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.

Fathers and Sons

ONE of the liveliest voices on the pages of the New York Times Magazine has just released a beautifully observed and heartbreaking book. Stephen Rodrick's The Magical Stranger: A Son's Journey Into His Father's Life justifies the overused word "poignant."

Rodrick is known to sharp-eyed readers for a wide range of stories in the Times magazine as well as Men's Journal; a recent story, on Lindsay Lohan, Bret Easton Ellis, Paul Schrader and the movie The Canyons, may be the smartest piece involving a celebrity I've read in years.

The Magical Stranger is both a look back and a look inward: It's a kind of reported memoir in which Rodrick chronicles his Navy-pilot father's early years and death in 1979, when he crashed in the Indian Ocean when Rodrick was just 13.

Full disclosure: Part of my interest in the book comes from the fact that his father and mine were classmates at the Naval Academy; apparently they didn't know each other. And while I've admired Rodrick's work for years before we met, we've become acquainted he moved to Los Angeles. Finally, I am unfairly biased in his direction because of his excellent taste in music, and he shares The Misread City's ardor for Lloyd Cole, the Go-Betweens and other exemplars of unpopular pop, a term it turns out to have coined.

Here is my Q&A with Stephen Rodrick, who appears at Vroman's bookstore in Pasadena tonight, June 3.

You’re a longtime magazine journalist – “I inhabit other people’s lives for a living,” you write – accustomed to looking outward at the world. Was it odd or difficult to look inward, and to report on and research your own life and family history?

It wasn't actually that difficult. I think waiting until I was in my 40s was a fortunate coincidence. The same powers of observation that you need to bring to profiling Judd Apatow or Serena Williams is a tool that serves you well when you look at your own life. As I do with my profiles, I tried to strip away the myth of my father as a fallen hero–which he was to some extent–and replace it with a portrait of him as a real man with foibles and tragic flaws.

I always say my greatest skill as a journalist is simply that I show up: Not just for a day or two, but for weeks in the hopes of getting a full understanding of the person that I'm writing about; the good days, the bad day, the days when nothing happens. And I tried to bring that to writing about my family and my father. There were trips I took cross-country and overseas that didn't make it into the book, but it helped give me an understanding of my dad and naval aviators that I think allowed me to write with a level of confidence about them. I tried to live with them, or my father's memory, as much as I could.

You’ve been living with the painful fact of your father’s death since you were 13. What triggered you to dig into that complicated story now?

Well, it was a bit of practicality that finally got me off my ass. I'd been talking about writing about my father and our family since I wrote a piece for Men's Journal on navy pilots back in 2002. But I kept putting it off, partially because it was a pretty painful experience to write about for six to eight weeks so the idea of spending two or three years on the project sounded pretty overwhelming. But I learned in 2009 that my dad's squadron, VAQ-135, was making their last deployment flying the EA-6B Prowler, my dad's old plane, in 2009-2010 before transitioning to a new jet. Half the book is memoir, half the book is reportage on following my dad's squadron so I knew it if I was going to make the experience as real as possible, it would have to be while they were still flying Prowlers. The guys actually got me up on a flight in a Prowler on a low-level training flight through the Cascades and despite booting a spectacular yellow fluid it was one of the great experiences of my life.

Give us a sense of what kind of research you did to try to understand the whole thing.

It was a little bit of everything: Filing a Freedom of Information request and combing through my Dad's accident report, talking to aviators who flew with him, going to his 50th high school reunion, discovering a diary he kept when he was twelve and thirteen; the same age as I was when he died.

For the modern part of the story; following VAQ-135 and, specifically, Commander James Hunter Ware the skipper of VAQ-135, I spent hundreds of days up around NAS Whidbey where they're stationed and then hit the road to meet them in the Pacific, Key West, Jacksonville, Pearl Harbor, and then traveling to Bahrain and Dubai to spend more time with Ware for his next job on the USS Lincoln where he was the air boss, supervising landing and taking off jets on the carrier. I probably logged about 50,000 travel miles and 250 to 300 days on the road. With some notable exceptions–confined to quarters in Dubai with bronchitis, the entire country of Bahrain–I pretty much loved every minute of it.

Did you have any kind of model for The Magical Stranger or for your writing in general?

I'm not sure I had a specific model but Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life for the memoir stuff, a semi-obscure American novelist Thomas Rogers' to remind me to shoot some comedy into the pathos and your dad, Robert Timberg's The Nightingale's Song for his look at what the Naval Academy was like in the 1950s and 1960s. All were well-thumbed along with some Evelyn Waugh book like A Handful of Dust which is my favorite novel. It really bore no specific relation to the book but reminded me how to write about people and tragedy in a tart, honest and sometimes funny way without either being mean or mawkish.

Your journalism is unpredictably wide-ranging from eccentric purveyor of “unpopular pop” Jon Brion to the making of the strange Paul Schrader/ Lindsay Lohan film The Canyons. Sometimes, of course, you jump because an editor calls, but when it’s up to you, what makes a Stephen Rodrick story?

I think like most writers, I look for people or subjects I can identify with. When I was writing the book, I spent a lot of time trying to parse what makes a book or any creative project work. Not conincidentally, it's a theme in my writing. favorite stories.  My favorite stories are watching artists try and make a project actually happen-whether it's Brion with Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, Judd Apatow with Knocked Up; Schrader with The Canyons or Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian trying to write a movie.

In a way, Hunter Ware' attempt to build a cohesive squadron that took care of his men and women while also maintaining a high sortie completion rate for missions over Afghanistan is just a military version of that. But watching people try to solve their own riddles has taught me so much about leading and creating that I feel a little guilty that I get paid to basically attend a seminar on 'Here's How You Make Your Dream Come True or Here's How Your Dream Gets Crushed By The Forces of Evil.'

You’ve lived in L.A. for a year or two now – after all your years in New York, what’s that been like?

I love it. I work at home so I don't have to fight the traffic and I get to swim laps outdoors all year round at Occidental College. It is true; it's a more isolated experience; both good and bad compared to Brooklyn. My wife and I have taken to referring to our house as the compound because a) it's great and comforting and b) you have to jump in your car to go do anything so it's also a compound in a house arrest kind of way.

I loved the ten years I spent in Brooklyn, but it starts to lose a little of its allure when all your friends get married and settled down and you're not going out five nights a week. Then all the question arise: Why am I paying $2500 for a 1000 square feet and I have no outdoor space? But there are some similarities; just like there were Brooklyn snobs who would need Jesus to be playing at the Bowery to cross the bridge and go to the Bowery on the weekend; here I live in Eagle Rock and it would take Jesus AND Mary doing an acoustic set at Largo to get me west of La Brea on a Saturday night.

But the tacos here are so much better.

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.

Culture and Criticism

TWO of my favorite journalists, film critic A.O. Scott and media reporter David Carr, have gone back and forth about a number of important issues lately. Some of this is analog vs. digital, print vs. Internet stuff.

Some of it has to do with the nature of the press, of DIY/artisanal culture, or the revival of vinyl records. And in this swirl of new and old, they ask, what is the role of the culture critic?

(Cue chin-stroking music, please.)

I wrote about a fading golden age or arts criticism a few years back, in a story -- eventually titled "Critical Condition" -- that drew so many letters, pro and con, that the LA Times added a Sunday letters page to contain them. Norman Lear responded to the article in a speech. That kind of thing.

My piece tried to look back, and to speculate on what was coming next. Here it is.

I'd like to think that what it said has held up pretty well, and that things are, if anything, bleaker than I forecasted at the time. How have things changed since then?

Farewell to the Man Behind Ecotopia

HE wrote a book that a lot of people haven't heard of, but one that influenced many and presaged a lot of the way we live now, especially on the West Coast, where it's set. That's Ernest "Chick" Callenbach, the Berkeley author of the book Ecotopia. Chick, as he was known, died on April 16.

This month has seen a lot of death in my world -- a very dear elderly relative, an old friend's mother, drummer Levon Helm -- and this one has a lot of meaning for me. When I met Callenbach, at his home in Berkeley in 2008, he struck me as one of the sharpest and most physically fit 79-year-old I'd ever encountered. (I remember him telling me how he walked from his house to the post office every day, which was quite a hike.) I also liked his sincerity, decency and sense of humor.

Because of a reissue of Ecotopia -- a slim novel which looks at a future in which Oregon, Washington and Northern California have seceded and begun an environmentalist utopia with a woman president -- I spoke to Callenbach for an article which became my first piece for the New York Times, my first piece of work after my layoff from the LA Times, and the first post on this blog. HERE's that story, which the paper titled, "The Novel That Predicted Portland."

My story looked at how hard Callenbach struggled to get the book published -- two dozen rejections.

“It was rejected by every significant publisher in New York,” he told me. “Some said it didn’t have enough sex and violence, or that they couldn’t tell if it were a novel or a tract. Somebody said the ecology trend was over. This was New York, circa 1974. I was on the point of burning it.”

Like a lot of '70s culture, the book ended up seeming less antique and more pertinent as we moved into the 21st century the limits to our resources became unambiguous.

I don't often stay in touch with former subjects; here's one I really wish I had.

(Here is a good obit from today's LA Times. And here is one from the New York Times.)

R.I.P., Chick.

UPDATE: Salon has run a piece found on Callenbach's computer in which he looks, as hopefully as he can, to the future. They stand in some ways as his final words.

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.

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.