Categories
GUEST EDITOR

Lou Barlow’s Good Things: “The Sun” Magazine

BarlowlogoLo-fi legend Lou Barlow has played in three of the most influential indie bands of the last quarter century: Dinosaur Jr, Sebadoh and the Folk Implosion. And while he’s still recording and touring with the reunited Dinosaur (whose Farm was released this summer), his main concern these days is his solo career. Goodnight Unknown (Merge), Barlow’s second album under his own name and the follow-up to 2005’s Emoh, is his best collection of songs in a decade and features guests including Dale Crover (Melvins) and Lisa Germano. Barlow also recently joined Lara Meyerratken in Ben Lee’s new incarnation of Noise Addict, which released It Was Never About The Audience for free last month. Barlow (backed by the Missingmen) is opening for Dinosaur throughout October and part of November. As if that double duty wasn’t enough, Barlow will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.

402_cover403_cover405_coverBarlow: A man named Sy Safransky started The Sun, an ad-free, black-and-white magazine, back in the early ’70s. It appears to be a hippie rag. My wife groaned when I got a subscription to it. She had a specific beef with Safransky’s end-of-the-issue “Notebook,” which read like anyone’s journal, like my journal, which is awful, awkward, self-pitying crap. But what Safransky has done is set the tone for a very approachable, unpretentious magazine. It’s left-leaning, opens with an interview with some unknown-to-me, counter-cultural hero who has spent their life changing the world. (These make me feel like a lazy piece of shit.). But much of the content is apolitical. A succession of short stories and poems intercut with beautiful black-and-white photographs follows. The stories all seem to be autobiographical, by non-celebrity writers, and in general, I find them more readable than similar-length pieces in, say, The New Yorker (the only other mag I read regularly, truth be told). The center piece of every Sun is the “Readers Write” section, where stories are elicited and collected under a different theme each month (coffee, leaving home, blood, etc.); what follows are 10 or so brief recollections from “real” people that are sometimes only tangentially related to the theme. I get the impression that most are stories people have waited their whole lives to tell or have been telling their whole lives. It can be intense. This part eventually won my wife over to The Sun, as she now admits. Each issue does have an underlying theme, summed up nicely by the collection of quotes on the final page called “Sunbeams.” The literary world makes me nervous. It seems to be full of intellectual bullying and ego. As you can see, I can’t properly construct a sentence. The Sun has slowly warmed me (hah! get it? sun, warm?) to the idea of writing as redemptive process accessible to anyone. This might seem ridiculous coming from a song-“writer.” But there it is.

One reply on “Lou Barlow’s Good Things: “The Sun” Magazine”

Comments are closed.