If Click Opera is a little slimmer and trimmer these days (what, a trip to London without a 20,000 word jeremiad about how horrible the city is? Nick, you're slipping!), it's because I'm writing a book, recording an album, traveling, and covering topics I might once have covered here in other venues, for money. Here's a round-up of three articles that appeared elsewhere online this week. Click each picture to read the whole article.
My Post-Materialist column in the Times talked this week about Naoko Ogigami's new film Megane (Glasses), Ku-nel magazine and the culinary end of LOHAS culture.
For the AIGA Voice I covered a "parasitical textiles workshop" organised here in Berlin by designer Rüdiger Schlömer, a very interesting man indeed.
The previous week's Moment slot covered the rise in interest in high density living, tying it into the recent mayoral contest in London and some Richard Florida research about links between high density and creativity.
Talking of high density residential structures, I'm excited to get a chance to go tonight to an art event held in the only Le Corbusier building we have in Berlin, the Berlin Unité d’Habitation. Susanne M. Winterling will project a film in the lobby at 8pm. It's part of the Berlin Biennial. Then tomorrow I'll catch the last day of the Ettore Sottsass show at the Schinkel Pavillon. Here's my tribute to "the pope of postmodernism" on the occasion of his death, aged 90, back in January.
As some of you may have heard, Fantagraphics signed an exclusive distribution deal with Diamond earlier this week. Folks like Tom Spurgeon and Brian Hibbs have covered most of the impact from the macro side of things so I thought I'd touch on things from a bit of a different angle. It's also a personal one, so bear with me.
Fantagraphics has been represented for the past number of years (exactly how many I'm not too sure about) by a fella named Tony Shenton. Tony is one of the few (the only?) independent sales reps that I know of in the Direct Market. In the booktrade, of course, reps are still fairly plentiful. Perhaps not as plentiful as they once were, but they're around all the same. Now, I have a soft spot for reps. For those who don't know, a rep basically visits with a store owner or manager and helps point out key titles in a particular publisher's catalogue. They often share marketing information and also just help point out works and authors that might otherwise get overlooked. Fundamentally, I think they make a store owner/manager better. Smarter. On top of it, they'll also give a heads-up for titles that get shortlisted for awards or are otherwise "hot" from a media point of view. Y'know, the stuff one needs to make their job better.
I should say here that it isn't essential for a publisher to have a rep. I dealt with a number of publishers that didn't have any at all. And I should note that there's a distinction between house reps (those work for a particular publisher exclusively) and independent reps (those who rep a number of publishers, typically smaller publishers, at the same time). The former will tend to be on salary and have a geographical territory they're responsible for. Here in Ottawa, it wasn't unusual for my house reps to deal with Eastern Ontario all the way to the maritime provinces. That's a vast amount of geography to cover - and they're often covered by a single rep in a single car. Not for the faint of heart.
Independent reps probably have it worse. Typically they're paid by commission, typically their territory is huge, and typically they're repping a massive amount of publishers, each with their own terms, release dates, and other quirks. In the booktrade, at least here in Canada, some of these indy reps have formed into various houses (groups like Hornblower Books and the Literary Press Group). And they'll have trade shows (Moggy will remember ye olde Chimo Hotel book fairs) where they, along with house reps, sell their wares to all the booksellers in a particular area to make things go that much quicker.
In comics, from what I've been able to gather, sales reps are few and far between. Marvel has folks like David Gabriel and DC has folks like Bob Wayne, but I don't think of these guys as reps. More marketing directors or whatnot, which is a different beast entirely. Some of the smaller publishers will have their owners act as "jack of all trades" (I mean, I get blown away by the energy that a guy like Chris Staros must have over at Top Shelf. What the hell doesn't that guy do?). And Image has Eric Stephenson as their "go to" guy. But none of these are a sales reps like I know sales reps.
Which brings me to Tony. Comics is a hard business and the Direct Market is a defacto monopoly. There is only one distributor of any note - Diamond (Cold Cut, now reborn as Haven Distribution, is there, I suppose, but Cold Cut's market share was always very, very small and Haven's most likely won't be any different). On top of it, Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Image are all exclusive to Diamond. And a number of smaller publishers (AIT/PlanetLar and Oni Press, for example) have also gone exclusive with Diamond over the past ten years. Tony, then, has repped many of those publishers who are betwixt and between. They're either not exclusive to Diamond, are too small or considered to be not appropriate for Diamond to distribute. Some of these are basically self-publishers. Others are large - Tony reps companies like Drawn & Quarterly, NBM and, until now, Fantagraphics. All are important from the point of view of bring diversity to comics that isn't (I think it's fair to say) represented by what Diamond distributes.
I will never begrudge Fantagraphics for making a move that they see as important to the viability of their company. It was only a few years back that they were deeply in trouble and issued their public cry for help. And one could probably make a good argument that they have an obligation to the authors and creators they publish to keep their work in print and as available as possible. While there's been some categorization that Fantagraphics has joined the dark side, I don't really feel that way myself. As much as I don't like Diamond's defacto monopoly, it most likely will ensure that Fanta's books are better stocked and retailers earn a better discount on them at Diamond then they would have previously (though perhaps not if a retailer dealt with Fantagraphics directly - something they now cannot do).
For Tony, though, it's not good at all. While I'm not sure exactly how much of a loss this is, make no mistake - it's a biggie. It hurts Tony's margins, it makes his total list that much smaller, and he loses the prestige that Fanta has as an arts publisher (not to mention their Eros line of arty porn, too). Worse, there's always the chance that if the move is successful for Fanta, publishers like Drawn & Quarterly might, as Brian Hibbs postulated, follow suit. With all of the commentary regarding this move, not much has been written regarding how it effects Tony Shenton (though to be fair, both Tom Spurgeon and Brian Hibbs have mentioned it). It's easy to forget the human beings involved in downsizing, mergers, and the like. People get laid off all the time. Small businesses go out of business all of the time. I wanted to take a moment and say that this move by Fanta does effect someone. Tony Shenton.
I'm hoping that Fantagraphics has, at the very least, treated him well through this entire process. I will also add that if you're a small or self-publisher, you may want to consider getting in touch with Tony about repping you. Especially if there are parts of North America that you aren't getting your book(s) into. His website is here (along with a listing of the publishers he reps), his myspace page is here, and you can always email him directly, too.
Tony is a good guy and this hurts.
Von
Edited to add: there's a good interview with Tony from December, 2003 over at Spurgeon's Comics Reporter site. It specifically focuses on the mini-comics side of things, but it's still worth a look.
Last night's performance at Richmond Library (photos courtesy of kineticfactory, who blogs his account of it here) was a rather magical and encouraging extension of the "site-specific storytelling" and "improv vaudeville" I've been doing recently -- a blending, in fact, of my rock shows with my art shows, and a promising probe into future possibilities (like the Hide and Seek Festival event I'll be doing during the last weekend in June, turning London's South Bank into Tokyo).
In the gathering darkness of Richmond Library, between the hours of eight and nine, for an audience of perhaps twenty souls, I appeared in the persona of Hieronymous Proctor, a Scottish "spirit medium of print media" or "procurator spiritual". Dressed in black and sometimes draped in a yellow blanket, I sought to reveal and release the spirits of dead people trapped inside the books, leading members of the audience over to specific volumes to choose and read a sentence at random, a message I would then parse for its hidden spiritual contents. "Peggy turned on her heel and walked away" was thus revealed to mean "Here on the endless plain of eternal anguish, we the gibbus dead are forever crossing the threshold into new realms of suffering and degradation. Help us!"
Using the stage door torch from the production of Madame Butterfly going on next door, I lit my own features from below, spun round with a scream, pointing the beam at a creepy fan window high up in the wall and claiming I'd seen a face there, or spotlighting shelves ("like the charred branches of lightning-blackened trees, on which crows and ravens perch") and explaining how the Dewey decimal system will be used to classify us in hell, or how book bindings in fact bind unwilling spirits into the books, trapping them there. I even performed a mini-exorcism on an accountancy textbook.
In between, there were songs -- Beowulf, Ichabod Crane (a new Joemus track, premiered live here, and compared by Kineticfactory to Talkshow Boy), Robin Hood, Scottish Lips and Lucretia Borgia. More pictures here. Oh, and I played the solos on a white Stylophone! HMV are selling them for fifteen quid.
I might do some blogging before I go to Italy. I don't know how much time I'll have for blogging; I'll have 20 hrs a week of internet, but chances are I'll use most of that on processing photos to post on flickr.
So is there anything in particular that y'all would like me to write about? Experiences overseas? Trying to figure out my daft brain? Relational ponderings? Experiences ________.
On the evening of May 15th I'll be making a special appearance at Richmond Library in London (map) as a kind of spirit medium tour guide, taking people on a ghost tour of the library aisles after lights out, trying to make contact, via the books, with the dead people who wrote them.
A truly spooky evening, then, lit by torchlight, punctuated by music and spattered, perhaps, by ectoplasm.
Momus Spirit Tour of Richmond Library Thursday 15th May, 8pm. Tickets £3, available from Richmond Library or via Online Bookings.
Since I will be in Florence for a month (May 26 to June 21 is when I'll actually be there), if any of y'all will be in the area, I'd love to hang out and take photos and whatnot. I'll probably also be spending a weekend in Venice, Rome, and possibly a day in Pisa. Anyways, if it seems possible and you're interested, I'd love to see what we can work out.
May is a month of sensuality, a month in which we schlepp around ideally hot, sunny streets in the year's first flip flops (scrubbed of last summer's dust), casually displaying our slightly neglected winter bodies. Later in the summer we'll have tans, and grow accustomed to the tans of others, and be much more casually embodied.
But for now there's still a glancing winter whiteness to our bodies -- they've been hidden from the ultraviolet rays for so long. There's a seasonal self-consciousness and a prurient curiosity to our interest in the newly-revealed flesh of others. Girls have bare legs, and sit on the ground cross-legged showing the tops of their panties over the hem of their trousers. Boys sport a visible mokori bulge. Breasts are suddenly massively -- or slightly -- present. Bums are wrapped in saris or hidden in a salwar kameez.
So this is my truth, show me yours. I am wearing a straw hat, chest-revealing shirt, wristbands to match my pink eyepatch, cheap sports pants and flip flops. I am remembering, and connected to, summers past. How are you dressed this season? How are you celebrating the relaxed, stripped-down sensuality of "the May" -- and the return to public scrutiny of your body, cocooned all winter in layers of fibre?
I can't stop thinking about him, and not in the loving, reminiscent way, but in the lonely, longing way that has it's moments when it steps over the line into detriments and depression.
I don't think I'd be so bad if he didn't lose his job. All of my usual financial stress that accompanies me has come back in one large wave. I'm not eating anything that's good for me, I'm pumping myself full of sugar. I finally turned the light on so I wouldn't be fading into the darkness... A bath seems nice, but I can't take one, and I don't feel like taking a shower.
Him and I started a puzzle, and I find myself staring at the pieces, trying to fit the shapes together even though they don't link. I know I'm trying to imagine his hands over the pieces and his voice set on the air.
Tom Spurgeon wrote a thought-provoking piece on the current pricing of comics (the periodical floppy kind). I generally tend to skim these things, mainly because of my book retail background. I started in books when it was still common to see a mass market pocket book priced at $5.99 Canadian. At this time (circa '94), the high price was around $7.99 CDN. In just a few years later, this was pushed to $9.99. Then crossed the "ten dollar barrier" to hit $10.99 CDN. Then $11.99 CDN.
That periodical comics have risen in price the same way in the same time period really doesn't surprise me. I don't like it, mind you, but it doesn't surprise me. So I started reading Spurgeon's article with that sense of "here we go again - more bitching." But that would be doing both him and the article a disservice. I don't agree with every point (see below), but there's some really thought-provoking stuff in there.
Bits like:
The fact that a Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book can break into the Diamond top ten doesn't seem to me as important as the certainty we will never return to an historical moment when a significant number of creator-owned books could sell 6500 or 9000 or 12000 copies, you could count on their presence in most major markets, and creators had a chance -- only a chance -- to build the beginnings of a career interacting with a readership multiple times a year over a several-year period, all without having to earn back an advance. I would argue it's more important to the general health of the art form and the industry that the next Jeff Smith be able to generate 30,000 in comic book sales than it is that Marvel moves 130,000 units with Stephen King's name on them. I'm not sure the existing Jeff Smith gets to that sales point without some struggle. And I don't think it's as easy as the on-line comic replacing the serial comic as the entry point; that's a seismic shift in culture and in the nature of the reading experience for me to believe it does exactly the same thing. In fact, I would argue that as a group the current on-line comics models come closer to encouraging a medium more like comic books in the 1940s than comics in the 1960s or 1980s.
and...
I'll take it all back if in 10 years the sons and daughters of the bookstore and the free comic on-line can boast of as many great cartoonists in their generation as the Direct Market babies are now able to point to in theirs, and if they have as many readers who know and care enough about their medium of choice to make an eloquent case on those artists' behalf.
*So what don't I agree with? Well, it's mainly how Spurgeon tries to tie inflation into the pricing mix. This might not be an issue if he also noted how the various costs have gone up, especially on the paper side for offset print runs. Prices have gone up in print media all across the board (comics, books, newspapers, etc...). If, for example, 50 lb. paper has also outpaced inflation, I'd like to have seen that referenced.
A good example of what I mean is Jeff Smith. While citing Smith in the article, he doesn't go into why Smith priced RASL #1 at $3.50 US. I don't mean to single Smith out, but RASL is a black and white book on crap paper. And since Smith told the ComicsPRO folks that #1 sold around 24,000 copies, some exploration on this front would seem to be worthwhile. Should Smith have priced it cheaper?
Not, I stress to add, that I have a problem with Smith pricing RASL at whatever he wants. Far from it. But it's hard to buy the inflation argument without a look at how costs have risen over the past 15 years.
I spotted these posters -- a campaign entitled "Make yourself an agent of BRAND AMERICA" -- on the mushroom-shaped billboard at the Maybachufer market near my house in Neukolln.
The posters purport to be cultural tips for Americans visiting other countries. I haven't seen them anywhere else, and I can't find any reference to them on the web. I guess they're an art project of some sort.
CELEBRATE THE IDEA 'AMERICA'. Americans have specialized in selling dreams, fears, and folklore of other people back to them. So bring back the best of the world and leave a little of the best of yourself wherever you go.
THINK BIG. ACT SMALL. BE HUMBLE. When Americans meet each other for the first time, our job and implied status is a key part of "who" we are, and how we introduce ourselves. This is less important elsewhere. Disguise your immediate business affiliations. While thinking big, act small. Be humble.
TRY THE LANGUAGE. Try to speak some of the language. It's easier than you think and ok to sound like a child. "Hallo" means "hello" and "Danke" "thank you".
I'd never heard of Daniil Kharms, the Leningrad microliterary absurdist and corpse-faced poseur -- he always dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe -- before reading Tony Wood's interesting article about him in the current London Review of Books.
He was a follower of the original generation of Soviet formalists, and was persecuted by the Stalinists for his refusal to knuckle down to the kitschy heroic styles with which they displaced and replaced this formalism. Kharms (who named himself after Sherlock Holmes, or perhaps "charms") made some headway as a children's author, but died in a prison hospital during World War II. What I mostly love about his short, silly and hilariously pointless stories is the sense of a childlike glee in breaking the rules, and an obvious relish in the crazy things a single sentence can do. Some of the techniques on display in his stories are things I do in The Book of Jokes. Although they can get Pythonesque in their silliness, they also give glimpses of Russian life in the 20th century.
Anyway, today I thought I'd just lay out some of the short (very short) stories I've found by Kharms in various places on the web.
The Redheaded Man (from The Blue Notebook) There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.
Falling Old Ladies Because of her excessive curiosity, an old lady fell out of the window and smashed into the ground. Another old lady looked out of the window, staring down at the one who was smashed, but out of her excessive curiosity she also fell out of the window and smashed into the ground. Then the third old lady fell out of the window, then the fourth did, then the fifth. When the sixth old lady fell out of the window, I got bored watching them and went to Maltsev market where, they say, someone gave a woven shawl to a blind person.
Anecdotes from the life of Pushkin (number 7) Pushkin had four sons and they were all idiots. One of them couldn't even sit on his chair and kept falling off. Pushkin himself was not very good at sitting on his chair either, to be honest. It used to be quite hilarious: they'd be sitting at the table, at one end Pushkin would keep falling off his chair, and at the other end, his son. One wouldn't know where to look.
Symphony no. 2 Anton Mikhailovich spat, said "yuck", spat again, said "yuck" again, spat again, said "yuck" again and left. To hell with him. Instead, let me tell you about Ilya Pavlovich. Ilya Pavlovich was born in 1893 in Constantinople. When he was still a boy, they moved to St. Petersburg, and there he graduated from the German School on Kirchnaya Street. Then he worked in some shop; then he did something else; and when the revolution began, he emigrated. Well, to hell with him. Instead, let me tell about Anna Ignatievna. But it is not so easy to tell about Anna Ignatievna. Firstly, I know almost nothing about her, and secondly, I have just fallen off my chair, and have forgotten what I was about to say. So let me instead tell you about myself. I am tall, fairly intelligent; I dress prudently and tastefully; I don't drink, I don't bet on horses, but I like ladies. And ladies don't mind me. They like when I go out with them. Serafima Izmaylovna has invited me home several times, and Zinaida Yakovlevna also said that she was always glad to see me. But I was involved in a funny incident with Marina Petrovna, which I would like to recount. A quite ordinary thing, but rather amusing. Because of me, Marina Petrovna lost all her hair -- grew bald as a baby's bottom. It happened like this. Once I went over to visit Marina Petrovna, and -- bang! -- she lost all her hair. And that was that.
An Encounter On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was on his way home. And that's just about all there is to it.
Also, "girly drinks" out on the patio. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon, not bad at all.
Here, have proof...yes, I cropped half of myself out cuz I was slouching all funny. Though it's nice also to be able to see the background; we might not have a backyard but our side balcony/deck is a pretty decent substitute. Bonus husky ears in the shot, too!
Happy weekend...hope everyone else is having a nice one, too.
Moggy
p.s. Yes, I painted the deck...no, I haven't gotten around to the railings. Please to be forgiving their flakiness.
I am using www.sproutbuilder.com to mash up a few social networks into a microsite. You can also use it to email me or call me right from the microsite on your PC. They are both in Beta now.
Then I added feeds for www.seesmic.com (video feed with video comments), www.adamgershenbaum.wordpress.com (blog), and www.twitter.com (microblog). Still have to add feeds and link to www.friendfeed.com (all acitvity and status updates for me and friends across multiple social networks), and www.stumbleupon.com (live bookmarks).
If you want to help me test it, play around with it for a bit. Click around, watch the videos, try the call button, hit the email and try to send me your contact info through the google form I built in. Then let me know anything you think would make it better. I still ahve to link up all the pages, and fix a glitch that doesn't show my icon on every page.
I want to eventually add a flikr stream, a chat room with video chat (www.seesmic.com could expand to this), live video and audio streaming capabilities (qik.com), a map from (www.brightkite.com0, and a calendar (icalendar, or google calendar).
Caledonia Dreaming, the recent BBC documentary about Postcard Records, is now online in its entirety. Right from the start, it's as infuriating as it is intriguing. "And now on BBC Scotland we celebrate the ups and downs of one of Scotland's most iconic record labels," says the continuity announcer, "Postcards". It's so iconic that the man has never heard of it, apparently. The woman doing the documentary voice-over doesn't sound much better. Luckily, though, my cousin Justin appears within a few seconds to tell us that the A&R men coming up to Scotland in the early 80s were cocaine-snorting, vodka-swilling wankers. Now there's someone who knows what's he's talking about!
The framing of Caledonia Dreaming is wonky. First there's that title, which of course refers to California Dreaming, and ignores one of the key points about Josef K, for me anyway: their Euro-centrism. Secondly, it's assumed that Postcard was all about the city of Glasgow; Edinburgh's music scene is hardly mentioned at all. Thirdly, all that happened before Postcard is summed up with a couple of stock shots of Rod Stewart (not a Scot) and the Bay City Rollers. No mention here of the Incredible String Band, Donovan, or other acts from the 60s and 70s who had already put Scotland on the pop map.
Even in the post-Postcard sections of the doc, there are curious omissions. There's lots about Wet Wet Wet and The Proclaimers, but no mention at all of the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream. There's also an odd emphasis on commercial success or failure; this is a documentary about Postcard, after all, which had zero success. Yet Altered Images (who weren't on Postcard) get more screentime than Josef K, who were. Aztec Camera get about two seconds in the whole programme, and the Go-Betweens aren't mentioned at all. Quite a lot is made of Franz Ferdinand's re-discovery of the early 80s sound, but the Fire Engines, who toured with FF and influenced their sound a lot more than Orange Juice, don't get a single reference. And John Peel, an important influence, wasn't spoken of at all.
There's far too much emphasis on the Blue-Eyed Caledonian Soul period of the mid-80s (Wet Wet Wet, Hue and Cry, Deacon Blue, Texas and, dare I say it, Del Amitri); music which, though it may have shifted mega-billions of units in its time, isn't musically innovative enough to inspire anyone in the future, and, as Paul Morley rightly says, represents the major music industry reasserting its control and reining in the very maverick talents whose creativity brought them on flights north in the first place. As my cousin Justin (a great interviewee and narrator) puts it: "They were absolute wankers, these guys. They didn't know anything about music. They didn't care about music. They only cared about getting paid a hundred grand a year."
I had an odd feeling, watching the film. For a start, I've met so many of the people interviewed, despite not having lived in Scotland since 1984. It was great to see the young, beautiful, camp Edwyn Collins smirking on a sofa and talking about how the major labels could come to Glasgow "and bring the coals to Newcastle and the fish from the fire". It was interesting to catch one solitary glimpse, in Part 2, of what Paul Haig looks like now (slightly mad-eyed behind dark glasses, and complaining that Alan Horne merely tolerated his band).
Although I did get glimpses of the scene that birthed my own music career, it was through the depressingly revisionist lens of mainstream TV which, as the Reid Brothers would put it, will "never understand, huh huh huh". They'll never understand what exquisite mysterious pleasure there was to be had from the Josef K album in 1981, what a secret rush of amphetamines and darkness it contained, how it turned away from America and towards Brussels and Prague, how it transformed Edinburgh into an Eastern European town, how it channelled Camus, how it fitted with the Citizens' Theatre's Genet season.
That'll all have to wait for my own autobiography (not that I'm promising one, mind), as will any account of my own part in Scotland's music scene, a shifty and peripheral and commercially-insignificant role, to be sure, but, in that sense, not much different from Postcard's. One thing I'm happy about is that I've never had a golden age, a hit, an anchor. I'm not pinned to any of the three decades this documentary covered, just as I'm not pinned, ultimately, to the geographical location of Scotland.
I'm making a record right now with a Scot, Joe Howe from Gay Against You. The track I finished minutes before watching the Postcard documentary takes a sketch Joe had made, a 180bpm 8-bit baroque fantasia, and marries it to the urgent existentialist spiky sparkery of Magazine's third album.
Is it a "Scottish" song? In some way it is; we're both Scots. It also spans the exact period Caledonia Dreaming covers; I started in the Postcard era, very much because of Postcard, and Joe wasn't even born when the label disappeared. The new song audibly contains both 1980 and 2008. But I think it's fair to say that this is a song nobody from television will ever hear or understand. And maybe that's no' such a bad thing, hen.
fenmere posted the following...and he's been very good to us and deserves good things. Go, take out an ad, do it! It's a worthy cause.
(And please repost this or forward it to anyone you think might be interested.)
Moggy
Keep the Indy Alive
Listen. Go out and tell every business you know that they should be advertising in the Whatcom Independent. If they already are, they need to increase their advertising.*
The Indy is two pages worth of advertising away from being solvent. It's that simple. If we went solidly solvent in the next three weeks, a merger would either not be necessary or it would be more possible.
Why should every business in Whatcom and the surrounding counties consider advertising in the Indy?
Three simple facts
1. Their ads would get in front of 20,000+ loyal readers from all around the county. And it would stay in front of most of those readers for the whole week (T.V. Guide, Events, Who's Playin'? and the other ads are all important directories for what's going on locally).
2. The Indy is the only county wide paper with the high journalistic standards it maintains. The other papers have all been documented as having pandered to their sources of income and beneficiaries. The Indy does not. It has no sugar daddies, no public shareholders, and no membership in any exclusive clubs or political groups. If the Indy goes, you lose that incredible news service. Period. There is no one else that can offer it.
3. The Indy's rates are not only fair, they are less expensive than any of the competitions. Especially the Bellingham Herald's, which holds the lion's share of the market. For every dollar a company places in the Herald, they could take a quarter and buy a larger ad in the Indy with better exposure and placement and a longer shelf life.
NOT ADVERTISING IN THE INDY IS A BAD BUSINESS DECISION.
Not advertising in the Indy is a disservice to the county, especially if you believe in your own business.
And to further sweeten the pot on new ad sales. The next three issues of the Indy are probably going to be hotter than ever. Particularly the last one.
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sad
Von and Tony
Last night's performance at Richmond Library (photos courtesy of 
Using the stage door torch from the production of Madame Butterfly going on next door, I lit my own features from below, spun round with a scream, pointing the beam at a creepy fan window high up in the wall and claiming I'd seen a face there, or spotlighting shelves ("like the charred branches of lightning-blackened trees, on which crows and ravens perch") and explaining how the Dewey decimal system will be used to classify us in hell, or how book bindings in fact bind unwilling spirits into the books, trapping them there. I even performed a mini-exorcism on an accountancy textbook.
sleepy
May is a month of sensuality, a month in which we schlepp around ideally hot, sunny streets in the year's first flip flops (scrubbed of last summer's dust), casually displaying our slightly neglected winter bodies. Later in the summer we'll have tans, and grow accustomed to the tans of others, and be much more casually embodied.
lonely
tired
calm