February 2009 Archives

An email written by Tobi Tobias just ping-ed into my in-box, announcing that she and all other arts freelancers have been let go from Bloomberg News. Will we get used to this decimation of critics? What are we supposed to do? Tobias doesn't think we ought to take it no more, which got me thinking about a class I attended of director Peter Sellar's earlier this week, "Art as Moral Action" at UCLA. His guest speaker was Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA. Josh told the story of a lucky friend of his who had a 15-minute audience with Obama in which she pressed for changes of a nature I really can't remember. But the point is this: At the end of the 15 minutes, Obama asked her, "Where's the movement? Show me the movement. If you have a movement behind you, then I can make good decisions."

Hmmmmm. Tobias is lighting the match. Are journalists ready to pull together, get organized and march on Washington, raise money through social media mechanisms cent-by-cent and build a narrative? Is this possible? Journalists are by nature fractious, doubtful and independent. Followers we ain't, but the stakes are high.

Tobias writes: "I wish we could, as a group, find more ways to do the work we love without taking a vow of poverty."

Poverty is real; she is not kidding. Can we get active as a group and find smart, creative ways to continue writing about the art we see, the art we hear, the art that asks questions and keeps our democractic values sharp and attuned -- and be paid? Why does this matter?

Think about it. What will the artists do? What are they doing now? Does informed criticism matter?

I think a good start is sharing the different economic models you come across that are working. Let's start pooling info and also looking at how theaters, music groups, dance companies, musuems and individual artists are adjusting to this new reality. Are there partnerships? Do critics and artists care enough to come together at least to talk? Most artists have been dealing with poverty and lack of recognition and respect far longer than the critics. It wouldn't be the first time we have learned from them -- in fact, that is the way we are most comfortable. Isn't it?

Start the movement, then maybe we can make good decisions.

Bluff or real threat?

Hearst Corp says it will close the San Francisco Chronicle if it can't get enough buyouts of its 1,500 employees.

If that happens, it would leave San Francisco with no paid daily newspaper and make it the largest US city to lose its main paper.

Just when it feels like things are opening up a little comes the email I got a week ago from someone I knew through my long support of the trouble-making South African poet-musician Mzwakhe Mbuli. It reports that the British Home Office, citing border security, has set up a new series of requirements involving sponsor indemnification, rigid schedules, and impossible levels of capitalization, is effectively banning any but the best-fixed artists from outside the EU from exhibiting or performing in Britain.

In the American music world, this has been a battle for decades. Initially it meant in practice that conservative immigration officials kept Americans from seeing music said officials deemed dangerous--not for their political content, usually, but as sources of mongrelization, cross-fertilization, and other cultural contagion. Since 9/11 it's gotten worse. Taking Cuba out of the equation for simplicity's sake, the idea ought to be to allow American audiences to experience Islamic music, which is invariably either secular or peacefully devotional. The audience will obviously consist primarily of one-worlder liberals and immigrants hungry for a taste of home, who in truth could stand to rub shoulders more than they do. But there will be spillover, and more Americans will be able to look a little deeper into a few Muslims' individual humanity. Unless you're set on jihad American-style, you'd have to call this a good thing. But it's been hard to bring off. Last spring key principals from a troupe of Belizean women failed to pass muster with immigration and the concert was greatly diminished as a result. This is the kind of thing an Obama administration can change fast--assuming larger immigration issues don't prove too distracting, and also assuming the money to make the always marginal business of international touring will still be there.

No doubt reflecting the increased xenophobia of a place that's seen more bomb attacks than we have, the new Labour government in Britain has taken another tack. Now I understand why Les Amazones de Guinee, a band (not a jazz band) comprising female militia members that's been together for more than 40 years and put out one of my favorite albums of 2008, never managed their promised summer tour. I signed the petition you'll find on the jump immediately about a week ago and wanted to spread the word immediately as well. I was asked to wait until the initial splash described below had played out. This is worth spreading the word about. Do what you can.

Dear Signatory,

Hopefully you will have seen The Observer today and the excellent news coverage the campaign has received.  The petition letter to the editor has also been published.  You can view these on-line:

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/22/immigration-arts-gormley>

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2009/feb/22/9>

This is a fantastic start, the list of signatories is growing and we're sending media releases to the wider press, radio and TV today.  You can view the list of signatories on the petition website:  http://www.petitiononline.com/MCvisit/petition.html

How can you help now?

The civil liberties group, The Manifesto Club along with myself and other arts groups are working hard to get the message across that these parochial and suspicious regulations need to be reconsidered, and re-affirm the vital contribution made by global artists and scholars to UK cultural and intellectual life.  As signatories who launched the petition, you can do 3 things:

1. Encourage others to sign the petition
2. Gather more testimonies, news stories and case studies
3. Put pressure politically on the Home Office and lobby the DCMS to do so
   

A public meeting will be held in late spring/early summer to consolidate, discuss and co-ordinate further action on this issue.  We are looking for a space to host this meeting, so any offers would be greatly appreciated.

The campaign website is up, containing further information and next steps of action: <http://www.manifestoclub.com/visitingartists>

Thank you for your support and please continue to spread the word.



--
Manick Govinda
Head of Artists Advisory Services & Artists' Producer
Artsadmin
Toynbee Studios
28 Commercial Street
London E1 6AB

Tel: 020 7247 5102
Fax: 020 7247 5103
Email: manick@artsadmin.co.uk
www.artsadmin.co.uk

William Triplett's piece on Michael Kaiser in today's Wall Street Journal is a must-read for arts journalists. The Kennedy Center chief discusses his initiative, "Arts in Crisis," as it begins to provide counsel and support to scores of beleaguered arts organizations across the country, but Kaiser's expertise transcends arts management. Like all skilled managers, he grasps fundamental concepts that elude bad managers in every industry. Talking about arts organizations' approach to cost cutting, he could easily be talking about the print media:

"When there are economic challenges, the first things that staffs and boards cut are programming and marketing, and that's the worst thing you can do," he says. "You're guaranteeing yourself you'll have less revenue next year, and that's how sick organizations get really sick. That's why I'm so nervous right now and why I'm doing this."

Cutting budget is obviously necessary, "but where you cut is crucial," he continues. "I cut the free coffee for staff here. It saved us $30,000 a year. I've also cut back on staff travel, including my own. I've never met a budget I couldn't cut, in any organization, no matter how small. But if you start by cutting the programming, rather than everything in the back of the house, you're signing a warrant that everything will just get worse, worse, worse."

This essay was written by NAJP member and NPR reporter Laura Sydell:

The election season is over. We have a new President. For the moment, the emails about Barack Hussein Obama's links to radical Islamic groups have stopped showing up in my inbox. But, throughout the election I heard regularly from a relative who was convinced that Obama was the Manchurian Muslim Candidate hiding his real anti-American beliefs. She sent me articles via email several times a week. They had bylines and layouts that made them look legitimate. My relative even sent one article she claimed had been written by Maureen Dowd; it traced some of Obama's campaign funding to banks in Saudi Arabia and other middle eastern nations. As soon as I read the piece I questioned its source. It had nothing of Dowd's usual biting satiric style. So, I checked the New York Times website and there was no such column. My relative backed away from the article but said she was still convinced Obama was getting money from radical Islamists.

When she sent me an article claiming that the school in Indonesia where Obama studied as a child was actually an extremist Madrassa I sent her an article right back from the Associated Press that had done investigation into these claims and proved them false. She still suspected there was something to it.

I had many fights with this relative. I pointed out that her sources were far right web sites. I told her she might want to get her information from more main stream outlets like the New York Times and the Associated Press she told me that they were biased and didn't report the truth. What is especially troubling to me is that this particular relative is a retired lawyer who was at the top of her class in school. She had the ability to be a first class thinker. However, she was a disgruntled Clinton supporter who had been offended by the Senator's treatment in the media. She could site Tucker Carlson's comment about how he crossed his legs every time he heard Hillary Clinton or the media's microscopic attention to Clinton's teary eyed comments in New Hampshire as proof that that main stream was willing to over look the truth to push the candidate they liked.

As a professional reporter who really does care about facts I found it hard to stomach my aunt's incessant critique of my colleagues...

Seth Godin is a marketer who takes a very pragmatic view of how the world works. If you don't know his blog, I recommend it.

In recent weeks as it is more and more obvious that journalism as we have known it is being dismantled, there's been an uptick in the number of people out proposing ways to "save" journalism. Getting a lot of buzz last week was former Time magazine chief Walter Isaacson's idea that micro-payments are what newspapers need to survive. The idea (an old one) is that news organizations would charge a penny or two each time you read an article. Then Steve Brill declared that the "free" model was killing news and that it is suicide to continue this way. His solution? Newspapers should just charge for their content.

Uh-huh. One problem. Pay-for-content has left the station and it's never coming back. The crux of Isaacson's and Brill's arguments seem to be: "Okay, we know pay-per-view hasn't worked before. But now that all these traditional news organizations are going out of business, we have to suspend human nature (the desire of people to get things for free) and have them pony up money."

I'm afraid that at this point, "saving" traditional journalism's business model isn't likely. The time to start doing that was 10 years ago, and it might have still been possible five years ago. But not now.

So back to Seth. The thing that follows today's journalism isn't likely to be an incremental change but a re-conception of it. Hopefully one that incorporates the best of traditional journalistic values, but is  better.

The telephone destroyed the telegraph.

Here's why people liked the telegraph: It was universal, inexpensive, asynchronous and it left a paper trail.

The telephone offered not one of these four attributes. It was far from universal, and if someone didn't have a phone, you couldn't call them. It was expensive, even before someone called you. It was synchronous--if you weren't home, no call got made. And of course, there was no paper trail.

If the telephone guys had set out to make something that did what the telegraph does, but better, they probably would have failed. Instead, they solved a different problem, in such an overwhelmingly useful way that they eliminated the feature set of the competition.

The list of examples is long (YouTube vs. television, web vs. newspapers, Nike vs. sneakers). Your turn.

Let's let Dave Davies of NPR's "Fresh Air" tell us about yesterday's big win for the eloquent Francis Davis, who was an NAJP senior fellow in 2001-02. If you click here, then click on "Listen Now," you'll find the bit about Francis at the six-minute mark.

With journalism hemorrhaging as badly as it is -- clearly, it's bleeding from all orifices now -- it's a little specious to single film critics out as "especially vulnerable to layoffs." But that wording by WNYC aside, the station's report about one strapped, freelance movie reviewer's successful fund-raising strategy for getting to Cannes is worth a listen. Turns out what works for Wonkette can work for arts journalists, too.

My first ever live blog. I guess this should make me feel like real blogger, but in fact it makes me feel like a real salary slave. All over the country, surviving rock critics ("pop" critics, "music" critics) are satisfying their employers' notions of with-it-ness by blow-by-blowing this famously inept event, chronicling the desperate antics of an industry that was proving how ahead of the curve it is by being scared shitless of the economy years ago. Insofar as I know who was nominated, I'm rooting for M.I.A., nine months pregnant exactly this evening, and Lil Wayne. As always, I expect nothing, including any real-time readers. Just practicing. I do not promise to stay awake for the whole thing, though.

8:06 R&b album: three dogs, including sentimental favorite Jennifer Hudson. One old-school fave: Al Green. One unexpected minor masterpiece: Raphael Saadiq. Hudson won, natch, thanked her family on earth and in heaven, as was certainly her right. Now I feel compelled to note the badness of her album in print.

8:09 Jokes and smarm by the Rock. Jokes worse than smarm.

8:11 Ditto by Justin Timberlake, who I still root for. General store line falls Completely Flat.

8:12 Al Green and JT duet on Let's Stay Together. Both sound terrific--improvising, interacting. Al looks like he's gained about 30 pounds. As long as his heart holds up, who cares? Later: my daughter noticed Keith Urban on guitar. I don't actually know what Keith Urban looks like.

8:20  Coldplay joined by Jay-Z, who isn't on Coldplay's label or anything, but does have an album coming out. They're all on the sinking ship together.

As I hope I've made clear, I'm a skeptic in the matter of governmental support of the arts. That does not mean, however, that I'm a skeptic in the matter of whether artists work for a living--many of them work very hard for very little. So when Josh Marshall of Talking Points Media posted the Tom Coburn amendment referred to below--he was especially piqued by language forbidding "rotating pastel lights" that apparently had its roots in a beautification project at the Center for Disease Control--I thought about reprinting it here. And now comes the letter I've copied, which comes to me from world-class freelance musicologist Ned Sublette, who's ordinarily way too left-wing for such trivia. Coburn's ridiculous amendment just passed big-time with support from the likes of Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Amy Klobuchar, and Russ Feingold. I would advise residents of New York, California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin to remind their oh so liberal senators that artists do in fact work for a living. I agree with Obama--the essential should not be sacrificed to the perfect. Nevertheless, this sucks.

Our voices need to be heard.  Please read below and act.  You can also go to http://capwiz.com/artsusa/issues/alert/?alertid=12612041, sign and press send! Details after the jump...

Last May in this blog I tried to put the complaints of arts journalists in perspective by recalling the situation in Zimbabwe, where journalists are being killed by Robert Mugabe's thugs and one reporting on an anti-Mugabe arts festival in Harare asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.

In December I fretted here about excessive whining from arts journalists as counter-productive to any kind of positive message that might win friends and grants and jobs. Now, with the economy in meltdown and print journalism itself under seige, arts journalists can at least see their dire fate as part of a larger domestic problem.

But what about Russia? Now, they have a serious journalism problem, and it isn't just economic. Many of the leading newpapers and television stations have been nationalized, which may save jobs but which sanitizes coverage. Four reporters from the independent Novaya Gazeta, which specializes in investigative stories, have been killed in the last eight years, the most recent on Jan. 19. The best known was Anna Politkovskaya, in 2006. Some 16 journalists overall have been murdered throughout Russia in this decade.

Who's doing it? Gangsters? Oligarchs? Ex-KGB operatives out of the Kremlin? The Kremlin has blamed Chechens for Politkovskaya's shooting, but others claim that's a crude cover-up.

So far, at least, such a fate has not befallen arts journalists, there or here; nobody has put a hit on Don Rosenberg. Not to make light of his situation or that of anyone who has been laid off or who worries that the axe might fall at any minute. The financial and psychological pain, not to speak of anger and old-fashioned professional pride, must be terrible.

But being shot down on a main street in your home town by someone with a pistol equipped with a silencer is worse. Especially when there seems no way to determine who is guilty and to being them to justice. 

I wrote Sasha Frere-Jones to congratulate him on his Beyonce column. One of his best. Was pleased to note his skeptical stance in re the president's dancing (see my inauguration post) and recommended the deletion of one adjective from the soy sauce joke. He wrote back to agree about the latter and added: "Doing an Ask The Author about this piece on the newyorker site. Maybe you can direct some young folks there:

www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2009/02/questions-for-frere-jones.html

I can't vouch for the youth of my readership here, but thought I'd pass the request along. Take a look at the column in any case. Exemplary. Though I would have found room for a sentence about "America the Beautiful." The way Mitch McConnell and Jim DeMint are going, we need all the reminders we can get.

My apologies for the title if it's bad Spanish--it's the only response I got to an email I sent out to four friends asking how to say "public service announcement" in that increasingly important language. Let me make clear as well that the list that follows should not be taken as hand-wringing or guilt-tripping about what I or you are missing. Romantic ballads in Spanish almost invariably embrace a floridity I can't imagine enjoying in any language, and in general, I get more out of pop songs when I know what their lyrics are, which is pretty hard in a language you don't understand. There may be a find or two for me in the list, but it's not like I think I've just discovered a new continent. Adjudging me a world kind of guy, Rolling Stone once assigned me a Juanes album; I liked it so little the project was abandoned by mutual agreement.

Nevertheless, while scrolling through 51 pages of albums certified gold, platinum, and (the increasingly rare) multiplatinum since 2006, I could not but be struck by the large number of newly certified "Latin" artists I'd barely or never heard of. I was aware of the growth of this audience/market, of course, and suspect that some of these artists are being welcomed into the RIAA fold retroactively. But I thought a simple naming of 91 names might make these truisms more vivid for you, as writing them down did for me. Names marked with an * are ones whose music I've consciously heard (jukeboxes in Puerto Rico have surely introduced me to others unawares); those with an !! are artists whose number of albums or platinum multiples suggest that they are BIG. Pardons in advance for the inevitable transcription errors. Ahem:

Pepe Aguilar, Akwid*, Alacranes Musicales!!, Alegres de la Sierra, Alexis and Fido, Ricardo Arjona, Aventura!!, Hector Bambino, Ana Barbara, Bebe, Graciela Beltran, Bety y Sus Canaris, Miguel Bose, Bronco, Cafe Tacuba*, Calle 13*, Cristian Castro, Manu Chao*, Chayanne!!, Conjunto Atardecer, Conjunto Primavera!!, Celia Cruz*, Daddy Yankee*, Dareyes dela Sierra, Oscar de la Hoya (huh?), Duelo, Tito El Bambino, El Patro de Sinoloa, Valentin Elizalde, Vicente Fernandez!!, Luis Fonsi, Ana Gabriel*, Kany Garcia, Grupo Innovacion, Jean Luis Guerra*, Enrique Iglesias*, India*, Inquietos de Norte, Ivy Queen (I think--they're on Univision, a Latin label), Jaunes*, K-Paz de la Sierra, La 5A Estaction, La Arrolladora Banda El Lima, La Factoria, Hector Lavoe*, Los Creadorez, Los Cuates de Sinaloa, Los Enanitos Verdes, Los Originales de San Juan, Los Pikadientes de Caborca, Los Primos de Durango, Los Rieleros del Norte, Los Super Reyes, Los Temerarios, Los Tigres del Norte*!!, Los Tucanes de Tijuana, Eddy Lover, Mana*!!, Victor Manuelle, Ricky Martin*, Mercyme, Luis Miguel!!, Montez de Durango, Tito Nieves, Don Omar, Yolanda Perez, Pesado, Rakim y Keny, RBD, Reik, Diana Reyes, Jenni Rivera, Lupilla Rivera, RKM y Ken-y (cf. Rakim y Keny just above), Paulina Rubio*, Adan Salina Sanchez, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Alejandro Sanz*, Joan Sebastian, Marco Antonio Solis!!, Olga Tanon, Tierra Cali, Gloria Trevi, Tropical Fantasia, Sergio Vega, Julieta Venegas, Alicia Villareal, Wisin y Yanda!!, Xtreme, Yuridia.


Like I said, no guilt-trip intended. No Enjoy the Culture of Your Neighbors camp counselor BS. Still, isn't there a story here? The almost nonexistent coverage of this music in the English-language press has long been a source of understandable ire among its fans. An informative overview of a world that for many white American Anglophones is hidden in plain hearing would be such a boon. I'd love to read a simple annotated list saying in a sentence or two who these artists are, where they're from, and in the most general way what they sound like. If a few have outreach potential, great. Me, I've never gotten Cafe Tacuba after too much trying (even attended a concert once), but I'm a pretty big Manu Chao fan, and you can find Calle 13 in the Consumer Guide that just went up. So more would be nice--more usually is. And if the more is just knowledge, not music, so be it. Soembody do this piece.