Recently by Robert Christgau

Had lunch today with Nancy Hanrahan, who for seven years in the '80s and '90s booked the New Jazz At the Public series at the Public Theater in Manhattan. She's now a tenured professor of sociology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who hopes to write a book about the decline of criticism in the internet age and was interviewing me to that end. A lot was said, including one point I'll get to that relates to Tom Moon's recent comment on his own less recent post--Plagens and me are in there too, and the back-and-forth seems of interest to me. But the main thing I want to report responds to Plagens's complaint that all we do at the NAJP is this blog. Hanrahan reads ARTicles regularly, but not as often as she would like. She thinks it's tremendously valuable, the only forum she's aware of for the problem that so interests her, and wanted to know why it's online-only--she'd read it more often if she could hold it in her hands. I replied with what seems to me the self-evident point that there was no way to make such a specialized publication economically viable, and nothing in her response persuades me in the slightest that I'm wrong. Nevertheless, especially coming from a sociologist I thought her climactic sentence was worth quoting in this era of hits and clicks: "Everything we need to know is quantified, but we don't really know anything." Think about that.

Among the things quantified, of course, are the deleterious effects of information bombardment on our mental functioning--well, often their mental functioning. Not that there was any quantification to speak of in "Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime," the chatty Matt Richtel piece Moon recommended in his comment today, which I'd forgotten I'd read this morning (on paper) by the time Moon brought it up. (Many others liked it more--it's at the top of the paper's most-emailed list! Does checking out most-emailed stories count as mental downtime? Or more distraction?) On the one hand, duh--I don't text, don't Twitter, don't have a Facebook page though maybe I should, and in general think information overload is a bane. On the other hand, that's exactly what someone of my age (and Moon's and Hanrahan's somewhat younger ages) is inevitably going to think, and I don't trust my command of this issue enough to make a big thing of it. It all sounds a little too familiar. Professors have been whining to me about how students don't read books for at least 30 years; I've been writing about information overload since my big New York Dolls essay in 1977, maybe longer. I wonder, just who are the sociologists and neurological researchers who are doing these studies? How old are they? What are their prejudices? I probably share those prejudices--a lot of them, anyway. But as I told Hanrahan when we discussed this point, I read too many articles 20-30 years ago about how you'd improve your infant's life by making sure s/he heard lots of Mozart before age one. What ever happened to that one?

Well, anyway, the big thing is: ARTicles--tremendously valuable. Post or comment now.

The way comments work at ARTicles is us exalted bloggers get to do what we will with them--approve, view, edit, or report as spam. I don't know what the middle two mean (I suppose "edit" is so we can remove "offensive content," not my thing), so I approve or report as spam--many come in saying stuff like: "Terrific post! Have you thought about refinancing your mortgage? . . ." But when the first comment on my Arcade Fire post just said "I agree." and nothing else I didn't know what to do. Wasn't spam, but what was it? An ironic comment on my longwindedness, or on commenting itself. Too subtle for me. I was suspicious, so I just deleted it. I was chicken.

Then Marc Hogan wrote a graf arguing with my assessment of Win Butler's anti-hipsterism, and Ann Powers said something rich as usual, and I was too busy to weigh in but looked forward to a few more intelligent opinions--the comments here are easily the smartest I see anywhere. Instead in wades "Jerry" telling me to go fuck myself, only less elegantly. And then comes three comments (two by the same guy, my own personal star commenter Dean Jones) insulting Jerry, and a fourth taking a potshot at Jerry before going on to out the unnamed "horrible stupid" critic of my post and further describe his sins. So let me say a few things about Jerry.

First, Jerry didn't write spam and I never hesitated to publish his comment. He was responding in his own horrible stupid way. But then there's a strategic matter. My belief is that the best way to hurt horrible stupid people like Jerry is to act like they aren't there. They want to deposit their dog doo-doo on the pavement, don't get any on your shoe. They only want attention and are too horrible and stupid to understand your cutting riposte. Only then this morning I got a cutting riposte I actually thought effective, from someone pretending (I assume) to be Jerry's parole officer.

So here's another thing about ARTicles comments. Sometimes we approve a comment and it never shows up in the thread. That seems to be what happened. What's more, I approved it from my spam folder--yet another thing about ARTicles comments is that that's where they sometimes end up on my computer for some no doubt AOL-linked reason--and so now it's gone. Would said parole officer be so kind as to resend?

As for anti-hipsterism, well, what Douglas Wolk said at EMP is right--these days, the main thing we know about hipsters is that they're someone else. But I would like to say that I started ID'ing myself as an anti-bohemian bohemian nearly 40 years ago, and that I think this is a sane and honorable stance as long as the underlying cultural analysis is realistic, which Butler's is. "Die Hipser Die"--stupid T-shirt. "We used to wait," or "How you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight"--right on, brother.

Just sent in a B&N Review piece on the new Arcade Fire album/tour, released August 3 and commenced August 4, and not for the first time when I'm coming in late--as more rock criticism should, albums being the most reusable of all artistic entities--began by looking back at their story and checking out the collegial consensus. Often this kind of prep work is just intellectual calisthenics, and that's what happened this time--I ended up researching and thinking about a lot of stuff that was obviated by the work, especially when I started concentrating on the lyrics, which I generally put off till I've absorbed the music. So I thought I'd share with you these three notes, which are unrelated except, obviously, that they all pertain to arts journalism.

1) Supposedly, the Arcade Fire's 2004 Funeral was the album Pitchfork made, the album that made Pitchfork, or both. In some limited sense, both. David Moore's rave, and 9.7 rating, certainly speeded up a bandwagon that was already rolling, and as Funeral  began its march toward gold-level 500,000 sales (which took till this year), the magazine's underground rep as a kingmaker--especially as of editor Ryan Schreiber's rave for the much more subcultural Canadian band Broken Social Scene a year before--was duly noted in the MSM. What I always wondered was the extent to which Schreiber had ordered up the review, as was widely but not therefore credibly rumored (backbiting rumor-mongering being even more rife in the online rockmag world than in the rest of journalism). One informant guessed but didn't claim to know for sure that Schreiber softened up the then 20-year-old college student Moore and then handed him the assignment on a band he wanted to make sure was very positively reviewed. So I got hold of Moore and obtained his version. Moore told me that there was some back-and-forth with Schreiber, but via IM rather than in person--he was a student at Ithaca College at the time. For sure it was clear that Moore would write a positive review, but he felt no pressure and got no instructions. Until, that is, it came to the rating. Moore wanted to give the record a perfect 10.0 (which he knows now was a little silly--"I was young, there was a lot I didn't know"). Pitchfork--Moore doesn't remember who--told him they didn't give 10s, so he suggested a 9.7 compromise. Which as a longtime grader I'd say is still a little silly. Within a year or two Moore had lost his passion for alt-rock--his crush on Funeral was based largely on its emotional avoidance of indie irony--and now writes a blog called Cureforbedbugs that's big into girlpop. He loves Ashlee Simpson. His ideas read better when you don't know the music in question. He makes his living running an enrichment program for lower-income elementary-school kids in Philly.

Not one but two of my favorite oddball artists died today, and I just want to note their passing in the same paragraph because in my mind they belong there. One was the guy in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and walked away unknown and forgotten into Chinatown soup alleys not even one free beer, the other worked most of his life as a file clerk in a Cleveland VA hospital. Both were Jewish curmudgeons with Orthodox backgrounds, though the file clerk was more curmudgeonly. Both made accessible art that defied category and has always seemed to me more substantial and moving than a lot of what gets taught in school and bruited in avant-garde circles. I give you Tuli Kupferberg: Fug, parodist in the literal sense, perverb writer, collector of celebrity baby pictures and New York Times atrocities, creator of the immortal found comedy album No Deposit, No Return, dead at 86. And I give you Harvey Pekar: jazz critic and collector, David Letterman fave, and writer-never-illustrator of the great comic book American Splendor, dead at 70. May their names live on longer than those of William Gass and William Gaddis both. I know, let 100 flowers bloom--even 1000. But when it comes to art, 1000 isn't all that many.

Finally found time to read the Robert Palmer collection Blues & Chaos, edited by NAJP-er Anthony DeCurtis. Highly recommended--should do every bit as much for Palmer's critical status as the "real" books Deep Blues and Rock & Roll: An Unruly History (currently out of print, which it shouldn't be, but available very cheap used, and also highly recommended). DeCurtis outdid himself here. He does include a few book extracts--good save from Palmer's coffee-table Stones job, which is far from his finest work. Liner notes aplenty--the Palmer essay accompanying the Bo Diddley box remains the best thing Palmer ever wrote (though I'm sorry not to have the Elmore James essay he gave Rhino as well). But most of this is journalism, much of it written from the Rolling Stone that made room for distinguished criticism both in essays flat-out and reviews longer than 150 words, and there's also worthy stuff from Down Beat, Memphis Magazine, Penthouse, The New York Times, and other periodicals. Here imagine me blotting a tear from my eye as I recollect good times past. Boo hoo.

It's been a little weird keeping the news of the end of my Consumer Guide column at MSN under my hat since I got the more or less final word only it wasn't totally final in the second week of April. There were several good reasons to be discreet, some self-interested and others matters of courtesy to Microsoft, so at first I just informed a few professional contacts and a very few close friends (who in some cases are the same people). But around the beginning of June, with the final edition due in a couple of weeks,  I decided to get more loose-lipped in an ad hoc way, which means a lot of the kind notes I've been receiving (a flow, not a flood) were from people who already knew the news. I've been interested to see the title phrase pop up three or four times, most publicly in the email "interview" my pal Ann Powers did yesterday.

Far from me to say, not least because I expect to continue to write record reviews elsewhere than my remaining regular gigs at All Things Considered and Barnes & Noble Review. But even overlooking its cliche density, that phrase seems worth avoiding. It encourages sloppy thought like whatever went through the head of the assigning editor at the New Hampshire public radio outlet that abetted a decent critic, better drummer, and (who knew?) dynamite self-promoter's self-labeling as "the last rock critic standing." (The critic-drummer, whose name you will note I am not spelling right, was in the non-print news again just a few weeks ago. No, I am not gloating, not even a little--shouldn't happen to Michelle Malkin. But coincidences this poetic cannot go altogether unnoted.) Point is, right, it's a crap time out there for arts journalists in general and rock critics even more. I've said so here many times and will again. And in that sense I suppose an "era" is ending--or ended a year, two years, five years ago. But even now there's loads of continuity. If I've learned anything from cyberpunk fiction, and I've learned plenty, it's that worlds do not end, they change.

Whether that means Doug McLennan is right and what I will in some subsequent post dub "the AOL model" is somehow a good thing, and by the way why not let local arts entrepreneurs control their own coverage, we're all in this together--well, that is another matter.

PS. I mentioned kind notes. Forgive my self-indulgence and let me reprint my favorite so far, much more for the first part, which is laugh lines, than the second part, which is hyperbolic praise. It's from my old pal Tom Smucker, who I only told a week ago even though he lives upstairs from me:

We were at a party 40 or 41 years ago and a young fellow came up to Bob and said, "So you're the guy who puts grades on records," meaning, "So you're the guy who moved the Notre Dame Cathedral to Sheboygan, Wisconsin" or "So you're the guy who puts catsup on caviar."  Four decades later, in my opinion, the CG will stand as the brick by brick record of how two generations assembled a cathedral of music and words from small discs of plastic, and for awhile, spools of tape.

Generally when I write about essay collections, a genre of which I am inordinately fond, I'm a voice crying in the wilderness. One reason publishers hate to put them out is that editors hate to cover them, on the grounds that they're not "original work." This is not the case with Elif Batuman's The Possessed. Not one to keep up with the publishing world, I was alerted to the book's existence by this excellent review by the excellent Dwight Garner in the (NY) Times. Sight unseen I put my hand up over at Barnes & Noble Review, where my editor Bill Tipper alerted me to this excellent review by Jessica Allen. But Bill had a copy sent to me anyway, and I stayed away from other reviews. Usually I take the opposite tack, but if my points have  been taken I don't want to know about it. It's the best book I've read all year, though Patti  Smith is coming up on the outside.

As Batuman relates, she is a product of literary theory. Not as exclusively as other grad-school survivors--she's clearly read way more novels than several theory victims I've chatted with. But what's striking about her in this context is that she not only tried to write a novel herself--to no avail, apparently, but I don't hold that against her: I had my own problems availing before I fell in love with journalism--but that she doesn't write jargon. She is in fact what once was called belletristic, a term I assume has fallen out of favor, jargon evolving as rapidly as it does. I mean, this woman can flat-out write.

In addition, she's not bad at reporting, at least of the J-school-derided first-person variety, which is generally the way we journos approximate fiction, because it gives us a readymade protagonist--in this case, a strong, brave, eccentric, literate-of-couse, and extremely funny one. She's a little naive about the money gig she's fallen into--is quite miffed when The New Yorker agrees to assign her a piece in Moscow if she pays her own way there, and then starts making J-school-style suggestions for how to proceed that she finds highly impractical on the ground, though the mag seems to have published the results anyway. And to be honest, what I like best about those results is the aforementioned "extremely funny." She's not above being a little mean--most funny people are--but at least in this case most of the humor is directed on long-dead and often outrageously cruel Russian aristocrats.

Then there's the three-part "Summer in Samarkand," interspersed among other chapters of which the best-known, justifiably so, is her account of a Tolstoy convention. Samarkand sounds like a terrible place--hilariously terrible, but terrible. But along the way she falls half in love with a 12th-century Old Uzbek poet who she makes seem, well, quite wonderful. Very little fun picked here. As litcrit, it's remarkable. Also jargon free.

Samarkand, you are more likely to know it now than you were two weeks ago, is in Uzbekistan. As Batuman explains, the modern Uzbeks were conceived as a kind of political convenience by the Soviets in the '20s. Even the Uzbek language is an artificial construct. As is her wont, Batuman is humorous about this--apolitical, amused. I wonder how she's responding to the current doings in Kyrgyzstan, where this half-fabricated ethnicity is now being slaughtered for reasons not altogether clear at this distance, though the fact that they're farmers in a nomadic land and hence better suited to the stationary pursuits of the modern world seems to have something to do with it. I hope some enterprising periodical has asked this literary scholar to try and figure it out. Preferably in the first person.

Last fall I called Jim Steinblatt of ASCAP to inquire as to how I might submit for the music licensing organization's venerable Deems Taylor Awards, which recognize special achievement in music writing, both journalism and books. I've submitted many time and only won once, but a guy can dream. So I was alarmed to learn that ASCAP had "suspended" the Deems Taylor the previous year. Putting on my NAJP hat at Steinblatt's suggestion, I wrote a letter to ASCAP that read in part as follows:

From NAJP-er Michaelangelo Matos comes this link, which really is worth a click, believe me: http://lizcolville.tumblr.com/post/668650389/id-like-to-report-a-thousand-thefts

Just in case you didn't, let me summarize. The link is to the Veraville blog of a writer named Liz Colville, with whom I am unfamiliar. It concerns a site called ShowBizCafe.com that from what I can see specializes in movies despite its all-encompassing name. Has an Alexa rank of around 187,000, which Colville says is pretty good (a relativity of scale worth noting--comments appreciated). "Churns out" lots of original content. Hotsy totsy.

Only actually, Colville goes on, maybe not:

Yes, there is original content written by a small staff, but these articles are boosted by a prominent and frequently updated news section featuring articles cut and pasted from dozens of reputable publications--BlackBook, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Paste Magazine, AFP, and, most frequently, The Hollywood Reporter--to name just a few I uncovered in the first two pages of an 18-page news archive. Not only are the publications not cited, but ShowBizCafe lists the byline as someone named "Mack Chico" (a pun on the CEO's name, Jack Rico, perhaps?) At the bottom of each article is this charming phrase: "Source: ShowBizCafe.com."

There's more--told you it was worth clicking. Need I go on at any length about how appalling this is? James Fallows is writing about it, for Chrissake. Website feasting off the ever-diminishing store of good writing that increasingly cash-strapped traditional publications are subsidizing, can't go on, etc.--with the added fillip that these creeps aren't even acknowledging the sources, or authors.

It isn't very long: 80 pages, cover price $9.99 but free with the Pernice Brothers' Goodye, Killer, which will be available June 10-15, sez pernicebrothers.com, "depending on where in this God-forsaken world you live." But it is a book: Pernice to Me, by Joyce Linehan and Joe Pernice, comprising the compiled and lightly annotated tweets of PB manager Linehan, which consist primarily of snide things chief PB Joe P has emailed, tweeted, voicemailed, or said to or in the presence of Linehan and Linehan has then tweeted for all his admirers to see because she was "fed up with the public perception of Pernice as some sort of gentle, fragile sad sack."

Pernice is a fairly witty guy who has a mouth on him, and also more of a writer writer than most songwriters--new record has one song that juxtaposes Ford Madox Ford to Jacqueline Susann, and last year he published a novel called It Feels So Good When I Stop. I got through it, too, which is more than I can say of Nick Cave's latest fictional venture. But I prefer Pernice to Me. Though it leaves stuff out--I just barely infer that Pernice is married and lives in Canada, though the band started in Massachusetts and Linehan continues to live there--it's one of those little glimpses into the highly unglamorous life of an indie-rock lifer. Pernice, who will be 43 in July, is a gifted songwriter whose music got a lot better when he adjusted concepts from the alt-countryish Scud Mountain Boys to the close-harmony pop-rock of the PB. And like so many similarly gifted guys, he just barely hangs in there, with his best chance of making a minor killing a lucky TV commercial or movie placement. This is the kind of life that can develop the mouth on you. And in Pernice to Me that dilemma is a lot more vivid than it'll ever be in the interviews he occasionally cranks out or the level of profile he's likely to inspire. Calling Pernice to Me arts journalism would be a stretch, I guess. But that's kind of the way it feels.