Category: Art & Culture

Steve Rubel asked some interesting questions not to long ago around the closing of Tower Records…

This gets me thinking, what’s next? Drive-in movie theaters are gone. Will movie theaters be next? Somehow, I think not. People love the communal experience.

My point here is not to play the prediction game. That’s easy. Rather, it’s to remind us that things are constantly changing. New technologies and habits replace old ones. Remain complacent with what you have in atoms and you might be disappointed when it moves to bits. In marketing and PR we need to always be mindful of this flow. That’s because one day, everything will be bits.

I don’t know if I agree with the “everything will be bits” part but this question’s been on my mind a ton lately. I grew up in record shops, video stores and movie theatres. You know you’ve hit a certain age when your childhood feels like a dying era.

I’ve been writing about this a lot lately and I’ve largely concluded that being sentimental (or relying on others to be) is an unhelpful waste of energy. Indie businesses are not teddy bears, cute, heartwarming but fundamentally without consequence on our lives. They have to survive as businesses too. And indulging in hackneyed platitudes about the big meanies who run chain stores or assuming that community goodwill will rule the day, even if it should, is a fantasy none of us can afford.

So while it feels like working the funeral beat, I’m still both fascinated by how this will play out and reassured that genre bookstores are holding on and, according this this article, folks continue to open bookstores. Maybe it’s a fools errand, I don’t know. But from asking around at places like Readerville, this new generation of booksellers has studied the market, formed strong community alliances and are establishing online operations before they open their doors. So maybe there’s hope after all.

If anyone has stories of suvival in the independent video store, movie theatre and record store spaces, send ’em this way. I’m researching another article as we speak.

I’m not sure I buy the Washington Post’s fawning praise of The Paris Review since journalist Philip Gourevitch took over the editorship of the world’s most famous literary magazine in March of last year. Gourevitch is quoted as saying “My mission was to revitalize the magazine, to give it new life for a new generation,” as well has “We want to be fresh. We want to be surprising.” I’ll buy the first. The second is a stretch.

The first: The Paris Review has redesigned itself as a leaner, more colorful publication with larger type and great space devoted to visual images. Good move. McSweeney’s, graphic novels and the general hyper-sightedness of our world has shown us that literature can be much more than words on paper. I would have gone so far as to feature illustrators too instead of just photographers as well.

Also, portions of each issue as well as the complete archive of the famed Paris Review interviews (in excerpt form at least) is available online. TPR makes enough pieces available from the current issue so that their website doesn’t seem like an exercise in digital tokenism. The interview archive sadly is little more than a well cataloged tease. One or two questions are available from each followed by a plea to purchase the issue or an announcement of when the interview will be available in book form. A few, (like Nelson Algren’s) are available in full PDF download but which ones are anyone’s guess.

This is bad presentation in several respects. One, the issue list price is still $12, an outrageous sum if what you’re after is one interview. Second, The Paris Review seems to have received some money from the National Endowment for the Arts to make this archive possible. Perhaps the transferring of more compelte interviews is in progress, perhaps the money only covers some of the catalog. I have no idea. But would it kill the magazine to explain the situation in a few sentences somewhere on its website instead of presenting this tremendous gift to readers the world over half-finished while calling it the “DNA of Literature?” Taking that metaphor, they’ve currently offered up enough DNA to produce a carpenter ant. Way too much of the code is missing.

This “new generation” Gourevitch courts wants their information quickly, mutably and generally for free. A literary magazine is not an oil well so free might not be feasible. Fine. How about $3 an interview, payable through Pay Pal? How about supporting the interview section with a few tasteful google ads? How about an interview membership for those who want to read the interviews–MFA students, devoted fans, scholars–but don’t need full issues. This is not the riddle of the sphinx. Gourevitch & Co. could pay an NYU graduate student to set up any of these features over a long weekend.

Finally, The Paris Review’s newest feature “Encounter”, a short Q&A with “an interesting, obscure” person not only leaves me cold but smacks of condescension. Look a non-literary person! Someone you’d never run into at Elaine’s! Someone who’s too real to be in fiction. And we found them, yay us and our love for the common man!

Maybe the idea is a kind of human eco-tourism, which fits in the age of reality television and Lonelygirl15. But it is neither fresh nor surprising. It’s at best warmed-over Joseph Mitchell without the humanity. And with the considerable brain power contained within the walls of 62 White St., they could have done better.

Bottom line: The Paris Review will still publish the world’s finest writers of fiction and poetry. It has the cultural cache to do much more without compromising what has made the publication great. But it is still thinking like a traditional literary magazine and it may be the very last literary magazine in an age of unbound content with the freedom to do so. At the head of dwindling pack, The Paris Review should be leading the way into the future, instead of nodding at it while seated comfortably in the past (via Arts Journal).

So what if I can’t afford an architect? This article needs a companion piece about how to add your own secret room to your house. It probably involves a pick axe and several tiki torches (via Kottke.org).

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution…

Amid all the courses in bioinformatics and global economics, algorithms, combinatorics and optimization — look it up — the next generation of engineers and computer scientists is reading, even writing, poetry.

“We’re trying to diminish the stereotype of the poet as some dreamy bozo who wanders around and then all of a sudden gets struck by inspiration,” says Lux. “Poems are made things. They have everything to do with intense emotions … but poems are made things. They don’t just happen.”

Cheers to that (via Arts Journal).

Ever heard of the Thunderdome at Burning Man (taken I assume from the Thunderdome in Mad Max)? My trainer and friend Cody has fought in this contraption seven times and remains undefeated.

Video below. This sh*t is crazy.

So last night’s event kicked ass. Over 100 people and a ton of laughter. Josh Kornbluth was hilarious as usual. My buds Amy, Erin, Steve and Clint turned out. Sam Felder was in town and we all went to Swensen’s for ice cream afterword. It was like the cherry on a sundae.

Moments like that make me glad for the speaking I do, despite all the anxiety and prep up front. It’s like exercise. It takes a while to feel the effect but when you do, it’s like breathing and letting the air fill you up.

Just a reminder that tonight I’ll be interviewing Josh Kornbluth onstage at the San Francisco JCC about his favorite work of Jewish literature, Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep.

Event is free. We get started at 7:30 PM. The JCC is right about here.

Come by if you can. Should be a hoot.

Giant-sized praise due to Joe at Butts in Seats who passed along this article about the role technology is playing in the arts. For anyone interested in the future of the arts and the effect technology will have on cultural consumption, this is a must read.

Arts Journal is blogging about the role of critics all week long, a topic close to my heart. I write books and do other things that are subject to criticism. It’s great to get a fabulous review (the L.A. Times called Bookmark Now “Pure inspirational power juice” which I thought was pretty cool) and stinks to get jacked (My own San Francisco Bay Guardian essentially accused me of turning young people into a pack of illiterate jello sacks). But I also write criticism for this august publication and began my career in journalism reviewing movies. So I play for both teams.

Critics at their best are conversation starters: Their probing should not only get you thinking about art and culture but hold it to some level of examination. Under any set of circumstances, we can think of a flimsy reason why an element of culture should be given a pass be it personal project, ringing with social significance or simply staring someone we think is nice/smart/hot/infallible. But that’s not what culture is for. It’s not meant to flatter our prejudices or lull us with comfort but challenge us. Critics are the first step in making that happen, telling the producers of culture that, no matter how fabulous you think you are, there will be at least one person asking hard questions. I think that’s an incredibly valuable service in a democracy.

Now there are good critics and bad ones, thoughtful, passionate examiners and hired guns packing nothing but attitude. The latter are just taking up space. But that doesn’t mean the entire critical enterprise is unnecessary. Instead it means that, in art schools and M.F.A programs, in creative mentorships of all kinds, we should be telling young artists that being critiqued is part of the game, a healthy part because our work is never perfect and we should never stop trying to make it that way. Bitching about critics (an author once sent me a note saying my review “really hurt” and he “just wanted me to know that.” I do know that. I also know that you’re being a brat and I will never speak well or you or your books again) makes artists look like whiny infants. I think we’re cut out for better than that.

Lou Reed once said “How’d you like to work on an album for a year and have some asshole in the Village Voice give it a B+?” To which I say, Lou, a) a B+ ain’t bad b) There are lots of other newspapers and c) hopefully, in your life, there will be lots of other albums.

While listening to an interview with Kurt Vonnegut on Bookworm this morning, he, in the course of making an unrelated point, sad this. In place of “When the shit hits the fan.”

“When the excrement hits the air conditioner.”

I thought that was brilliant.