Last minutes these days

I'm back, and the shows went great. Thanks to everyone who came out and played and organized things and helped clear out our basements by buying records! I put up some photos from the shows over on the Eggs website. Some quick observations, and then I'll get back to recovering from the inevitable cold that comes from breathing secondhand smoke and staying up past 11.

• This is a young man's game. I realized this at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday morning as we carried our equipment up three flights of steps to Rob's apartment in Brooklyn. It's hard to believe we used to do this day after day after day.
  
• Cigarette smoke sucks. The difference between playing in New York and D.C. was striking--in the former, I lost my voice all on my own, about two-thirds of the way through the set. In D.C. it was pretty much gone by the time we got onstage. I can't wait till smoking is outlawed in bars everywhere.
  
• Rental vans are smaller now, but the amenities are better. I drove all weekend, so I didn't get to watch any of the movies on the DVD player that came with our Buick Terraz, but I've seen, say, The Big Lebowski enough times that I don't actually have to watch it anymore. The lesson here--if you're driving, you get to choose the movie.
  

And now, back to the Western Channel.

Sleeping bag, earplugs, AARP card (for hotel discounts)

I'm heading up to D.C. tomorrow afternoon to play aging rocker for a couple of days. Just wait till the stagelights dance on my wrinkles!

Build it...

Geez, I had no idea the Times-Dispatch was as popular a place to write for as it appears to be. Four weeks ago, I submitted an op-ed to it. Today, after intervention from an editor I badgered into listening to me, I heard back--there's no room, and no plans, for outside contributors right now. (They did suggest I could cut it to 250 words and submit a letter.) So I guess I'll just run my op-ed here!

“Build it and they will come.” Of all the things we have to thank Kevin Costner for—Robin Hood with an American accent, teenage mailmen saving the world, “Tin Cup”—this sentence is perhaps his worst legacy. Because the tagline for Costner’s 1989 baseball fantasy “Field of Dreams” has been become a rallying cry for consultants who specialize in convincing American cities to try to revive their downtowns with convention centers.

Last week, the Brookings Institution published a study called “Space Available: The Realities of Convention Centers as Economic Development Strategy.” The study’s author, Dr. Heywood Sanders of the University of Texas at San Antonio, has been a frequent critic of such projects, so it’s not surprising he hasn’t come around.

What’s noteworthy about this study is that he’s proved that the convention business is a loser—in more ways than one.

Convention-center boosters maintain that the depressed state of the event-planning business is due to the recession and the attacks of September 11, 2001. But Sanders shows that convention box office started to head toward the earth long before Space.com did the same.

In big cities, conventions and tradeshow business is slowly evaporating. Attendance at Chicago’s McCormick Place is down 25 percent in the last three years. New York’s Javits Center is off 37 percent since 1997. Atlanta’s Georgia World Conference Center is down a staggering 50 percent since the same year.

Las Vegas and Orlando have picked up some of this business. But after years of growth, attendance in these destination cities has dropped to pre-millennial numbers.

And in smaller cities such as Richmond? Don’t ask. Sanders says an “arms race” between places like Charlotte, St. Louis and our town has lead to mutual assured desertion downtown, with convention centers often landing events only when exhibition space is offered gratis.

There are a lot of reasons for the decline in business. One is that in industries that used to account for a lot of trade shows, such as computing and electronics, there are simply fewer companies sending employees to shows, as well as fewer companies. In 1997 Las Vegas’ COMDEX show boasted 1.38 million square feet of exhibition space and attracted over two hundred thousand attendees. In 2003, it was down to 150,000 square feet and about thirty-nine thousand attendees. It wasn’t held in 2004.

Add in better technology for selling at distances—Internet videoconferencing, for instance--and you’re looking at an industry in a death spiral. Add a glut of new convention space—nearly 12 million square feet in the past five years—and the body begins to stink.

The main culprit, Sanders concludes, is consultant studies that promise the moon. One of the examples he gives smarts a bit, because it’s Richmond. Studies in 1995 and 1999 projected a total of 556,000 new hotel room nights per year. According to John F. “Jack” Berry, president of the Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau, there were 44,762 new room nights in 2004. Yup, less than a tenth of what the consultants predicted.

Sanders’ report calls for public review of consultant studies when it comes to future projects, so cities don’t end up throwing good money after bad—building, for example, a performing arts center to attract conventioneers--to try to prop up their failing exhibition centers. That would be a good start. Because the costs of these turkeys aren’t confined to their construction and maintenance—as Sanders points out, every dollar spent chasing imaginary business is one that can’t go to time-tested forms of economic stimulus like transportation, small-business incentives and improving schools.

Because in the end, “Field of Dreams” is just a movie. And the man who made “Waterworld”? Not such a great business guru.

Terroir continued

A couple of emailed comments from people who aren't comfortable with the comments field:

why I love Richmond: Where else can you see the vanity plate: S8N BLOS

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Off the top of my head & recycling some thoughts I’ve had elsewhere…

Richmond is a great city if you can find just a few people who share your weltanschauung to hang out with.  The same can be said of just about anywhere, I’m sure…but it’s a little easier to find those people in Richmond.  I think.

You’ve written before about the insular nature of the Richmond “scene” (ugh, it doesn’t feel good even to type that).  Sometimes I think that’s a plus.  Thing is, Richmond is a hipster town but in a very fucked-up and insular way. Richmond hipsters pay no attention to what’s hip and happening across this great land...only to what’s hip and happening among their circle of sixteen friends. Richmond continues to act as if the rest of the country doesn’t even exist. Sometimes that’s good (as much as I joke about hipsters in white belts...nobody wears a fucking white belt in Richmond). But generally, it’s to the detriment of the city. It’s good for a city to have a population of youngsters wanting to be au current. It stokes creativity and boosts the economy. Instead, you have bands like LOW playing before twenty people, bands like RADIO 4 barely being able to drown out the conversation at the bar, and THE KILLS playing an all-ages, afternoon show while people help the opening bands coil their guitar cords. And still...nobody gives two shits or a saddle.

Still, somehow I like Richmond.  When the light is just right, and you can spend a day doing nothing so productive as picking up some used books or old records and walking around, you can easily fake yourself into thinking life here is just like a scene from “Slackers.”  Again, that can be a good or a bad thing. 

Richmond is a big fake-out.  Approach the city from the South, and it rises mightily above the James.  It looks really impressive.  Just don’t try to find a cup of coffee after 5:00 p.m. on a weekday, or anytime on the weekend.

It’s ghostly.  It’s haunted by failure.  It has the scent of greatness constantly eluded.  If you’re halfway interesting, you’ll know you’re always among the most interesting people in the city. 

Richmond is the city bands stop to take a piss in after playing The Black Cat, and before playing the Cat’s Cradle.

Terroir, twilight

Lately I've been thinking about the French concept of terroir. It's that ineffable quality of locality that makes a Médoc Cabernet Sauvignon different from one from Graves. It's why Japanese whiskies don't taste the same as Scottish ones, even when they're aged in the same rooms. Closer to home, it's why a peanut-fed pig from North Carolina can't produce a ham as lovely as one from Smithfield.

It's in the land—some magical combination of water and soil ingredients, a palpable impalpability.

Lately I've been trying to come up with something that makes Richmond special. I have some ideas, but they're unbearably cynical and I can't bring myself to type them out. So I'm throwing it to anyone who's interested and can use the comments field: What's so great about this place? It could be something negative, like that we're mired in mediocrity as pure as honey from the sun-washed praries of British Columbia. Or, you know, positive. I haven't had much luck with the latter.

And it feels so goooooood....

I used to be in a band called Eggs. We enjoyed some very minor success as an indie-rock band in the early '90s. Recently we decided to get back together to do a show commemorating the 20th anniversary of our record label, Teenbeat. Then we decided we'd do one more show, in New York. All the information about these earth-shatteringly important cultural events can be found on Eggs' new website. None of us anticipate these shows leading to anything further. If you're interested in coming to the D.C. show, you should probably plan on buying tickets pretty soon, as another, more popular Teenbeat band is reuniting for the show as well.

Negative approach

We were at a party in Richmond, right around the time we'd decided to move back down here, but before we'd actually done it. In two different conversations, two people at the party made a point of saying they didn't have a television when talk turned to something mass-media-related. I remember thinking that was odd; no one says, "You know, I have a TV" when others mention the theater, or film, or classical music.

Since then I've I've lost track of the vegetarians, fans of natural childbirth and advocates of analog recording, French diesel engines from the '60s and single-lens-reflex photography among folks I've just met. Usually it's the first or second thing I learn about them. Not what they do for a living—what they don't do.

In fact, work seems to be almost a distraction for these folks, a necessary evil that supports their real avocation. More than once, when I've told someone here that I'm a writer, they've asked me what I do for money. It's one of the weirdest things about Richmond—for a place with such a disproportionate number of clever artists, there are very few who have found a way to put their talent to work for themselves.

Now, obviously, a lot of this is out of peoples' hands. Richmond is a very small city, a tertiary market at best, and there simply aren't a ton of interesting jobs out there. And I think that plays into the "don't do"s, because anytime people are forced, out of economic necessity, to work in environments where their gifts are not particularly appreciated, or even required, they tend to resent everything about the people around them. Rubbing up against "mainstream" culture day in and day out, then retreating to "safe" places with your fellow miserables, well, I guess badges of nonconformity are a currency of sorts.

Tattooes? Whatever. Religion? Go nuts. But on the whole I suspect this negative definition is corrosive. I do believe, all things being equal, everyone "owns" their own happiness. Yeah, it's hard to make a living as a fine artist, but surely there's some aspect of your skill set that lends itself to a decent wage and doesn't require you to give up on the outside world altogether? That might require moving to a larger city, but then again, places such as Asheville seem to get along just fine, without all the wagon-circling I sense among the Richmond hiperati.

Jobs that intersect with your interests aren't easy to find. But just like good stuff on TV, they're out there. Anyway, just a thought or two on a cold morning.