[contextly_auto_sidebar id="iQQVe5TAzEEnpCsYlIIqaek1CQTiG9Gn"] WELL, I feel like the vaudeville announcer lingering onstage because the dancing girls are late: The piece I intended to launch this blog with turns out to be waiting until the weekend. But I’m quite intrigued by this essay on creativity, work and careers in the arts, which appears in my favorite newish magazine, Pacific Standard. … [Read more...]
The Life and Death of the Alternative Press
IF it weren't for the '80s Village Voice, I probably would not be a journalist. (The world, I expect, would be a better place.) This weekend I have a story in Al Jazeera America about good times and bad for alternative weeklies. I talk about the crystalline sense of mission these publications had during conservative times, and the troubles they've had more recently. And I try to shine a light … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
Cheering George Packer’s "The Unwinding"
LORD know this book does not need any more praise, but I want to wave the tattered American flag for George Packer's The Unwinding, which just won the National Book Award. The book is not perfect -- more on that in a minute -- but it is lyrical, powerfully reported, passionately written, and lives up to its subtitle: "An Inner History of the New America." As research for my own Creative … [Read more...]
Arts Journalism Summit 2013
RECENTLY I went to the Annenberg Beach House -- the same spot on which William Randolph Hearst once built a 110-room love nest for his affairs with Marion Davies -- to try to figure out the future of cultural journalism. This summit on the crisis of the arts press was put together by the Getty and USC folks.On that cloudy day in Santa Monica, the Getty's arts fellows -- a very sharp bunch -- from … [Read more...]
Peter Rainer’s Movie Criticism
IT’S almost impossible to find a word that can be changed in Peter Rainer’s film criticism, or a way to express an idea better than he already has. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way, during the year I served as Peter’s editor. It makes his work a pleasure – sometimes a revelation – to read. I can’t recall many critics who you really feel thinking on the page quite as well as Peter does; the … [Read more...]
Farewell to a Los Angeles Chronicler
SOMETIME during that hazy, gray zone around Christmas and New Year’s Day, one of LA’s finest scribes left town, maybe for good. I’m talking about former Village Voice/LA Weekly/Los Angeles magazine writer and editor RJ Smith. He’s also the author of two acclaimed books, The Great Black Way: LA in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance and last year’s The One: The Life and Music of … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
The Perils of the Creative Class
WE were supposed to be entering a laptop wielding, latte-sipping world where the Internet made us all more "connected," weren't we? But the Internet, combined with the bad economy and a restructuring of American life, has led to an erosion of the very creative class it was supposed to invigorate.HERE is my new piece in Salon which looks at the state of the much hyped creative class in 2011. It's … [Read more...]
Kicking Ass with Evan Wright
SO far the most acclaimed first-person account of the current Iraq War is "Generation Kill," in which LA journalist evan wright embedded himself in a marine battalion quite different from the soldiers who fought the vietnam war.today i have an LA Times piece on wright, who i sat down with recently. a very serious, sincere and complicated dude who makes the case (both in his work and in … [Read more...]