ARTicles

Don't Hurt the Children

2008-05-09T15:57:18Z

The trope of the cold-blooded critic was strongly challenged this week when some New York reviewers, on Broadway no less, went out of their way not to inflict unnecessary harm on a pair of young artists who were out of their depth. Not wanting to inflict harm on theatergoers, either, however, they did their job and unanimously proclaimed the pair's musical, "Glory Days," the fiasco it evidently was -- "was" being the operative word for a show whose opening night proved also to be its closing night.

"Glory Days," which transferred from Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va., used the youth of its creators, now all of 23 and 24, as a marketing hook. Critics like Clive Barnes in the New York Post didn't let that greenness temper their derision, but others saw it as a reason to take pity.

Here's Linda Winer in Newsday:

Show business is full of stories about talent recognized too little, too late.

Not as obviously sad, but potentially as destructive, is the less common case of too much, too soon.

But so it is with "Glory Days" ...

As a first effort by bright newcomers, the piece has youthful promise. As a grown-up offering in a Broadway house (not to mention at Broadway prices), this little-show-that-can't is so far in over its sweet head that we fear for its safety.

Eric Grode, in The New York Sun, blamed the adults: "Not many writers in their early 20s would turn down an offer to come to Broadway on the grounds that their material wasn't remotely ready yet. That's the job of more seasoned veterans, such as [director Eric] Schaeffer or the producers."

Ben Brantley, in The New York Times, was gentler, though no less clear:

I can see why the producers of "Glory Days" might have thought this was an auspicious moment for a big-time New York transfer.

Ultimately, though, they have done this little, hopeful show no favors by dragging it into a spotlight that invites close and unforgiving inspection. I do find it heartening that a pair of enthusiastic and gifted young artists have fallen in love with that beleaguered form, the musical, as a means of self-expression.

A raft of reviews unambiguously terrible enough to shutter the show immediately, yes, but the most responsible of them were not unkind.

The Quality of Mercy

2008-05-07T15:41:28Z

I don't know Joanna Connors, but she is a fellow arts journalist -- former theater and film critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer -- who has just published a deeply wrenching five-part series about the violent event that changed her life. In 1984, she was raped on the stage of a theater while on assignment. Her series explores the paths that brought both her and her assailant to that stage, and it's a tale of tragic loss and ultimate redemption. This is important work by one of our own. If you haven't already read it, please do. One word: mercy. Another word: grace.

Taking the leap: A new USC Annenberg Masters

2008-05-02T20:52:51Z

You heard it here folks, if you haven't heard it already.

USC Annenberg School for Communication is taking the audacious leap (because what other kind is ever worth taking?) and launching a nine-month Master's Program in ARTS JOURNALISM, as part of the new Specialized Journalism series.

The faculty is led by Tim Page, who until recently was the chief music critic at the Washington Post and who earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his "lucid and illuminating" music criticism. He's also written widely on film and literature for the Post and other publications. He's a fabulous teacher, if I dare say, and I have totally loved working with him to put this program together.

I'm also on the faculty. So, full disclosure: everything I write about this program is loaded with enthusiasm for it. We are working in dynamic partnership with USC's five arts schools (Cinematic Arts, Theatre, Architecture, Fine Arts and Music). The curriculum straddles the Journalism School and these five schools. What we're hoping is that students will exit the program pumped up with maximum integrity on digital media skills, entrepreneurial savvy and business tools, solid arts backgrounds and good -- really good -- journalism.

The deadline for applications is July 1, 2008. The program begins on August 11 and is open to mid-career arts journalists, recent graduates holding bachelors in journalism or the arts, and to artists. The mix of people and experiential nature of the program's thrust -- getting out into Los Angeles and behind-the-scene at artists' studios, into places known and unknown, mainstream and grassroots, for one-on-one encounters with arts and artists -- distinguishes this Master's program

Students will also participate in workshops, seminars and performances offered through USC Annenberg's established fellowship programs, the Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship in November and the NEA Institute in Theater and Musical Theater in April '09.

If you want more info, send me a comment or write to the Assistant Dean of Admissions, Allyson Hill allysonh@usc.edu

Blog mania

2008-04-30T03:37:04Z

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.

]]> We didn't come up with many answers at our lunchtime meeting. But I think it was healthy that we tackled the topic in the first place. The big unanswered question: How can you be expected to do the job you were doing pre-Internet while also filling the Web's insatiable appetite for fresh, constantly updated content? Is cloning legal?

Here's some of what we agreed upon:

Newsrooms need to realize that not all blogs are created equal. Some papers, in a panic, are telling reporters to throw anything they can online and call it a blog. Compilations of news updates, briefs, rewritten press releases and stuff that wasn't interesting enough to get into the print edition might be considered by some people to be blogs, but the time commitment is a lot different when you're producing original (and well-written) commentary.

Blogs take time. I'd love to see every editor in America go through the process of writing and tending to a blog for a week: posting daily, inserting appropriate links, uploading photographs, monitoring comments, responding to readers. Only then, I think, will managers really begin to realize how much time it can take to maintain a good blog. Just one complicated entry -- a roundup of recommended arts events for the weekend, say, rife with links, photos and commentary -- can take a good hour to put together. There's more to writing a blog than just throwing up a few sentences online. Bloggers know that good entries can require additional reporting, fact-checking and -- most important -- a distinctive tone. Sure, there are blogs out there consisting of stream-of-consciousness, rough-draft material. And they read like it.

Blogs need to be promoted. Cross-promotion between the print product and the online product is essential. Blogs can be used to expand on print stories or offer multimedia experiences for readers. Almost every arts/entertainment advance story written today can use a YouTube clip, for example. Often, for an arts feature, a newspaper's photography department will have three or four great shots but will only have room for one in the print edition, so use the rest online. If you have a great local film or theater fesitval in town but only have room to print the top winner, refer people to the Web site for the other awards. (And clips, too, if they're available.) One thing I do with my theater reviews for The Fresno Bee is run longer reviews online, then condense them in print. Cross-promoting can work the other way, too. If you have a great story in print, give a pitch for it online and give the link. Promotion on the paper's home page is essential, too. Often, blogs are buried and hard to find. I've seen newspaper Web sites that make you go on a Treasure Hunt just to find that day's arts stories, and even then you aren't always successful.

Think big. At my paper's blog last week, our pop music writer, Mike Osegueda, actually organized a last-minute music concert at a local venue, then promoted it virally online. All of us bloggers showed up and made a party of it.

Reader interaction is crucial. I'm often told by readers how much they appreciate that I (and my fellow features bloggers) take the time to moderate discussions, offer comments and answer questions. As you build a readership, the sense of community grows. That's one of the things that keeps regular readers coming back.

Alas, all these things take time. That's what our first meeting was all about. And it made me realize that I'd like to ask fellow arts-journalist bloggers (and others as well) reading this entry how other people out there are coping: How are people managing the time demands of this new blogging era? Have editors reduced expectations for number of print stories produced in order to accommodate more blogging? Is blogging something you do at the "end of the day" if you have time, or is it given first priority? Any tips for more efficient blogging? Are any arts-journalist bloggers out there being pulled from print duty entirely and told to blog till the cows come home?

And, finally, does anyone out there have any examples of good blogs doing good things but aren't slowly killing the people who write them?

When Art and Politics Don't Mix

2008-04-29T21:25:11Z

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.

Joshua Seftel's 'War, Inc.' (Not a Documentary)

2008-04-28T15:02:59Z

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.

EMP III

2008-04-24T01:48:26Z

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.

Embedded errors, facts and fictions

2008-04-22T20:39:57Z

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.

Shift Happens

2008-04-21T19:44:48Z

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.

Media-ting: how do you define editor?

2008-04-21T05:36:32Z

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)

EMP II

2008-04-19T23:43:55Z

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.

]]> After the Christian ethnomusicology talk I described in "EMP I" came "Ballads for Americans"--my own talk on John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change," musician-songwriter-journalist-philosophy prof Franklin Bruno on Paul Robeson's "Ballad for Americans," UCSB ethnomusicologist Katherine Meizel on Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA." Bruno is classic EMP material--as I see him (he might disagree), someone whose passion is music and whose day job is philosophy. But Meizel is too, because like most of the academics who come to the conference she makes an effort not to write like one--she's discovered that it's possible to make substantive arguments without couching them in jargon. Neither of these presentations was a knockout by me, but both were excellent even so--entertaining, too. Bruno fleshed out his point about how Robeson's reading of Earl Robinson's Popular Front cantata undermined "sentimental pluralism" with an amazing film clip in which Bing Crosby led a WWII diversity rally at Mount Rushmore, and Meizel brought her history of Greenwood's jingoistic perpetual hit, which has its roots in the pre-Iraq Mideast crisis of Beirut 1982, into the present, as represented by her great ethnomusicological passion, American Idol.

Typically, every lecture I saw for the rest of Friday was at least as good: my sister on the rock-critical legacy of the late Ellen Willis (she'd been so anxious, and she nailed it), Princeton's Daphne Brooks taking Amy Winehouse down in her non-English prof hat, journalist-bandleader Greg Tate delivering one of the three disquisitions on "blackies who rock" he'd spewed out in the previous--24? 12? 4? with Tate you never know--hours,
successive papers on the recruiting music of the US Army and the Iraqi militias and then one about US soldiers' iPods in which powerful content rendered stiff presentation irrelevant. But one struck me hardest, especially in an NAJP context, not because it was the best, but because of who it came from and what it covered.

If the name Regina Arnold seems familiar to NAJP-ers, that may be because Gina Arnold was once an NAJP fellow. Based in California--mostly in the Bay Area, with a stint at the LA Times--Arnold was one of our most dedicated chroniclers of American alt-rock in the '80s and '90s; I've taught the R.E.M. chapter of her Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana in both journalism and music history courses. It didn't help that she outlived the bohemia of her heart, but it also didn't help that the alt weeklies where Arnold wrote dried and tightened up. Anyway, now she's Regina, teaching and pursuing a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford. Her topic were two competing rock festivals that took place in San Jose in May of 1969. Arnold's aim here is to undercut the peace-and-love myth of Woodstock by looking at these slightly earlier events; by an odd coincidence, she could look back at journalistic accounts of Woodstock by both Ellen Willis and Tom Smucker and find that the myth had its naysayers at the time. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by Arnold's account of these forgotten events--one official festival, one free counter-festival.

For one thing, it's strange to look back four decades in your own life and realize that you've lived through history that requires and in fact resists research--I wasn't at these events, but I attended others now just as obscure. But I was also struck by where Arnold had to start--with a newspaper account (a daily, I believe), which was apparently written by a stringer who also
worked for the commercial festival. What was missed amid the peace-and-love kvelling and weird-freak color? A racial dynamic in which, as Arnold points out, African-Americans performed but didn't attend. Also, according to later reports, how well substantiated I don't know: seven assaults, four stabbings, 15 rape attempts, and one gang rape (by festival workers in a tepee). Arnold didn't mention the critical aspects of the coverage, which was presumably risible. As a believer in criticism, I wish she had. But clearly some reporting would have been a good idea as well. In 1969, the editors in question didn't do much to guarantee either. Due in part to the myth of Woodstock, they'd presumably do better today. But how much better? And for how much longer?

Of course, there'd certainly be bloggers, and that's certainly be better than nothing. But in most situations, it's useful to test such accounts against news media--paper, digital, who cares--with an investment in the myth of objectivity.

A Toiler in the Fields of the Cinematic Obscure

2008-04-17T22:33:25Z

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.

Look what he can do -- eLatino Wizard

2008-04-17T22:11:43Z

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.

Begin this Beguine! Fred and Eleanor

2008-04-17T00:17:08Z

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.

RSS Feed Worthy

2008-04-15T06:06:10Z

David Byrne's blog qualifies.

Don't you want to know what he's thinking? Inject his journal. No BS. He's about what he sees, including photographs of ugly beauty. He derives spiritual elation from the Renaissance Hotel in Dallas, for crying out loud. And so will you, when you see his pic. Byrne consistently takes the artist's point of view, because he is one. (Read his take on the BCAM opening in LA and on the Murakami show). Who said criticism is dead? His rapid mental shifts, seering eye, probing opinion and compulsive desires brand criticism as it thrives right now. But you are probably already RSS feeding...