The Web, Jaron Lanier and the Disappearing Middle Class

TODAY I have a long and I hope substantial Q+A with web visionary-turned-skeptic Jaron Lanier. Here it is. We get into some ideas that reflect on my investigation of the fate of the creative class in the 21st century, including the growth of a tiny digital plutocracy at the expense of the imperiled middle class.

The piece is provoked by his powerful and odd new book, Who Owns the Future?

The Future of the Movies

THIS week in Salon, I interview David Denby, one of the New Yorker's film critics. We spoke about his new book, a collection of new and old essays and reviews, Do the Movies Have a Future? here.

A few years ago, I might have told you that Denby was too pessimistic and a little stodgy. I think it's clear today that his cautionary tone is warranted. In a nutshell, he's concerned that films have been reduced to corporate marketing for children and that real artistry is becoming hard to find. Movies for grownups have never had it so bad.

And this will make more sense after you've read the Q+A, but here are some bits that Salon did not have room for.

I think there’s good criticism in every genre if you know where to find it. I guess, it seems to me, that it’s bigger than that and has more to do with -- and this is true on Pitchfork as well -- popular tastes going one way and quality going another. I don’t have an answer here. I don’t know quite what happened, but I think we could -- whatever our differences in, say, musical taste -- probably agree that The Beatles, Dylan, the early Stones -- this is all stuff that has happened before I was born so  this isn’t Boomer nostalgia on my part -- was a period where a mass audience... and maybe 50s Miles Davis and some other things... where mass taste and quality were moving forward on the same track more or less. Even though, yes, some things were overlooked. Something is changed. Not just in rock and roll, but in film and perhaps in culture at large. Perhaps there is a larger cultural explanation for this. I don’t know what it is, but it feels like that’s happened in a number of different places.

Well, it’s the way the market system works. And the way people’s tastes are developed when they’re very young, and what they’re caught by. Cultivated taste in all the arts -- whether it’s literature, painting, music, film -- gets developed slowly by steps. And that’s why I said it was so important that, when you were a kid in the 50s and 60s, you were dragged to the movies by your parents. You half understood what was going on, but it aroused your curiosity. What was all of this sexual intrigue? The psychological complexity. Why was that person in a rage? It’s partly about how young people are educated into taste. I mean, very few people have naturally high-developed taste right from infancy or being aged 7 or 8. And that’s why I’m so upset that the movie business doesn’t seem to be laying the ground for grown up taste in the future. People will just drift off to television, and quite rightly, since there is all sorts of interesting and serious stuff there. It’s a calamity. Basically, the studios have attached their future to the birth rate rather than developing an audience that will go to movies in their 40s, 50s and 60s. That’s what they’re doing and I think it’s profoundly self-destructive.

I’m going to close with an old hero of yours. Pauline Kael was a mentor of yours and an undeniably brilliant person with an electrifying prose style. But she was also a critic who gradually ignored foreign films, exposed sensation for its own sake, insulted the art house audience as well as seriousness and cultivation. How does she fit into your argument?

Personally, she had an enormous affect on me and about 50 other people. She stuck a cattle prod into my side. And she changed her mind about my talents later on, which was a growing up experience that was painful, but I think, in the long run, healthy and necessary. Yes, she disliked overly controlled, formal exercises from Europe and austerity. She preferred the vitality and the mess of American popular culture to the highly controlled European art style. Although she did certainly push the young Goddard and the young Bertolucci, and she adored Kurosawa.

All influenced by American cinema, obviously.

Yeah. She adored Kurosawa, and then that influence of Kurosawa came back onto Spielberg and Lucas and many other people. But, I think, basically, your description is correct. As she grew less and less interested... For instance, she couldn’t do anything with the Germans in the 70s.

Fassbinder, she completely ignored.

Fassbinder was just, to her mind, thoroughly unappealing. And she just felt in a terrible mood everytime she saw one of those movies, so she didn’t write about them. But she didn’t really respond to Wenders or early Herzog, either. She felt... I quote some of those reviews where she felt her strength was being “sapped.” You know, her All-American energy. She was a California farm girl, she was not going to be pushed over by these European phonies. That was the persona. So, you know, I think that was wrong and some of us feel that she went too far in demanding craziness and zaniness and that she missed out on some interesting and exciting things. But all I can tell the young people is it’s great to have a mentor, and it’s great to be rejected by your mentor. Painful as that might be. Because then you’re forced to shed some of those early influences and find your own voice and interests.

I’m teaching a criticism class right now and encouraged all of the students to pick up a critic, read his or her work, do a report and get to know it. But, the next step is to transcend the influence of Dwight Macdonald or Ellen Willis or Pauline Kael or whoever it is.

You have to read everything. You have to absorb everything good. I always tell young people, “Don’t forget that your medium is words.” The artist’s medium might be music or film or digits, but your medium is words. That means you can’t just read journalism. You have to read Shakespeare. You have to read Wallace Stevens. You have to read fiction because otherwise you’re just going to fall into a kind of jog trot of journalese phrasemaking. You’re going to date yourself very quickly, and have nothing much to say. So, you’ve got to continuously freshen the language. And the people who do that are the ones who survive. 

Saving SoCal's Libraries

THIS blog is dedicated, of course, to West Coast culture, from classical music to science fiction, and I tend to stay away from politics here. But an issue crucial to the survival and access to West Coast culture is breaking now: the closing of libraries and especially school libraries in Southern California. This has been brought about by the recession and bad political judgement.


Pasadena Unified and LAUSD have plans to fire all of their school librarians, with the closing of those libraries likely. It feels like they are fulfilling the very East Coast stereotype of Southern California as shallow and anti-intellectual that I have spent much of my time in LA combatting. Who needs Bradbury's "firemen" from Fahrenheit 451, torching books, when locals decide to dismantle access to books and ideas on the basis of "fiscal responsibility"?


It's coming at a time when the economic climate has caused use of libraries nationwide to surge, and when the need for students to be information literate had made school librarians more crucial than ever.


HERE is the Op-Ed piece from today's LA Times. The piece concentrates on the way the Internet -- that great blessing and curse -- has made the work of school libraries more complicated and more important. Information flows so freely that young people can't separate the good from the bad. As school librarian Sara Scribner writes:


And to most kids, whatever they read on the Internet is "all good." I've been told, quite emphatically, that the Apollo moonwalk never happened, the Holocaust was a hoax and George W. Bush orchestrated 9/11 -- all based on text, photos or videos found online.


I should add here that Sara, a former LATimes and LA Weekly music writer who reviewed major records by Beck, Wilco and Sleater-Kinney before beginning  a new career as a teacher a decade ago, is also my wife. If she, along with these other school librarians who've been pink-slipped, loses her job, your favorite culture blog will be broadcasting from Portland or Austin, or not at all. (Because the LA Times decided that I was expendable, the two of us and our young son depend on her health insurance.)


Politically, we're seeing a combination of short-sightedness by the school districts and a lack of courage by Gov. Schwarzennegger to properly fund the schools and the rest of the state's infrastructure with tiny taxes on the wealthy. Gov. Reagan had the political guts to raise taxes for the sake of building the state; this supposed macho man has shown nothing but cowardice and confusion in dealing with the financial crisis.


So if you care about West Coast culture, or about The Misread City, please tell your friends in Pasadena and LA to make some noise. Interested parties can check out this site dedicated to saving Pasadena's schools through a Yes vote on Measure CC... To be -- I hope -- continued.


Addendum: Sara and others were on NPR's To the Point with Warren Olney, for a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation about these issues and more -- here is a link.

Vancouver and The Future of William Gibson

I SEEM to be hearing a lot about Vancouver these days. Not sure why, but it reminds me of my one trip to that glorious city to interview visionary novelist William Gibson. The writer often credited with foreseeing the Internet and much of hacker culture, Gibson was about to publish Spook Country, his second novel (after Pattern Recognition) to concentrate on the more-or-less present.

Gibson was as smart and easy to get along with as anyone I've ever interviewed: I was struck by his humility. HERE is my profile of him, where we talked about growing up in the conservative South, his flight to Canada, his breakthrough with Neuromancer, his clumsiness with technology and interest in rock n' roll and country music, and what a loser his friends thought he was when he started writing science fiction.

(Doug Coupland, who also lives in the city, was one of my first author interviews, back in 1994; a reader of The Misread City has just dug it up for me, here.)

And if you end up in Vancouver, the best place I ate was the Rain City Grille (where I ordered the locavore menu) and my favorite place to drink there is an indie/ retro pub called The Morrissey.

The Misread City Goes Into the Future

THIS week yours truly will be serving as guest editor for the blog io9, which is devoted to science, futurism, and science-fiction in all its forms. I'll be posting on some topics familiar to readers of The Misread City -- some news regarding author Ursula K. Le Guin, a new film based on a Philip K. Dick novel -- as well as topics largely new to me such as eco-tourism and UFO abductions. (Or perhaps those are the same thing)

I find io9 both smart and funny and hope my readers do too. In any case, look forward to seeing you there.

HERE is a link to all my work on the site.

And don't forget that my best guitarists poll is still live!

The Future of Publishing?

WITH dignitaries including saxophonist Wayne Shorter and Ray Bradbury, and displays ranging from publishers' new books to the history of the low-rider, the Guadalajara International Book Festival -- dedicated this year to the literature and culture of Los Angeles -- has been quite packed already. I'm going to try to offer a few snapshots of Tuesday's festival -- hoping to get time for a second post on last eve's wild night.

The afternoon included a typically elegiac, mandarin speech by former LATimes book editor Steve Wasserman on the future of publishing. We've entered what he calls "an ultimate stage in the democratization of knowledge."

It's also, he said, a time when digital technology, conglomeration, the collapse of bookstores, independent and otherwise, "renders serious reading increasingly irrelevant." He fears a "hollowing out" of the culture of sustained argument that makes for an informed citizen.

Literary people, Steve feared, will become "the party of the past." He compared the situation in the U.S. to Europe and especially Germany, where state controls (forbidding price-slashing) kept an indie bookstore culture thriving even in bad economic times.

He offered two contrasting phrases. First, Philip Roth's prediction that the novel will go the way of Latin, known only to a small elite. And second, Auden's line, "It is always a danger for the present to write history in the future tense."

"The Tyranny of E-mail"

WHAT does a sumerian love poem have in common with that email you just sent to your boss? probably not a whole hell of a lot. but both are means of communication made possible by the technology of the day, and it's the kind of thing john freeman gets into with his new book, "the tyranny of e-mail." (the old-school spelling is his.)

here is my interview with freeman -- who was recently named editor of british literary magazine granta, from sunday's LATimes. this year, of course, marks the 40th anniversary of the first electronic text message.

part of what's most interesting in his book is the history -- the arduous route for instance, a letter would take to find its recipient in the ancient world, the way the catholic church took over in the dark days after the roman empire crumbled, the coming of mass literacy in the english speaking countries, the way lincoln was besieged with telegrams in the same way obama is chained to his blackberry, and so on.

freeman is especially strong on solutions, calling for a new style of communication based on the "slow food" movement. this photo, by the way, is of a civil-war era pony express rider.