Posts Tagged "Off the Record"

Muted (R)evolution

Posted by The Author on 10 Sep, 2011 in He Writes, Stuff That Happens | Comments Off

A small piece pondering the impact of digital on street press and the music industry generally has been published in the September issue of Meanjin (volume 70, number 3).

You have to knock. If you’re supposed to be there, someone will let you in. The exterior broadcasts little; only a small sign in the window marks the name of the magazine.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Come on in.’

Inside, the walls groan with the weight of history hanging from them. Posters old and new jostle for the limited space available: Powderfinger bidding farewell to the world, the Smashing Pumpkins touring their new album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. To the left, a reception desk curves away from me around the corner of the room, overlooking the entire area. No one sits behind it. To the right, stacks of papers line the wall by the front door without any discernible order to them: the reformed Saints here, the Residents there. There’s at least fifteen years of history lying at my feet, almost discarded on the floor.

It’s available in all good bookshops or you can buy a copy online over hereabouts. Go buy it. Go on.

Off the Record Now Available in Digital

Posted by The Author on 13 Feb, 2011 in Digital Publishing, Featured Articles, He Edits, Stuff That Happens | Comments Off

After much technical jiggery-pokery, Off The Record is now available in digital form, including the Kindle store for all you kindlers out there. The book is also coming soon to Apple iBookstore and Google eBooks.

In time it will also be available from all major vendors, including Baker & Taylor, B&N, Borders, Bowker, Ebooks.com, Ebrary, Follett Digital Resources, Kobo, Lightning Source (Ingram), Netlibrary, Overdrive, Sony, and Tecknoquest.

The ebook for Off the Record will be available to customers worldwide, so if you have had any trouble finding yourself a print copy (you obviously haven’t tried here), now is your chance to pick yourself up copy in fully recyclable pixels.

Book, launch, media, new, digital

Posted by The Author on 4 Nov, 2010 in He Edits, He Writes, Stuff That Happens | 2 comments

It’s been a busy few weeks and there is little sign of things slowing down any time soon, so allow me to wallow in that desultory refuge of the most vile corporate hacks: the dot point.

• Off the Record: 25 Years of Music Street Press is available now in all good bookstores. Check the web site for details on where to get it online or walk into your favourite independent bookshop and demand it on the shelves in great quantity.
• We are holding an official book launch with John Wilsteed of the Go-Betweens as the official book launch launcher. It’s at Avid Reader in West End on Wednesday 10 November at 6:00pm. It’s free to attend, but you’ll need to book with Avid Reader.
• We had a great discussion with Richard Fidler on ABC Brisbane last week. You can listen to it here.
• A new novel exists in a rough-as-bags 20,000 word draft. I can guarantee it will include a Hofner bass, a car named Cedric, and a C90 mix tape.
• I’m about to get even more insufferable on the topic of digital publishing because I have just taken up a new post as the manager of if:book Australia.

Authditor

Posted by The Author on 23 Jul, 2010 in He Edits, Stuff That Happens | Comments Off

Author. Editor. I tried coming up with a portmanteau for what I do, but the best I could manage was ‘authditor’ (given that ‘auditor’ was already taken). Somehow this unholy Vulcan-mind-meld of roles has not so far completely done my head in. Then again, maybe I’m not the best judge of these things.

Being both an author and an editor means you sympathise with parties on each side of the brilliant-writing divide. You know how hard it is to crank out a draft, but you also know the groaning horror of facing trite, clichéd, poorly spelled, and even more poorly punctuated slop from overly sensitive and precious wordsmiths. Being an authditor is like being a swinging voter, except you’re not necessarily also a bogan.

So in late October, my collaboration with Sean Sennett on an anthology of Australian music street press will be marching inexorably through the landscape in what I hope will be plague proportions. Like any good anthology, it will be big and fat and absolutely chock-a-block with references to Iggy’s Fun House record. It even has the word ‘boner’ a few times for good measure.

To create the book, Sean and I trawled (really there’s no other word for it) through more than 1,300 issues of Time Off. A conservative average of three interviews per issue still comes up with around 4,000 stories to consider. We had to reduce that to under a hundred. It was a wild ride. Digital files exist only for articles published since around 1997. Everything before that had to be eyeballed. Neck pain, eyestrain and inky fingers were standard fare. It was fun, though. Prominent advertisements for massage parlours jostled with exhortations about how AM Stereo was going to transform Australia’s radio landscape. I took photos. When you’re locked in the world of your subject, strange things happen. I almost wet my pants when I saw a 1984 interview with Johnny Marr. Then I almost threw the computer through the window when I Googled the quotes and realised the story was rehashed from a contemporary article in The Face.

To help us deal with the volume, we identified early on a core list of artists we thought should get a jersey. That list ran to about two-hundred. Each of those artists might have featured anywhere from a single interview to ten or more. We had to decide not just on artist, but the era (was that period interesting for the artist?) and author (did the piece take an interesting angle?).

We were working with previously published pieces, but pieces composed in a very different environment to ours. A few people pulling together pages and pages of articles, information and ads every single week. As an editor, when I came across a rough patch of prose, I mostly sided with the authors. Spelling howlers? Blame the lack of resources or the deadline. Change the text, shrug, and move on to the next sentence. As an editor, it was easy to take a withering approach. As an authditor, the feelings were mixed. Still, the results are exciting.

There was a point to this article when I started. Now I’m just in need of a good editor. Know any?

Book Blog

Posted by The Author on 17 Jul, 2010 in Stuff That Happens | Comments Off

We have set up a specific blog for Off the Record which will kick off this coming Wednesday at 25yearsofstreetpress.com. For your convenience, here’s the first post:

Off the Record has been compiled from articles originally published in Australian street press from 1986 to 2010. It contains interviews with no less than 95 artists: Australian and international, some at the top of their game, others somewhere else entirely. Many of the articles were published only once on the week of issue and have otherwise remained under dust until now.

So who made the final cut? Who of the thousands of artists interviewed over the years were interesting enough to make it back into print. It’s already our most frequently asked question, although usually in the form of:

‘So is [insert favourite band] in it? Huh?’

We could just post a list of the artists, but that would be boring. Instead we’ll reveal each artist individually and with visual aids.

Starting Wednesday 21st July, a video clip will appear on the blog featuring the first artist. Every day after that we will post another video until the book’s release.

Keep your eyes on 25yearsofstreetpress.com for updates all the way to October.