This is a few days old, but I never got around to posting it: Liz Phair talked to Billboard magazine about changing record companies, the 15th anniversary re-release of Exile in Guyville, the accompanying documentary and more:
I missed being on an indie. I never wanted to go to a major in the first place, but Matador basically sold me to Capitol, and when they divested, I was left there. It has been a long time since I could do what I wanted. When I was on Capitol, I tried to adapt and make the best of it, but I can honestly say, for the first time in 15 years, I feel creative. I don’t have to start with a mindset that thinks about how to sell the record and works backward.
The re-release was actually ATO’s idea initially, but I did realize that we’d never done the 10th anniversary edition, and it seemed like a good thing to do. I jumped on the idea because I wanted to work on the DVD and revisit the scene that happened around “Guyville” in 1993. I wanted to bring that moment back to life, and it was also a good way for me to establish my independence.
I was recording demos all winter, after taking a few years off, which I needed. The demos were all super cheap, and my friends all lent me their time and got involved. I’m going to start recording in mid-April and hopefully bang this puppy out. I have a strong vision that I can’t quite articulate yet, but I’m hoping it’ll be clear on the album.
That’s the house’s humidifier behind him. It makes living in the desert a lot more bearable.
Classes are canceled today at Virginia Tech, and the day is given over to remembering the events at West AJ and Norris Hall a year ago.
As befits a high-tech school that was on the cutting edge of the Internet before the World Wide Web had even been created, all of the day’s events are Webcast.
 Almost a decade after Jenn getting married was mentioned on the front page of a newspaper blowing past Wonder Woman’s feet (in 1999’s Wonder Woman #148), James has appeared as a secret agent in Wonder Woman #19 (they restarted the series a third time), on sale now.
(He’s not the blonde guy. The blonde guy, Nemesis, is a decades old character, and two blonde guys out of costume talking to each other can get confusing, as Marvel Comics’ Avengers has shown a number of times over the years. Captain America, Yellow Jacket and Hawkeye all need new haircuts, at a minimum.)
A big thanks to Gail Simone for sneaking him past the velvet rope and into the DC Comics universe!
Go get the issue at a comic shop today, and while you’re there, go ahead and pick up the paperback collections of All-New Atom, Birds of Prey, Gen-13, JLA, Superman or Welcome to Tranquility. (The latter is creator-owned, I believe, so Gail gets the biggest check from that. Buy those first. They’re about a superhero retirement community.)
A reader sent me a link to this article from the always-great Christian Science Monitor. I couldn’t figure out a way to shoe-horn it into the Hesperia Star site — at this time, we don’t have blogs there, although when our site finally gets the Pluck community features upgrade, I’m sure we will — so here, for the readers who sneak a peak at what is theoretically my away from the workplace personal blog, are some excerpts.
The list reads more like demands from a Hollywood agent than from a candidate to lead the schools for an antebellum-tinged suburb of Atlanta.
To come to work here in Clayton County, a failing school district in Georgia, former Pittsburgh superintendent John Thompson wants $275,000 in salary, a $2 million consulting budget, a Lincoln Town Car with a driver, and money to pay a personal bodyguard.
Sound a bit hefty for someone likely to pull a power lunch in a junior high cafeteria? Maybe not.
Fewer qualified candidates, rising expectations, and a near-impossible job description are creating a new breed of superintendents: Call them central office rock stars. These candidates say that, for the right price, they’re willing to do an unpopular job that can take a heavy personal and professional toll to whip underperforming districts into shape.
The trend is exacerbated in struggling minority districts – many in the South – the very ones feeling the greatest pinch from new federal and state accountability laws.
The pipeline is drying up even as the number of US school districts, because of consolidation, has dropped from 35,000 in 1965 to 13,000 today. Some 20 percent of school districts are actively looking for a superintendent, according to the American Association of School Administrators (AASA).
That’s because principals and central office staff who would typically fill the superintendent job say accountability standards and politicized school boards mean it’s not worth the hassle.
Minority districts that want to hire a black or Hispanic superintendent are in even worse straits: The number of educators coming out of black colleges has dropped by 70 percent in the past 20 years, according to the National Association of Black Educators in Washington.
“Leadership always is symptomatic, a warning sign of what’s happening at deeper and more fundamental levels,” says Walter Fluker, executive director of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
In 1990, a typical opening for a superintendent would bring in about 250 applications, says Richard Greene, a former superintendent leading the search in Clayton County. “Today, if you get 30 or 40 it’s phenomenal,” he says.
As a result, average salaries have increased from about $110,000 10 years ago to more than $200,000 a year today. Total compensation packages for larger districts are in the $325,000 range. Today, big-city superintendents stay an average of 18 months, says Dr. Greene of the search firm Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates in Glenview, Ill. For suburban districts, average tenure hovers around three years, he says.
Superintendents often work 80-hour weeks and routinely have to juggle politics, policy, and management without generating negative headlines. With many capable bureaucrats choosing not to apply, short-term turnaround specialists are finding a niche, experts say.
The parallels to what’s happening in multiple High Desert school districts is pretty obvious, I think.
In the Hesperia Unified School District, the average tenure of a superintendent is four years, incidentally, although that number is obviously skewed by Hank Richardson’s one year term.
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