April 2008 Archives

Your newspaper's print circulation is declining. The staff is smaller. Your newsroom managers are so obsessed with boosting Internet traffic that they're waking up in the middle of the night screaming about hit counts and RSS feeds. So what do they want the arts staff to do?

Blog.

It's happening at papers all over. Managers are discovering that blogs about entertainment and the arts can drive traffic. Ours, at The Fresno Bee, is doing well. Not only that, but well written blogs can draw in regional and national audiences, which hit-count-loving corporate types love.

At a Newspaper Guild gathering at a Fresno pizza place last week, we got together to talk about the B word. Blogs are all the rage, of course, and editors who a couple of years ago wouldn't have known a browser from a button hole are now fretting over Top 10 read-stories lists and figuring out how to work "Facebook" into every lifestyle section headline.

Here's an interesting, yet flawed connection between art and politics:

Roger Waters performed at the Coachella Music Festival over the weekend.  Against the wishes of local officials and without the consent of the presidential candidate himself, Waters commissioned a plane to drop tiny fliers on the crowd in support of Barack Obama.  Unfortunately, most of the confetti ended up on neighboring lawns in Indio and La Quinta, which drew the ire of residents who were forced to clean it up. 

"They're all over the place. It's littering. I've got all my homeowners calling me and complaining," said Bill Hays of the Desert Shores RV Resort to the Desert Sun.  "If I was going to vote for Obama, I wouldn't this morning if this is how he runs his campaign."

Well, that doesn't help anyone...except for maybe John McCain.

Former NAJP fellow Joshua Seftel, who's made a career as a documentarian, has brought a timely new comedy to the Tribeca Film Festival. "War, Inc.," co-written by and starring John Cusack, is screening all week, and S. James Snyder, a film critic for The New York Sun (where I work), is calling it one of the festival's not-to-be-missed events. Josh (NAJP 2002-03) is part of a Tribeca Talks panel discussion by directors and cinematographers tomorrow at 2 p.m. at the New School.

Rather than some illusory narrative, let's see if I can bullet-point the final two days of this year's EMP Pop Conference in Seattle. It would help if I knew how to make a bullet-point in this program (or any other). You'll have to settle for asterisks.

*Worst presentation: the first one I saw Saturday, by an academic who will remain nameless, though not genderless. His topic: "What Is the Sound of Revolution? The Auditory Imagination of the American Radical Left." His problem: indicated no knowledge of any difference in historical importance or political acuity between the Weathermen (dead wrong but smart and momentous), Timothy Leary (never a political figure even when he claimed to be), and the Manhattan pseudo-anarchists who briefly gathered under the rubric Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers (marginal publicity seekers without even minimal follow-through).

*Best New Orleans presentation I saw (I was moderating during Ned Sublette's, which my boss at Microsoft thought peachy): Alex Rawls, editor of NO music mag Offbeat, on Katrina protest songs, though he did forget BG's "Move Around."

*NAJP baton pass: Larry Blumenfeld on the struggle of New Orleans marching and Indian bands against Bush's malign neglect and Nagin's police (Larry has a Soros grant to study this stuff) to--quick, run upstairs to Level 3--Douglas Wolk on "The Ballad of the Green Berets" (Douglas specializes at EMP in obscure historical resuscitations).

*What I learned at the panel I moderated. 'Tis better for a young academic to deliver her postgraduatese as if it's a punk song than to humanize her language and be mild about it. Also: Tom Smucker hasn't altogether mastered PowerPoint. Saved by the tech.

*Journos under 30--established Nate Chinen and newbie Tal Rosenberg--made me care about Hawaiian balladry and an Israeli peace song that join hands in the transcendent schlock category. Special award to Rosenberg for best use of the first person at this conference. Supposed to be a no-no, young fella. Shouldn't be. No no-nos.

*Sometimes my old friend Greil Marcus describes music he regards as transcendent that I come away regarding as no such thing. His description of the incredibly bland Tift Merritt's careful rendition of Dylan's "Hard Rain" convinced me completely. He then trumped it with an equally convincing description of the Roots' furious "Masters of War," which he nailed to the wall by playing the music. We were spellbound.
*I hope somebody taped as-told-to king David Ritz's plenum disquisition on the spiritual satisfactions of an amanuensis. Completely off-the-cuff, or so it seemed, and I wasn't the only one who feared it would go on forever because start so anecdotally and indirectly. Finished right on time, with a flourish. Clearly the man has developed an instinct for long patterns of speech.

*The seminal cultural sociologist Richard A. Peterson, who got his Ph.D the same year I got my B.A. and whose 1997 Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity I'd just taught that Wednesday, did an intro for the panel he moderated on "Making Roots Music Pop Heroes" that cut even Barry Mazor's excellent Jimmie Rodgers talk.

I thought maybe this would be the year the academics took EMP over, quality-wise. But Peterson and John Vallier and a few others notwithstanding, the best stuff continued to come from journalists, many of the standouts professionally marginal. I became a journalist because I had concluded there was no better place for someone like me, having quickly learned after college that my talent for fiction was nonexistent, to do lasting work as a writer. Little did I suspect  that four decades later a semi-academic conference would be one of the best places to prove it.

Here's a link from my Rockwell Matters blog about how the Internet, especially, perpetuates errors once made, all drawing in a perhaps excessively self-referential way from my own experience as observer, or victim, of such errors.

This eyeopening, mindblowing info-loaded video, Did You Know 2.0,  is a good and vital tool that's making the rounds of professional journalism seminars on digital media. 

 

Have you ever heard the term "unmediated media"?

I hadn't until the Re/Covering Islam seminar at USC Annenberg on Friday, which really had nothing to do with the arts, but plenty to do with how Muslim culture and news is covered by the press. In his astute closing remarks, Professor Philip Seib -- who wrote The Global Journalist: News and Conscience in a World of Conflict -- used it to characterize the globalized discourse that's happening on the Web and giving us an unprecedented possibility for greater cultural cohesion.

I took him to mean by "unmediated media" the unedited posts by journalists and ordinary people contributing to the digital media explosion without mediation or editing. This started a scribbling, musing word-stacking game in my mind that went something like this:

If unmediated media is unedited media, then editors are mediators.

un-MEDIA-ted

to MEDIA-te

to MEDIA te

2 MEDIA te

2 MEDI 8

m EDItor = editor = mediator

Editors are very much needed for the practice of good journalism on the Internet. But they are a rarity. Perhaps we can create a new title for them that references digital media by calling them mediators. I don't know. What do you think? We'll design the business model later to pay them...the floor is open for discussion.

(The image is of a globe called WORK TOGETHER by artist Rion Stassi; www.coolglobes.com)

So here it is more than a week after the last EMP Pop Conference presentation I described in "EMP I"  and I thought I should at least augment my notes with my fading memories and record some of what I heard and observed. To start I want to emphasize that if there's an event of this sort in any other arts field I'd like to know about it. This year marked the first presentation by my sister, Georgia Christgau--a journalist turned high school English teacher who wrote rock criticism while earning her keep as a typesetter at Creem and The Soho Weekly News, as the Village Voice's night editor, editing at an ecology mag and a union newspaper and High Fidelity, then finally with the Board of Ed. Rock criticism is that kind of calling, which is one reason I'm proud of it. Two similar pals of mine also presented: my old friend Tom Smucker, who combined a decade-plus of occasional writing for the Voice with a job at the phone company, where he ended up editing a union newspaper too, and my young friend Jesse Fuchs, a game designer who tutors for a living. (Both killed in PowerPoint.) But the point of this preemptive digression is that my sister dragged my lawyer-by-day, trumpeter-by-night brother-in-law along. Like my wife and daughter before him, he arrived with a head full of Seattle tourist opportunities and just about never left the EMP building where the conference was held. There was just too much interesting stuff going on.

Here's a link to a Rockwell Matters blog entry in which I extol the virtues of a critic I've never met but who gives hope that quirky esoterica can thrive even in our most downscale print publications.

Jordi Ortega, USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2003, helped turn print into electronic pay dirt for a 2003 start-up independent tabloid, Latino Weekly, based in Los Angeles. And today it was announced that Latino Weekly''s electronic spin-off http://www.elatinoweekly.com/ (for which Ortega is video editor) is entering a global content partnership with Wizzard Media that will result in eLatino moving into broadcast. Articles in The Weekly and eLatinoweekly not only stress arts and entertainment, but they are published in English and Spanish.

Here's a quote you can take to the bank from the Wizzard Media press release:

The Latino market is poised for significant growth over the next two years. Recent in-house marketing research compiled by www.elatinoweekly.com shows that the U.S. Hispanic market is expected to reach purchasing power in the trillions of dollars by 2010. With almost 50% of U.S. Latinos under the age of 27, twice as many of them are moviegoers compared to any other population segment in the nation. In addition, 56% of U.S. based Latinos, 21% of South Americans and 18% in Central Americans are web users.

 

Get that Replay Finger ready! I promise you."Begin the Beguine" from Broadway Melody, Armenian music by Harout Pamboujian (no relation to Cole Porter). Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell as never, ever before seen.

So

What do you think of the Jeff Koons's Tulips? Too late.

They are going away. Victims of abuse. (These things are way bigger than you are, so I am not talking dirty, felonious abuse not matter how much the tulips look like something else.) I am also not breaking any news here. Suzanne Muchnic at the Los Angeles Times did. She produced a model, Class A arts report about art in public places and the rights people feel they have about touching, sitting upon and doing group shots in front of art that's unguarded and placed where it cries to be touched, sat upon and turned into a family Christmas card.

On Sunday, Koons's Tulips were, I don't want to say heavily guarded, because in this day and age when kalishnikovs or reasonable facsimiles are commonplace, a couple of guards with shiny badges and four ropes is not a big deal. BUT Tulips was surrounded this weekend like a President's coffin lying in state at the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM). I wanted to see them before they are whisked away later this week probably forever.

They are magnificent beauties. They make the plaza at BCAM, bookended by Chris Burden's Urban Light -- worth a trip to LA, I'm telling you -- and Charles Ray's Firetruck, which is also being removed from the site. Take a glimpse:

 

Don't you want to adjust your suspenders and leap on it??

EMP 2008 has been one of the most engrossing and exhausting ever, but Elijah Wald's presentation was so NAJP-relevant it deserves its own post. Wald has written for many periodicals but concentrates on books, which anyone who's ever signed a midlist contract can take as one more scary story about the economics of arts journalism. One of his recent books is about the narcocorridos--Mexican and Mexican-American story songs about the drug trade. Wald had another scary story about these story songs, and about arts journalism. I'll try to sum up. Anyone who wants to find out more can do so at or via elijahwald.com.

 

Briefly, it goes like this. In late 2006, a narcocorrido artist named Valentin Elizande was murdered, reputedly--on speculative hearsay evidence--in response to a grisly YouTube video that appeared to threaten a drug gang from a rival province, which was presumed to have finished him off in retaliation, though the video only appropriated his song and had nothing to do with him. Shortly thereafter, a Mexican singer named Zaida Pena was murdered along with two associates. She was not a narcocorrido singer, but one of her songs had a title that could be translated "shot to the head"--an idiom better rendered coup de grace, in this case the experience of seeing her man with another woman. A little later, five more Mexican musicians were killed, including four members of a techno-style band no one could imagine had anything to do with narcocorrdido.

 

No one, that is, except for all the newspaper editors, in Mexico as well as the US, who then assigned stories about how drug dealers--supposedly encouraged by violent YouTube entries, although Wald reports that YouTube has encouraged a move away from the narcocorrido trend because it can be more immediately responsive to the news events traditional corridos often dealt with--are killing off Mexican musicians. Essentially, Wald believes, this is nonsense--only one of these artists, Elizande, had anything remotely to do with the drug trade. He says most of the reporters who've consulted him as an expert, with Fox a significant exception, try to account for the objections he raises, doing a tightrope walk between rational analysis and the sensational story their overseers smell. Most of the stories run in the news hole, not the arts section. Most of them, he says, are the only coverage the newspapers in question ever give Mexican music, which accounts for 50 percent of all "Latin" music sales in the US.

 

Think maybe there's an arts story here? I wish. Wald reports that at a conference he recently attended, several academics thought they might write papers about how the drug trade was killing off Mexican musicians. They were disappointed when Wald proved a wet blanket.

 

Every April for seven years now, Seattle's Experience Music Project has sponsored the EMP Pop Conference, an extraordinary venture in criticism and scholarship that brings together academics and journalists specializing or sometimes just moonlighting in every kind of popular music. In seven years of nonstop presentations, for precisely one 20-minute period have I found nothing I cared to listen to at one of the three-become-four separate lecture sessions that run all day Friday and Saturday plus Sunday morning--there's always something valuable being said somewhere. At EMP, the journalists regularly kick ass. Not only do they write better than the academics, they have better ideas and sometimes even better research. This year's conference kicked off Thursday, April 10. There's still time for anybody nearby who cares about what arts journalists are capable of when they can presume a responsive audiences and no holds barred should come down whether he or she is a pop music fan or not. One way or another, most people are.
 

That said, the keynote can be dicey. In 2007, Jonathan Lethem killed, but Thursday's panel discussion of EMP's excellent current special exhibit, American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music, was, well, a panel discussion. Except for Quetzal's Martha Gonzalez, whose mild and rather whiny militance reminded me all too much of her band, I liked all the participants: Los Lobos's almost scholarly Louie Perez, Ozomatli's earnest Raul Pacheco, world's most sophisticated Elvis imitator El Vez, and curators Shannon Dudley and his wife, Marisol Berrios-Miranda, who elevates her warm-heartedness into a convincing intellectual position. But they all tended to wander around the key themes of the mutability of "Latin" identity and the failure of rock's blues-and-country-had-a-baby foundation myth to come to terms to the many different kinds of contributions Latinos have made to it anyway. You know how panel discussions are.

 

Friday, on the other hand, was nonstop. Except during a lunchtime panel discussion about youth activism, I was engrossed from nine in the morning till seven at night, with many of my favorite moments coming from academics for once. After concluding that I might not get full value from the young academic whose Bob Marley presentation would follow those of freelance scholar Garnette Cadogan (a brief history of slavery in popular music) and British academic Jason Toynbee (who had flown in from London via Amsterdam and whose body seemed to have shrunk visibly in the two hours between my encountering him in the hotel lobby and the meet-and-greet Thursday, yet who convinced me that morning that there were deep class implications in Marley songs I'd always passed over), I went upstairs to the tiny Demo Lab to see whether ethnomusicoligist-archivist-librarian John Vallier's "Ethnomusicology's Missionary Position" would unpack, as they say, the one-worlder evangelical zeal that weakens the discipline. Instead I learned that real Christian missionaries had for decades been studying "applied ethnomusicology" in order to write hymns--let's call them Christian propaganda songs--utilizing the scales and instrumentation of various indigenous peoples. That was mind-blowing enough. But at the end Vallier tied this, positively and negatively, to the zeal to which I just referred. A terrific piece of writing in a room that, when I arrived, was about to engage in a heated discussion of whether the graduate-school postmodernese in which the dreadful previous paper was written constituted a dialect of English whose effect and/or intent was exclusion. Vallier's academic prose sure wasn't.

 

Time to go to the Saturday session. I'll report more in the days to come.

 

 

When I was fresh out of college, I took a job at a non-arts related publication just to beef up the resume. Long story short: I was on the fast track and quickly found myself promoted to managing editor of a monthly magazine (what were they thinking?!!). Anyway, I ended up doing most of the work and getting none of the credit, and as a result, my boss tried to fire me. You know how that goes. After freaking out for a few hours, I had a lawyer friend send a stern warning to the publisher, along with a package of damning documents, a letter of resignation, and a request for a handsome severance. The PTB apologized and asked me to stay, but I left happily and began doing what I really wanted to do, which was to write about the arts. Best career move I ever made.

There wasn't anything particularly brave about that move - I was a kid with a beat-up car, a bunch of roommates, and few responsibilities beyond growing up, paying the rent, and staying out of trouble. But I do know that gut-wrenching feeling of rejection, that gnawing question of what to do next, so I have enormous respect for people who manage to take a bad situation and turn it into something better. We could all use a bit of inspiration from such stories, especially in these fragile times. And that's why I want to tell you about the Actors' Shakespeare Project, an artist-run troupe here in Boston. It's a tale that starts with rejection and ends with redemption.

Now for a bit of good news. In the midst of the terrible headlines about laid-off critics, slashed arts coverage and cutbacks in music education in the public schools, I figured I'd pass on some positive tidings for a change. I was excited recently to write a different kind of arts story: a piece about a fantastic new performing arts center opening smack in the middle of California's Central Valley.

And here's the most amazing thing: It belongs to a high school.

The Clovis Unified School District puts a premium on the arts, and officials here have planned for years on how to provide superior facilities for its students. After voters passed two bond measures, the district budgeted $17.5 million to build an arts center that houses a 750-seat concert hall and a 150-seat black box theater.

First, let me join Laura in sending three cheers to Ann Hornaday, who was among my class of NAJP fellows in the program's inaugural year and who has persevered in writing passionately about film all these years since. Bravo!

Congratulations also go out to my former Boston Globe colleague Mark Feeney, who won this year's Pulitzer for criticism. Mark, I'm told, gave a warm and gracious speech, in which he pointed out that all the finalists deserve praise. He shared credit with everyone, even taking the time to thank the librarians and copy editors, who are so important to the process but share little of the glory. One colleague who heard the speech told me that he hadn't felt this inspired since he first walked into the Globe building nearly two decades ago, noting that it reminded him of why he got into this business in the first place. So here's to all the winners and finalists -- and to the whole team of people who make it all possible.

That said, today's piece in the Globe had a most interesting quote from Globe publisher Steven P. Ainsely that bears repeating:

"In a time when so many newspapers are having to weigh difficult decisions about what coverage is important, I'm very proud that the Globe and its newsroom have continued to stress the importance of arts coverage in a community that values it so highly."

Those are encouraging words, and to be fair, for the most part they're true, especially when you consider the hemorrhaging going at papers all over the country. The Globe staff still includes two movie critics, two television critics, a classical music critic, two rock critics, a theater critic, an arts reporter, and a few generalists who fill in as needed. Coverage and staffing, though, is not what it was when I was on the staff, and the section continues to shrink in size. (The Monday and Wednesday sections were just combined with other sections, which cuts space significantly.) Jazz, world music, and, to some extent, dance have fallen by the wayside, and many of the city's smaller, but worthy arts organizations bemoan the loss of coverage. Still, it is encouraging to see the publisher's words in print and on the record. Let's hope they're not just words for Awards Day, and that they continue to ring  true in the unpredictable (and terrifying) future.

Amid the gloom that's permeated ARTicles of late, heartening news arrived this afternoon about a former NAJP fellow who's a genuine, working, staff critic at a major metro daily. The all-around excellent Ann Hornaday (NAJP 1994-95) was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, adding to the effervescence of a day when her paper, The Washington Post, walked away with a half-dozen Pulitzers. The five criticism jurors, among them former NAJP director Michael Janeway, lauded her "for her perceptive movie reviews and essays, reflecting solid research and an easy, engaging style."

Dance criticism has taken a big hit recently.  Hard on the heels of Deborah Jowitt's sudden departure from The Village Voice, The Orange County Register has lost dance critic and former NAJP fellow Laura Bleiberg.  Apparently, Bleiberg was the last full-time newspaper dance critic in all of California.  

On The OC Register's Arts Blog, Bleiberg admits that she is not sure if the Register will replace her with another staff dance critic.  She is leaving the Register to join South Coast Repertory as Associate Director of Development.

Another former NAJP fellow Valerie Takahama also left The Register in August, after working there 19 years.  She says part of the reason she was let go was that "they felt they didn't need an architecture writer anymore."

Criticism, that is. At least criticism for print outlets, if you still cherish the hope of earning a living out of it. It's hard to know what to make of the recent onslaught of firings and buyouts and forced transformations of staffers into freelancers. (See here for my musings in my own blog on Deborah Jowitt, the recently so transformed dance critic of the Village Voice.)

Yes, one can pin one's long-range hopes on the web, but that doesn't pay the rent today. One possible result of all this will be the inexorable evolution, or devolution, of criticism from a profession into an avocation. The old connotations of the word "amateur," meaning a lover of the arts, or a gentleman lover of the arts, will be reborn.

Perhaps this will have the advantage of winnowing the field to true arts lovers, as opposed to careerists. All kinds of people seem to find the time to post their thoughts on the web, without being limited to well-off idlers. Yet the class implications of this transition are disturbing. If the rich have the most time and energy to blog, then our view of the arts will be skewed. Or criticism will become the preserve of geriatric retirees. I speak from knowledge on all these points.

Oh, well. The arts will survive, and so will criticism, but maybe in a form hard to recognize from the perspective of newspaper criticism as we have known it over the last century.