Thursday, 24 January 2002

More On Stories That Should’a. So anyway, stories on photographers for Black+White.       I have to say that jumping on that airplane and going to Europe for a few years was one of the best things I ever did, despite the extremes of high and low. After hanging out with a number of people who manage to sustain careers thinking and writing about the same things as I do, it became obvious you could have a life being some kind of public intellectual.       I wanted to do the same kind of thing back in Australia, which is, really, what I had intended when I was out shopping around to publishers the ideas that eventually fused into Black+White. The intention was a publication that evolved, tried out new ways of communicating with the print medium, continued to be a badge of belonging for the inner urban creative tribes and made some money into the bargain.       What got in the way was the innate conservatism of local magazine publishers. If this was such a good idea, somebody overseas would already have done it, and then we would have bought the licence to do it here.       Hmm. Nevertheless, even within the narrow focus that Black+White has had for some time, it should be possible to write stories that go beyond that focus and are closer to my original intention. I managed to do that on and off for a while when they published what I call comment and quote articles on artists instead of Q&A pieces. Jock Sturges was a prime candidate for a long comment and quote piece, on a par with Albert Watson.       I don’t think Black+White’s people are going to allow such stories on photographers any more, so I have been on the lookout for other subjects, hence New Order and 24 Hour Party People. There are some great stories underneath all that passion and history, some personal connections, and some salient points I can make.       And if Black+White doesn’t want to give me enough pages to do the tale justice, then I can republish it in its real length here, then try designing the pages as I think they should be seen. New Order: Get Ready is their latest CD and Crystal was the first single released off it. Images by Jürgen Teller, art direction by Peter Saville. 1:58:09 PM    Add a comment.

My God, It’s Alive! I finally got upstreaming to happen again!!!       I didn’t get any help from UserLand or any replies from my posts to the Radio Discussion group. What I did was essentially voodoo—aimlessly fiddle about with the various files within the Radio UserLand folder. It seems to have paid off, so far. One upstream event, although the templates that I mucked around with have not upstreamed yet so I have lost some of the CSS I had added.       I’ll see how Radio goes through the rest of the week, then make a decision about buying it on the weekend.       Now back to our regular programming. 12:03:32 PM    Add a comment.

Stories That Should Have Been. I have filed the Jock Sturges interview, and I am pretty sure the editor is going to ask for a change or two. No surprise.       The problem is in a story format that has become set in stone, when that was never the intention for these kinds of stories nor for the magazine itself. The story length is 1000 words. Such stories accompany collections of images by an individual artist, one image per page, averaging 8 to 12 pages.       The rationale for the story text is that it allows the artist to speak about their work in pretty much their own words, with a short intro from the interviewer. Of course, a fair amount of editing does go on and what purports to be a straight Q&A rarely ever is.       Occasionally I have had problems getting enough words out of a photographer to fill that 1000-word space, even with a longer intro, but usually there is no problem. Sometime you come across someone so articulate, so thoughtful and so interesting you could do 3500 words on them. I have submitted stories of that length on people like Albert Watson, to see them cut down radically in size, and I could easily have written 3500 words on Jock Sturges.       Artists like this are a precious gem, and it’s a shame to waste the opportunity. That’s why I began publishing the full versions of my articles on the web so long ago. Covers of various issues of Black+White magazine. Despite the name, it publishes in full four-colour. 11:11:39 AM    Add a comment.

Further To The Perils of Publishing. It’s now Thursday 24th and the last entries that have successfully upstreamed to this weblog are still those from Monday 21st. I’ve made 3 posts since Monday that have not succeeded in upstreaming, and I have shelved a number of others as they have gone off the boil. What’s going wrong?       I’ve started a new topic in the Support Center Discussion Group asking if these time lags are normal. Here is hoping for some assistance, or some answers. Or maybe I am just getting something badly wrong?       Radio was working reasonably well until late last week. So much promise and now this. Or is this just the way it goes with UserLand products?       I’m reading about other users’ disgruntlement about basic features not working right, while Dave is going on about more upcoming groovy bells and whistles. Let’s get core functions working first, Dave. 12:44:04 AM    Add a comment.