[contextly_auto_sidebar] THE other day I hung out with Burbank resident and globe-trotter Cory Doctorow, who is a cult figure with a very large cult. We talked mostly about his new novel, Walkaway, which is intellectually fascinating and really moves. Will try to fill in this post a bit for now, but here is my LA Times profile. I will point out that obvious that I find him a bit … [Read more...]
Art, Censorship, and the Death of Emmett Till
[contextly_auto_sidebar] WELL, it's really come to this, hasn't it? Having to defend the very existence of a piece of visual art not against Puritans or Nazis or Southern Fundamentalists or the Taliban but against.... other artists. The story of how the New York art world has been divided between people who think artist Dana Schutz should be able to paint (and exhibit) a picture of Emmett … [Read more...]
Arts Journalism and the Culture Crash
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOME things have gotten a bit better since I published my book two years ago; some have unraveled more or less on schedule. One thing that does not seem to be improving is the state of cultural journalism: Arts critics (and reporters, like yours truly) continue to be laid off as publications scale back and decide -- just as school boards do in lean times -- that … [Read more...]
Snapshots from the Culture Crash: 1
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LONGTIME music journalist Steve Mirkin has been, like a lot of us in the creative class, though a series ups and downs since the Internet remade journalism and the recession undercut the middle class. He appears briefly in my book Culture Crash. Here is an update, which begins around January 1. It was not going to be a happy new year for me. After more than two … [Read more...]
Pres Obama’s cultural policy
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LIKE a lot of Americans, I'm sorry to see President Obama go. But in at least two areas, he was a real disappointment. One was his gutless response -- or lack of response -- to the housing crisis, which involved mostly looking the other way and proposing toothless acronyms while banks crushed homeowners struggling with the Great Recession. His second great failure … [Read more...]
The Creative Class Thrives in Ancient Greece
[contextly_auto_sidebar] The second of my histories of the creative class just went up on the website for Radio Silence, the Bay Area journal dedicated to music and literature. Here's a passage from it: Greece saw a kind of civic society of music and dance. Every class from king to serf took part; the children of citizens were educated to sing and play the lyre; and guests at a drinking party … [Read more...]
Where did the creative class come from?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="H6GVlMAv9FbtIDTE6yRckcn9TVgOyWzQ"] YOUR humble blogger has been absolutely swamped with a cross-country move and writing about pop culture (mostly) for Salon. I hope to never leave CultureCrash fallow for nearly this long. At least, I've got something I'm proud of to post: Here is a piece on the site of the Bay Area music-meets-literature journal Radio Silence. It … [Read more...]
What Silicon Valley means For Culture
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="WjZxcPtWCK6ExlRGkfHJTGqGfWWntSeY"] RECENTLY your humble blogger was able to connect the current situation in the world of technology -- the money, the power, the self-deception -- with the history of the arts. Specifically, I'm talking about cultural patronage, and I take it back to Haydn, Moneverdi and Velazquez. This piece of mine from Salon may interest Arts … [Read more...]
Ranting and Rolling in Los Angeles
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="mWdRzlBTyNGzGnaVXOaed48P7lTbyuwV"] I'll be at Chevalier's Books in LA's Larchmont Village neighborhood tonight, with the writers Lynell George, David Ulin and Joe Donnelly of the literary magazine Slake. Be there or be square. I'll also be at the LA Times Festival of Books on Sunday April 19. … [Read more...]
What Happens When a Newsroom Dies?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="xufOwYj5n0XdtGNHU7t2P2ob7klfXyeT"] THERE's a poignant piece up on The Guardian about a photojournalist who has tracked the collapse of American newspapers, especially the once-great Philadelphia Inquirer. Here's the story's opening graph: In the past decade, as a percentage, more print journalists have lost their jobs than workers in any other significant … [Read more...]