Page Two: It's 3:01AM

This is a column I hoped to never write. It's especially ironic that, as my first in a number of years, it is a lament not a celebration, a farewell not an introduction. The Chronicle at its core has always been created and defined by its writers. Rarely has the paper undergone such changes as it has in recent months, with Music writer Margaret Moser retired while the News section has lost Jordan Smith and Amy Smith. Now the issue you hold has Michael Ventura's last column.

Going forward it is a very different Austin Chronicle you'll be reading. Not the same but still somehow very much the same. Managing Editor Kim Jones, working with the other editors, has helped recruit exciting new writers while recasting the paper overall with a design by Creative Director Jason Stout that allows it to be more dynamic. At the same time, she has increased and expanded our online coverage. The paper now, I believe, is as good as it has ever been even with the loss of these crucial voices.

In so many ways Ventura's leaving creates the greatest gap as his position has been the most unique. He has always written solely what he wanted to write. His retirement thus is the loss of a whole genre – Michael Ventura.

The following story has nothing to do with this column. Driving around Lubbock one day, Joe Ely picked up a hitchhiker whose sole possession was a knapsack full of albums. They were all his first release, Townes Van Zandt explained as he handed one to Joe. After dropping him off, Ely quickly drove to his friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore's house where they listened to the album over and over. In many ways American music took a step forward that day.

It happens like that in Lubbock. The truly dramatic nonchalantly exercised. Many years ago Ventura, himself hitching back to the West Coast from a wedding in Nashville, ended up in Lubbock at a house on 14th Street where Butch Hancock, Gilmore, and Ely lived. He planned to only crash there briefly. Two years later he left Lubbock, without ever really leaving there at all.

Another aside. My first night in Austin in 1974 visiting friends, my friend Everett and I drove out to see Doug Sahm at Soap Creek Saloon. Standing at the bar with a 75-cent rum and coke while watching Sahm and band tear it up, I felt at home for the first time in my life. Every day of my life since has roots in that evening.

It is so presumptuous of me but I've always figured Ventura had that kind of feeling in Lubbock: not a blinding light but a comfort in the bones, not a revelation on the road to Damascus, but a sense of finally feeling whole.

When he left, it was to move to Austin, where he ended up writing for the Austin Sun. After that paper folded there was a long run at the nascent LA Weekly, where he quickly became its most popular writer. Along the way, a toboggan ride of a screenwriting career ended up with two finished films (Roadie, Echo Park) and a number of scripts authored. Novels, collections of columns, and stints teaching high school students and publishing poetry all followed.

When the editor of the Weekly was abruptly fired, Ventura quit in protest. In one of the highlights of my tenure here I invited Ventura to write for the Chronicle. He accepted. Over the past 20 years he has held forth every other week with his column "Letters at 3AM," asking readers to join him in genuine conversation.

Gleefully pushing all to think for themselves, his columns are the antithesis of the current generation of print and media pundits, who (regardless of their politics) explain to readers not just the exact line they should be in but their precise place in that line. Instead Ventura consistently engineered intellectual breakouts from accepted thinking, so consciously wide-ranging that even his most loyal fans would not always agree. His thematic trajectories were so wild and fierce they made the most elaborate of those Family Circus footpaths seem simple.

Ventura loves language, people, ideas, books, music, and films, but most of all dialogue. Partisan ideas are dead ideas. Heir to the great American writers of the Twenties in terms of elegance and style, he is also at one with the Beats because of his passion for driving language and a literate intensity. Among the finest essayists of his generation, at heart he is a storyteller in the great oral tradition.

The ways he tells stories of the past and present is not to lock them in concrete but instead to provide pathways of thinking aimed at the future. The Chronicle has had the privilege to be a home in his quest for human decency and creative community delineated by an unceasing questioning of the status quo. His leaving the paper lightens it in some ways, but his much-needed voice will continue to be heard as he begins yet another act in a life that has already gone far beyond the standard three. We will miss him greatly, but mostly we can't wait to see what Ventura has to say next.