lies like truth

Jamie Gahlon asked arts journalist Chloe Veltman to answer some questions about criticism. She kindly obliged.

What is the state of arts criticism today, as compared to a decade ago?

There is relatively little genuine arts criticism in America today. But there is a lot of arts commentary.

I was thinking about this recently as I wandered through downtown Austin, TX, as the South by Southwest Festival was entering its final throes.

For the past five days, this city has been a playground for musicians and lovers of music. I don’t know how to begin to quantify the amount of discussion in writing, video and audio that the festival generated. I myself contributed to the overall noise, writing my blog, lies like truth, every day during my stay here (as well as during last week’s SXSW Interactive Festival.)

What I wrote provided hopefully interesting commentary on the music I experienced and other facets of the SXSW scene. But it wasn’t criticism, I realized. And with that realization, I felt bad.

The thing is that criticism, when practiced diligently, is a much higher calling than commentary. Anyone can comment on something.

But to construct an engaging, deeply felt, educational and entertaining response to a work of art is an art form in itself. And unless I spend the necessary time digesting the work, reading around it and thinking about it before putting my thoughts into the public domain, then it’s not criticism. It’s merely commentary.

In order to excel as a critic, I need the resources of time and money to do my best work. Because my blog isn’t paid and something that I write mostly off the cuff before getting down to paid writing gigs for the sheer joy of sharing immediate thoughts about the cultural scene, it is very much a venue for commentary rather than criticism.

I believe that I share this reality with most of the other people who cover the arts today.

With very few adequately remunerated jobs for arts critics left in the U.S. journalism scene as opposed to a decade ago, blogs—those great modern bastions of commentary—are thriving.

Meanwhile, true criticism is dying. (I know, I know, it’s a cliché to say this, but I can’t help myself because it’s true.)

Today, criticism is really the purview of a few people who still have those precious staff critics’ jobs for mainstream media organizations and those for whom money and time are meaningless. I am talking trust fund babies and trophy wives. That’s too bad.

If the thinking is that social networking is replacing professional criticism—and nixed a professional review’s ability to drive sales—then can some middle ground be found between professional criticism and interactive social networking and if so, what would that look like?

This question carries the assumption that the point of criticism is to drive ticket sales.

Box office revenue is one by-product of criticism, but in my view it has always been a minor one.

And I don’t think that the falling off of this aspect of criticism in the wake of the growth of social networking is hugely responsible for the demise of arts criticism in the media. It’s only part of the story.

In any case, if I accept this assumption, I would say that the middle ground, at least in the short term, is the acceptance of the fact that criticism is something that must be created by people who are passionate about art but not dependent on criticism as a way to make a living.

Once this reality has been established and accepted (and perhaps it’s just a short-term reality) then it’s a question of harnessing the web’s filtering power to allow the best of the (mostly amateur) voices to rise to the top.

So the middle ground is likely to be a mixture of the work of the few remaining professional critics, seasoned amateur critics (who may well once have been paid for their work in this field) and members of the public who have no particular arts writing background but have a strong enough editorial voice to be heard above the din.

Describe your arts criticism utopia.
In my arts criticism utopia, I would have the resources to practice criticism rather than commentary. And every day would bring a lively conversation between a wide community of stakeholders, including members of the public, artists and journalists, about art.

The original post on HowlRound can be found here.

Some brief notes from a weekend of fantastic culture-vulturing…

1. John Logan’s Red at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Les Waters: I am going to miss Les Waters. The talented director recently decamped from his position as associate artistic director at the Berkeley Rep to assume the top artistic job at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Those lucky Louisvillians. Red, John Logan’s play which delves into the intellectual and emotional life of the great American painter Mark Rothko, provided a fitting Berkeley swan song for a director of Waters’ intellectual and emotional capacity. Logan’s writing gets a little off track at times — he has Rothko bloviating and ranting too much. But Waters’ sensitive and physically arresting mise-en-scene helps to keep lighten the more stolid moments. The dynamic between David Chandler as Rothko and John Brummer as his long-suffering assistant, Ken, also keeps things lively.

2. The Cult of Beauty at the Legion of Honor: I was mesmerized by the Legion of Honor’s exhibition (in collaboration with London’s Victoria & Albert Museum) devoted to the Victorian Avant-Garde (1860-1900). What I realized as I wandered around gazing at the various Frederic Leightons, Julia Margaret Camerons, Dante Gabriel Rossettis and Aubrey Beardsleys etc was how the aesthetic of the period, with its elegant lines, attention to rich textures, and mixture of antique and contemporary thought, is exactly how I like to fashion the space in which I live. I didn’t know until yesterday that I am — and have infact always been at a subconscious level — a follower of this style! What a revelation that was. Anyway, it’s a gorgeous show which balances stiff-upper-lipped uptightness and louche decadence, tragedy and comedy and nature and artifice in perfect measure.

3. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema: Like a salmon swimming upstream, I strode in the opposite direction to hoards attending the opening weekend screenings of The Hunger Games and headed instead to catch Lasse Hallström’s lively and quite touching romantic comedy about people who follow their own hearts even when the odds are stacked against the success of their ideas. Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt play the two leading characters, a government fisheries expert and the financial representative of a wealthy Yemeni Sheik who wants to introduce the sport of salmon fishing to his desert-strewn country, with pathos. There is gentle chemistry between them. What I liked best about the film, though, was a short scene near the beginning in which we see McGregor sitting in a church playing the bass viol as part of an early music ensemble. wasn’t expecting that! His character’s estranged wife, who’s not a very likable character in the movie, sits next to him puffing on a sackbut. Love it.

Terry Riley is a composer and performer with a taste for understatement.

Halfway through a piano recital the great American composer and pianist gave on Friday night as part of San Francisco’s venerable Old First Concerts series, he mumbled: “After intermission, I’m going to try to play the organ a little bit.”

When we all returned to our seats and Riley reappeared on stage, the grand piano had been pushed to the side and the composer all but disappeared behind the wooden partition that housed the church’s organ. All the audience could see of Riley was the very top of his colorful skullcap.

Riley had given the audience plenty to look at as well as listen to during the first half of the concert which he delivered at the piano. At one point, the Gandalf-like composer, who isn’t given to wearing formal concert attire as you can see from the above picture, sang an Asian-inflected mantra in a gravelly baritone. At another, in the middle of one of his pieces, he dropped the battery pack of his radio mike on the ground. It whacked the wooden floor with a thunk.

But during the the second half of the concert, there were no visual distractions to get in the way of being completely immersed in Riley’s miraculous organ music.

The composer turns out to be a latter-day Kapellmeister. During his spiraling, almost-hour-long, untitled spree on the instrument, Riley managed to draw out a multitude of textures and colors. Velvety, sotto voce melodies gave way to great striding baseline ostinati; effervescent scales became portentous cluster chords; night and day and all four seasons and every possible weather pattern were packed into that hour. It was quite an emotional journey.

Riley is known more as a composer and performer of pieces for the piano and electric organ. His name doesn’t instantly come to mind when thinking of contemporary composers who write for the church organ. He recently performed on the organ at Disney Hall in LA. I wish I could have been there to experience it.

I would go a long way to see that colorful skull cap poking out from an organ loft again.

 

Helene Whitson is a sometime guest on VoiceBox, my weekly public radio and podcast series about the art of the human voice and the best of the vocal music scene. A choral wonk par excellence, Helene is the founder of the San Francisco Lyric Chorus and the San Francisco Bay Area Choral Archive. She’s one of the most knowledgeable people on the field of choral music I know. And one of the sweetest. Craig Hella Johnson, the artistic director of Conspirare (an amazing choral ensemble based in Austin), whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person while I was in town last week for the South by Southwest Festival, asked me to introduce him to Helene after I told him about her. Helene sent Craig and I such a vivid description of what sparked — and continues to spark — her as a singer and lover of choral music, that I asked her if I could publish her words on my blog. She said yes. So here they are…

I’m one of the worst kinds of people–a late-in-life convert. I didn’t know anything about choral music until graduate school (I received my Library Masters’ degree at UC Berkeley), when one of my classmates said, “We have to do SOMETHING (and if you went to Library School, you’d understand WHY you had to do something–anything–that wasn’t Library School related). Let’s sing!” I said, “Sing? I may have hummed a tune in the shower, but that’s the extent of it.” I’ve always been an instrumentalist–piano, violin, recorder) and I didn’t know anything about singing. I had piano lessons, and a class or two in music appreciation in college, but that was it.

But, UC had an non-auditioned student singing group, and we both joined. I could read music, and the hardest thing of all was trying to figure out how to make the pitches coming out of me match the notes on the page. I did get the hang of it after a while, and here we are 47 years later. Bill (my hubby and co-choral archive conspirator in crime) came along with the non-auditioned student group, so I learned about choral music and got someone to help pay the rents and mortgages at the same time.

Choral music is a passion, I must say. How could one NOT be converted? I obviously had some sort of genetic weakness for choral music, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t give it up. I improved a little when local sheet music stores went out of business, so that I couldn’t go down and spend my wad, but then I discovered the internet, and all was lost. It’s the same with recordings.

Bill and I started collecting recordings and scores probably in the late 1960s, early 1970s. We joined our first formal singing group in 1968. We started our own group in 1970. We’ve sung in a number of groups since. In the early 1980s, I started collecting clippings and programs and what recordings we could get from local choruses. I was an archivist in my real life (Special Collections Librarian/Archivist and Founding Curator of the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archives at San Francisco State), so collecting things is just part of my nature. Documentation is what archivists do. But then, we just started collecting all kinds of choral music–just to have. I often would buy things that I hoped one or another of my choral directors might do–especially when the music was unknown.

I don’t know if you know John Poole, who is one of the emeritus Music Directors of the BBC Singers, among other things. He is an incredible choral conductor. He recently was teaching at Indiana. One of the choruses with which we were singing had a workshop with him in the early 1980s, and Bill and I were so taken with his teaching that I really wanted to bring him back and let others have the opportunity of working with him. My sister and I tried to locate local choruses so we could invite singers to take an extension class workshop with John at San Francisco State, but I didn’t get enough registrants, so the class was cancelled. That was the genesis of the San Francisco Bay Area Chorus Directory. Since we’d had such a hard time trying to find choruses, we thought we could create a directory, which we did over the years. The last edition–the 4th–was published in 1999. We’ve done an online edition, but haven’t had time to tweak it a lot, so haven’t changed our choral archive webpage. We’ll get there. The Lyric Chorus is a full time job, as I know everyone who works with a chorus knows. But, we’ve bought a house that we’re remodeling, and hopefully, the choral archive will in be a usable space in the near future, instead of in lots of boxes and piles in our little cottage.

I am in New Orleans during one of its very few “quiet” periods. Quiet is a relative concept, especially in The Big Easy, where music and booze flow every night of the week, working life be hanged, and festive Mardi Gras beads festoon bicycle handlebars and fence railings no matter the season.

And yet there’s relatively little going on this week in New Orleans. The only cultural draw to speak of right now is the city’s annual Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival.

The Festival is in its 26th year and takes place in a variety of locations around the city. It features a gratifying mixture of academic discussions, poetry readings, writing workshops, performances and offbeat stuff.

My favorite thing on the program in the latter of these categories is the wonderfully bonkers-sounding “Stella and Stanley Shouting Contest” on Sunday afternoon at Jackson Square at which “contestants vie to rival Stanley Kowalski’s shout for ‘STELLAAAAA!!!’ in the unforgettable scene from A Streetcar named Desire.” I gather that this is a festival tradition and I wish I weren’t leaving town today so that I could take part.

Williams spent quite a bit of time in New Orleans. The dramatist moved to the city in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He lived for a time in the French Quarter — initially at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré.

I got to spend last night in the company of the festival attendees, organizers and various other hangers on for an opening celebration and performance event at The Old Mint Building on the edge of the French Quarter.

I am still tapping my feet and smiling as I recall Song For My Fathers, a euphoric, tightly-spun performance piece based on journalist, New Orleans native and jazz clarinetist Tom Sancton‘s memoir of his formative years as a musician on the New Orleans jazz scene.

Sancton is an engaging storyteller. His narrative, which tells of how a middle-class white kid from uptown New Orleans found himself learning the clarinet from the great jazzman George Lewis and then playing alongside some of the trad jazz world’s finest musicians (most of them disenfranchised and black), is accompanied by live music performed by the members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, audio footage and powerful black and white photographs projected on a screen.

Sancton’s is a story about human solidarity achieved through art and the ebbs and flows of a city’s cultural heritage. It’s also incredibly funny and touching. Much of the pleasure comes out in Sancton’s eye for detail, such as his recollection of a sign detailing the price of song requests to the band that hung in the Preservation Hall jazz club which read: “Traditional request $1; Others $2; The Saints $5”. At other times, the work is loaded with gravitas. The moment when the brass band marches through the audience performing a funeral dirge is as somber as it is full of life.

There were many locals in the audience last night and I overheard people talking happily about their city when the performance was done. “This makes me proud to live in New Orleans!” I overheard a woman in a big hat and gaudy floral dress say to her friend.

I’m a stranger here. This is my first visit to New Orleans, in fact. I can’t think of a better introduction to this city than Song For My Fathers. I’ll be coming back.

Today is the final day of the SXSW Festival. If I ever attend this event again, I would do two things differently: I would come to the music festival without a badge and I would most likely skip the Interactive festival altogether.

Don’t get me wrong — the SXSW music festival is a marvelous event. But for someone like me, who prefers to discover exciting music at the fringes and a bit by accident rather than lining up for hours to catch an act that already has several platinum-selling CDs and a bazillion video videos on YouTube, buying a pass for SXSW is, quite frankly, a waste of time.

Many of the events that I enjoyed the most this week, such as Roger Greenawalt’s ukelele Beatles marathon at the Hickory Street Bar & Grille (pictured) or Boston singer-songwriter Sarah Blacker at Austin Java, happened in coffee shops and bars where I only had to show ID to get in. No one cared whether I was an official festival attendee or not. And the venues I frequented which bothered to scan passes upon entry were all open to non-badge holders too. The only difference was that the people without passes had to pay a little money (e.g. $15-$20) to get in.

I think this “a la carte” system would on the whole suit me better next time around, even though this would mean missing out on some interesting panel sessions at the convention center. If I hadn’t had a SXSW pass, I would never have heard Paul Williams sing or seen images of naked decapitated fat men gracing the front of heavy metal albums, for instance. There’s food for thought.

I’m off to New Orleans tomorrow for a musical adventure of a different kind.

Band, bands and more bands.

Even though yesterday’s rampaging around the South by Southwest Festival was full of fine music (the highlight being a lunchtime gig by the Seattle-based gypsy rock outfit Hey Marseilles), the thing that stands out for me is the hour I spent in the company of a bunch of metal heads at the Austin Convention Center, listening to a discussion about the visual art inspired by the heavy metal music scene.

I guess metal fans are more traditional in some ways than other types of music fans: Digital consumption is the mainstay of the genre at this point as with the rest of the music world. But there still seems to be a thriving market for vinyl in heavy metal. Plus there are all the T-shirts with snarling skeletons baring hatchets that no self-respecting heavy metal fan would dare leave the house without.

As such, the market for visual art around this genre is thriving, and yesterday a panel discussion featuring three such artists (Mike Williams, Shawn Cahan and Orion Landau) plus moderator Corey Mitchell attracted a crowd of about a hundred badly dressed 20-to-50-something men with tattoos, long hair and pot bellies. Surprisingly, there was also a smattering of better-dressed, younger women.

It was a fascinating hour to say the least.

First off, I learned from Landau, a graphic designer in the metal space who creates amazingly intricate album covers for bands in a style that dates back at least as far as Hieronymus Bosch, that heavy metal fans like figurative and illustrative art. “Metal heads like a storyline,” Landau said. If a band member comes to Landau with a color palette in mind (e.g. “this album is dark purple”) then it’s Landau’s job to make something literal out of the abstract. Apparently it’s quite common for metal bands to think of their albums in terms of colors. I like this artist’s work a lot. It has intelligence, beautiful use of color and impressive penmanship. I particularly enjoyed Landau’s eye for comedy too: I never thought heavy metal had much of a sense of humor — unless you count Spinal Tap and that’s not really heavy metal, but rather heavy rock — until I saw Landau’s image of Brian Posehn, a dweeby looking comedian in the heavy metal space who asked the artist to depict him looking like Conan the Destroyer while standing on top of a pile of dead bodies, all of them the cadavers of comedians Posehn hates. (See image above.)

The second part of the discussion was led by Shawn Crahan, who is with the heavy metal band Slipknot and is responsible for a lot of his band’s art. Crahan, who goes by the moniker “Clown” which is hilarious because he takes himself so very seriously, works primarily in photography. Even though the guy quickly got on my nerves with all his pretentious talk about being an artist and seeking out pain etc, I must admit that some of his pictures are astounding. “I’ve been working with models, not in the fashion sense, but the contorted sense,” Crahan announced as he showed us a photograph of a young woman lying facedown on a forest floor of tangled branches and dead leaves, with her legs splayed and her neck and head disappearing out of the bottom left hand corner of the frame. My first instinct was to think rape. But there are footsteps leading in one direction to where the body lies, which implies that perhaps there was no one else on the scene and that the model had walked there and fallen down herself. Disconcerting. Crahan has a penchant for studying and taking pictures of roadkill. He pontificated at length on the artistic merits of a newly run-over deer. The most beautiful image Crahan showed was of his daughter, aged 19, wearing a pretty, white vintage dress. The girl is in a state of utter turbulence and disarray. Her eyes are like dark pits and her mouth is a smudged pout. Her right fist is clenched tightly by her side as her left arm wields a heavy hammer. It’s a perplexing and thoroughly undoing combination of innocence and anger. I kind of feel sorry for the girl having Crahan as a father. But that image was the most memorable image I saw during the entire session. In fact, it’s probably the most memorable image I’ve seen in a long time and I wish I could get my hands on a print.

The third presenter was, unfortunately, the weak link of the session. He was probably high. I have no idea about Mike Williams’ talents as a heavy metal singer for Eyehategod, but his band should hire someone else to do their artwork. Mostly Williams works with basic collage, assembling images from books and other sources into dull designs along vaguely thematic lines. Williams clearly likes to think of himself as part of the “instinctive” school of heavy metal artists who don’t need to explain their work to anyone. All I could glean of his process beyond the fact that he likes to work with spray paint and stencils (“I can’t get into Photoshop”) and occasionally rips images he wants to use from library books, was the statement “painful art is always the best.”

It’s clear to me that SXSW was never meant to be a trade show packed with tech goons on iPads hawking impenetrable and useless products that allow human beings to do things like rate their clout on the global Dance Dance Revolution scene or share their hamster videos.

Now that the goons have mostly departed, Austin feels more real. The crowds are still insane and Sixth Street continues to smell like urine and rancid barbecue. But at least people are looking up from their personal mobile devices every once in a while and bothering to listen to each other rather than acting in the spirit of sell, sell, sell.

Yesterday brought a wonderful mixture of music, fresh air and camaraderie.

The day began with a conversation between documentarian Stephen Kessler and the amazing songwriter Paul Williams. Williams, who looks like a garden gnome at only five feet two inches, is responsible for some lovely old tunes from the 1970s and 80s such as Helen Reddy’s “You and Me Against the World”, and the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays”, as well as his contributions to films such as “Evergreen” from A Star Is Born and “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie.

Kessler is a fan of the Williams’ songbook — he made a documentary entitled Paul Williams Still Alive.

Williams is more than still alive. I’d say he’s a force of nature. During the hour-long presentation, the songsmith sang excerpts from his catalogue and entertained the crowd with his stories about Barbra Streisand and ASCAP.

I then took myself off on a long bike ride out into the park south of the downtown area and wound up at Flipnotics to see if I could catch a set by Tall Heights, the Boston-based cello, voice and guitar guys I had seen performing outside the convention center on Tuesday.

Flipnotics is a great, hippy-little cafe-bar with a sprawling deck and $2 beers. It’s well off the beaten track as far as SXSW goes which made me exceedingly happy. I like good music and I hate overbearing crowds. Flipnotics offered the perfect place to experience under-the-radar gems in a chilled out setting.

The highlights for me included Tall Heights (more about them in a bit) and a lovely young San Francisco band, French Cassettes, half of whom look about 14 years old. Theirs is a sort of upbeat pop with a grungy edge. Think dirty bubblegum. They attract teenage girls. Their lead singer likes to act out what he’s singing about with his hands, miming actions like knocking on a door and weeping as the lyrics dictate. It’s very endearing. I am also very impressed with the French Cassettes’ drummer, who keeps things going at a playful clip.

Paul (cello & voice) and Tim (guitar & voice) of Tall Heights, did not disappoint. I listened to their whole set in a state of rapture. It’s those spiraling high male voices that always do me in. Plus these two are super talented songwriters, have a gentle yet captivating stage presence and are both beautiful. Tim, who is gangly with a mop of unkempt hair, an aquiline nose and kind eyes, has a warmth and easy going manner about him. Paul has a shock of black curls on his head and the most startling blue eyes I’ve ever seen on a musician. Or perhaps on any being I’ve ever seen besides a Persian cat I used to know.

Later on, after several beers and a trip to a nearby taco truck, and before several more beers, adventuring into town to hear some fantastic live music at St David’s Sanctuary courtesy of the power ballad songstress Julia Nunes and the darkly sweet-voiced country maven Anais Mitchell, we would discuss why Paul and Tim prefer not to look at the audience when they’re performing.

The songs Tall Heights sing are so emotional, lyrical and smart that perhaps making eye contact with the audience in a small venue would be too overbearing. One track, which is inspired by a remote, oceanfront hotel on the East Coast that removes its walls when a storm approaches in order to let the elements have their way, serves as a metaphor for Tim’s aunt’s battle with breast cancer. I can understand the need for an inward gaze when singing this song in an intimate space.

Tim and Paul say they like watching musicians who seem to be playing to themselves in a private room instead of overtly performing to a crowd in a public space. I dunno. There’s a case to be made for keeping the emotion introverted — it can help to build tension. But I also think musicians who look back at the people who are looking at them have the ability to forge a stronger connection with a crowd on the whole.

So the evening rolled as all the best evenings do. It was fascinating hanging out with two musicians on the make. As far as SXSW goes, Tall Heights is pretty much near or at the bottom of the totem pole. Tim and Paul certainly don’t deserve to be there, and they will rise to the upper echelons, I’m sure of it. But the music industry is a tough place to be and this is Tall Heights’ first time at this most massive and overwhelming of music events.

Tim and Paul had driven all the way at their own expense from Boston to Austin in a big car full of equipment, leaving behind their part time jobs and busking gig at Boston’s Faneuil Hall for a few weeks. En route, they performed house concerts in a few towns before eventually landing in Austin for three gigs which they had set up themselves. Tonight at midnight or 1am, they will get to play one or two songs in a showcase for up and coming performers. I hope the audience members aren’t so drunk and rowdy by then that they don’t listen with the care and attention that Tall Heights deserves.

In addition to performing, Tim and Paul also here to seek representation. That’s what the showcase is for. And really every interaction is a networking opportunity for these guys. For instance, when we met, I told them about my vocal radio music series, VoiceBox, and they obliged me with an audio interview, which we took care of on the deck at Flipnotics. At some point, the interview will wind up in a broader show about singers performing on the street, which is Tim and Paul’s current milieu. Plus, we spent the best part of last night at St David’s trying to track down some promoter (let’s call him Sam) whom Tall Heights thought might be a good match for their work. None of us had any idea what Sam looked like so we kept trying to look at people’s festival name tags in order to identify the guy. It was hard to do this surreptitiously. People look at you funny when you walk past them staring at their chests.

After I left Anais Mitchell’s haunting hangdog moon over a prairie of a set (I didn’t want to cramp the guys’ schmoozing potential) I found out via text that they had succeeded in finding Sam and deemed their networking a success.

I hope Tall Heights gets a well-deserved break soon. I’d like to hear Tim and Paul perform on the west coast — The Freight & Salvage‘s audience in Berkeley would eat these guys up.

In the meantime, I hope they don’t get discouraged. When Julia Nunes announced that she had played on the Conan O’Brien show the previous week, Paul’s eyes widened. “Conan O’Brien,” he said with a sigh after Nunes had finished her set. “Shit.”

It’s a truism that the best things in life and art often occur as a result of luck.

Yesterday’s galavanting around Austin during the South by Southwest Festival palpably brought this home as the two most memorable things I experienced were completely unexpected.

The first was the live illustration of an otherwise fairly turgid panel discussion on the impact of the Internet on the music business. While the panelists were pontificating on stage about the latest somewhat disingenuous systems for helping musicians to get paid, an artist was quietly creating a visual representation of the discussion on a big white board positioned to the side. I took a snap of it (see above.) Not only did it draw together all the salient points into one easy-to-digest picture, but it made the discussion come to life. The artist works for a company called ImageThink and its team was engaged in creating similar posters for some of the panels at the SXSW Interactive Festival. Pity they’re not sticking around to do the same for the discussions at the Music and Film events.

The second serendipitous thing that happened yesterday was when I got lost trying to find my bicycle. I rounded a corner of the convention center and heard an amazing sound — two guys singing in falsetto together! The voices belonged to Tall Heights, a Boston-based voice, cello and guitar duo who are doing some shows at the festival this year. While high male voices are common enough in indie pop music, I don’t think I’ve ever heard two guys singing up in the stratosphere together. Their voices were strong and sweet and I loved the curlicue harmonies that the musicians made as they busked with their instruments outside the Austin Convention Center. I am going to hear them play a proper set this afternoon at Flipnotics on the Barton Springs Road later this afternoon.

A few journalism-related ideas that stuck with me from yesterday’s panel presentations here at SXSW:

1. People aren’t buying newspapers because that are considered to be trusted sources of information anymore. They are buying papers because they want to see their lives depicted. Justin Ferrell, a panelist on a talk about the business side of journalism and a fellow Knight Fellow at Stanford, told a compelling story to illustrate this point: He was once browsing the newspaper and magazine aisle in a North Carolina Barnes & Noble and overheard someone talking to the attendant about wanting to buy a local paper. There were none left, apparently — a lady had come in and bought the entire stack in one go. Why? Because there was a picture of the woman’s dog in that issue.

2. Developers are the new kings of journalism. You cannot start a media organization without having an IT director. This is the only key position. Content people come second. And legacy media organizations are also employing programmers in much greater numbers these days. While it’s hard to get a job as a journalist, there are far more opportunities for code monkeys.

3. The Onion’s editorial process is fascinating. Each edition of the satirical newspaper starts with the process of culling around 500 headlines from staffers and freelance contributors. These get whittled down and then assigned to writers. Each piece is developed in two drafts and four rounds of edits. Also, John Randazzo, who runs The Onion, says that the publication doesn’t seek to trick readers but there are still some people who are fooled. One example, which beggars belief, is the Louisiana Governor, who was so shocked by an article from The Onion about a mega-abortion center in which women slid down water slides etc, that he republished it online.

Certainly one of the most gorgeous pieces of body art I’ve seen on any man. Sighted at a bar in downtown Austin amid a throng of noisy tech-art geeks showing off their wares. The owner said the tattoo represents the logo of the first radio station that he worked at in Oregon. That’s serious devotion to the cause.

I’ll be curious to see how the music festival differs from the interactive one when it starts next week. The interactive festival is predominantly about people networking and pushing a business agenda. I expect there’ll be a bit of that going on during the music event. But the performance element may help to dilute the endless sales pitch.

I’ve only been at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, TX for two days, but I’ve seen enough panel discussions to know that the festival’s system for running this core component of its activities could use an overhaul.

Several mediocre discussions I attended yesterday, including one hilarious clunker where the presenters basically talked to each other rather than the audience and more or less completely failed to address the issues that they were scheduled to talk about in the festival’s program book, compel me to write this post.

On the one hand, the SXSW’s approach to programming panels is a worthy one. Instead of having some higher power on the festival’s executive committee decide whom should speak and about what, the panel selection is quite democratic. Anyone can suggest an idea for a panel and assemble the content matter and their fellow panelists. Then it’s up to them to get enough votes behind the idea from friends and the general SXSW community ahead of time in order to get their panel on the actual festival schedule.

However, most people I’ve spoken to about the SXSW festival who’ve been coming for years say that most of the panels are a waste of time and that as a festival attendee, and that you’re better off taking advantage of one-on-one networking opportunities at parties etc.

As I’ve discovered on several occasions over the past couple of days, these SXSW aficionados aren’t wrong. Sitting through hours of incoherent thoughts and vaguely-answered questions by rambling self-publicists who often don’t know how to present themselves or their work compellingly to a crowd in an often over-stuffed hotel conference room where the the air conditioning is cranked too high, is not my idea of a good time.

Now, it’s easy to see why so many people want to find a way to present at SXSW. The perks for panelists are not to be sniffed at. They include a free pass to the entire interactive, film or music festival (depending on which category the panel falls into) worth at least $600, lower-cost hotel accommodations in a central location near all the main festival activity, and, perhaps most importantly, the chance to further one’s business interests and clout.

But with little formal curation, getting accepted as a panelist at SXSW is ultimately more about branding power and having a big network of friends to vote for your idea than it is about the expertise/profile of your assembled group of panelists and what you all have to say.

Hence SXSW is full of sexy sounding synopses in the program guide, such as “The Power of the Unpopular,” “3 R’s of Horror: Remakes, Reboots & Rediscoveries” and “Brands That Believe in Sex After Marriage.” But I don’t think I’m going out on a limb even from my so-far limited experience of this festival, to say that there might not be a whole lot of substance behind this stuff.

If panel discussions at the SXSW festival were like shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, it would be possible for the good stuff to rise to the top because at the Fringe there are enough repeat performances of most shows to enable audiences to see them and spread the word about what works and what doesn’t. But panels at SXSW are one-off things, so if you miss a good discussion, well, that’s tough, though I guess there are recorded versions of some if not all panels available online and then there’s the various social media updates and synopses about what went on in the room.

So what’s the solution to this problem? For a start I think there should be fewer panels. The festival is offering hundreds if not thousands of talking head situations. It’s completely overwhelming and quantity does not equal quality as this year’s proceedings palpably demonstrate.

Beyond that, perhaps there should be a stronger focus on SXSW taking it upon itself to carefully curate panels made up of the brightest people with the best ideas.

And then there could be more of a soapbox tier of speakers which are “elected” by the masses as is not the case to present by their networks and self-branding efforts. Talent scouts from the festival could scout the soapbox presentations to find worthy content for the following year’s curated panel lineup, perhaps asking potential presenters to put together proposals that go more deeply into the previous year’s discussion or go in new directions.

Food for thought anyway. Righto. I’m off to battle the elements and check out more panel discussions. Even though I have issues with the way they’re organized, I’m still excited by the offerings here in Austin and can’t wait to get downtown again today.