The president of Zambia, Levy Mwanawasa, has died, almost two months after a minor stroke that led to complications. Death, of course, being a particularly serious complication.
Now, I don’t pretend to have more than a cursory knowledge of Zambian politics. (I spent six weeks reporting there in 2003, a time when I would have rated my knowledge of Zambian politics ever so slightly higher than “cursory.” What’s next highest, “perfunctory”?) But Mwanawasa struck me as one of the good guys in southern African politics. He seemed to make a serious effort to fight corruption within his government. The Zambian economy certainly improved during his time in office, although that’s much more the result of Chinese demand for copper than anything he did. And Mwanawasa was the first and for a long time only African leader who was willing to openly criticize Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
(Mugabe, of course, could not pass up the opportunity Mwanawasa’s stroke provided to be a dick.)
Here’s a blog post I wrote in 2003 about my trying to get an interview with Mwanawasa.
Ah, the days of desktop publishing on the Mac SE, when New York (top right) was the classiest font available!
Just stumbled upon this two-year-old blog post about Cosloy Youth, which was apparently a late-1980s Houston-based zine cum homage to Gerard Cosloy. (Not to mention a homage to a certain guitar band.) Cosloy would later become known as half of the team that runs NYC indie label Matador Records, but back then he was best known as the producer of his own zine Conflict.
I was born slightly too late and significantly too uncool to really get into zines at their peak; by the time I exited small-town orbit and headed to college in 1993, the scene were already starting to trail off. But I remember one of my first acts of potential college coolness was writing off for a Matador catalog — which back then meant sending a physical letter into the city and getting in return a smudgy xerox with every Matador release listed in dot-matrix glory — and mail-ordering a couple back issues of Conflict in the bargain. (I’d gotten the Matador address from the back of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Extra Width, which I think was the first non-classic-rock CD I ever bought. Spencer namechecks Cosloy in at least one JSBX song, but I can’t for the life of me remember which one.)
I mention this only because that 1990s music/zine scene has been making feel old lately. I’ve given two talks to journalism classes the past couple of weeks, and each time I tried to describe how the distribution of news and information was so different when they were still in the womb, before the web. It’s hard for them to grasp, just as a horse-and-buggy world will never be much more than an abstraction to me. Both times I mentioned zines, which are a pretty direct precursor to blogs and self-publishing online. I got blank stares both times. (I decided right then not to continue with my Factsheet Five-as-early-Google metaphor.)
The other bulletin of my creeping senescence came at a couple shows earlier this summer at T.T. the Bear’s in Central Square. If you’ve spent any time going to shows in Boston, you know T.T. the Bear’s is a third-tier venue — for acts not big enough to fill, say, the Paradise or the Middle East. Within a week or two, I saw Sloan and Eef Barzelay. It’s been a few years since either act reached their commercial peak, and neither one was particularly Himalayan; Sloan got its biggest buzz around ‘94, while Eef’s former band Clem Snide had a very small boomlet around ‘01. I loved them both — still do. And both are actually still doing really strong work; there’s a lot of good stuff on Eef’s new record, and after a seven-year run from quality, Sloan’s last two albums have been really good.
But both ruefully noted in their stage banter that this was not their first time playing T.T. the Bear’s. Sloan’s Chris Murphy said they had played there the night Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993, back when they were a bunch of young scrappy comers on the way up, not 40-somethings who don’t seem to have enjoyed each other’s company for the past decade or so. And Eef mentioned his second gig ever had been at T.T. the Bear’s opening for the Gin Blossoms, around the same time. (“They were assholes,” he told the maybe 30 of us in attendance.) The two shows each had a completing-the-circle feel, but not in a healthy, holistic way. More in a I’ve-been-doing-this-almost-20-years-and-I’m-still-playing-T.T-the-fucking-Bear’s way.
Random things found while typing this up:
— The Ray who helped run Cosloy Youth is this Ray Shea, whose web site features a prominent statement endorsing crawfish fat. I like Ray already.
— A piece from and about ’90s culture (referencing Cosloy) by a young Ana Marie Cox, who would later find glory at Suck.com and fame as the original Wonkette.
— MP3s of a soundboard recording of Sloan at a festival in Vermont in 1992. (Also Codeine, Come, Beat Happening, Six Finger Satellite, Eric’s Trip, Giant Sand, and Barbara Manning, among others.)
— Cosloy is still co-president of Matador, but he (oddly!) now writes a frickin’ sports blog. Here’s an interview from 1999 in which he kinda sounds like a dick. Here’s a post by Will Leitch where Cosloy sounds a little more like a dick. But hey, one Slanted and Enchanted gives you a lot of dickishness leeway.
Have you ever awoken from a dream about me and thought: Man. I would sure love to work alongside that guy on an important project. One that could affect humanity as we know it today. Or at least one that would pay me a salary and give me kick-ass vacation benefits. And a Harvard library card!
Today is your lucky day! Recently posted on JournalismJobs.com is the job of assistant director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University. (The director = me.)
So if you’re a talented journalist and you get the Internet at a deep, cellular — maybe even mitochondrial — level, I’d love to see your application. See the ad for the link to the official Harvard jobs site.
Jesus, two months without posting? I should have my blogging Original Gangsta card revoked for that. It’s amazing how much Twitter saps away one’s blogging impetus. (I’m still twittering with semi-wild abandon.)
To make up for my absence, I offer two things: (a) a promise to do better, and (b) Mr. Rogers breakdancing.
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
