Once upon a time, music publishing was a profoundly unsexy profession, the IRS of the industry. When a sample or interpolation needed clearing, some ink-stained wretch from one of the major publishers would amble out to furnish the papers and disappear back into the Xerox mines. Today, music publishers are the ones making headlines. Industry power brokers like L.A. Reid and Clive Davis have largely been supplanted by figures like Primary Wave CEO Larry Mestel or Merck Mercuriadis, president of the venture-capitalist upstart Hipgnosis Songs Fund. The jaw-dropping transactions—Bob Dylan to Universal’s publishing arm for somewhere north of $300 million; half of Neil Young’s catalog to Hipgnosis for $150 million; Stevie Nicks to Primary Wave for close to $100 million—come not from artist signings but catalog acquisitions.
In the current speculative boom, Primary Wave enjoys a 15-year head start. The founders—Mestel, along with Shukat and Adam Lowenberg—met at Arista Records in the late 1990s, when the industry was breaking all-time revenue records. In 2005, when the CD boom started to go bust amid widespread piracy, Mestel left Arista to found Primary Wave, inviting Shukat and Lowenberg to join him. In March of 2006, Primary Wave announced its first-ever acquisition: the catalog of Kurt Cobain, for which it shelled out $50 million.
Walk two kilometres east of the BBC office in Bangkok, and you pass more than 40 dispensaries, selling potent marijuana flower buds and all the paraphernalia needed to smoke them.
Travel in the opposite direction, to the famous backpacker hangout of Khao San Road, and there is an entire marijuana-themed shopping mall, Plantopia, its shops half-hidden behind the haze of smoke created by customers trying out the product. The website Weed in Thailand lists more than 4,000 businesses across the country selling cannabis and its derivatives.
And this is Thailand, where until last June you could be jailed for five years just for possessing marijuana, up to 15 years for producing it; where other drug offences get the death penalty. The pace of change has been breathtaking.
While marriage may be an endless, evolving equation of events and decisions that increase or decrease the original store of love, in the end, one hopes, there is still, indeed, love. Keane understands this. Her perceptive, generous observations and attention to her characters’ inner lives make for a book that is much, much more than the sum of its characters. She manages to find the extraordinary grace in our achingly ordinary world.
But what sets “Weyward” apart from other witchcraft-related fiction is Hart’s wise decision to also explore topics that require no belief in the dark arts: men’s fear of women and the violence it can generate, women’s affinity for their ancestors and the blessings bestowed by intimate contact with the natural world.
In her graduate-level writing class on plot and queer structure, Pittsburgh-raised writer and book editor Sarah Cypher poses the question: “In the dominant mode of storytelling, a protagonist knows what they want and overcomes obstacles to get it. But when we tell stories about bodies and desires that won’t conform to traditional structures, how can we work with a sense of risk and playfulness to reject normative, closed notions of how characters ‘should’ develop and how stories ‘should’ be structured?”
This openness to risk and playfulness — while rejecting conformity and literary traditions of character development and plot structure — is a grounding force in Ms. Cypher’s debut novel, “The Skin and Its Girl,” released this month by Ballantine Books.
Editor Jane Holloway has gathered together a rich assortment of writing — not just stories — from a wide selection of writers. All of the pieces revolve around book-related themes, many are set in book-lined worlds and most feature book-loving people. It's a bibliophile's delight.