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.

Print, Online and the Creative Class

TODAY I have another piece in Salon, this one about the folding of New York magazine into a biweekly, and the resulting conversation about where the media is (and isn't going.) HERE it is.

People trying to be "counterintuitive" are framing this as a win for journalists and journalism, since more people will read New York related copy on the blogs (some of which are quite good.) It's like saying musicians -- or music -- are thriving because more people listen to their songs on Spotify than ever did in the old record label-and-album model.

If you work in journalism, or the media business, you know that the phrase, "we've moving online" is typically a code word for de-professionalization -- something the creative class has gotten awfully familiar with. David Carr in the New York Times had the right take, I think.

The magazine also plans to bulk up its print publication with more fashion and luxury coverage, at a time when most Americans – among them, the new mayor tells us, a lot of New Yorkers -- continue to emerge only gradually from the Great Recession. (The Bloomberg operation will reportedly cover the arts, despite firing its arts staff, as a subset of luxury.) 

New York magazine – which has always combined the smartly serious with conspicuous consumerism, Frank Rich alongside frivolity – is not the only publication that is upping its fashion and luxury “content.” The way high-end fashion coverage, celebrity-worship and house porn continues to replicate in magazines three decades into flat middle-class wages is a paradox a greater critic than I will have to tackle. But whatever is driving this, it’s not something most Americans should celebrate, especially journalists, who increasingly toil to remain in the middle-class instead of buying $50,000 watches.

Like the David Lowery piece that ran yesterday, this gets into stuff I investigate deeper 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.

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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.

Peter Rainer's Movie Criticism

IT’S almost impossible to find a word that can be changed in Peter Rainer’s film criticism, or a way to express an idea better than he already has. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way, during the year I served as Peter’s editor. It makes his work a pleasure – sometimes a revelation – to read. I can’t recall many critics who you really feel thinking on the page quite as well as Peter does; the ideas and critical themes unfold in the same way great storytelling does.

Here at The Misread City, we’re quite excited by the release of Rainer on Film: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era. The collection includes plenty of film reviews – from Night of the Hunter to L.A. Confidential to Blue Velvet, as well as longer essays on cultural/aesthetic issues, pieces on actors and directors (Bergman, Robert Altman), and sections on documentaries, literary or theatrical adaptations, and the movies of Steven Spielberg.

In the book’s introduction, Peter talks about falling for film as a kid watching the same picture over and over on the TV show Million Dollar Movie, and his youthful attraction for critics Pauline Kael and James Agee.

Peter loves film as deeply as anyone I know, but he doesn’t keep his disappointment to himself when he’s let down by a filmmaker he admires. “Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else,” he writes. “It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance.”

Peter has served as film critic for the Los Angeles Times and New York magazine. He wrote for me at New Times LA in the late ‘90s (that work made him a Pulitzer finalist); he currently writes for the Christian Science Monitor.

This is my Q+A with Peter, who appears at Book Soup on Monday June 10 and at Vroman’s on Wednesday June 19.

Did coming of age as a cinephile in the ‘70s – writing for your college paper and programming a campus film society, then writing your first professional review of Chinatown – spoil you for the decades that came after?

I feel spoiled to some extent by the way in which I came up as a critic. I was film critic for my college newspaper, the Brandeis “Justice,” which was a great laboratory for putting my ideas into print and then hashing out the blowback from my students and teachers. There was a great immediacy about the whole process. In some ways, it’s a microcosm of the ideal situation for a critic – having as an audience a smart, contentious, captive audience of true believers.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that the movies that were coming out then, the early mid-‘70s, represented a golden age. This isn’t nostalgia. Week after week I found myself reviewing “The Godfather,” “Cabaret,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Mean Streets,” “Straw Dogs,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Last Picture Show,” “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Sounder,” you name it. I used to joke that back then even the bad movies were good. (Now *that’s* nostalgia).

One of the main qualities that distinguishes your criticism, I think, is

your talent at “seeing through” a film, to spot its invisible claims and pretensions, to look squarely at what it is selling us -- whether a mainstream Hollywood movie or independent art film. Where does this impulse come from, and how the hell does it work? I’m not sure I know a critic in any genre who does this so insightfully and accessibly.

I love “looking through” a movie because there is often so much more going in a film, politically, psychologically, morally, aesthetically, than simply what is being presented to us. This is my natural disposition. I don’t like feeling conned when I go to a movie. I’m a natural skeptic who, of course, is also open to being gulled on a regular basis. I guess this makes me a magician’s ideal audience, and the best movie artists are indeed magicians.

Movies reflect the society in which they were made – this is a concept that runs throughout my criticism. I didn’t realize to what extent this was true of my writing until I began collecting my pieces. It’s kind of like packing up your library when you move. You begin to see patterns in the books you buy that you may not have been consciously aware of.

Pauline Kael said that the critic was the only thing that stood between the audience and the marketplace. These days we have a more sophisticated style of marketing, and perhaps a less sophisticated brand of taste: Blockbusters, sequels, an amplification of special effects that makes the corporate ‘80s look nuanced, and a Hollywood system increasingly geared to violence- and sensation-loving teenage boys. (In some ways it ‘s a parody of the kind of cinema Kael called for.) What’s the role of the critic in this 21st century funhouse?

The role of the critic in the 21^st century funhouse, assuming there is a role anymore, is the same as it’s ever been – to write as well as you can on movies worth writing about. The increasingly overmuscled marketing juggernauts and the pile-on of pronouncements on movies from every quarter, digital or otherwise, makes life difficult for a critic who wants to be heard above the din and say something worthy of more than a tweet.

Is there a type of film – a genre, a certain budget -- that has become almost impossible to make, or at least to distribute with any hope of finding an audience? What are we missing?

Small-scale, handcrafted dramas, especially featuring people over 40, are difficult to finance in Hollywood nowadays. Television has become much more of an arena for the sort of serious, extended domestic dramas that used to be standard in Hollywood, before the franchise mentality took hold and the budgets went blooey. The life of a TV critic is in some respects more challenging these days than the life of a movie critic. But then again, I am writing this here in the summer movie doldrums!

It’s easy to doubt, lament, and lose faith in the movies. Who are a few of the filmmakers, from past or present, who restore your love of the medium?

There are wonderful directors working now and doing good work against considerable odds: I loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” a real risk-taker, and shot in wide screen; I think Drake Doremus (“Like Crazy”) is quite talented, Jeff Nichols (”Mud”), Deborah Granik (“Winter’s Bone”). Richard Linklater is extraordinarily versatile, maybe the best of his generation.

There are way too many directors I admire from the past, so just a brief stab here – the humanists: Satyajit Ray, Vittorio De Sica, Charlie Chaplin, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir. It doesn’t get any better than their best.

Farewell to a Los Angeles Chronicler

SOMETIME during that hazy, gray zone around Christmas and New Year’s Day, one of LA’s finest scribes left town, maybe for good. I’m talking about former Village Voice/LA Weekly/Los Angeles magazine writer and editor RJ Smith. He’s also the author of two acclaimed books, The Great Black Way: LA in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance and last year’s The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, a deep cultural history which got two rave reviews in the New York Times.

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But RJ has been a startlingly cool cultural journalist for decades now:  When I moved to town, in ’97, he was one of a very few bylines I already knew, from his work in the Voice and his decamping for the LA Weekly during an early-90s heyday during which it employed – I think I have this right – Jonathan Gold, Lynell George, John Powers, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson and many other luminaries. (Manohla Dargis arrived, I think, near the end of that period.) My now-wife worked as an intern around this time, and picked up the phone one day to find Arthur Lee, of the band Love, calling.

When I met him years later, at the old Knitting Factory at what may’ve been a New Pornographers show, I was a bit starstruck. And for all the journos laid off during the dark days of ’08 and ’09, RJ’s dismissal may be the most inexplicable. 

He’s written about death of Elliott Smith for Spin and Steve Martin’s art collection for the New York Times magazine, and recently penned a line (involving Iggy Pop) in his Los Angeles magazine piece on artist Chris Burden that nails a cultural phenomenon I’ve been trying for years to describe half as well. He’s about as perceptive a reporter as I know, with some of the outsider's perspective you see in everyone from Carey McWilliams to the late Huell Howser.

RJ is an elusive cat (“RJ? We don’t even know his real name,” a mutual friend told me the other day), but we managed to become friend over the last few years here. I’ll miss him personally and professionally – he’s been a valuable source of advice on my own book. And I know I’m not the only Angeleno who will miss his decoding of the complex culture of the Southland. With just about every piece, RJ tackled his subjects in a smart, off-center way that never would have crossed my mind, but still made it clear in the writing.

Here at the Misread City, we’re wishing RJ well at his next gig, at Cincinnati magazine, in a city he got to know through the record label that put out some of James Brown's earliest (and finest) recordings. Angelenos’ loss will be Ohioans' gain.

Though part of me wonders – what’s happened to the journalistic scene in Los Angeles if it can no longer hold talent like RJ Smith? Here’s hoping his exile might not be permanent.

Here’s my Q+A.

When you came to LA in 1990, it was before the riots, before Salonen, before Beck’s breakout, and so on. How did the city strike you then: Did it seem wide open in some ways? Culturally sleepy?

I came to Los Angeles in 1990. Jonathan Gold had famously just been fired as music editor at the LA Weekly, and Kit Rachlis, who I had known at the Village Voice before he became editor of the Weekly, brought me in to rebuild the music section.

I thought I would be here a couple of years and then head elsewhere, but LA has a way of redefining your suppositions. We stayed. The early 90s were an amazing time to be here: You could see Beck in a Star Wars helmet playing a vacuum cleaner in a bowling alley; painters were fighting to reclaim downtown inch by inch; Pocho was this heresy of a zine. The coolest stuff was weird, out, then, and when you stumbled onto something good you really felt like you had discovered a treasure.

Hard as it is to imagine today, there was a time when people talked about attacking the citadel of the Music Center.  Or maybe it was the LA Times. These days there is no death star to conveniently focus on; the Times and the Center are just flavor-bringers, their monolithic status long gone.

There’s a feeling that a lot of stuff is going on and not much feeling of a target worth hanging your ambitions on. (Other than New York, always an inviting target to LA: I think why the fate of MOCA is crucial to watch is not tied to the idea of “high culture” vs. “pop culture” but to the question, who will define the LA art world: New York or LA money?)

Your James Brown book, The One, got better reviews than just about any non-fiction book I can remember. What was the best thing about writing that?

Connecting with the south in a way I never had before. It was amazing to be traveling across South Carolina and Georgia just as Obama was getting elected the first time. That, and getting invited over to Bootsy Collins’ house for dinner.

You wrote incisively about the press for LA magazine. When you arrived here, the city had three alternative weeklies, one with a whole research and fact-checking department. There were other reasons to think our publications might compete with those in New York. How does the print journalism scene compare these days? Are there fewer forums for serious or personal work than when you arrived?

To speak the obvious, there are as many or more outlets today, they’re just not paying what they used to. Or, just not paying. The LA Review of Books is a still promising project, and Arthur is up and running again. KPCC and KCET have been hiring journalists, and Slake showed what was possible with literary journalism at least until a better paying job comes along. It did good stuff.  

Hard to say if people are better or worse informed than they used to be. I’m still waiting for somebody to call bullshit on Gangster Squad’s glorification of Chief Parker!

You’re headed back to your native Midwest. What attracted you to Cincinnati magazine?

Well, first of all it’s nice to be living in a big city that has a football team.

I grew up in Detroit, and I suppose from a few angles Cincinnati reminds me of that place. A great editor is getting rarer and rarer, and in Jay Stowe, Cincinnati has somebody I was eager to work with. I’ve known his reputation since he was at Spin, and from there the New York Observer and on to being editor in chief at Outside. I started talking to him when I would come to Cincinnati to research King Records for the JB book, and the more I saw of the city the more interested I got.  

It’s a place with a mix of north and south, tea partiers and anarchists. Plus it has, in Wussy, the best band around right now, and I got to see them play in Over-the-Rhine last Saturday night. Working in a town with a humane cost of living gives me the chance to conceptualize, and write, the next book, and maybe the next one too.

What will you miss most about LA?

I would drag any stranger or friend I could to Watts Towers upon arrival in town, hoping they would see what I saw: an amazing upwelling, a monument to the individual and the community.

LA is a great place to build crazy stuff in your backyard without criticism orperhaps interest from your neighbors. Call it freedom or a lack of care, but LA gives you a lot of space to make stuff up.

The New York Literary Life

A few years ago -- before the crash, back when everything seemed to me moving forward more or less fine -- I went to New York to interview three youngish writers with first novels due. I asked:

Is it possible to lead a dedicated literary life in the billionaire-filled, media-crazed New York of today? To be heedless of the material world as you burrow into novels and ideas the way the old Partisan Review gang did in the '40s and '50s, to come up with notions that rock the intellectual landscape? And if so, who exactly is still paying attention?  

The three novelists -- Nathaniel Rich, Keith Gessen and Ed Park -- all had slightly different answers. You can find my story here. I'm still unsure how the changed economic/literary/journalistic landscape changes all this.

And these days, Rich has a new novel coming -- fresh off a burst of journalistic activity and a profile on him and his bro in NYT Styles. Gessen had a recent piece in the New Yorker and continues to write for  N+1, which he helped found. And Ed Park, a longtime editor at The Believer, was recently hired by Amazon to acquire new fiction.

Look forward to more from these three gents.

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.

Kicking Ass with Evan Wright

SO far the most acclaimed first-person account of the current Iraq War is "Generation Kill," in which LA journalist evan wright embedded himself in a marine battalion quite different from the soldiers who fought the vietnam war.

today i have an LA Times piece on wright, who i sat down with recently. a very serious, sincere and complicated dude who makes the case (both in his work and in conversation) for print journalism. (i got the un-macho ohioian in a very dazed state, just off a plane from japan, and he seemed to slowly reorient as his espresso kicked in.)

anyway i knew i was going to like wright's new book "hella nation" -- chronicles of neo-nazis, would-be porn stars, a runaway agent -- when he distanced himself from hunter s. thompson and instead quoted the godlike a.j. liebling. 

the book collects pieces wright wrote when he was "ambassador to the underbelly," as his dad once put it.

one of my favorite pieces in the book is about taxi-dance places in LA, originally edited by renowned editor janet duckworth, then at the LA weekly. the piece is a masterpiece of empathy and historical vision.

Photo credit: Flickr user Viajante