Editor's Note: December 2011

by Brian K. Mahoney, November 30, 2011

Looking back at 2011, two trends jump out right away: 1) Things are getting worse. 2) Things are getting better. The economy doesn’t seem to be able to rebound to pre-2008 levels. (But maybe we need to rethink capitalism anyway.) Our political leaders can’t agree on much of anything, from whether and how to increase our debt burden to how we might reduce it. (Meanwhile, out in streets, the 99 percent are inventing new approaches to decision-making.)

If you stare too long into the bright sun of the media, you’ll go blind with indifference. As it ever was, it is still people who make the change, one pepper-sprayed person in Zuccotti Park or UC Davis at a time. In 2011, Chronogram was full of stories about passionate people grappling with how to live: how to change the world, how to accept what we cannot change, how to be good, how to act with integrity, how to be healthy, how to be funny, how to work and how to play, and always attempting to explain the central organizing existential question: Why do we live in the Hudson Valley?

Below are some highlights from our coverage in 2011 that attempt to answer that query, albeit in roundabout ways.

Singular Vision

In 2010, Jaimy Gordon’s novel of the racetrack, Lord of Misrule, was the long shot winner of the National Book Award. Gordon beat out authors with more familiar names from publishing houses like Knopf and Norton. Her publisher? Kingston-based McPherson & Company, a one-man operation run by Bruce McPherson, a guy who publishes physically beautiful books by little-known authors that he totally believes in. McPherson is living his idiosyncratic dream, though as Books editor Nina Shengold captured in her January profile, it’s not all champagne and glitzy book launches: “There are hundreds more cartons [of books] on the back porch and stacked like cordwood under heavy weight tarps in the back yard. ‘This will dispel all illusions,’ McPherson says.”

For Pete’s Sake

Of course, with Pete Seeger—profiled by Music editor Peter Aaron in February—it’s never for his sake, always someone, or something else: a cause, a movement, an idea. Seeger’s music and environmental activism are textbook examples of how change is effected in the world, one moment of integrity after another after another. (In 2011, Peter Aaron also bagged some other big-name musical game in the Hudson Valley, penning pieces on jazz elder statesman Sonny Rollins and Kate Pierson of the B-52s.

Also in February, I interviewed Helena Norbert-Hodge, whose film The Economics of Happiness explores the social and psychological costs of our globalization-driven consumer culture. When asked how she thought globalization might change course if the leaders are profiting from the perpetuation of the system, Norbert-Hodge made a remarkably prescient remark, given the Occupy Wall Street protest to come: “I don’t think we’ll be able to persuade the political leaders and CEOs. We need to talk with the 99 percent. The 99 percent have the power if they choose to exercise it.”