[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 I Have in Common With Andrew Sullivan
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="nKnrC7PUeqDJC4RDR5siDCwLQPIJamEg"] OVER the last few years, as the traditional print media has fallen into a tailspin, a number of observers -- including very smart, canny ones -- have predicted that blogs would replace print as well as the more established websites. Andrew Sullivan, whose site The Dish was updated often and drew an enormous readership, was often … [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...]
The Collapsing Fortunes of the Club Deejay
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Am8vEARmW7HozjXX5GcmuHgcQEc0fAD8"] WHEN people try to destroy my argument about a crisis in culture, one of their most common tacks is to suggest that I'm describing just the fading of an old world -- classical music, literary writing, print journalism and so on -- that is being eclipsed as a new, more democratic pop-culture-driven world rises, bestowing its … [Read more...]
“In Praise of Difficulty”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="b8rJJnGCXKiH3M8zWOVGbX2BXfYXXJBs"] DO we need cultural seriousness, intellectual contemplation, works of depth and complexity? I've been hearing for most of my life -- I came of age in the '80s -- that we don't. Just asking the question got you branded, when I was a kid, a sissy or a bookworm; now it gets you called a snob. But a very fine, reasonably long … [Read more...]
Does Quality Exist? Does it Matter?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="wQDbiK53WLrcRyDIHLNO7bs9fTuwmnMY"] THE novelist Rick Moody tracked me down recently and asked me to go back and forth with him over the issue of aesthetic quality. He -- as an emissary of the literary blog The Rumpus -- was especially interested in the notion of art that was "born to be bad." We chewed on this issue for a while -- connecting the argument of my … [Read more...]
Six Questions: Where Do We Go Fom Here?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="1whRNQEaMtG6Y3rKjMLHRzTEwdTzdym6"] THE American Scholar magazine recently asked me to lay out some of the questions I was left with upon completing my book, Culture Crash. I was glad they asked me for questions rather than answers; the plight of the arts, humanism, the middle class, and art for art's sake seem so complex and impacted that it's a lot harder to solve … [Read more...]
Culture Crash and the 21st C Musician
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="kIKdAj6Xm5kqbZ9uMHw3rRcxIyuEkbsM"] ONE of my favorite discussions of the new world of the arts and culture -- the economic, technological, sociological changes I describe in my book -- comes in this conversation I had with an editor at the new 21st C Musician site. (I've written several pieces for the site on the transformation of classical music.) Considering both … [Read more...]
Introducing The 21st Century Musician
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="9QYXBUzJHimvnKsbZ6oLELXVvjWIavAs"] OVER the last few years I've been diving into the breakdown of the old 20th century creative economy and assessing as best I can the crisis we're in now. But I've also been asking myself -- and everybody I know -- how we might move forward. Part of the answer comes from work I've been doing for a new online magazine called the 21st … [Read more...]
The Death of a Great Video Store
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Xk6JC31DMBzwhIx8HqWSAUMhlvPf4tdk"] LOS Angeles is the capital of the film world, but it is about to lose one of its last great shops that rents movies: Vidiots in Santa Monica. I got to know this place about a decade ago, as well as a store made up of some of its alums, CineFile in West LA. A little later, I frequented Rocket Video, which closed a few years ago and … [Read more...]