Announcing CultureCrash

MY ardor for and fascination with the West Coast are undiminished. But recently I've put most of my blogging energies into my new project, CultureCrash: Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction. It's part of the ArtsJournal family, and I began it on the invitation of the site's founder, Doug McLennan.

On CultureCrash I'll be looking mostly at the plight of the arts, media culture in the 21st century: What are the forces arrayed against a healthy culture and a robust creative class, and what can we do to make things better? These are crucial issues that I'll get into more deeply into my book, which comes out on Yale University Press later this year.

Re. West Coast culture: As I said, my interest in these topics continues. I'll be moderating a panel at the Writing From California conference later this month: Watch this space.

And hope to see you all on CultureCrash.

The Life and Death of the Alternative Press

IF it weren't for the '80s Village Voice, I probably would not be a journalist. (The world, I expect, would be a better place.)

This weekend I have a story in Al Jazeera America about good times and bad for alternative weeklies. I talk about the crystalline sense of mission these publications had during conservative times, and the troubles they've had more recently. And I try to shine a light on the good and important work they still do.

In the piece I get into my youthful infatuation with the alt-press -- I interned at the Voice, freelanced for the now-defunct Boston Phoenix soon after leaving college, later worked for New Times Los Angeles. As nasty as that company could be, we had a blast there, some of the time, and I'm still proud of the work my colleagues and I did there. (Even if New Times responded by killing the paper and destroying its online archive.) Where is the alt press now?

And I try to sketch out what various weeklies have meant to the city of Los Angeles, which remains the Misread City.

Happy holidays to all my readers.

David Lowery vs. Silicon Valley

CAMPER Van Beethoven's singer David Lowery has become the most ornery of those fighting for musician's rights. He's erupted over piracy, Spotify, lyric websites, and the battle between the surviving Beastie Boys (with the ghost of Adam Yauch) and GoldieBlox.

I speak to him for Salon here.

He makes a pretty good case for what's wrong with Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, which leaves artists out of the revenue stream.

(Lowery and his argument also make an appearance in my book Creative Destruction, which comes out next year.)

Cheering George Packer's "The Unwinding"

LORD know this book does not need any more praise, but I want to wave the tattered American flag for George Packer's The Unwinding, which just won the National Book Award. The book is not perfect -- more on that in a minute -- but it is lyrical, powerfully reported, passionately written, and lives  up to its subtitle: "An Inner History of the New America."

As research for my own Creative Destruction, I've spent the last year or two reading numerous books of social criticism, going back to the mid-century American generation of Vance Packard, and up through Barbara Ehrenreich and others, and this book makes an excellent extension of that tradition. (It is also self-consciously in the oft-overlooked tradition of Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy.)

Dwight Garner, in the New York Times, wrote about the potentially unwieldy number of piece that make up The Unwinding, some of which originated in The New Yorker. Here's Garner:

It is Mr. Packer’s achievement in “The Unwinding” that these pieces, freshly shuffled and assembled, have speed and power to burn. This book hums — with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion for those who are caught in the gears of America’s increasingly complicated (and increasingly poorly calibrated) financial machinery.

The larger discussion of the book hinges not on its skillful portraits of Florida real-estate busts, political life in Washington, Silicon Valley libertarians, or sketches of Newt Gingrich and Oprah Winfrey (who turn out to the the same person), but on its big picture -- or lack thereof. Here's David Brooks:

When John Dos Passos wrote the “U.S.A.” trilogy, the left had Marxism. It had a rigorous intellectual structure that provided an undergirding theory of society — how social change happens, which forces matter and which don’t, how society works and who causes it not to work. Dos Passos’ literary approach could rely on that structure, fleshing it out with story and prose. The left no longer has Marxism or any other coherent intellectual structure. Packer’s work has no rigorous foundation to rely on, no ideology to give it organization and shape.

Brooks, with whom I sometimes disagree, is onto something here, and several of my friends on the left have expressed similar reservations. Why is it that a journalist more-or-less on the left is uncomfortable/unwilling to frame his work with an  overarching theory of society or history, the way similar scribes did in the 19th or 20th century? The reasons are long and complex, and I hope to get into this another time. (For what it's worth, Salon's Laura Miller, a critic I like a lot, praises the book because it "pointedly refrains from making sweeping polemical arguments about 'what’s gone wrong.'... In a culture in which everyone is perpetually shrieking their political opinions, it’s hard to convey just how refreshing this is.")

For now, let me acknowledge Brooks' criticism, but assert whole-heartedly that The Unwinding is an incredible piece of work, something that everyone who wants to understand the crisis in America today should pick up pronto.

+++

Postscript: As a reader, and an Angeleno, I am disappointed that Rachel Kushner's The Flame Throwers, a captivating novel about the New York art scene and '70s Italy, did not take the fiction prize. Both of Rachel's novels (The Other is Telex From Cuba) have been greeted with great acclaim (I am lucky enough to have written about both of them), she is as sharp a person as we know, and here at The Misread City we are confident that she will live to write and fight again.   

Arts Journalism Summit 2013

RECENTLY I went to the Annenberg Beach House -- the same spot on which William Randolph Hearst once built a 110-room love nest for his affairs with Marion Davies -- to try to figure out the future of cultural journalism. This summit on the crisis of the arts press was put together by the Getty and USC folks.

On that cloudy day in Santa Monica, the Getty's arts fellows -- a very sharp bunch -- from the US and UK spoke and argued with some local artists and arts leaders, media scholars, tech-kids and foundation types. Some fascinating conversation, some depressing, some encouraging.

I wrote two essays on how the whole thing worked out. In the first, "A Day Full of Questions," tried to document the day's debates as accurately as I could. The second piece, "Some Unanswered Questions," looks at the issues that didn't come up, or didn't seem substantially resolved. (In the first piece, perhaps, I am playing reporter, in the second, a critic.) That one concludes with what ended up being an intriguing dinner at director Peter Sellars' house.

For anyone with an interest in these things, I encourage you to take a good look at the rest of the site, which Doug McLennan, the ArtsJournal.com founder who put it together, calls a virtual summit. There's a lot of spark and intelligence on the site, though no easy answers.

Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites

OVER the last year or two, I've given myself a crash course on social criticism -- wonderfully grim and eloquent books by Bell, Ehrenreich, both Packers (Vance and George) and various "mass culture" theorists of the '50s. I hope to get into some of them over the next few months.

One of the best of them is Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: American After the Meritocracy. I'm often stirred or intrigued by a book, but it's not often that one really changes the way I think. Hayes's book, which looks at the meritocracy that followed the WASP establishment, is one of a very short list. He considers how a system that supposedly rewarded talent and intelligence helped lead us into the Enron debacle, the mishandled Middle Eastern Wars, the Great Recession, baseball's steroid scandal and the mess that is the Catholic church.

I should say that the premise of this book very much goes against my grain: I've thought over the years that belief in a meritocracy was what my family had instead of religion or a sense of ethnicity. But reading Hayes argument and reflecting on how nasty the 21st century has been made things look different. (The book has recently been released in paperback.)

If you still have bitter memories of Judith Miller, Dick Cheney, Bernie Madoff, the cardinals who looked the other way during the pedophile scandal, and so on, Twilight of the Elites will help you make some sense of it all. They're the new "best and brightest," and just as fatuous and dangerous as Halberstam's gang that got us into the Vietnam War.

HERE is a Salon Q+A with the author by my friend David Daley.

"Creative Destruction" Announcement

GANG, yesterday the Los Angeles news/media website LA Observed made the first public announcement of the book that grows out of my Salon series. Here it is.

The book's working title is Creative Destruction: How the 21st Century is Killing the Creative Class, and Why It Matters.

There's a lot up on the LAObs post, so I'll leave that to explain the project. (Here are links to individual parts of the creative class series as well as my interview on Studio 360 With Kurt Andersen.)

I should add that the photo of yours truly was taken by Steven Dewall, a photographer I've long been acquainted with who will have at least an occasional presence here on The Misread City.

Please stay tuned.

Musicians vs. the Internet

THIS week has seen an exchange between young music fan Emily White and indie rocker David Lowery about how fans consume music these days, and where that leaves the artists. 


So far, the argument between the two has remained civil – and Lowery refuses to condescend to White or her generational peers in his piece -- but the nasty tone of the Web all but guarantees that things will get ugly.


HERE is my piece for Salon on the matter, which dovetails with my recent writing on the plight of the creative class.

Collecting the Creative Class

MY recent stories on the struggles of the creative class have hit some people hard -- I've gotten more emotional responses from these, I think, than anything I've written in two decades as a cultural journalist. 


(Due to the mean-spirited, anonymous nature of Internet culture, I've also gotten nastier comments than I expected, along with some smaller doses of smart, reasonable criticism.)


In roughest terms, my stories take different angles to look at the same problem -- the decimation of the creative class, which includes artists of all kinds as well as the people who distribute and assess their work -- in recent years due to digital technology, the recession and changing values.


In any case, as I dig deeper into the issue, I wanted to make all of these pieces available to interested readers. Here's the series, so far, in total.

The creative class is a lie

The dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead. The media is melting. Blame the economy -- and the Web

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/singleton/

Why “branding” won’t save the creative class

Freelance work -- and a strong "brand" -- will never beat a job. Free agency's nice -- but so is health insurance

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/why_branding_wont_save_the_creative_class/singleton/

Does culture really want to be free?

Are new media companies "digital parasites"? The author of "Free Ride" tells Salon piracy is killing art

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/01/does_culture_really_want_to_be_free/singleton/

The clerk, RIP

The clerk has been killed by the economy, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon. Computers might want your creative job next

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/18/the_clerk_rip/singleton/

The architecture meltdown

One of the coolest creative-class careers has cratered with the economy. Where does architecture go from here?

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/04/the_architecture_meltdown/singleton/

No Sympathy for the Creative Class

Taxpayers bail out Wall Street and Detroit. But there's no help, or Springsteen anthem, for struggling creatives

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/22/no_sympathy_for_the_creative_class/singleton/




Steal This Album:
What happens if no one pays for music?


http://www.salon.com/2012/06/20/steal_this_album_what_happens_if_no_one_pays_for_music/

My Studio 360 appearance: 

All of my Salon pieces: 

Creative Class on Studio 360

MY latest Salon story on the plight of the creative class has gotten more attention than anything I've written this year -- thanks to those who read and passed around this story.

"No Sympathy For the Creative Class," as it's called, looked at the distance between our assumptions about artists, musicians, writers, etc. and the reality of a life in the arts, especially during times that are hitting the creative class especially hard.  In any case, it seemed to strike a nerve.

So I'm pleased to announce that I'll be on Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen over the weekend. (Times vary.) This is one of the nation's finest arts/culture shows, and it was a real pleasure to discuss these topics, however grim, with the SPY magazine co-founder.

Kurt is an excellent interlocutor, and our conversation was lively. But I admit to being a bit tongue-tied when he asked me about solutions to our current plight. Part of what's happening is structural, grounded in technological changes, and cannot be easily reversed. Part of it may budge with changes in thinking and doing.

The simple answer, which I should have given Kurt, is that so far I have concentrated on the root causes and human, tangible effects of this new world we find ourselves in. As for a path out of the current crisis, to a less punishing world for creativity and culture, stay tuned. Ask me in six months.

I'm also going to start posting small items that relate to my argument. Here's a story from UK's The Guardian whose title is quite direct: "Other professionals don't work for free. So why are writers expected to?" As someone who broke into journalism by writing for nothing, because I was told this was an important exercise in "dues paying," and who continues to get offers to work for free, this hits me particularly hard. I welcome comments on it.

Thanks again for following these issues, folks, and see you on Studio 360.

UPDATE: HERE is the link to my interview, which broadcasts nationally over the weekend.

Architecture and the Creative Class

THINGS seemed to be going so well: The architect was a figure tailor-made for the heyday of bourgeois bohemia, and Frank Gehry was palling around with Brad Pitt.

But things changed, badly, and it's not clear now when, or how, they'll change back. Corporate firms are in some cases doing fine, and architects who design for the 1% are doing better than those who depend on civic projects, but many others are hurting.

The latest of my stories about the creative class in the 21st century -- part of Salon's Art in Crisis series -- just went up HERE. I spoke to a number of architects and observers to get a sense of this important but imperiled field.

The Hell of Freelancing - or is it Purgatory?

FOR some people, going it alone is a blast, and lucrative as well. Advocates of the "free agent nation" see it casual, flexible, energetic -- a way to tap into your real talent and potential.

Free agent Reggie Jackson

They say we've moved beyond the stodgy, gray-flannel-suited Organization Man of mid-century, who was all about conformity and corporate loyalty.

But for many writers, artists, musicians and so on, dealing with a collapsed economy and a shifting culture driven by the Internet, it's not much fun. These stories tend not to get told.

The second piece of my Salon series on the fate of the creative class is up. Please check it out.

The Perils of the Creative Class

WE were supposed to be entering a laptop wielding, latte-sipping world where the Internet made us all more "connected," weren't we? But the Internet, combined with the bad economy and a restructuring of American life, has led to an erosion of the very creative class it was supposed to invigorate.

HERE is my new piece in Salon which looks at the state of the much hyped creative class in 2011. It's the first of a series in which we look at how artists, writers and people who deal with culture are faring -- a story that has been largely untold.

I spoke to a number of sources, including artists and writers struggling with the creative life and Internet skeptics Jaron Lanier and Andrew Keen.

Pres. Obama and the Plight of the Middle Class

FOLKS, I'll be appearing on KCRW's To the Point with Warren Olney, which will broadcast today at noon on 89.9 FM in Los Angeles and later, presumably, elsewhere around the country on the PRI network.


We'll be talking about Obama's jobs speech and the larger issue of the middle class during the economic downturn. I'm there to discuss my experience as a laid off newspaper reporter who's struggled with the collapsed economy.


One bit of Obama's speech was especially resonant for me: 

These men and women grew up with faith in an America where hard work and responsibility paid off. They believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share -- where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits; maybe a raise once in a while. If you did the right thing, you could make it. Anybody could make it in America.

Anyway, we'll be discussing this and more shortly.

Update: With the show now up and broadcasting from KCRW, I want to recommend a very intelligent discussion in which your humble blogger was just okay.

One point: Chicago small business owner Jay Goltz, who wrote a smart piece for the New York Times about hiring, took issue with something I said about taxes and the rich. He made the point that someone making $250,000 is in very different shape than a billionaire hedge fund guy. I did not have time to respond, but I agree completely. (We need more small business owners like him and fewer too-big-to-fail corporations.)

Finally, this matter connects to a larger point which I did not get time to make, but: The most affluent 400 people in this country hold as much wealth as the bottom 150 million. So to even talk about the middle class is a bit of a nostalgic fiction, at least in the way we used to discuss it as a robust center of American life.

These days, politics dances to the tune of the top 1 percent, not the middle class. There is class warfare in this country: It's that very richest tier against the rest of us -- and they're winning. Bigtime.

Billy Bragg and Mavis Staples at UCLA

FRIDAY night at Royce Hall saw an unlikely double bill, with British folk-punk hero Billy Bragg playing a full set mixing politics and pop before soul goddess Mavis Staples, who channels the spirit of the black church and the civil rights movement.

This incongruous pairing ended up being a blast, though the two may have more in common politically than musically. (Both artists have also, of, course, worked with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy.)

It's easy to love Billy Bragg's early music -- those rough songs from the '80s belted out with a thick British accent and an electric guitar. For a while in the early '90s it seemed like Bragg was going to ride the alt-rock boom into something like fame: He had a small hit with the jaunty "Sexuality," co-written with Johnny Marr.  But the music that's come since the early '90s with some exceptions like the Woody Guthrie records with Wilco, has seemed less urgent.

So it was a thrill to see Bragg set up solo on the Royce stage with just a stack of amps and Telecaster. His set leaned heavily on political songs, including a cover of Woody Guthrie's "I Don't Have a Home in This World Anymore," and some new numbers that sounded good. His political rants in between songs were about as engaging and persuasive in their common sense and compassion. The recent U.S. elections clearly inspired him.

And his love songs -- "Greetings to the New Brunette," "Milkman of Human Kindness," "A New England" -- still sound great. I'd forgotten how great Bragg could be live. My wife lamented that she could not vote for this British citizen for president.

The highs of Mavis Staples -- best know as part of the Staples Singers -- were high indeed even if she was less consistent than Bragg. Alongside gospel -- "Creep Along, Moses" -- and soul numbers, with stirring vocal harmonies, she sang CCR's "Wrote a Song For Everyone" and The Band's "The Weight."

At times in the set Staples seemed to get lost, and she's some of her voice's middle range sounded worn. But Staples gave off so much decency and positive energy it was hard to mind, and her band was spectacular.

A fuller review HERE by Steven Mirkin in the Orange Co Register.

Tribune Corp, 2010

IN the spring of 2008 I was called into the office of the editor who was supposedly running my section, Calendar. He said good things about my previous year of output and how much he was looking forward to what I’d turn out next. (Nearly every day I had a story in the paper, he came by my desk with a smile to tell me how much he liked it.)

The LA Times building after its bombing 100 years ago

He referred me to an annual evaluation in which my assignment editor praised the “excellent and productive year” I’d just had, and told me I’d earned 1 4 percent raise in a bad year for the company. I went back to work and continued to have a fruitful and, er, productive time as the papers books and ideas reporter. 

A few months later – almost exactly two years ago today – I was called into the office of my new editor. Sitting with him was a woman with Sarah Palin glasses and a series of bright blue folders. I was told I had until 5 p.m. to clear out of the newsroom and that my job was terminated immediately. (Though I'd written multiple stories on indie rock, classical music, architecture, movies and other topics, I was not reassigned.) 


I was made to sign forms that forbid me to say much more – proving that for all our political excitement about Constitutional rights, a corporation can take anything they like away from you.

I went home to my wife and two-year-old son and told them, blithely, that everything would be all right. (Over the next few days I got repeated calls from a Pasadena placement company offering resume’ writing workshops free of charge thanks to my employer’s great generosity.)

Confused? I was, too. I'd been hired by John Carroll, then perhaps the most respected editor in the country, in 2002, when the LA paper was so hot it was poaching talent from New York and winning multiple Pulitzers; now hundreds of us were unemployed in a scorched-earth economy. What happened? 


Some of the cause has to do with technology and larger economic issues, but some of it is more specific: A gripping, well-researched and deeply disturbing piece by the New York Times’ David Carr documents the greed and ignorance of impotent robber baron Sam Zell and his gang of thugs who took over a once-great newspaper and drove its parent company into bankruptcy.

The day I lost my job, I knew I would go through a tough year or even two, but that things would stabilize before long: I was raised to believe that hard work always wins out. 

After the two worst years of my life, things are even more unstable for my family; neither journalism nor the economy have not recovered. (I drive a 16-year-old car that won’t last much longer.) We’re likely to leave the state by year’s end.

My story is not unique – the two best editors I worked with at the Times and many fine reporters were canned that same dark day and in ensuing months. Several thousand people have lost their jobs at Tribune papers over the last few years. (It gives me no pleasure to observe that many former Times hands I know are doing worse than I am.)

I often think of Louis Uchitelle’s The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences. This 2006 book by the NY Times labor reporter shows how corporate power and a weak regulatory apparatus allow someone in a corporate tower to erase lives for the sake of quarterly profits and staggering CEO salaries. (The bonuses paid to Tribune bosses, documented in Carr’s story, beggar the imagination.) It’s a transaction my family – and many others – knows all too well.

California Vs. The Great Plains

The writer and urbanist Joel Kotkin has a fascinating piece in a recent Newsweek called "The Great Great Plains," which looks at the way cities like Fargo and Bismarck -- as well as most of Texas -- are booming while much of the rest of the country languishes in a dead economy.

It got us here at the Misread City wondering: What are Omaha and Dallas doing right that Los Angeles and other West Coast cities are doing wrong? And why can't the great state of California keep up with... North Dakota?

I'm a longtime admirer of the work of Kotkin, whose latest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. I spoke to him for a New York Times piece about bohemia and the recession, and while I suspect his politics and mine are not always congruent, he's a formidable thinker and reporter. We're happy to have him in a Misread City Q+A.

So in brief, why do the cities of the plains seem to be doing so well?

Basically these cities benefit from being in the heart of the commodity economy that benefits from growing demand from China and India, which are currently the engines of the U.S. economy. They also have good schools, are affordable and reasonably pro business.

Meanwhile, West Coast cities, especially LA, remain in the toilet economically. Given all the dynamism here, Why?

California is committing suicide, at least economically. The extreme 'green' policies are just the latest blow after a series of tax and regulatory burdens that are forcing business to expand elsewhere. We still have some key headquarters - more in north than south - and amazing skills, but the flow is almost all the wrong way. In LA specifically there seems to have been little economic strategy except the notion of green jobs, which is largely hype and every other community is going after. So we end up with solar plants in Arizona manufactured outside the state so we can pay for ever more expensive energy...

The key is that the city council in particular, along with the Mayor, have no notion of how economies work, although they may be writing the book (unconsciously of course) on how to make one not work.

This is not just a tax and regulatory issue. Other places with similar burdens - Boston, NY, Seattle - are not booming but doing better. If it wasn't for Detroit we'd be the big city basket case in the country

How much do California’s woes have to do with the tax-revolt measure Prop. 13?

Prop 13 had several bad effects. First, it centralized decision-making in Sacramento, never a good idea, since it took away property tax revenues. Second, it shifted taxes too much to income, which hurt entrepreneurs, the middle class and investors. It also made the state more liable to wild swings in stock and housing markets. Third, it became an excuse for people, largely on the left, to ignore the larger problems of over-regulation and hostility to business.

Prop 13 went too far and should have been restricted only to residences, with a cap at some level. But as someone who covered it at the time, the establishment (that's including most business) did not have the will to reform a system that was driving people out of their homes.

In other words, lots of blame to go around.

How much longer do you expect West Coast cities will be ailing, and what will it do to our urbanism, our neighborhoods and sense of civic connection?

 

I am not sure you can put all the western cities in one context. Seattle and Portland have much smaller working class, minority populations and more access to clean energy (hydro mostly). They should transition a bit earlier given their own anti-business instincts.

The Bay Area has a leg up with Silicon Valley and has a more affluent population. San Diego and Orange also have problems but also not as many poor people or workers in distressed industries as LA or the Inland Empire. They will lag US but not as much as LA.

LA has the most diverse economy but needs to keep its traditional linchpins (manufacturing, trade and entertainment) going. Right now hard to see how this happens until there is a major political change.

Shocked and Appalled at UCLA

David Sefton -- generally the most intriguing and unpredictable of Los Angeles' arts showmen -- has resigned from his post running the UCLA Live series that takes place at Royce Hall and other venues. Sefton, a native of Liverpool, is being coy about this, but it's hard not to imagine that someone as passionate about his programming, and about his particularly fervent niche of high and low, stepping down unless he received considerable pressure.

Here is the LA Times story which runs tomorrow. Writes Mike Boehm: 'He said Thursday that he quit in response to "a major rethinking and restructuring" of the program that his bosses at UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture are undertaking in response to "increasing fiscal pressures" brought on by the poor economy and the state's fiscal woes.'

In the 13 years I've been in LA, only Esa-Pekka Salonen of the LA Phil has been a more exciting local force in the arts. I recall the jolt the arrival of the irreverent Scouser sent through the local cultural community, and went to as many of these offerings as I could. Here is my LA Times story on Sefton concentrating on his wild theater offerings.

One early sign that a short-sighted and stupid decision might be coming was UCLA's recent (and barlely announced) canceling of the International Theater Festival, the key to Sefton's annual programming and some of the most daring avant-garde performance I've ever seen, from Societie Rafael Sanzio to Complicite to the more traditional but still bracing Shakespeare performances by Mark Rylance's Royal Shakespeare Company. The best coverage of this is by Steven Leigh Morris. (Dean Christopher Waterman of UCLA says ticket sales had been low.)

I also wrote a cover story on Sefton for New Times LA soon after he arrived: I spoke to or corresponded with a number of cultural luminaries, including Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson and late great deejay John Peel, and all sung Sefton's praises and talked about his transforming of London's South Bank Centre. Christ, here's a guy who brought Scott Walker out of reclusion!!

"When I arrived I was an enfant terrible, and now I'm an eminence gris," Sefton told Boehm. "It takes just 10 years."

Eagle Rock and Small Business

TONIGHT I go to a wake of sorts for Paper, a shop on Eagle Rock's Colorado Boulevard. The shop sold cool books, smart gifts, letterpress printed cards, and leather journals -- exactly the kind of combination that signals the arrival of a neighborhood into bobo heaven.

The closing of the store -- done in by the recession, of course -- is especially poignant because owner Shannon Bedell lost another shop about two years ago. Blue Heeler specialized in very stylish imports from Australia, from men's bags to a whole range of chick stuff, and added some flava to Eagle Rock Boulevard and to this side of LA in general.

Bedell has also appeared in two New York Times stories on what's called Northeast Los Angeles, which is sort of our Brooklyn. The first was about the arrival of this crescent of neighborhoods to hipsterville. The second, written by yours truly, came out about a year ago and questioned whether a newly cool neighborhood could survive the recession.

That question seemed complicated to me then, and seems no less complicated now. Since my story, two of my main sources -- Bedell, and Kelly Witmer, who ran the boutique Regeneration -- have lost their shops.

At the same time, a very fine gourmet Mexican cafe has opened near the Trader Joe's, and last night I had a Belgian style wheat beer made by the new Eagle Rock Brewery. (Their first batch seemed to have been released last month at the Verdugo Bar, a place I highly recommend. Especially now that The Chalet is gone) And of course, while no one is immune to the economy's chill, Colorado Wine Company continues to thrive and it's as hard as ever to get a seat at Auntie Em's.

Back to Shannon for a minute. She's exactly the kind of small business person -- social, curious, good taste -- any neighborhood needs, and her shops made Eagle Rock distinctive. I'm sorry to see her stores go, and hope she, and the neighborhood itself, rise again when things improve.

Photo credit: Colorado Wine Co.

Newspaper Layoffs and "The Disposable American"

IN 2007, a mean-spirited robber baron bought an important american media company with money that wasnt his, in a deal that no responsible anti-trust division would have permitted. over the next two years, hundreds of journalists were laid off from the LA Times and other newspapers. in october, i became one of them. departing with me were the deeply talented writer lynell george, the best editor i've ever worked with (maria russo) and many others.

i was given a few hours to clear out my stuff and get out of the building. i was offered a measly two months severance pay and -- thanks! -- free career counseling at the onset of the worst economic downturn since the 1930s.

earlier this year, after the company declared bankruptcy, another wave of layoffs hit, taking my other favorite LA Times editor, craig fisher, with it. today is yet another wave, which has already felled the talented reporter tina daunt. (the LAT now has less than half the staff it did when i was hired in '02. let me point out too that the tribune executives who sold the chain and let the paper fall behind walked away with golden parachutes in the tens of millions.)

one of the most salient explanations i found to this madness was contained in louis uchitelle's "the disposable american: layoffs and their consequences." this excellent 2006 book, by the veteran new york times economics and labor reporter, looked at the phenomenon in historical terms. what he finds it that the huge wave of american layoffs is not inevitable -- a natural way of responding to the up-and-down cycle of prosperity -- but rather the result of years of legislation favoring big business. if the laws are written for the corporations, they will see the people who work for them as disposable. (and they have.)

some of the layoffs in LA and elsewhere, of course, have to do with the slumping economy and the collapse of newspaper's income source. even the new york times, as was announced yesterday, may be doing some serious laying off. gourmet magazine just closed.

for now, i'm praying, in my agnostic way, for my friends and former colleagues.