CommentsView From the Top
Editor's Note
For monthly publications, December is generally the time to reflect back on the past year and make some overarching statement of conclusion—good, bad, or indifferent; hopeful or hopeless—leaving January open for prognostications on the upcoming annum. Well, consider me late. November was very much a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of month—not the best frame of mind for contemplation—and its abrupt end caught me quite by surprise. (Why did I think there were 32 days in November?) Now, as we go to print in this darkest hour of the year, hard on the winter solstice, I’m ready to look back on 2007 with the requisite level of repose and clarity.
To immodestly paraphrase Martin Luther King: the arc of Chronogram is long, but it bends toward greatness. Poring over the past 12 issues fanned out on my desk, I see the work of hundreds of people (literally), who believed in this ongoing project enough to lend their considerable talents to its execution. Thanks is not enough.
And now, a brief stroll through some of my favorite moments from
Chronogram in 2007.
January We feature phenomenal local art on the cover each month, so when our creative director, David Perry, told me he wanted to design a calendar for the cover of the January issue—something he thought would be “simple, elegant, and likely to end up under a magnet on the refrigerator”—my first thought was: What? Did the Hudson Valley just run out of artists? David proved himself right, however, and the cover became a icon, making it to more than a few fridges and bulletin boards.
February As music editor Peter Aaron noted in his profile of Adam Snyder, Kingston is not a town known to inspire many songs. Snyder, who grew up in Kingston, decided to record a whole album about the city, This Town Will Get Its Due. Its songs were deftly described by Peter, whose wide ranging taste in music make him as comfortable writing about singer/songwriters as jazz musicians or classical composers—all subjects he covered for the magazine in ‘07. An added bonus to the feature was a video of Snyder performing and talking about his music, shot exclusively for our website by videographer Brian Branigan.
March Chris Ferraro worked closely with senior editor Lorna Tychostup on “Conduct Unbecoming,” an examination of the legal discrimination against homosexuals that’s tolerated in the US military.The article also showcased one of my favorite illustrations of the past year, by Jason Cring, a witty take on the Uncle Sam recruitment posters of old.