Page Two
In the beginning, we kept the Chronicle going mostly out of sheer perversity and stubbornness; 23 years later, it looks like there was more to it than that
By Louis Black, Fri., Sept. 3, 2004
I know I wasn't planning on being involved for more than a year or two in the paper, and suspect publisher Nick Barbaro felt the same way. We had started the paper because we figured Austin needed a publication like this one. Certainly, I wasn't thinking clearly about much those days, but I'm guessing the thought was that once it was established, we'd move on to new projects and adventures.
Over 1,000 issues, millions of words, innumerable staff members, husbands, wives, and children later, the Chronicle is still here – and I'm still here. No big blowout for this anniversary; I figure the celebration is next week's issue, and the issue after that, and so on into the indefinite future.
The relationship here is between our readers and the paper, between readers and writers, between readers and advertisers ... and, most important, between readers and the city – which is, after all, the readers.
Given the charged local issues – toll roads, school bonds, and rail transportation – and the national atmosphere of a high-pitched presidential campaign (including more smirking at the Republican Convention than used to go on at a men's club smoker), this is probably a moment for some thoughtful comments. I have nothing to say: Amid the noise, I long for quiet; in the pitched partisan battle, it would be nice to hear some calm discussion.
In the beginning, we kept going out of sheer perversity and stubbornness. I remember no hardcore store of optimism that things would get better, that we would survive. At one point, my major determination to keep this paper alive was provided by one local pundit who kept predicting our demise. "The Chronicle won't make it to the end of the summer," he'd declare. Teeth gritted, I'd be damned if we weren't going to still be publishing then. As the summer ended, the pundit would announce, "Okay, they made it through the summer, but they won't be around come the new year!" Damn, damn, damn, I'd think, and go back to the task. I was just looking for the space where we might crash and burn quietly and on our own.
Now, a few people from the first year or so are still working here. I doubt Barbaro was pessimistic or optimistic, but rather more concentrated with the job at hand (the issue) and then the next job (the next issue). Carolyn Phillips was optimistic; she couldn't have sold the paper unless she believed in it, and she sold it. Margaret Moser loved the paper and believed in it, but I'm sure that, as a professional survivor, a consolidator of power, and an innovative strategist with a long-term vision, she had alternatives in mind. She'd been through too much to place her faith solely on one square of any bingo card. Our film graduate-student comrade Marge Baumgarten started working the front desk after our first year but was probably too focused on dealing with the crazies, bill collectors, sales people, and would-be staffers to think about the future.
Back then, when I thought about the future (which I rarely did), I wasn't thinking about the Chronicle. In a way, at that time, its creation and place in my life seemed almost an accident.
Maybe three years into the Chronicle, I had yet to take a substantial personal vacation. It was a time of constant crisis: financial, personal, editorial, advertising, distribution, promotional, etc. In the chaos of ongoing and regular explosions, the paper's minute-but-steady progress was impossible to notice. In the chaos, I managed to put on a substantial number of pounds, ballooning up to some ungodly weight; I could hardly make out the number on the scale, as anywhere I looked there was exploding stomach. Popping shirt buttons, I finally took a trip to Massachusetts to visit my parents on Cape Cod and my friends Fred and Paula.
Fred and Paula were staying at a relative's house, located in a town right before the Cape. I went there first. One afternoon, I spent hours floating on the pond behind the house in a small boat. It was calm and quiet – just the sounds of birds, insects, and wind. I floated in circles, almost comatose, the sun beating down. After some time, I felt slowed down for the first time in years, like what I did in terms of work and creative effort was being given a chance to catch up with who I was. No great on-the-road-to-Damascus or sitting-under-the-Bodhi-tree revelation, no great vision unfolded. Just the quiet of the afternoon.
Now, given that quiet and calm were conditions I had not only never cultivated but invariably disrupted, this was not just unusual but unnatural. At some point, the sense of panic I always carried, the fear of failure, the uncertainty about the future, my long-acknowledged lack of any reasonable skill set, as well as my always troubling past history all settled into the present. For some moments, at least, I was there. Just there, on the boat in the pond, and nowhere else.
Nothing changed; no knowledge was gained or fear lessened. It wasn't negatives equaling a positive, nor understanding quelling feelings of inadequacy. But just in the peace of such quiet, I relaxed. All the haunting emotional storms lined up and, viewed in unison, if there was no resolution, at least they were understandable. For one who long distrusted relaxing – as an unacceptable act of surrender and lost control – relaxing was enough. I was not renewed, reborn, or re-energized. I just stopped so aggressively dying (if not physically, then in deeper, more spiritual ways). For more than a decade afterward, whenever I needed to, I returned to that afternoon, to the boat on the pond, to the blue, green, and open sky of it, though I never visited the house or pond again.
Later, on the same trip, in the cellar of my parents' house, I found stacks of papers from my youth. There were many from many places and years. East Village Other was the paper I had the most copies of, since I grew up outside New York City. The stack included copies of The Avatar (from Boston, edited by guru, cult leader, and harmonica whiz Mel Lyman), The Oracle (the psychedelic gold standard for publications from San Francisco), The Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta), The Berkley Barb, The Rat, and The Old Mole (based on a quote by Marx on how the revolution was a mole that kept on going despite suppression and adversity). Among the more political publications were copies of Muhammad Speaks (Black Muslim), Daily Worker (Communist Party), The Militant (Socialist Worker Party), Solidarity, The Fag Rag (Boston), I.F. Stone's Weekly, off our backs (the first feminist publication I remember), and who knows what else. Lest this seem completely leftist, there were books and pamphlets from the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as various anti-labor, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant groups. I don't remember their having tabloid publications as much as paperbacks, broadsides, and pamphlets.
I sat there as the deep smell of mildew saturated my clothes, reading through the publications. It was only a few years later that I saw the direct line from them to the Chronicle, that my decisions had not been so whimsical, my major life decisions not so much by chance.
What you hold in your hands is this week's issue, the work of a wonderful, dedicated staff and the greater work of every one who ever spent any time in any way on this paper. When all is said and done, it is your paper, the readers', and we thank you for it. I only hope you guys are as entertained reading this as (I think – I don't want to speak too quickly for the whole group) we are putting it out. 
