Articles by Randy

1. Laughed at 2. Ignored 3. Fought 4. Accepted

We appear to be on Step 3 of the Gandhi Disruption Scale in the public media world (most of the media has at least shaded toward Step 4).

***

One of the necessary tasks of management is to handle some smelly work at times while maintaining a calm facade. Thus, I actually had a twinge of sympathy for Chris Turpin when he had to codify this really dumb new NPR policy (in the ethics handbook, no less). I seriously doubt he buys the underlying premise for one second and I’d be really disappointed to find out I was wrong:

If you read this story, you’ll grasp the public radio politics that apparently made this move necessary. In reality, the policy has little impact other than to placate people who need constant placating, but it sends an ugly message to the disruptors. It tells them: Know your place.

I’ve worked for a series of employers whose base products were being disrupted — NPR, USA Today, CNN, even AOL when the dialup wheels started coming off — and there always was an attempt at some point to punish the future of the franchise under the guise of protecting the base. It’s the punishment phase, in fact, that’s a sign that the real purge is nigh — when acceptance sets in and the legacy media company faces reality.

So from that standpoint, I guess it’s a good sign that NPR is involved in this silliness. It’s a step in an evolution. Of course, I don’t work there any more, so I can troll NPR on Twitter:


the show grows smaller

the show (formerly The Show) has been rolling along for about a month now, working its way through a final season that lots of people hope will be more dramatic and musically interesting than what’s been coming out of this factory for the last couple of years. But all I’ve noticed so far is: Everything keeps getting smaller.

Remember when the hopefuls filled football stadiums for tryouts? You didn’t see that this year, and they weren’t generally filling basketball arenas, either. The individual programs are way, way shorter than they used to be, and there are far fewer of them. And I’ve played in bars bigger than the venue being used for the current round, before we finally get to the “Idol stage,” whatever that means this year.

I’m not sure if the plan is to shrink this franchise until it disappears, perhaps with a slight popping sound, but that appears to be a strategy. Even the performers seem smaller: With a couple of exceptions, this year’s crew features a lot of breathy singers who appear to feel emotions very deeply. Even the guy who’s doing his best (blonde) Billie Joe Armstrong impersonation seems to have a taste for turning everything from Billy Idol to Olivia Newton John into a Quiet Storm groove.

The pageant kid/show kid wing of the show seems particularly well-represented this year, which is not a good thing by my standards, but who are we kidding here? This show is not for me. It has survived in part for its ability to reach out to a younger audience after getting dangerously close to attracting a Depends demographic at times. I’m getting dangerously close to Depends age myself, so this development makes me grumpy at times. Mostly I think, “I didn’t realize modern music sucked quite so much.”

Thus, the show has become more lowercase than at any time in its history, which is why it’s going away. In fact, let me shrink it some more by renaming it: theshow. That’s about what it deserves now. And if it keeps getting smaller, it’s going to make that Really Big Finale seem really, really awkward.

Jost Van Dyke in winter

“Margaritaville” is a bleak treatise on pain and suffering. Think about it: The subject of the song has has been abandoned by his lover and is heavily self-medicating with alcohol. He has only a declining supply of sponge cake to eat. His clothes are falling apart and his foot has been slashed open by a piece of discarded metal. A tattoo of a Mexican woman has been etched into him and he does not know how it got there. This is clearly a person in need of an intervention and a tetanus shot.

That hasn’t stopped the song (which is now stuck in your head, for which you hate me) from blooming into a gigantic financial enterprise built around a sanitized island-in-the-sun experience. In Capitalist Margaritaville, all the natives are friendly and all the drinks are cold and everyone wears floral prints and overconsumption of rum has no consequences other than temporary awesomeness. And there are cheeseburgers. So many cheeseburgers.

There are people who go to Jost Van Dyke looking for just that experience, and they quickly get irritated when they discover that truly bumming around on a barefoot island means that people will not wait on you hand and foot. They’re the kind of visitors who think it’s hilarious to talk in a fake Jamaican accent and act like an entitled horse’s ass around the locals. They get the dead-eye stare in return, but, like the song says, they haven’t a clue. They generally can’t take the vibe for very long and leave and tell everyone back home about how dirty everything is, and by ‘dirty’ they mean ‘not Americanized enough for me.’

But for some of us, it’s amazing that this place still exists and is relatively accessible. Jost is a British Virgin Island that’s just a few miles from Tortola, has only a few hundred permanent residents, might have a couple of dozen places at a maximum to rent on the whole island to stay, and mostly scratches a living by having fantastic beaches and harbors and bars. I fell in love with it after visiting it on a day trip from nearby St. Thomas in 2012. But could I take it for a whole week?

Oh, hell yes:

porch

 

So thank you, Jost Van Dyke, for treating what ails me. I thought I got it before, but I really get it now. And I’ll leave you with the artwork my wife made while on Jost and had hung at Ivan’s Stress Free Bar, where it now has an honorary position below an old photo of Ivan and a woman he said he couldn’t identify:

randk

The new, hot little number

I don’t like adorable cars. Adorable cars break, are underpowered, emphasize style over substance, don’t last and ultimately may not be worth much at trade-in time. And thus it was with mini-Coopers, which have attracted a part of me since the new generation was introduced in the early 2000s.

But I revisited them every few years, as I cycled through a Chrysler PT Cruiser and a non-very memorable Nissan Murano and a genuinely cool Volvo C30. I looked at a Mini in the last two purchasing cycles, but the cars were either too small or too big or too unpractical. They just didn’t hit that sweet spot, even though I admired their styling.

Not this time. Last year, Mini came out with a four-door hardtop — better-looking than the Clubman, smaller than the SUV-in-disguise Countryman, bigger than the base model, hot as hell in the ‘S’ model (and honestly, not bad on power even without it). So when the Volvo started doing the things that cars do when they might start costing you a whole lot of money, I decided it was time for a new vehicle.

Behold the result:

mini

This Mini is a “program car” — it was used as a loaner for a few months and then put back in stock. It has only a little more than 4K miles on it but is about $5K off the price of a new unit, even though it’s less than six months old. It’s the hot little ‘S’ model, and even though it isn’t tricked out with some of the cool tech that’s now available on Coopers, it’ll do the job that I need it to do. And it’s the cheapest car I’ve purchased since, oh, the 1990s.

It also gets 40% better city gas mileage than the Volvo (which was a hot car) and is a rocket. People talk about the “go-kart handling” of Minis, and although that really isn’t true any more, the ride is wonderfully firm without feeling uncomforable or teeth-rattling. And it roars off the line, and you can go 80 in it and think you’re going 50 in no time. And it is shockingly quiet for a small hatch.

The reality is that, over time, these Coopers have had more and more BMW technology slipped into them. They’re still assembled in England, but the engine and everything important except the basic design is very much Bavarian. It is precise and hot and very, very fun. And it has the utility I need as a musician, with the hatchback and configurable rear seats/hatch. Hey, I think I love it.

Auld acquaintance

Kristi-Sue is asleep. We’ve both had that experience on New Year’s Eve, where one of us is awake and the other is in bed because she/he is working the next day, and this time it’s her turn. It gives me a chance to reflect on 2015 before it goes away.

This year didn’t start particularly well. We both still were hurting from the loss of Dexter, the insane Jack Russell who was our friend for 15 years until he passed a couple of weeks before Christmas. But we went to Cayamo again a few weeks later and that festival (which we are going to miss in 2016) was tremendously good for what ailed us (OK, that’s my opinion, but it sure seemed like my wife had fun). And as a musician, I probably played more gigs in 2015 than any year in my life. And I felt renewed as a professional, as I watched Industry Dive grow into a real player in its field. That stands in stark contrast to the 15 years I spent prior to joining this no-longer-a-startup, where I worked for big media outlets that all were collapsing and struggling with the pace of change and often full of negativity.

I had so much fun with Teresita, too. We wandered off to the redwoods for the first time together and spent Thanksgiving with my family for the first time since my father passed. And by year’s end, she had finally, finally, finally gotten off the insane 4 a.m.-to-noon schedule that so often isolated us from each other. Seventeen years of that was about 16 years too many, as far as I was concerned.

Thus, we walk into 2016 with more optimism and joy than we’ve had in a while. We’re reaching the Magical Ages where you never know when something will go terribly right/wrong, but I’ll know we’ll face these adventures together, just as we always have. I hope you have someone like that in your life. And to you, I also say: Happy New Year and best wishes for 2016.