 On October 4, Liz Phair releases her next album, “Somebody’s Miracle.”
Given that each of her albums have chronicled her life (although lots of listeners seem to wish she was still the college student who recorded “Exile in Guyville,” and just making “Exile II,” “Exile III” and so on), it’ll be interesting catching up with her. “Little Digger,” “Rock Me” and other seemingly autobiographical tunes on her unfairly maligned last album were fascinating to me. It doesn’t hurt that we’re (roughly) the same age, and if our lives don’t match up exactly — she’s a divorced single mother at this point, for one thing — it sure feels like I’m listening to a peer catching me up since the last time we spoke.
I’ve decided to skip seeing her summer tour — it’s hitting San Francisco, LA, NYC and the DC area, all of which I could theoretically make, with varying degrees of difficulty — in favor of the one she’ll do in support of “Somebody’s Miracle.” If anyone catches her on tour, let me know how she was. (And yes, she still has a fair amount of stage fright for someone at this stage in her career. She’s still lots of fun in concert despite that.)
La Liz has always been fairly Web-savvy when it comes to promoting albums — the entirety of whitechocolatespaceegg was streamed for a weekend before being available in stores — and starting this Friday, she’ll be beginning her own podcast with interviews and music. The URL hasn’t been listed yet on her site, but it sounds like a goody to me. I wish more musicians would take this sort of hands-on approach when it comes to promoting their work.
While I’m now (mostly) over my college era lust for hot guitar-slinging chicks (or I was, until “Rock Star: INXS” came along), apparently I wasn’t as alone in that as I thought: outsideleft (the name is a soccer thing, not a political thing) has compiled a list of the top 12 hottest female guitarists ever. No honorable mention for the star of my one-and-only nudie poster I had in college — Lita Ford wearing only a strategically arranged guitar — but Liz is #2 on the list.
From YubaNet:
A rabid Harry Potter fan took his life yesterday after inadvertently learning a plot spoiler from the soon-to-be-released J.K. Rowling opus, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6).
Jude Ralston, 32, of Hudson, Ohio left a suicide note indicating that since overhearing the plot spoiler at a shopping mall earlier in the day, “I no longer have a reason to live.”
Family and friends who gathered for a candlelight memorial outside Mr. Ralston’s house remembered a man who seemed to live only for Harry Potter – and wondered if they could have done anything to prevent his tragic fate.
“When Jude got that vanity license plate that said ‘Hogwarts,’ that seemed harmless enough,” said Polly Clovis, who attended Model U.N. with Mr. Ralston while the two were in high school. “But when he started wearing that wizard hat around town, we really should have seen that as a cry for help.”
According to friends of Mr. Ralston, the Potter fanatic had done everything in his power to protect himself from stumbling across Potter plot spoilers, even disconnecting his computer from the Internet and avoiding his favorite vintage comic book store.
Ms. Clovis said that she hoped Mr. Ralston’s death would cause federal authorities to tighten the flow of Harry Potter plot information to prevent similar tragedies from taking place.
“In my heart I believe that could have saved Jude’s life, even if he didn’t have one,” she said.
Elsewhere, President Bush called the jailing of a New York Times reporter “a positive step,” but warned that many other reporters were still at large.
So just don’t do it!
In other news: Peter is on a well-deserved vacation this week, so I ascend to the heady/patsy position of Acting Editor for the Hesperia Star. I’ll be white-knuckled until my early deadline of Thursday evening. If the paper ends up being nothing but huge photographs to fill up space, you’ll know I had a breakdown somewhere along the line.
When I was at my second newspaper gig, Dear Newspapers in McLean, Virginia, I was under the tutelage of managing editor R. Cort Kirkwood. Cort, now the editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and I both have strong personalities, and we clashed a fair amount. But I learned a quite a bit at Dear. (Not to mention made a friend in education reporter Todd Behrendt, who later helped me get a job at the Potomac News, where he had landed while I was still freelancing in Egypt.)
 One of the things Cort spent a lot of time focusing on was making sure that none of our four-person reporting staff wrote stories that were too “inside baseball.” In other words, not too wrapped up in the nitty-gritty insider details that were of no real interest or relevance to the average reader, like a sports story that discusses arcane personnel issues instead of the who, what, where, when, why and how of the actual game.
Another way he approached this, in a way that’s been more applicable to me throughout my career, was that “every story is someone’s first.” The reader at home doesn’t care if you’re tired of writing the background and the context on some complicated issue over and over again in subsequent stories. For some of them, those follow-up stories will be the first time that they’ve been exposed to the issue, and they need that background, whatever your feelings on it might be at this point. It’s certainly something I’ve had to remind myself of numerous times over the years, especially with complex stories like the progress of the Hesperia casino proposal.
I don’t always succeed on these two related points, but it’s something I try to bear in mind. It worked out well in one illustrative case, when I picked up a Virginia Press Association award in 1998 for play reviews I wrote at the Potomac News. The secret of my success: Cort’s advice. Although I have a reasonably strong background in theater, I wrote for a regular person who just wanted to know whether or not a given play was worth seeing and why.
I wrote the reviews as though I was telling my mom about them. Mom’s a smart cookie, but she also doesn’t really care about blocking or technical intricacies or backstage politics. She, or at least the imaginary version of her I used as my audience while writing, wants to know 1) what the play is about, 2) some examples of what it’s like and 3) whether or not to see it. It would have been very easy to slip into talking about the inside baseball aspect of the plays, but Cort’s advice (OK, his barked orders) came back to me over the years and steered me right.
Remember the readers when you’re writing. That’s your audience, not the editors and not other reporters and not even the newsmakers themselves.
Next week, we’ll talk about the art of the quote.
 Rock Star: INXS is what American Idol should have been, but realistically, stood no chance of being, Bo Bice aside.
American Idol, if you’re one of the five Americans unaware of it (I think even natives of the Amazon jungle are aware of it at this point), gives us the dubious spectacle of winnowing down hopefuls (who will then be shown in endless special episodes, like a bizarre videotaped version of chorus geeks mocking the wannabe chorus geeks) and then, once they have their 16 or so fresh-faced teenagers and twentysomethings, make them sing songs their grandparents liked. This last season was a little better — it was mostly songs their parents liked, instead. But still, for a show that professes to be a hunt for the next great pop star (although, to date, none of the winners or runners-up have realistically made a claim on that title), it’s relentlessly dorky. It might be interesting, sort of, to know that some 19-year-old kid from an Alabama trailer park can belt out Rogers & Hammerstein tunes, but what, exactly, does that say about this kid’s chance of making it as a pop musician? Barring meteorites wiping out Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Miami and anywhere else modern pop music is created and produced, not much.
 In contrast, Rock Star: INXS has a certain real-world urgency to it. Formerly one of the biggest rock acts of the early 1990s (I saw INXS in concert twice in college, and they were amazing each time around, both at the beginning and end of their tour supporting their “Kick” album), their lead singer, Michael Hutchence, died under circumstances that will probably remain somewhat hazy forever.
The rest of INXS, though, doesn’t want the band to follow Michael, and are currently working on a new album. The only problem, though, is that Michael’s death greatly overshadows the band in the modern day, and they both need to find a new lead singer (one who can be soulful, but who can also rawk when rawking is required) and generate positive publicity to push the bad stuff out of the public’s mind.
Enter Survivor creator Mark Burnett and his light (for reality TV) touch. The resulting show essentially follows the same formula as AI (as the cool kids call it), but the series began having already winnowed the hopefuls from around the globe way, way down. And instead of the somewhat sadistic way AI handles eliminations, drawing it out more and more, and openly laughing at the discomfort of people being humiliated on national television as they chase their dream, the members of INXS are singularly mature and polite about the process. Rejected hopefuls aren’t sent off in disgrace, as they are on other reality shows like America’s Top Model, but instead or treated with respect: “I’m sorry, but you’re just not a good fit with INXS.”
(On the other hand, eye candy Brooke Burke is forgettable at best in her role as host. Survivor host Jeff Probst apparently only makes it look easy to do that sort of job well.)
 Given the mediocre track record of AI, it’s perhaps surprising that, at this point, there are several hopefuls who look like real viable candidates. (Of course, many of the hopefuls play in bands or solo already, and one even was a headliner in a West End rock and roll musical.) And even more surprising, at this point, it looks more likely than not that INXS’ new lead singer will be a woman. There has been a lot of talk about how women rockers can really rawk over the years, but it’s been a long time since they’ve really proven it — every time the phenomenon is talked about, the current subjects of the scrutiny seem compelled to dump rock for introspective singer-songwriter treacle. The female contestants on Rock Star, at least so far, deal with their demons the way rock singers are supposed to, by punching back musically.
Maybe this will all blow up in INXS’ and the viewers’ faces, but right now, it sure feels like the band is about to get at least one more great moment in the sun with their new lead singer, whoever it might end up being.
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