July shows

It's been a very very good summer for concert-going this year. Here's some footage someone shot at the Wilco show earlier this month in Northampton...

They say at good ole Camp Howe...

A lot of things have been conspiring lately to make me think about summer camp, including this week’s package in Slate about American summer camp. I went to Camp Howe in Goshen, Mass., right off Route 9, which I drive past everytime I visit my parents or see a concert. I remember when I was eight and was dropped off there at what felt like the very end of the earth.

It was a 4-H camp, which meant I had a chance to learn how to shear sheep and the proper way to harness a donkey. In the course of seven weeks, I met probably hundreds of kids, from all sorts of backgrounds and towns, and I knew very little about any of that beyond the quality of their personality. For example, I had a very good Puerto Rican friend for many of the weeks I was there. I didn’t realize that Ananda was actually Indian until I took an Indian studies class in college.

It is incredible what I learned in those few weeks. It sounds trite but the volume of memories from that place shocks me. From memory I could draw a map of the compound, whose cabin was where, how to get down to the lake, why you should use that bathroom rather than this one, etc. I remember campers like James, who always wore this yellow polo shirt, and this other kid named Chris who had a tendency to get bloody noses. We had very cool counselors. Ours wore this Pony t-shirt and kept a tin of Skoal tucked in the calf of his white tube socks (this was 1984, so this was pretty cool). He taught us how to slow dance with a girl by demonstrating on the post of the cabin one night after lights-out when all we had were our flashlights. We had another fellow named Hank, who had a fearful reputation as a bit of a jerk, and who looked like he walked out of a Billy Idol video. But I remember during one of our afternoon quiet periods he came to make rounds. I was reading a novelization of the second Indiana Jones movie, and he came over to my bunk, looked at the book, and said with touching seriousness, “tell me how it ends.”

I remember my first baffling experience of arbitrary human nastiness, when I was walking down the winding forest path to the lake with a kid I vaguely knew named Ben who out of the blue began hurling insults at me. By the time we got to the beach we were near to blows, and the counselors broke us up and demanded to know what was going on. Ben explained that I had called him “Ben-Gay.” I had done no such thing, and hadn’t heard of anyone else doing such a thing -- but I made sure that everyone in the camp called him that by the end of the week.

I have memories from other camps as well, like Boy Scout camp in 1985 when I came thisclose to being named “Camp Clown” for my outgoing and funny personality (it was a toss-up between me and another kid, so there was no official clown that year. We each got booby-prizes: mine was “Camp Singer” because I knew a bunch of stupid campfire songs I’d learned the previous summer at Camp Howe). No one who had known me before or since can believe that, but I swear it is true.

What it's worth

As a working journalist I check Romenesko about four times a day, and eagerly follow every letters-section dust-up, usually yelping my thoughts at one side or another. The latest interesting one is about journalist pay and what it is doing to the profession. This recent thread (it can be found here), reiterates a lot of the questions everyone finishing up their CSJ applications should be asking themselves.

Some of the postings I’ve noted include young journalists complaining that it is impossible to earn a living in this job, former journalists who loved it but left it for public relations, older journalists saying it has always been this way and you should do it for love and the Holy Mission of Reportage, and older journalists telling these worthless pups to zip it already because they had to walk uphill both ways to their first job etc. I’ve been in one of those moments where I’ve been thinking about these things lately, and not just because I just cut my monthly Big Check to pay for my fancy education (more on that in another post!). Just the other day I spent a few hours cruising around the website for The Oshkosh Northwestern because they had posted a job that I think I would like. It’s a fantasy of course: I’ve no ties to the broad middle of the country, and who knows what my wife would do out there, but that’s what journalism is all about nowadays. While it might not register the first time you hear it, but whenever I have doubts about journalism and whether it is worth it I turn back to Hunter S. Thompson. In December 1958 he was moved to write to Editor & Publisher in response to a column about – wait for it – how young journalists weren’t coming to the profession because of low pay.

“The reason for journalism’s shortage of young talent is just as obvious as the fact that most of the newspapers in the country today are overcrowded rest homes for inept hacks,” he subtly notes. “Burial grounds do not attract talent.”

And later…

“Journalism, for my money, has nearly tumbled head over heels in its hurry to toss away its integrity and compromise with the public taste, the mass intellect, and the self-sighted demands of profit-hungry advertisers. Now how in the hell do you expect to keep on attracting top talent? Sacrificing good men to journalism is like sending William Faulkner to work for Time magazine.”

That’s 1958 folks!

“A free press is not indispensable unless it makes itself indispensable,” he concludes. “So how about cleaning up your house and then bellowing about now one wanting to come in?”

A Year

Hard to believe that it was only one year ago today in Moscow when I, Olga, and her parents piled into a black Volga sedan for the trip from her parents’ apartment in Shchukinskaya to the Central Palace of Wedding Registrations, It was a bright, midsummer day, clearly going to be hot. I remember when our driver skillfully used some side roads to avoid traffic -- dear Ol praised him on his skill finding his way to the ‘Palace,’ assuming he must’ve ferried a lot of people there. Instead he suspiciously shot back “what’s that supposed to mean?” We soon found out he’d already been married three times.

We’d gone through a lot to get to that trip across Moscow. It started on a hillside here in Williamstown in April, when our dog Gryeka discreetely ran off for a little while so Ol and I could have a talk. It included a trip to Boston for me, where I got to see the official Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and get a stack of documents from the Northampton City Hall, Mass. Department of Public Health, and the Berkshire Eagle officially sealed. That was nothing compared to the bureaucracy Ol had to weave through in Moscow, and what we had to manouver together once I finally arrived. After leaping through the official paperwork, we still had only ten days to find a restaurant (we gave up and had it at home) and find shoes for Ol.

I love my wedding memories. I love handing off my passport and visa to a Russian civil servant, while Robbie Williams’ “Rock DJ” absurdly played on the sound system. The way we had to defend not laminating our wedding certificate, and have our music picks for the ceremony narrowed down to what the assembled musicians could hack through that morning. And the waiting around in puffy leather chairs until our turn was called and our party could march on in. How given my very limited Russian skills I understood only some, but was amazed and amused by the fact that this civil hall had a full-blown and brightly sun-lit clerestory. And signing the documents, only knowing where to sign by the skillfully deployed long twisted plastic pointing stick. And Ol planting this ring on me that hasn’t been moved since.

We all had a toast of Novy Svet champagne in the lobby, and then walked off into the day. We took a regular old Lada to get back to the apartment, and set about turning the study into a big dining room while father-in-law prepared the feast of satsivi and other tasty things. And of course leaving before all the guests had left so that we could catch a car to get to the railroad station for the overnight train ride to St. Petersburg for our little honeymoon.

So one great year has passed, and an even better one lies ahead.

This is not a test post...

Erm, actually it is.