I’ve been a lifelong magazine addict. I blame my mother. Growing up in the hinterlands of southern Ohio, back in the day when our house was the last one one on the street in a sleepy suburb north of Cincinnati, my intellectually starved mother subscribed to a slew of magazines: Esquire and New York in their heyday, the New York Review of Books, Harpers, Horizon and others. I went into newspaper work because Esquire, in its pre-lad mag days, didn’t present an easy entry path to an unpublished, Tom Wolfian-wannabe essayist from Forest Park, the Planned Community.

These many decades later, the whole newspaper/magazine industry is perched on a fault line called the Web. Short of the New York Times, I don’t think any newspaper alive today can be sure to be alive five years from now in its current incarnation. Magazines, too. What will replace them since the need to have someone filtering the massive info-onslaught will never go away? Well, everyone is a-buzz about the iPad’s launch this next Saturday. That’s a start although only a start. We need some kind of income-generation beyond banner ads, perhaps a micro-payment system that nicks you for a fraction of a cent for every page you visit, so that at the end of the day, you’re billed a quarter for your visit to the Times or Charleston Gazette or the Poughkeepsie Parakeet. Information may want to be free, but someone needs to get paid to write it up and shape it into something sensible and worthwhile.

Meanwhile, what might the next newspaper or magazine actually look like short of the gloppy, confusing mess that most newspaper Web sites resemble? Time Inc., proposes the following look for Sports Illustrated in the ‘coming soon‘ video below of a magazine tablet. I want one of these for my magazines and my newspaper.

Jack Shaffer over at Slate isn’t so sure iTablets and their ilk are any magic bullet, though. (more…)

You think you’ve got problems? I think I’ve got problems? Boy, have we got problems in our life. But what if you only had one leg? Now, that’s a problem. That would get you down, wouldn’t it? Or …  you could dance the salsa.

Oh, this is one of the most delightful and visually scrumptious music videos I have seen in a long, long time, by the band Hold Your Horses for their hit song “70 Million.” Artist friends, take note – this one was made for you. From the YouTube description of it: “An entertaining and cheeky music video for 70 Million, hit song by Franco-American band, Hold Your Horses!, offers a wink at art history as band members playfully reconstruct famous paintings in an off the wall lyrical interpretation all their own.”

New York Times columnist Frank Rich, as he did so often in the Iraq War debacle and last year’s Obama/McCain square-off, cuts to the quick and right to the heart of the matter in surveying the pathetic and shameful behavior in the aftermath of  health care reform’s passage:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

And this is an essential point for those Republicans who care about the legacy of their party and those progressives who long for the return of sane Lowell Weicker-style Republicans to reclaim the steering wheel of the GOP:

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

The whole thing is worth a read.

I am on my yearly Spring walkabout for the next week. Two nights ago, I crashed in a colonial mansion in the West Virginia hinterlands beneath the broad cut of the Milky Way. Now, I’m townhousing in Washington, D.C., for several days. Then, it’s on to a night at the Bhavana Society monastery back out in the West Virginia outback. Finally, the sojourn comes to a finish on the closing day of All Together Arts Week in Princeton, W.Va, and a concluding concert on Sat., April 3 at The Room Upstairs, where my new musical-theatrical troupe, Third Eye Cabaret, makes its world debut. (Did you hear that, World?) You should come, if you can. The band has a chick drummer. I’ve always wanted a chick drummer.

The Walkabout Mission (should I choose to accept it, and I have) is to wander to interesting places and crash with dear and interesting friends, while having no set agenda, drinking lots of good coffee, eating many convivial meals and having no deadlines nipping at my heels like a pack of cranky schnausers. So far, so good. The Walkabout Committee would like to thank Lauren Ruth for her essential support of Walkabouting, part of a regimen of psycho-spiritual regeneration and upkeep recommended by traditional cultures throughout the ages.

One of the delights of Walkabout 2010 (now in its 4th year) is that the lay board of the Bhavana Society is welcoming back today the Bhavana Society abbot Bhante Gunaratana, who has been wandering the world on sabbatical for the past year. It is a well and good blessing to have this extraordinary man back in the fold of the hills in this part of the world. I recommend his latest book, “Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English.”

Because my Macintosh is a-swim with un-edited video from a host of projects, semi-projects, brainstorms and yet another random video shot (‘Stop me before I shoot again…‘), I deliberately left my Canon G-11 at home this trip. Also, to re-focus my Muses’ energies back onto wordsmithing. For the past five years I’ve been so intensely focused on multimedia work at office and home, that me and words needs to get re-acquainted. (Which is part of the impetus behind the “fictional memoir” underway elsewhere in this blog.)

In any case, below are some photos taken along the way of a past walkabout. West Virginia can be such a delightfully eccentric place. While driving north up from a visit to the Green Bank Observatory, I rounded a corner and came upon this house. Those are bowling balls posted on rebar. Visionary recycling in action.