Hunter S. Thompson was a twisted sort of role model for me to have had back when I was still wide-eyed Molly Sheridan, cub reporter, and I find that there's really not a lot of call for that kind of journalism (other than how to tip a whiskey bottle) now that my beat is the new music field.

But maybe there should be. There are plenty of musicians around who could provide the "say what?" and Quentin Tarantino could provide the composer-associated profanity. Yes, hyperbole, but instead of navel-gazing op-eds detailing the end of civilization as evidenced by the death of the newspaper critic--seriously, who knew a chair at the obit desk was the critic's heart's desire?--maybe it's time to get not a new topic, but a new angle on the proposition.

Greg Sandow has been writing a lot about how a rock vs classical critic tackles the live concert review, which has provided ample it-doesn't-have-to-be-this-way food for thought, and AJ's own fearless leader, Doug McLennan, has certainly embraced the show-don't-tell model of change.

The inbox delivers up plenty of enquiring-minds material--many of them topics I wish there was more time to explore in summer road trip fashion and at book-length word count if only there were no need to pay the electric bill. But though that may be what the writer desires, what does the reader seek? In a digital landscape where (setting aside copyright concerns for a moment) content presentation is wildly open to fresh reformation, what do cultural consumers want from their media about media? Is the concert review, the cd review, and the once-in-a-while profile piece really all there is? What would gonzo arts reporting be and what might it do for the place?

UPDATE: Doug has also posted some deep thoughts in response to Martin Bernheimer's recent "arts criticism was killed by the blogger on the Internet" essay in the Financial Times.

If you're up for a road trip, can I just point out how delicious this New Albion festival at Bard College looks? Makes me want to camp out under a tree for the duration.

For those whose complexions and gas budgets make attending summer concerts in the middle of the forest prohibitive, the Internet sneaks you in through a backstage entrance without requiring that you exit your living room. Hot tickets include the Aspen and Tanglewood festivals. Hours of fresh Elliott Carter await.

As I've mentioned in this space before, stereotypes can be evil inhibitors of progress, but we all carry them around with us. In the spirit of intervention, I thought I'd throw a few things I've heard lately out into the road (and maybe under the bus).

• People of a certain age think louder music = better performance. This was actually pointed out to me a couple of days ago, and my mouth was half open to object, but then I promptly shut it. After all, I'm the sort of girl who goes to the symphony and wishes those 60 musicians were just so much louder. I think I appreciate subtlety, but I also love music cranked to 11. Did the amp stunt the eardrums of everyone born after 1975?

• Play it again, Mr. Carter. Whether it's Top 40 radio or an iPod on a constant playlist loop, most ears love the repetition of songs. John Zorn tracks? Not so much, apparently. I had a recent letter from a Counterstream listener: "In the past 8 months, you've played the same Zorn track three times between 5 and 6 a.m. Please rotate your programming." Well, then. When I love a song, I listen to it over and over again. However, I have never done this with a piece of "new music" unless I was reviewing a recording. Like working at the Dairy Queen and ingesting no ice cream, sometimes I think I avoid getting addicted because new music is my job. Secretly, I've often wondered if this makes me a fraud.

• Who's afraid of the Internet? Writers, it seems. First, the freakin' bloggers were going to take the pros out of the game. Now, the commenters criticize them to the point that they flee from the public persecution. The Internet is a dangerous playground. Not everyone always gets where you're coming from and the whole scene can get pretty crass. We could all just be Minnesota nice, but is there something to be gained intellectually when you know your fellow readers/writers won't hesitate to take you down a peg? Is that what a world that types 5 billion words every minute needs?

• The Long Tail might save us from obscurity, but it may hang us first. Chris Anderson gave us hope that even if we didn't sell a million records up front, our Best of Beethoven albums might come out ahead over a period of many years. Well put that confetti back in the tube, kids. The dude may have had things all wrong.

This choice quote from the post got 'em riled around the office today:

During the peak of the avant-garde - during the careers of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Milton Babbitt - there was no concern about the audience. Audiences had always been there and would always be there, except when they weren't anymore. It's remarkable to imagine composers wondering why no one's paying attention to them while at the same time their work's value is measured by how much they can piss people off.

Rather a broad stroke to paint in terms of composerly motivation, I think, but it's also a strangely popular theme this week. Over on the other side of the pond, there's a little fistfight going on w/r/t some similar audience frustrations.

I don't think it's extremely challenging music that hurts so much as our silent taking of its punches when they clip our jaw. It's the middle of July, and yet we passive-aggressively hack like consumptives as our sole expression of irritation. Are concert hall audiences too repressed to riot any more? Polite is waiting till it's over so you don't ruin the piece for anyone else. But I would feel a cathartic release and leveling of scales no matter what I was subjected to if, when so moved, I felt at liberty to holler a bit at the end. It would be exciting. Maybe the woman next to me loved it. I would know what she thought; she would know what I thought. In an ideal world, maybe we could have drinks and debate it out afterward--and maybe she would be so excited by the music that she would pick up the check.

"Plus, you know, it'd be great 'cause you're a girl."

The comment was not atypical.

Sigh. I know where she was coming from. When the diversity call goes out in the new music field--when "just the usual dudes" just won't do--we often find ourselves playing an awkward affirmative action game. Though honestly, sex, race, creed, income bracket: Know anyone who knows this world and is _______? If it's not carrying around a Y chromosome and a light skin pigmentation, it often seems hard to find.

Now, don't get me wrong--I enjoy being a girl. But it can get tiresome when in your head you're just as smart and capable (if not eminently more so--we are talking about internal dialogue here) as your male counterparts, but you're the only lily floating around in the pond. How did I get here? And where is everyone else?

Since I've been watching new music, the blogosphere--hell, just life in general--I've been depressed to note that even while riding this 116th wave of feminism we're still crashing into breaker walls. Look at the list of bloggers on ArtsJournal. Notice anything missing? Not that I'm a saint here--my blogroll is quite light on the female touch as well. I swear I'm not discriminating, so what's going on here? Someone else noted recently that women commenters are scarce in blogland as well. I can vouch for that. But why do we keep quiet? Too shy? Too busy? Too depressed?

The re-issue of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville got me thinking again about how far we've come, and yet how deceptively far away we remain. And how often it is that when women are most successful, it seems traceable to how well they fit into Guyville, not how well they play a game you can see is definably on their own terms. And it's particularly dangerous to me because it's so quiet a problem at this stage. What are women in the 21st century? Can they do anything they want? Or will the best of us just follow the blockbuster lead--play the game as it is already laid down, but this time in stilettos--while the rest sit home and eat yogurt?

I bring it up because I'm feeling inspired, and David Morneau is my flashing beacon. Every day for the past year David has produced a new 60-second composition, and his personal creative marathon is over today! Congrats, David! 

Like the most irritating news reporter, I rode along side him during the home stretch and shouted out some questions from the air-conditioned pace car. Morneau must not have been even slightly winded, because he gave me some of the most thoughtful and inspired answers I've heard in a long while. Now I really want to make some art myself. And I think some serious deadline pressure is what it's going to take to make it happen.

[cue theme music]

Get the Morneau creativity pep talk here and listen to the music here.

Asymmetrical haircuts and ironic clothing just not your thing? If the prostelizations coming out of the Church of How Indie Rock Will Save Concert Music^TM leave you cold, perhaps it's time to look elsewhere.

With faces as straight as Stephen Colbert, the gentlemen of HGP take a few cues from their hometown club scene, slide everything off the table, and throw down. Destined to be the #1 Hot Summer (New Music) Jam of 2008, come on, boyz, shake it up (but watch your language).

Ever since NPAC, I've been unable to shake a comment that was made at my table during one of the group caucus session discussions: The best artists are inherently selfish people by design, only interested in their own goals, and so this whole desire to strategize some kind of collective action plan will never work.

Okay, yes, 15-year-old Molly found herself in love for the first time when Howard Roark laughed, but wasn't this pronouncement of dedicated self-focus a bit harsh? Then Corey, my sparing partner in cultural thought, jumped in to refocus my view.

One of the things we value in an artist is his or her ability to show us how to look at things in different, unexpected ways. I think that quality is the opposite of selfish, but any time you attempt to widen someone's perspective, you run the risk that they will feel threatened by that and react against it and call you selfish. I wonder if finessing the way you challenge accepted norms so that it doesn't threaten people is one of the most important qualities an artist can possess.

In the quiet of our boxes, we fight fiercely to create and communicate, and it can make us unbelievably proud and scare the shit out of us all at the same time, and that's all even before we show it to our best friend. But we are not isolated figures in that moment. We have begged, borrowed, and stolen our stories and our influences out of our enemies' cars and our lovers' mouths, and I think we are speaking as loud as we can, even if the sound is delayed for a little while. And claim what we will, if no one listens when it's finally truly expressed, I think we feel we have failed, even if a person 50 years down the road hears us as clear as day. So let's not make excuses and remove ourselves from the challenge of real life connective work. It's difficult and heavy; and yes, many of us are cynical, which will make it even harder. But I don't think even the most Dietrich of us seriously wants to be alone.

Alaska seems a strange home for a composer, John. If you were looking for unusual landscapes, couldn't you have gotten a suitably cheap and isolated studio a little closer to the action (not to mention a few more musicians) in, say, Detroit? Is that much snow and darkness good for your work (not to mention your equilibrium)?

I've always seemed to gravitate toward extremes. And I came to Alaska to get as far away from the action as I could! In art and in nature, the edges are the places where the most exciting things happen.

I am, of course, just jealous. I've seen photographs of the area you call home, and it is quite awe inducing. Is there a lot of fishing, wood chopping, and hiking in your life, in addition to the notating and the orchestrating, or have I just read too much Jack London?

My own reading tends toward John Haines and David Abram. But I do feel fortunate to live in one of the most powerful places on Earth. And I'm happy to say there's still a fair amount of wood splitting, sauna sweating, hiking, and camping in my life.

Next week we'll be performing and filming my percussion cycle Strange and Sacred Noise out on the tundra. And I've begun sketching a big new piece to be premiered next summer in the Canadian Rockies, as part of Steve Schick's new percussion institute at the Banff Centre. So my work is keeping me in touch with earth, air, fire, and snow.

Environmental work is actually what first brought you to Alaska in the 1970s, and you now frequently speak out about the dramatic climate changes you've witnessed in your home state over the last decade. Since many of your pieces draw directly on your experience of your environmental surroundings, how does this crisis impact your work?

We're living at a moment of unprecedented change, faster and more dramatic than any other in the history of our species. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Arctic. As the signs of climate change become undeniable, my work is expanding to a more global perspective. One of my current projects is a new sound and light environment for Venice, Italy...another beautiful place that's seriously threatened by climate change.

Despite the vicarious romance we may attach to the Arctic adventure you're living, you do leave your little cabin in the woods and travel world-wide for performances and such. Do you find that the music you write changes depending on what city you're in? Do you restrict yourself to writing only in certain places? Are you inspired when you're away by other landscapes, by walking down urban streets?

I love the noise and the energy of New York, Amsterdam, and other great cities. And in recent years I've become enamored with the special magic of the desert. Wherever I may be, I'm sketching and thinking about new work all the time. But when I'm traveling I'm usually too busy to compose. So most of that still happens in my one-room cabin studio.

In our previous conversations, you've referred to yourself as a recovering drummer. How much of a foot do you feel you have in the "classical" world and how much are you attached to the worlds and opportunities offered by other genre areas? Has that changed over the years?

I didn't really grow up in classical music. So, to tell the truth, I've always felt a bit of an outsider in that world. I came of age playing in garage bands. But when I discovered Varése, Cage, Feldman, Harrison, Nancarrow, Tenney, and company, there was no turning back.

At this point in my life all those influences have long since been assimilated, and now I live pretty much in my own musical world. But right now I'm working on a piece that uses the most basic materials of rock and classical music-major and minor triads.

This is the first time I've used conventional harmonies in my music. But not to worry...The treatment is anything but conventional. I tend to think of harmony as color. So this is just another set of colors for the palette. And I'm spreading them freely, all over the canvas.

It doesn't matter much to me what we call music or how we talk about it. All that really matters is what it sounds like, and how it moves me. As a listener, my favorite thing is to hear something I haven't heard before. And as a composer, the thing that makes me happiest is when someone half my age likes what I'm doing.

It was fun to read in that recent New Yorker profile that you and your wife, Cynthia Adams, serve on the board of the Alaska Goldpanners, the local amateur baseball team. I was shocked! Further research turned up this photo. Be honest, John, were you finishing a piece between hot dog bites?

There's not much time for hot dogs. When I go to the ballpark, I always keep a scorecard. Keeping score keeps me in the game. It's a kind of meditation aid that helps me stay focused in the present moment and the unfolding intricacies of the game. So at the ballpark, as in my day job, scorekeeping seems to be what I do.

And I'm not alone. There's a long line of composers-from Ives to Babbitt to Polansky, Mahler (David, not Gustav!) and Altieri-with a passion for baseball.

I'm not much interested in sports. Of course, baseball isn't a sport. It's a game. At times it approaches the condition of art. But, as Peter Schjeldahl observes: ..."in art none of the players knows for sure what the game is."

While I've been overcoming the sleep deprivation and the jet lag, I've been reviewing what went down at this year's massive National Performing Arts Convention and contemplating why it's left me both incredibly inspired and intensely frustrated by the state of the arts.

Unlike the sort of test-run NPAC in Pittsburgh in 2004 where meeting-and-greeting outside my field was possible due to proximity in hallways between sessions but a high hurdle to clear, this time around the individual disciplines had a reason to talk to one another--they were trapped at tables together every day for an hour or more and were obliged to discuss the great issues of the day. This was a great improvement. That said, the AmericaSpeaks process was a lesson in everything that seems wrong to me with democracy--many people making decisions on topics most don't have the time to fully grasp before voting requires them to take ill-formed stances. The results: average, predictable. The challenges we enumerated as a voting group of some 3000 performing arts community members:

1. Our communities do not sufficiently perceive the value, benefits, and relevance of the arts, which makes advocacy and building public support for the arts a challenge at every level.
2. The potential of arts education and lifelong learning in the arts is under realized.
3. The increasing diversity of our communities creates an opportunity to engage a variety of ages, races, identities, and cultures in our audiences and organizations.

That said, overcoming some of these challenges and making improvements will certainly help our social and economic standing, if not our art. In many cases it may add spice there, too. But the process that carried us to embracing these goals wasn't designed to push at the field's status quo. In our conversations together (often limited to 20 minutes at most per topic area) there was no time to think beyond the usual suspects, beyond the usual frame of reference. Voting felt like boiling things down, not building possibilities up. Maybe my expectations were too great, my desire to have it all now too outsized. Perhaps that's where we are now set up to go next time, without tripping in the ditch of misunderstanding where our colleagues in other areas are coming from. I often find I'm set to "full steam ahead" at the risk of immediate scalding. But still: profile, education, diversity. You don't say?

Speaking of not understanding where people are coming from, I admit that I was one of the groaners when it came to plenary speaker Jim Collins. "Doesn't he write those books business people buy in airports," I'd announce to everyone I discussed his session with. But he gave his "Why Business Thinking is NOT the Answer" talk with revival-tent bravado and it was filled with some take-away gems. Survival is not about circumstance, but about choice and discipline. "Who" comes before "what" when choosing the team, and then the impetus needs to be on creating conditions and leadership where people can unify around not the "consensus" idea, but the "right" idea. (Yeah, well, no one said it was crystal clear and easy. He still wants you to buy his books at airports.)

Collins also stressed that we need to look to the successes in our field like beacons, that greatness is cumulative action not a single event, and that decline can be in process long before we see the shadow it's casting. But fire a bullet, not a canon ball, and calibrate your strategies before empting your clip.

In the end, he urged those in the room to hold true to our core values but not to fear changing our practices. The key, he suggested, is to hold tight to who we are, but not to confuse that with keeping a death grip on what we do and how we do it.

Now that we've come back down the mountain, sounds like it's time to go to work. The next challenge is a personal one for anyone who wants to lend a hand: What can I do to further these goals?

I did lock it down long enough to take in some great thoughts (yes, other people's thoughts) today, however. Anna Deavere Smith took the mic during the opening session to speak about why the institutionalization of art can be a dangerous beast, why "public" is not a dirty word, and why we might do well to reconsider our architecture. She got my mind churning.

1. Beware the well-organized closet: Are we really looking for art to come from the reasonable man? Smith suggested that she'd rather engage with the foolish person, and I see her point. Sure, it's a crazy, messy business, but when artists are all toeing the line, isn't that really and definitively The End? In an age when the Fourth Estate is slacking in its duties, can we afford the comfortable, centralized, sanctioned artist?

2. Somewhere along the way, public art got perceptually aligned in the public conscience with the public toilet. Smith didn't go much further here, but it's not hard to see what the implications are. Art designed for use by and engagement with the public is not the 8th sin but the 9th wonder. No need to hold your nose.

3. We need tents not stone buildings. Art is not General Electric, and we need to value mobility into the community over perceptions of grandeur. The image of the gilded hall loomed large in my mind at this point in the talk. Are we artists, or are we bankers? What were our goals when it came to audience perception that led to how we present it, and what should our goals be? How do we realign?

And so that was an hour of thinking here in Denver. Three more days to go. I'll try to start talking a little less and typing a little more.