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I call Deep Water an on-going experiment. “Experiment,” in this case, doesn’t refer to the scientific process for testing a hypothesis as much as it refers to the kind of idiot curiosity that urges a match to a combustible substance.
Face it, magnesium is just cool, the way it burns bright white; the cone of granules begs the spark.
Going back to Issue the First of the printed magazine, you can see our cast shadow from this flame in the “Thunderclap Toad” composition. I love that picture, but nothing evidences the anthropology of idiot curiosity like “Thunderclap Toad” or the “Page of 23s.”
If you’re not careful, the incendiary moment becomes the purpose of the exercise, instead of the action necessary to produce the desired outcome. Deep Water has always been an attempt to produce a magazine of thoughts about music, culture, and ideas without commercial constraints determining or limiting editorial decisions.
The lack of constraints enabled, even spurred, us to create “Thunderclap Toad.” And, while I still love the moment that created that image and the image itself, it represents the confusion between means and purpose. By Issue the Third, we had gained that sense of restraint that balances the difference between what we can do and what we ought to do.
We applied that sense with the previous Deep Water Acres web site, which is now the archive site. That web site was a place to echo printed content and draw attention to the magazine. The opportunity we captured orbited the problem of our global audience. We had a lot of readers, only they were scattered though the world in small discrete granules of readership. The question was how to unite them into a nicely shaped cone suitable for alighting?
The time to experiment with assembling a quality publication using desktop publishing is long over. We looked to Deep Water Acres to become the magazine.
As we worked to evolve Deep Water, we knew with increasing certainty that the old website would not suffice to replace the printed magazine. We had practical concerns around making content contribution easier to a broader community of authors. We wanted a forum to transform commentary into dialog and review into discourse. We wanted to provide a resource to download and share music. We knew that we needed a blog to transform Deep Water into dialog.
Thanks to Nat, we now have that capability. Deep Water Acres is no longer a community of readers, but rather a community of interest
That community of interest forms a boundless experiment in front of us. With it we all have the same temptations we faced in Issue the First. Is a podcast just a different rendering of Thunderclap toad? Is having the ability to contribute thoughts on music, culture and ideas a justification for any given contribution?
I’m excited to see where this goes, applying innovations and ingenuity to discourse without constraints beyond the agreed-to etiquette of informed consent. So what if we burn off our eyebrows? I love the bright flame of this “experiment.”
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