking around Chicago, IL. This is a collection of pics I’ve too-long kept hidden on the private Facebook.

This could work in a few cases—tween-pop stars such as Miley Cyrus that command singular devotion from their fans—but not for mature music listeners with a large collection of artists in their library. What the new band app craze reminds me of more than anything is the failed enhanced CD initiatives of yore, in which labels were going to add value to physical CD’s by forcing anyone who played music on their computers to interface with it inside of a clunky, frustrating Flash or Quicktime file that offered the exact same content you’d find on the artist’s website.

The headline zooming around the blogs right now is correct on one thing: the album is dying*. But the statement should be more along these lines: the album is dead, long live the playlist. Or long live Random Shuffle. Or iTunes Genius. Trying to create a new product that locks users into one app, particularly given the iPhone’s unscalable app interface and Apple’s insistence on not allowing third-party apps to run in the background, is just another in a long line of failed attempts by the music industry to create a new bundled product that only a handful of obsessives would want.

• And yes, I realize that such a statement sounds contradictory coming a few days after I announced that I’m working on a new album, and to that I say: the album isn’t quite dead yet. The writing’s on the wall, but as long as there are olds who still have some emotional connection to the concept of the album, there will remain a continually shrinking market for it. In addition, the infrastructure just isn’t there to sell and promote single songs or short EP’s for an independent, unsigned artist–to get your music on iTunes, Amazon mp3, CDBaby, etc, it still has to be delivered in album form. This will no doubt change in the next few years, as the emotional attachment to the album continues to fade (I can’t remember the last time I had the desire to listen to a full album, and I’m 33, not 19,), but it’s certainly not going to change in six months or a year.

Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.

A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money.

Really? Everyone’s doing OK other than the labels? Anderson is making a common mistake here (like most people who have opinions on the future of the music business, but know absolutely nothing about it.) First off, the claim that everyone is doing “OK” no doubt extrapolates from the cases of artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Dave Matthews Band etc, who, of course, are doing OK. They’ve got money in the bank, they’ve got a healthy number of fans (and cross-promotional marketing opportunities) to ensure that they will continue to do “OK”. Like many a tech evangelist before him, Anderson is assuming that these rare instances represent the bulk of the music industry, ignoring the huge majority of bands out there that are operating on a working-class income level. To generalize how these bands are doing—again, the majority of working bands—by using Radiohead as a model is like trying to extrapolate how independent books stores are doing by looking at Amazon’s sales figures. The difference in scale is immense.

To determine how most of these working bands are doing would be very difficult. Collecting metrics on this would demand getting actually profit/loss sheets from working professional bands, a difficult proposition since 1) many of them don’t track that shit very well and 2) the ones that do are loath to talk about the economics of being in a band and guard their bands’ financial information with a Steve Jobs-esque level of secrecy. This is complicated all the more because it’s always been difficult for working bands. As record sales decline, gas prices rise and ticket sales soften due to the economy, are these bands really doing “OK”? It’s hard to say conclusively. Many of them would probably say that it’s always been hard to be a professional musician, and it’s getting continually tougher with each year. Unless Anderson wants to pull out some actual numbers demonstrating how the economic situation has improved in the past decade for 90% of the working bands out there on the road, he might want to think twice about using the music industry as a model for his free new world.

via the Daily Swarm

Late in December 2006, while most offices were closed for the holidays, the Independent Press Association (IPA) quietly sent an e-mail to its member publications announcing that the organization was closing its doors. Despite previous optimism expressed by the IPA’s board of directors, for many of the publishers whose titles the organization distributed, it came as little surprise. For them, the IPA’s sudden announcement was endemic to a total communications breakdown between the organization and its client publications that began in early 2005. Publications represented by the IPA continue to contend with the likelihood that thousands of dollars they are owed will never be seen. For some, such as Kitchen Sink (and Punk Planet itself), this comes as the IPA’s final, and fatal, blow. The fallout has been profound-the independent publishing community has experienced an unprecedented bloodletting in recent months, as magazines run on a shoestring have been unable to overcome huge losses in operating income.

In the newsstand distribution business, bankruptcies are nothing new. But in the case of the IPA, the dissolution also speaks to a much deeper crisis of mission. For publishers of IPA-distributed titles, the irony is palpable. An organization once established as an advocate for the independent press, the IPA has brought an array of the publications it was founded to support down with it. The sense of betrayal and frustration goes deep—-hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to distributed titles has disappeared, only likely to be repaid on a percentage of the dollar by the fiduciary firm Uecker and Associates, which was assigned to distribute what remain of the IPA’s assets.

Founded in 1996 by John Anner, the IPA was established as a non-profit Social Justice organization for publishers and writers. The IPA offered counsel on the nuts and bolts of publishing to up-and-coming publishers while engaging in social works programs such as the New Voices in Independent Journalism, which arranged for grants for journalism students of color. It wasn’t until 1999 that the IPA got into distribution, buying out beleaguered for-profit newsstand distributor BigTop (which was later renamed Indy Press Newsstand Services.) The organization stated that the IPA could better cater to the national newsstand distribution needs of its member titles than the large, for-profit magazine distribution behemoths.

Anner left the organization in 2003, replaced by Jeremy Adam Smith, who served as Interim Executive Director and was charged with finding a permanent director. Smith and the board chose Richard Landry to head the organization, with the hopes that Landry’s management experience in the for-profit sector as founder of PC World magazine would prove useful in the IPA’s foray into newsstand distribution. Though BigTop/Indy Press Newsstand Services was successful in increasing circulation of its titles, in early 2005 a handful of publishers began to notice that payments were coming late. In some cases, the late payments were written off by many as isolated incidents. “At the time,” says Bitch publisher Debbie Rasmussen, “we weren’t really in communication with other publishers. We didn’t know it was a broader occurrence, so we weren’t that alarmed.” Carla Costa, publisher of Kitchen Sink magazine, had a similar experience. “Payments starting coming in later and later,” she says. “At that point, the communication was still OK, in terms of getting closing statements for issues on the newsstand and potential payment dates-even though the payments were coming late they were still forthcoming with that information.”

On October 15, 2005, Landry posted to the IPA listserv, addressing the late payment issues. In the post, he stated, “The reasons for this are numerous, but they really boil down to the fact that independent newsstand distributors like Indy Press require a lot of working cash themselves in order to be able to deal with the very long return and payment cycles that are standard for our business,” assuring member titles that “I and members of the board have been working to find better, long-term ways to support the cash-flow needs of Indy Press so that we could be sure to make timely payments to you, our members and publishers.”

After months of pursuing a partnership with an established distribution company to shore up the IPA’s finances and improve the payment and accounting backend of the distribution chain, in March of 2006 Landry announced to the members that the IPA had signed into a partnership with Canadian distributor Disticor. The company was to handle billing and financial responsibility for the titles while IPNS would continue to manage marketing for their titles and continue their advocacy role for the publications.

According to Landry, the deal would provide the IPA with a cash infusion that would allow them to repay their debts to the distributed titles. Implied in this deal, in the eyes of many publishers, was that the titles that signed the new Disticor contracts would receive preferential payment schedules.

Many publishers balked at the Disticor deal, reluctant to renew their business relationship with the IPA by signing into a brand-new, three-year contract. Some decided that they would rather risk eating the funds owed them than sign a new contract jointly with Disticor and the IPA. Former Tikkun publisher Joel Schalit (a former associate publisher of Punk Planet) was one of those individuals. “We made the decision to not go with them before the Disticor deal was announced,” says Schalit. “We didn’t have confidence that a bailout would ameliorate their problems. We had suspicions that our sales reporting from BigTop wasn’t correct, and we would still be dealing with them. I knew that by pulling out on the distribution deal, I was giving up a lot of money that was owed to us.”

For magazines without the strong subscriber base Tikkun would fall back on, Writing off the Big Top debt was not an option, and many begrudgingly gambled they would be paid for amounts owed them. “The Disticor deal was offered so we would get paid,” says Giant Robot publisher Eric Nakamura. “I felt like there was no choice … there might have been a payment schedule, but it was the kind of schedule that leaves you with a huge debt when you don’t get paid.” Unfortunately for those magazines, the transition period between signing to the Disticor contract and receiving payment for the quickly increasing amounts the IPA owed was economically crippling.

Payments promised for one date failed to materialize months later. New sales representatives were assigned to member’s accounts for a short period of time, only to disappear with no fanfare save for bounce-back e-mail responses. Requests for statements would garner no response for weeks, and when numbers were provided, they often came without an account breakdown or any statement detail. “They were making late payments, not communicating with us, making promises about when payments would come and breaking those promises, misinterpreting our contract and trying to take credit on returns that were long closed in order to whittle down what they thought they owed us,” says Bitch‘s Rasmussen. For Kitchen Sink, the situation quickly turned dire. Costa explains, “not only did the payments become severely late, to the point where we had to significantly delay two issues, but the communication also really deteriorated. We stopped being able to get closing statements in a timely manner, because at that point I think they were running out of money so quickly that they couldn’t give you a potential pay-out date, so they just wouldn’t communicate at all. When they closed, I only had one of two closing statements I needed from them.”

“In the end, it took a month for e-mails and phone calls I sent out on a weekly basis to be returned. It put us in a position where even though we’re willing to fundraise to print our issues, it put us on a backlog of payments for two full issues, and it’s a financial crunch that we can’t really beat,” Costa describes.

From the Inside Looking Out

For a number of former IPA employees, the organization’s decline was equally perplexing. Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, who served as a technical assistance consultant for the IPA from 2004 to 2005, discovered the cash flow problems indirectly. “In July of 2005, they didn’t pay me for my consulting job. I got very concerned. I started asking questions among people in the organization. I started hearing that things weren’t good and there were problems with distribution and I realized there was a financial problem they were trying to hush up. They were hiring more and more bookkeepers, and they said it was just a cash flow problem with the bookkeepers, and that the situation was working itself out. When I started to contact people for the December 2005 conference, then I started to hear back from people that the IPA was paying late.”

Sales representative Lauren Cooper, who left the IPA in April of 2005, saw warning signs in late 2004. “My job was to get publishers to do more promotions and get more copies out and publishers would say, “‘that’s great and all but you haven’t paid me for two issues,’” says Cooper. She began experiencing communications problems of her own. “It just sort of snowballed from that point, and I couldn’t get answers. Previously I could go up to accounting and say, “I’ve got this publisher on the phone and they want to know when they’re going to get paid’ and there was always some sort of answer, even if it was ‘give me a couple of days.’ But it became no communication flow ever.”

Former Bitch publisher Lisa Jervis served on the IPA board from November 2004 until January 2oo6 as co-chair of the Member Advisory Committee. She contends that during her stint on the board, she was similarly kept in the dark about financial matters. Jervis states that she “soon realized that for my own comfort level with my fiduciary responsibilities to the organization, I was not getting nearly enough information about the organization’s finances. I do not feel like enough information was shared with the board about what was going on. It led to delays in the situation being taken as seriously as it needed to be, and I think that made the outcome a lot worse for a lot of publications. There were constant struggles over communication, both in getting info for the board, and in getting info to the membership.”

The View on High

In the past year, no small amount of publisher and staff frustration has been directed towards Landry and the IPA Board. Critics assert that Landry’s tightly regulated, top-down management approach led to a lack of transparency and a crisis of confidence that only exacerbated the IPA’s newsstand distribution issues. One of Landry’s sharpest critics is Smith, who states that hiring Landry stands as “one of the greatest regrets of my working life.”

“When BigTop or IPNS got into trouble, Richard’s response, which was consistent with what I experienced as a member of the staff, was to shut down communications and make sure that there was no information going in or out, which had a number of horrible consequences, one of which is that it led members to distrust the organization, another of which was that an incredible amount of bad publicity was generated, which would turn to philanthropic funders reading that publicity and concluding that IPA wasn’t a good investment.”

Landry responded to criticism on February, 2007 in an interview with the San FranciscoChronicle, stating that “The IPA I joined was a very distressed organization, and I spent the past three and a half years trying to pull it out of a difficult financial situation.”

Smith, however, has little sympathy for Landry’s argument.

“When he became executive director there’s no question that he faced a lot of questions to be solved,” he says, emphasizing that “when you’re an executive director or leader of any organization, that’s your job-to solve problems.”

Despite their personal criticisms, both Cooper and Jervis emphasize that Landry inherited a dire economic situation when he became Director of the IPA. “The seeds for BigTop’s problems were sown a long time ago-in my opinion, back when the IPA acquired BigTop in the first place,” says Jervis. “There seems to have been a profound underestimate of the financial expertise needed to manage that kind of business, and the organization just never had it and never put the proper systems in place. Richard Landry inherited a financial mess-I don’t think anyone even knew how big a mess it was.”

“There were always cash flow problems,” says Cooper. “Some of the accounting problems were inherited from when BigTop was a for-profit and the IPA bought it.” Kaiser concurs. “To be perfectly honest, when Landry took over the IPA it was in serious financial trouble,” she says. “Anyone in that position would have had to fire some people, make some hard decisions.”

Despite her concessions, Cooper retains strong criticisms of Landry’s handling of the crisis. “The position of the organization under Richard’s leadership was to preserve the organization first, the publications second,” she states. “I can understand trying to make sure there’s some money in the bank, but do you start taking the people who make you that money for granted?”

The Fallout

Since the announcement that the IPA was shuttering its operations, the fallout in the independent press community has been profound. A number of magazines, such as Kitchen Sink, have opted to cease publication. Costa states that the factors contributing to their decision have as much to do with exhaustion as unpaid revenue. “At the time of the IPA closure, we had Kitchen Sink 15 at the printer and didn’t have any money to ship it because they couldn’t pay us, so we had a printed magazine we couldn’t pay for at the printer. What we were able to do with a big number of small donations was payoff our printer and mail it off to subscribers.”

In another stroke of irony, as with many publishers who signed to the Disticor deal, Costa has found new distributor Disticor (which will continue to distribute titles that signed into the new contract) to be forthcoming with payments. Revenue from the first Kitchen Sink issue distributed by Disticor will fund the printing costs of their upcoming final issue. But unfortunately for Kitchen Sink and other strapped publishers, due to the often arcane process of newsstand distribution, in which magazines are paid for issues sold many months after the magazines go off the shelves, the revenue lost during the transition from the IPNS is far too much to make up.

Instead, the Costa and the editorial staff of Kitchen Sink are refocusing their energies on the Neighbor Lady Community Arts Project, the non-profit organization that Kitchen Sink became an energy- and money- consuming project of. While the former magazine staff will continue to work with the non-profit, Costa states that the publication has decisively met its end. “We won’t ever revive Kitchen Sink magazine. We just can’t. It’s a money problem-not for lack of will, because we’ve worked really hard on it for five years. I think it’s time to move on, because it’s exhausting and I think having a chance to work on new plans will revitalize everybody. It’s too expensive for us to do as a group of volunteers.”

Not all affected publications are shutting their doors. For Bitch, the unpaid revenue has been crippling, but hasn’t dealt a fatal blow. In February, Rasmussen told Punk Planet, “We got our notification saying they owed us $35,000, and our records show that they owe us $81,000.” Months later, she has yet to get any indication of how much of that money the magazine may receive. “We haven’t had any contact with their attorneys,” she says. “I’d sent a couple of messages to Susan Uecker but I’ve only gotten generic responses back. I’ve heard conflicting reports about what (if any) money we should expect. Some people think publishers won’t see any of it; others seem to believe that we’ll probably get 10 cents on the dollar of what the IPA claimed to owe us.”

As Costa and the Kitchen Sink staff wrap up fundraising efforts to get issue 16 out the door, they don’t expect to know how much they will-or won’t-receive until the end of summer at the earliest. “We’ll have to wait until claims are processed before we hear back,” she says. “I’m assuming none of us will know what happens until the end of the summer but I’m not very optimistic about it.”

Members of the Independent Publisher’s Network, the group that a number of former IPA members and publishers have organized in the wake, found that among the assets being sold off in order to repay the publishers are the mailing list contacts of those publishers themselves, in yet another twist that emphasizes how far the legacy of the IPA has strayed from the organization’s original mandate. Responses on the group range from bemusement to renewed anger among former IPA members whose contact information is potentially being sold to spammers and direct marketing companies in order to help pay for the debts they themselves are owed.

On the Independent Publisher’s Network online forum, former staffers and publishers are rebuilding that community that was crucial to the IPA’s mission in its’ formative period, before it became embroiled in economic controversy, before it tried its hand at the distribution business. But for these publishers, still recovering from the IPA fallout, the community must contend with a host of crises threatening the entire publishing world. Even as they work themselves out of an economic quagmire, the crucial question confronting these publishers is how to preserve the independent press as a viable concern while it faces multiple threats-from scarce distribution options, from increased bulk mailing rates, from the Internet, from continually declining advertising income.

Smith states that progressive publications have to become increasingly savvy about their bottom line. “Freestanding independent titles have to be smart about it,” he says. “The winning formula at the moment is that you keep a tight rein on your expenses–that you diversify as much as possible, that you have some kind of subsidy in the form of donations or in the form of institutional sponsorship, or some sort of cash cow, and that you have a very well-defined mission and niche. If you believe that there has to be an independent press, then it’s simply a matter of finding a way,” he says. “In that sense, you can’t focus on the negative, you have to seize on that and try to develop that. I just think we’re in a very tough period right now.”

Yet as an already-tough business grows only more difficult, Rasmussen emphasizes that both publishers and readers must take stock of what has been lost and commit themselves again to supporting independent voices. “I’m committed not just to independent media but radical and anti-capitalist media,” says Rasmussen, “and I worry about the declining number of outlets for these perspectives. Independent print publishing is enormously difficult and costly, even more so when you’re challenging conventions, like consumerism, or subsidizing your publication with corporate ad sales. We all need to realize that if we want these publications to continue, we have to do our part to support them.”

Reporting needs to get paid for. But denying everything that has been learned in the past decade as to how people use and interact with content on the web is absolute unmitigated insanity. It’s almost as if the people in the business who are making these arguments want to commit career suicide.

You know the basic argument; it’s made by your Reason Magazine-subscribing acquaintance whenever there’s a large public outpouring of grief over an event deemed unimportant by said bastion of reason and logic. And of course, it’s a bit ridiculous for your average person to experience sadness about a person-as-abstract-concept, a faraway figure of wealth and decadence. That doesn’t make the sorrow any less valid, however. And these responses don’t make a reasonable argument; instead, they’re merely the outbursts of trolls expressing their narcissism of minor differences. Skeptics can tut-tut all they want, and (rightly) wonder why more people are choked up about the death of a pop star, than, say, yesterday’s reports of the increasing death toll in Iraq. Fair enough. But to express confusion at why so many people are affected by this death in particular, and suggest that this sadness is merely a ridiculous response to a minor event, is disingenuous at best.

For people between the ages of, oh, 25-45, Michael Jackson is a vector of childhood nostalgia. He’s the last of an era of bigger-than-god pop stars, the sort of figures that people feel a personal identification with, no matter how much (in this case) that figure was troubled/disturbed/potentially criminal. There won’t be another figure like MJ, and his passing, I think, represents to people the passing of a certain era with which a distinct generational span feels a real, personal identification with. People aren’t necessarily mourning Michael Jackson–an abstract public figure who’s been the subject of primarily public scorn for the past 15-20 years–but the passing of something more personal and intangible. And yes, that may be somewhat maudlin and nostalgic, but it’s a valid emotional response to a news event this size. It may be, to some degree, misplaced, but it’s far from silly or ridiculous.