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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
The Creative Class: Idle Dreamers
THE latest of my series for Salon on the damage the recession, digital technology and the Internet have exerted on the creative class runs today. I'm consumed with the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend but will try to post on it more extensively later.This piece looked at the crisis and said, Why aren't we hearing about it? Why has it not entered the cultural conversation? And why … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
Death of the Clerk
TODAY I've got a new story from my Salon series on the demise of the creative class. It looks at the humble store clerk and asks, What does it means that these people -- and the places they work, like Rocket Video, Tower Records, Dutton's Brentwood Books, and so on -- are disappearing?I spoke to a video store clerk, writers Jonathan Lethem and Dana Gioia, an MIT research scientist and others.Here … [Read more...]