Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 981
October 14, 2015
Quentin Tarantino clarifies “Selma” Emmy diss: “I haven’t seen it”
In a recent conversation with Bret Easton Ellis about “Selma's” snub at this year’s Academy Awards, Quentin Tarantino appeared to diss the film by saying ‘‘[Director Ava DuVernay] did a really good job on ‘Selma,' but ‘Selma' deserved an Emmy.” Now Tarantino has clarified these marks (well, sort of), telling IndieWire in an email that he hasn’t even seen “Selma” and didn’t mean the Emmy comment as an insult. “I’m writing you to pass on that the quote from the NY Times piece about Selma is wrong. I never saw Selma,” Tarantino wrote. “If you look at the article, it was Bret who was talking about Selma, not me. I did say the line ‘it deserved a Emmy,’ but when I said it, it was more like a question." “Which basically meant, ‘it’s like a TV movie?’ Which Bret and myself being from the same TV generation, was not only understood, but there was no slam intended,” he continued. “Both Bret and myself come from the seventies and eighties when there were a lot of historically based TV movies: the King mini-series written by Abby Mann staring Paul Winfield; 'Crisis at Central High’ with Joanne Woodward. And 'Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys.' These were great TV movies. I’d be honored to be placed next to those films. However, I haven’t seen it. Does it look like a seventies TV movie? Yes. Does it play like one, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.” The moral of this story: Don't opine on things you haven't seen (particularly when Bret Easton Ellis is in earshot).In a recent conversation with Bret Easton Ellis about “Selma's” snub at this year’s Academy Awards, Quentin Tarantino appeared to diss the film by saying ‘‘[Director Ava DuVernay] did a really good job on ‘Selma,' but ‘Selma' deserved an Emmy.” Now Tarantino has clarified these marks (well, sort of), telling IndieWire in an email that he hasn’t even seen “Selma” and didn’t mean the Emmy comment as an insult. “I’m writing you to pass on that the quote from the NY Times piece about Selma is wrong. I never saw Selma,” Tarantino wrote. “If you look at the article, it was Bret who was talking about Selma, not me. I did say the line ‘it deserved a Emmy,’ but when I said it, it was more like a question." “Which basically meant, ‘it’s like a TV movie?’ Which Bret and myself being from the same TV generation, was not only understood, but there was no slam intended,” he continued. “Both Bret and myself come from the seventies and eighties when there were a lot of historically based TV movies: the King mini-series written by Abby Mann staring Paul Winfield; 'Crisis at Central High’ with Joanne Woodward. And 'Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys.' These were great TV movies. I’d be honored to be placed next to those films. However, I haven’t seen it. Does it look like a seventies TV movie? Yes. Does it play like one, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.” The moral of this story: Don't opine on things you haven't seen (particularly when Bret Easton Ellis is in earshot).In a recent conversation with Bret Easton Ellis about “Selma's” snub at this year’s Academy Awards, Quentin Tarantino appeared to diss the film by saying ‘‘[Director Ava DuVernay] did a really good job on ‘Selma,' but ‘Selma' deserved an Emmy.” Now Tarantino has clarified these marks (well, sort of), telling IndieWire in an email that he hasn’t even seen “Selma” and didn’t mean the Emmy comment as an insult. “I’m writing you to pass on that the quote from the NY Times piece about Selma is wrong. I never saw Selma,” Tarantino wrote. “If you look at the article, it was Bret who was talking about Selma, not me. I did say the line ‘it deserved a Emmy,’ but when I said it, it was more like a question." “Which basically meant, ‘it’s like a TV movie?’ Which Bret and myself being from the same TV generation, was not only understood, but there was no slam intended,” he continued. “Both Bret and myself come from the seventies and eighties when there were a lot of historically based TV movies: the King mini-series written by Abby Mann staring Paul Winfield; 'Crisis at Central High’ with Joanne Woodward. And 'Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys.' These were great TV movies. I’d be honored to be placed next to those films. However, I haven’t seen it. Does it look like a seventies TV movie? Yes. Does it play like one, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it.” The moral of this story: Don't opine on things you haven't seen (particularly when Bret Easton Ellis is in earshot).
Laura Ingraham and Fox News have a dumb new lie (that sounds a lot like one of their greatest hits)
By all accounts, the biggest loser from Tuesday night's Democratic debate was the Republicans. The Democrats discussed the issues and argued with each other while mostly avoiding personal attacks. It was hard not to draw a mental contrast between these adult-acting Democrats and Republicans, who can't even get it together to elect a House Speaker and whose primary process is dominated by a man who makes facetious remarks about the Holocaust and a literal reality TV star. In response, conservative media and politicians are just doubling down on the lame politics of resentment, accusing Democrats of wanting to give away "free stuff." The problem is that what they are describing as "free stuff" is actually the opposite: Democratic ideas are all about helping people work. Sneering at people's ambitions and desire to work hard as "free stuff" is not going to help overcome the image of conservatives as a bunch of ideologues who don't have the maturity to understand complex issues, much less come up with solutions to help make this country more productive and fairer to everyone. All the social and labor-related policy proposals discussed during the debate last night were geared towards the goal of making it easier for working Americans: A higher minimum wage to make working more worthwhile, child care and family leave so that people with families can continue working at their jobs, health care so that people's lives aren't derailed by illness, and education so that hard-working people can realize their career ambitions. Even the dreaded socialist Bernie Sanders focused his pitch around the idea that people want to work and that the government's job is to help them get and hold on to a job. But to hear conservatives speak of it, giving people the tools they need to work for a living is somehow about laziness and "free stuff." Marco Rubio helped kick things off by complaining, right after the debate, that it was "basically a liberal verses liberal debate about who was going to give away the most free stuff." Also after the debate, the Fox and Friends cast worked the "free stuff" angle. "They're giving stuff away," Stuart Varney complained. "In fact, I keep going back to this. They're buying votes." Laura Ingraham, a guest on Fox and Friends, was particularly incensed at the idea of making college more affordable for everyone. "All the kids in college, like, yeah, we can keep playing foosball and hanging out after college because we're all going to," she argued, "they're going to take care of us." Perhaps Ingraham spent her college years goofing off and not studying---the quality of her radio program certainly is evidence for that---but that's not what college is actually like for most students. The people she's trying to portray as lazy leeches are mostly hard-working kids, many of whom hold jobs in addition to going to school full-time. The Sanders program she's hating on actually proposes expanding the work-study program, so that more college students who want a job can have one. Far from being a giveaway to the lazy, this is about making sure people who want to work and strive have a chance to do so. Right down the line, every item that Rubio and the Fox News folks try to spin as giveaways are actually programs geared towards getting people to work. Look at the lament issued by Brian Kilmeade: "Childhood education, higher minimum wage, public college, public family leave, health care, health care for children, and in-state tuition for illegals, which they were cheering for!" Every single item on that list is about people who work, not people who want to be paid for sitting on their butt. A higher minimum wage? Well, paying people to work is a well-known incentive to getting them to work. Public family leave? That's there so that people with families don't have to choose between their kids and their job. Health care? Keeping people healthy is critical if you want to keep them working. Education programs? Not only are most students getting educated with an eye towards getting a job, but going to school is, in and of itself, hard work. Honestly, looking at that list, you might start to wonder if Democrats don't put a little too much value on work. But one thing is for certain: The notion that they're encouraging free-loading is laughable. You don't tie all your incentive systems to working if you don't want people to work. But it's not surprising to see conservatives flailing like this. The Democratic candidates, particularly Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, laid out an easy-to-understand vision of what they think this country should be like: One where people work hard, absolutely, but one where that hard work pays off. Where getting a job and working on it should result in things like health care and education and a decent life for your family. Indeed, they cast a scornful eye on the real freeloaders in our society, which are the wealthy elite that want to get richer without sharing the wealth with those who created it. It is this vision that clearly frightens Marco Rubio and the Fox News crew. And so we're greeted with this rhetoric that inverts reality, that labels hard workers as freeloaders, to the point where even your paycheck---see all the anger over the minimum wage---is treated like it's some kind of government giveaway. That kind of rhetoric is good for rallying the troops who thrive on the politics of resentment. But it's not going to do much to convince the rest of voters, who know that they work hard and just want to be able to have something to show for it at the end of the day.
October 13, 2015
Quit chasing “passionate millennial males”: Their tastes shouldn’t dictate what we read and hear
In a week with no shortage of seismic media happenings—including The Village Voice being sold and Playboy ceasing publication of nude photos—the news that publishing giant Condé Nast had acquired independent-minded music website Pitchfork Media sent even bigger shock waves around the industry. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, although a New York Times article breaking the news praised the company’s “thriving live event business” and noted the quarterly print publication The Pitchfork Review would continue to exist. The Times also obtained an email from Condé Nast CEO Bob Sauerberg, which noted the deal “reinforces our commitment to building Condé Nast’s premium digital network, focusing on distinctive editorial voices and engaging high-value millennial audiences.” However, another comment in the article from Condé Nast’s chief digital officer, Fred Santarpia, in particular drew the ire of many: Having Pitchfork as part of the company’s portfolio brings “a very passionate audience of millennial males into our roster.” That Pitchfork is often perceived as being male-dominated is well-documented: 88 percent of respondents to the People’s List, a crowdsourced ranking of best albums during the site’s first 15 years, identified as male. (In response, the site noted that this skewed percentage only represented “contributors to the People's List. And is not indicative of Pitchfork's overall demographics.”) Recent Quantcast U.S. statistics for the domain pitchfork.com don’t fare much better: 82 percent of the site’s visitors are male, while 45 percentof the site’s visitors are males who fall in the 18-34 age range. Of course, Quantcast is just one measure of web traffic, which is a notoriously tricky thing to measure in a definitive way. (Moreover, an archived copy of the 2010 Pitchfork Media overview is far more balanced: The collateral reported that just 64 percent of the site’s visitors were male.) Far more troubling was Santarpia only singling out the site’s “audience of millennial males,” because of what the comment implies about the rest of the site’s readership: that it doesn’t exist or somehow isn’t as dedicated. Quantifying passion for a website is an imprecise science—Is it return visits? Time on a page? Retweets? Facebook shares?—and insinuating that Pitchfork’s non-male-identified and non-millennial audience isn’t as fervent or loyal is insulting. For women in particular, being taken seriously as passionate music fans is often difficult. It’s a bias that’s deeply ingrained—Google the phrase “female music fans” (but without the quotes), and the first hit is a link to the Wikipedia page for Groupie—and it starts early. Teenage girls enthusiastic about their favorite bands frequently earn the tag “fangirl,” a pejorative term that condescends to their excitement, denigrates their loyalty as somehow silly or lacking, and hints they’re only interested in musicians due to good looks. Earlier this year, Monster CEO Noel Lee explained the launch of its Pearl Collection of pink and purple headphones thusly: “Ladies have different priorities — sound quality isn't the top of the list. It's comfort, lightweight, that it doesn't mess up my hair — that's all very important." And then there was the outcry against the blog “My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection,” which dredged up complicated issues about the gendered nature of music discovery, as well as how women are perceived to approach record collecting or critical analysis. When women like music, it often turns into a defensive pose, one burdened by stereotypes or fraught with baggage to overcome. (I was shamefully guilty of this in the recent past: In fact, a knee-jerk tweet I wrote chastising the “Stupid Record Collection” blog nearly went viral, and while I stood by the essence of my words, I subsequently felt bad about casting judgment on a perfect stranger.) Perhaps more troubling, when the new owners of one of the biggest music websites don’t acknowledge over half of its audience, it shows an unsettling lack of understanding of what the site is about. By reducing Pitchfork to its “passionate audience of millennial males,” it undermines the site’s efforts to be inclusive with their masthead, contributing writers and coverage. Neither the site’s staff nor its content is male-dominated. Staff-wise, two of its four senior editors are women; its associate editor is a woman; and two of three contributing editors are women. Non-male bylines aren’t a rarity on the site, which isn’t always the case with other websites or magazines. One of the senior editors, Jessica Hopper, oversees The Pitch, which has recently published articles called “Why Michete is The Worst Queer Rapper You Need to Listen To,” “Searching for Huggy Bear: Riot Grrrl and Queerness in the American South,” and “Op-Ed: Would Chris Brown be Allowed in Australia if He Were White?” along with pieces on Patti Smith’s new book, “M Train”, the evolution of prison songs and on bounce queen Big Freedia’s new book. Earlier this year, the site ran a massive cover story on Bjork which featured an extensive discussion of how she’s not given enough credence for her contributions to her own music, as well as how motherhood’s changed her outlook. These articles were noticeably and deliberately trying to elevate awareness of underrepresented artists and points of view, provocative topics and (in some cases) problematic issues. All of these things are too complex to appeal to just one particular niche group. In fact, boiling the site down into a desirable destination for a coveted advertising demographic, or considering its distinctive traits as conduits for engagement, is a depressing reminder that even the smartest, important and well-intentioned journalism in 2015 is too often viewed as a mere product. That women were excluded from this buzzwordy strategy is equally depressing, though sadly not surprising. Women who enjoy and are knowledgeable about music aren’t always rewarded with authority or treated with respect—they’re overshadowed (or mansplained to), or dismissed outright. That doesn’t mean they’re not out there, however: For the record, Quantcast’s stats show that the highest percentage of pitchfork.com’s female visitors are from the 25-34 age bracket, a group comprised of those considered squarely in the millennial generation. (A mere percentage point behind? Both the 18-24 and 35-44 age groups.) There’s no indication as to how passionate this “female millennial audience” is, but perhaps now that they’ve been actively diminished, it’ll make this group—and the rest of Pitchfork’s ignored readership—even more fired up to reclaim their space in music fandom.
“Bridge of Spies”: Tom Hanks goes full Jimmy Stewart in Spielberg’s flawed but disturbingly timely Cold War history lesson
There are any number of manufactured meaningful moments in Steven Spielberg’s lumbering, old-fashioned and richly engaging Cold War drama “Bridge of Spies,” and I don’t entirely mean that as a diss. This is a Spielberg movie starring Tom Hanks, after all, who comes as close here as he ever has (after 20 years of trying) to playing the Jimmy Stewart role in a classic Frank Capra picture about America’s wounded but essentially decent soul. “Bridge of Spies” takes place at a relatively recent moment of American history that would define so much of what has happened since, and was co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen – who are younger than Spielberg, but also remember that era. If this movie's not going to have wistful, ambiguous moments of resonance, it’s not going to have any damn thing at all. Let me work my way toward the moment in “Bridge of Spies” that simultaneously moved me and rankled me, and that captures the movie’s greatest strengths and most abundant weaknesses – always closely related, in the case of any Spielberg film. Hanks plays an upstanding New York attorney named James B. Donovan (a historical figure, although contained her in one of those Hollywoodized narratives “inspired by true events”), a onetime prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal who has taken on two difficult assignments at the behest of the United States government. One of them gets him in trouble with his wife and his law firm, and pilloried in the press as a Red sympathizer and possible traitor. The other one ends up getting him depicted as a national hero. First off, Donovan agrees to defend accused Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (played here by the marvelous English actor Mark Rylance), an assignment several other prominent attorneys have refused. As the Coens and co-writer Matt Charman tell the story, this begins as a straightforward question of legal principle: Every criminal suspect, guilty or not, is entitled to a competent defense. But when Donovan comes to understand that Abel’s conviction is a foregone conclusion, and that the government wants something that looks like due process rather than the real thing, he moves toward more aggressive tactics. This is largely true, by the way: The real Jim Donovan damn near got Abel’s verdict thrown out, arguing before the Supreme Court that the incriminating evidence seized by the FBI came from a warrantless search, and that even an enemy spy (if charged as a criminal defendant) was entitled to Fourth Amendment rights. He lost that case by a 5-4 vote. A few years later – the chronology of “Bridge of Spies” is, I suppose, deliberately murky – Donovan embarks on a secret mission to East Berlin after the U-2 incident of 1960, when the Soviets shot down a CIA spy plane and captured its pilot, the briefly famous and/or notorious Francis Gary Powers (played here by the bland, WASPy Austin Stowell). It seems ludicrous to protect spoilers in a story about an episode that concluded 53 years ago, but I suppose we can say that there’s plenty of atmospheric Berlin Wall cloak-and-dagger stuff, agreeable performances from Mikhail Gorevoy as an unctuous Soviet negotiator and Sebastian Koch as a shadowy, suave East German, and the obligatory Spielbergian in-jokes drawn from cinema history. (Donovan walks past a Berlin cinema that’s showing a film called “Ein Zwei Drei” – that is, Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three,” a farce about the collision of capitalism and Communism in occupied Berlin.) If you want to know what happened to Rudolf Abel, and how the Americans eventually got Gary Powers back, you can go read Wikipedia. You can also see “Bridge of Spies,” of course, if you keep in mind that it’s a Tom Hanks Oscar-bait movie more than a history lesson. It doesn’t misrepresent the facts, or not exactly, but it shears them free of context to a large and damaging extent. Anyway, towards the end of the film, with all that business squared away, we see Donovan riding an elevated train over the placid outer-borough suburbs of the early 1960s. He’s trying to ignore the fact that the other passengers have noticed him, because his face is on or near the front page of every New York newspaper that morning. (There were at least five of those at the time, maybe more.) So instead Donovan looks out the window in contentment, surveying the sunlit and prosperous nation whose most important principles he has defended. Then the train crosses one of those invisible urban boundaries into a poorer Brooklyn neighborhood of tightly packed multi-story buildings, and he sees a gang of kids scrambling over a back fence from one yard to another, quite likely up to no good. A cloud of fatherly moral concern passes over the sunny Tom Hanks visage, and it’s like a Capra-Stewart monologue, delivered in silence: Are we living up to the promises we made to each other? When we insist that we stand for freedom and equal opportunity, do we really mean it? How much better than the Commies are we, in fact? Spielberg is pushing an entirely unexceptional version of Hollywood liberal idealism here: Yes, we are a better and nobler nation, because at least we still ask ourselves these questions. Rudolf Abel may have been railroaded, but he had a good and honest lawyer, and he was not tortured or subjected to brutal interrogation (as Gary Powers clearly was). But when we lose track of those questions, when we no longer have the Jimmy Stewart-Atticus Finch-Tom Hanks paradigm of Establishment masculine decency to fall back on, we’re in trouble. I have no particular problem with that lesson plan, although one could say that the historical record calls for a sterner admonition, and it’s delivered here with such Hanksian blandness that viewers are clearly offered the opportunity of missing the point entirely. “Bridge of Spies” is meant to be an inspiring Capraesque fable about Jim Donovan, exemplary American, and that's fair enough. But in constructing that fable Spielberg and the writers skip over all the most important and interesting material about the U-2 incident. CIA director Allen Dulles was at once needlessly paranoid about Soviet plans for thermonuclear war and overconfident about American technology. Although depicted to the public as a super-secret, cutting-edge surveillance aircraft, the U-2 was a flimsy, underpowered construction that the Soviets had no trouble detecting and shooting down. Powers did not disable or destroy the plane (as he had been ordered to do) and did not commit suicide when faced with capture (ditto). He probably wound up telling the Russians everything he knew about the CIA and the U-2 program -- and you and I would have too, of course. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev trolled President Dwight Eisenhower for weeks after the initial incident, delaying the news that Powers had been captured alive and inducing the Americans into spinning all kinds of embarrassing falsehoods about the supposed weather-spotting plane that had supposedly wandered of course after its pilot supposedly asphyxiated. Ike felt so despondent after the real story came out that he briefly contemplated resignation. In terms of historical fact, the U-2 episode was a massive Soviet propaganda victory that made the United States look incompetent, arrogant and poorly prepared. There are valid commercial reasons why Steven Spielberg doesn’t want to tell that story, but those reasons make clear that “Bridge of Spies” is itself a form of historical whitewashing, albeit one less noxious and harmful than the customary American variety. I liked the movie a lot – it’s one of Spielberg’s most measured and most adult films in years, with production values every bit as good as you’d expect. And it would be awesome, in terms of cultural and historical impact, if the ideologues at Breitbart and Drudge and so on decide to heap invective on this tale of Jim Donovan’s backstage role in the Cold War as pantywaist, lily-livered, anti-American moral relativism. But to haul out one of the bigger critical truisms (which happens to be true), stories about the past are invariably stories about the present in disguise, and this one has a double edge that goes beyond anything that Spielberg and Hanks and their writers intend. Those who insisted in the late 1950s that the Constitution did not apply to Rudolf Abel – because we faced an implacable foe and it was a time of national emergency and so on -- have made the same argument many times in many ways, and make it today about anyone associated with “terrorism,” no matter how tenuous the linkage or how scanty the evidence. That’s a dangerous ideological illness that is well worth noticing. So is the seductive fiction that a redeemer will arise among us, played by Tom Hanks playing Jimmy Stewart playing an upstanding lawyer who believes in the reasonable middle ground of the American way. Look around you: Where is that hero today?
Sweet Jesus, David Brooks is finally making sense: How Fox News & the GOP insanity caucus pushed him over the edge
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but David Brooks is making sense. In his New York Times column this morning, he appears to discover what at least half the country has long known: The Republican Party has been hijacked by unruly nihilists. “The House Republican caucus,” Brooks writes, “is close to ungovernable these days. How did that situation come about?” I’m not sure what prompted his eureka moment, but it’s nice to see Brooks, a card-carrying member of the conservative intelligentsia, finally reckon with the present state of the GOP. Three months ago I wrote a similar column about the degeneration of conservatism and the Republican Party. I argued that conservatism, as a practical political philosophy, was essentially dead in this country. And that the GOP has abandoned its rich intellectual history, thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and even William F. Buckley, Jr. In today’s Republican Party, there is no place for ideas or compromise or prudent governance; it’s a party of reactionaries and insurgents, people drunk on destruction. To his credit, Brooks grapples honestly with this in his piece. He writes: 
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but David Brooks is making sense. In his New York Times column this morning, he appears to discover what at least half the country has long known: The Republican Party has been hijacked by unruly nihilists. “The House Republican caucus,” Brooks writes, “is close to ungovernable these days. How did that situation come about?” I’m not sure what prompted his eureka moment, but it’s nice to see Brooks, a card-carrying member of the conservative intelligentsia, finally reckon with the present state of the GOP. Three months ago I wrote a similar column about the degeneration of conservatism and the Republican Party. I argued that conservatism, as a practical political philosophy, was essentially dead in this country. And that the GOP has abandoned its rich intellectual history, thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and even William F. Buckley, Jr. In today’s Republican Party, there is no place for ideas or compromise or prudent governance; it’s a party of reactionaries and insurgents, people drunk on destruction. To his credit, Brooks grapples honestly with this in his piece. He writes:
This was not just the work of the Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month’s activity. The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals. Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.This is all undeniably true, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Today’s GOP is the inevitable result of decades of collusion between the Republican Party and the conservative media-industrial complex. The sane and reasonable conservative voices have been subsumed by the hysterical shrieks of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and the entrepreneurs on right-wing talk radio. These are the voices that represent conservative politics, and they are what’s poisoned the conservative brand. And Brooks makes no effort to deny this:
All of this has been overturned in dangerous parts of the Republican Party. Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.The lunatics on Fox News and on conservative radio are the ones peddling the crisis narratives and the apocalyptic angst, and over time this mentality has come to define the GOP. Brooks is absolutely right when he writes that “politics is the process of making decisions amid diverse opinions” and that it “involves conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests.” But balancing opposing points of view is impossible for a party of purists, and that’s exactly what the GOP has become, as Brooks himself acknowledges. The collapse of the Republican Party has been a disaster for the country. Like it or not, ours is a two-party system that depends upon cooperation. But, as Brooks notes, “the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship.” Many Republicans appear not to believe in democracy itself. They deny the legitimacy of those who don’t share their views and they cynically work to obstruct rather than advance legislation. The consequences of this have been enormous, and it’s astonishing that a Democratic administration has been able to accomplish anything in the midst of such intransigence. I’m not sure what took him so long, but it’s refreshing to see someone like Brooks write openly about the roots of Republican dysfunction. I don’t imagine his message will penetrate the conservative echo chamber anytime soon, but at least it’s a start.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but David Brooks is making sense. In his New York Times column this morning, he appears to discover what at least half the country has long known: The Republican Party has been hijacked by unruly nihilists. “The House Republican caucus,” Brooks writes, “is close to ungovernable these days. How did that situation come about?” I’m not sure what prompted his eureka moment, but it’s nice to see Brooks, a card-carrying member of the conservative intelligentsia, finally reckon with the present state of the GOP. Three months ago I wrote a similar column about the degeneration of conservatism and the Republican Party. I argued that conservatism, as a practical political philosophy, was essentially dead in this country. And that the GOP has abandoned its rich intellectual history, thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and even William F. Buckley, Jr. In today’s Republican Party, there is no place for ideas or compromise or prudent governance; it’s a party of reactionaries and insurgents, people drunk on destruction. To his credit, Brooks grapples honestly with this in his piece. He writes: This was not just the work of the Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month’s activity. The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals. Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.This is all undeniably true, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Today’s GOP is the inevitable result of decades of collusion between the Republican Party and the conservative media-industrial complex. The sane and reasonable conservative voices have been subsumed by the hysterical shrieks of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and the entrepreneurs on right-wing talk radio. These are the voices that represent conservative politics, and they are what’s poisoned the conservative brand. And Brooks makes no effort to deny this:
All of this has been overturned in dangerous parts of the Republican Party. Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.The lunatics on Fox News and on conservative radio are the ones peddling the crisis narratives and the apocalyptic angst, and over time this mentality has come to define the GOP. Brooks is absolutely right when he writes that “politics is the process of making decisions amid diverse opinions” and that it “involves conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests.” But balancing opposing points of view is impossible for a party of purists, and that’s exactly what the GOP has become, as Brooks himself acknowledges. The collapse of the Republican Party has been a disaster for the country. Like it or not, ours is a two-party system that depends upon cooperation. But, as Brooks notes, “the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship.” Many Republicans appear not to believe in democracy itself. They deny the legitimacy of those who don’t share their views and they cynically work to obstruct rather than advance legislation. The consequences of this have been enormous, and it’s astonishing that a Democratic administration has been able to accomplish anything in the midst of such intransigence. I’m not sure what took him so long, but it’s refreshing to see someone like Brooks write openly about the roots of Republican dysfunction. I don’t imagine his message will penetrate the conservative echo chamber anytime soon, but at least it’s a start.
No nipples required: What does Playboy’s never-nude future hold?
It’s official: beginning with Playboy’s March 2016 issue, there will be no more nude women gracing its pages, according to The New York Times. Playboy chief executive Scott Flanders explained that, essentially, the magazine founded by Hugh Hefner did such a good job making images of nude women acceptable, it’s no longer in any way taboo, illicit or even necessary to the brand. “That battle has been fought and won,” Flanders told the Times. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.” This is not the first time Flanders has used that same p word. He told Entrepreneur in December 2014, “You could argue that nudity is a distraction for us and actually shrinks our audience rather than expands it…At the time when Hef founded the company [in 1953], nudity was provocative, it was attention-grabbing, it was unique and today it’s not. It’s passé.” As Techcrunch points out, in addition to far more explicit photos and videos being accessible at the touch of a button, nudity may be directly preventing them from growing their online audience. John Biggs wrote, “[n]one of the major carriers of online content allow porn to be sold through their stores. The Disneyfication of online markets is to be expected – nearly every content provider has come down hard on the side of non-prurience except, notably, Reddit – and when there’s money to be made in the Newsstand app (but not the physical newsstand) it makes perfect sense for magazines like Playboy to change.” Eric Spitznagel, a writer who’s conducted close to 50 interviews for Playboy, calls the move “kind of brilliant, actually. It's an acknowledgment that Playboy isn't the same thing it was 30, 20, even ten years ago.” In an email interview, the 46-year-old contrasted the appeal of the magazine in his youth to its place today. “When I was growing up in the late 70’s, early 80’s, the Playboy centerfold was necessary. It was the only place you could see adult boobies. I remember visiting a friend whose dad had a bunch of Playboys in his basement, and we went through them like spies looking for clues. It felt legitimately dangerous to be reading them, like if we were caught, we'd go to pornography jail. I was so grateful for every photo. But now, in 2015, Playboy isn't even [among] the top 20 places that teenage boys go to find pictures of naked girls.” He hopes that maybe this is a chance for the writing to truly become the magazine’s focal point and be recognized not as an afterthought, but something noteworthy in and of itself, no nipples required. “As somebody who's written a lot of interviews and articles for Playboy, there's a part of me that's really excited about this,” Spitznagel enthused. “Because every time I write something for Playboy and try to share it on social media, invariably somebody says, ‘What, you mean that magazine has articles too?’ Ha ha ha, funny, I get it, you're talking about the boobies. Yep, Playboy has lots of boobies, but also words too.” The real question is, who’s going to stick around to read them—and who will pick up the magazine for either the first time, or the first time in years? In Playboy.com’s announcement of the change, they argue that there’s room for a new incarnation of the magazine, one that draws inspiration from its online presence: “Last year we re-launched Playboy.com as a safe-for-work site and discovered something about our readers and our identity: The Bunny transcends nudity…Yes, we’re taking a risk by going non-nude, but this is a company—like all great companies—that has risk in its DNA. It was built around a magazine virtually no one thought would succeed, yet now it’s impossible (for us, anyways) to picture a world without Playboy.” But is it really? Or rather, can the magazine innovate while leaving what made its brand so iconic behind? In comments on Playboy’s Facebook page, many readers aired their disappointment over the decision. “It was fun while it lasted, this seems eerily like a ‘political correct’ move for the PC world we live in. Looks like you gave into the system you fought so hard against,” wrote one commenter, while another called it “the death of tasteful nudity.” Lux Alptraum, former editor and publisher of Fleshbot, told Salon the magazine has to figure out what it stands for, if it’s no longer riding on what she calls its “'Mad Men'-era charm.” The legacy of the bachelor with a bevy of girlfriends lifestyle that founder Hefner embodied—and still tries to—as represented in the magazine’s pages, has to evolve with the times if it’s going to succeed. “If Playboy doesn’t have nudity, what is Playboy?” asked Alptraum. “If Playboy is a magazine for men that’s smart cultural commentary, why am I going to read Playboy rather than GQ or Details or The New Yorker or The Atlantic? They’re at an advantage because people know what Playboy is and it’s a strong brand, but if they’re changing what that brand is about, it’s potentially amazing and potentially disastrous.” While Alptraum doesn’t think it was necessary that Playboy get rid of its nudes, “I understand why they did it,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think the presence or absence of naked pictures matters. Playboy is in this weird middle ground. They had the naked photos for so long because that made them edgy and different and special, and then that ceased to make them edgy and different and special. To me, the question is, what makes them special now? I think taking the nude photos out gives them the ability to compete in a more mainstream environment, but that also means they have more competitors.” When I mentioned to former Penthouse executive editor Peter Bloch, my old colleague when I was an editor at Penthouse Variations and contributing editor at Penthouse, that my first reaction to this is that it’s either a “crazy or brilliant” move on Playboy’s part, he dismissed both those options. Instead, he called it a “desperate gamble” to save the magazine, whose circulation has dwindled to 800,000 from 5.6 million in 1975, as the Times noted. “They used to have great interviews and they still do from time to time, but so does everybody else,” said Bloch. “I don’t see the rationale for somebody who hasn’t been buying Playboy to now say Oh, they don’t have the girls? Well now I’m going to buy it.” Bloch said the change could succeed, but will be an uphill battle. “It sounds like they’re going to be competing directly with GQ or maybe Esquire. To go head to head with them, it’s going to take a lot of resources and a lot of great editing. I would guess if they can get some really great innovative young photographs to do great sexy pictures that don’t have overt nudity, people might be interested in looking at them.” The Times says Playboy is eager to court the 18-30 age group, and women are certainly a part of that desired readership. Chief content officer Cory Jones told the Times they plan to run a sex column by a “’sex-positive female,’ writing enthusiastically about sex.” Last year, Jones explained to Columbia Journalism Review the worldview of its safe for work website, Playboy.com, which relaunched in August 2014: “Playboy is about being a gentleman…I think it’s very inclusive. We have had feminist writers forever; we’re extremely pro-women.” CJR pointed out, though, that Jones “declined to describe the brand as feminist in an interview.” If Playboy is trying to reach millennial women, 27-year-old writer Gaby Dunn is among their target market—young, hip, feminist and plugged in. She’s the co-star of YouTube show "Just Between Us" and has written for Playboy’s website about her fondness for dick pics. Dunn told Salon, “I'd like them to get back to the literary history they enjoyed when they had really good authors writing for them. Maybe make themselves the sex version of The New York Times Magazine.” Dunn was less impressed with their plans to try to claim a feminist-minded tone. Her advice for the magazine? “Playboy's audience today strikes me as enlightened bro, so maybe lean into that? Every magazine has a sex positive woman writing a column. If I want that content or if I want to write that content, why would I go to Playboy and be the one woman on a staff of men when I can go write the same article for a magazine that is edited by women and where I can surround myself with women writers?” As for Spitznagel, while on a personal level, he cops to being “a little sad that there'll be less boobs” in the mag, he dismisses that as pure “nostalgia” for a time that’s come and clearly gone. “I'm also sad that my 4-year-old will never know what it's like to wait an entire week to watch his favorite TV show. Saying ‘Playboy can't get rid of the naked women’ is like saying ‘My son can only watch Bugs Bunny on Saturday morning, because that's the only time I could watch it as a kid.’”It’s official: beginning with Playboy’s March 2016 issue, there will be no more nude women gracing its pages, according to The New York Times. Playboy chief executive Scott Flanders explained that, essentially, the magazine founded by Hugh Hefner did such a good job making images of nude women acceptable, it’s no longer in any way taboo, illicit or even necessary to the brand. “That battle has been fought and won,” Flanders told the Times. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.” This is not the first time Flanders has used that same p word. He told Entrepreneur in December 2014, “You could argue that nudity is a distraction for us and actually shrinks our audience rather than expands it…At the time when Hef founded the company [in 1953], nudity was provocative, it was attention-grabbing, it was unique and today it’s not. It’s passé.” As Techcrunch points out, in addition to far more explicit photos and videos being accessible at the touch of a button, nudity may be directly preventing them from growing their online audience. John Biggs wrote, “[n]one of the major carriers of online content allow porn to be sold through their stores. The Disneyfication of online markets is to be expected – nearly every content provider has come down hard on the side of non-prurience except, notably, Reddit – and when there’s money to be made in the Newsstand app (but not the physical newsstand) it makes perfect sense for magazines like Playboy to change.” Eric Spitznagel, a writer who’s conducted close to 50 interviews for Playboy, calls the move “kind of brilliant, actually. It's an acknowledgment that Playboy isn't the same thing it was 30, 20, even ten years ago.” In an email interview, the 46-year-old contrasted the appeal of the magazine in his youth to its place today. “When I was growing up in the late 70’s, early 80’s, the Playboy centerfold was necessary. It was the only place you could see adult boobies. I remember visiting a friend whose dad had a bunch of Playboys in his basement, and we went through them like spies looking for clues. It felt legitimately dangerous to be reading them, like if we were caught, we'd go to pornography jail. I was so grateful for every photo. But now, in 2015, Playboy isn't even [among] the top 20 places that teenage boys go to find pictures of naked girls.” He hopes that maybe this is a chance for the writing to truly become the magazine’s focal point and be recognized not as an afterthought, but something noteworthy in and of itself, no nipples required. “As somebody who's written a lot of interviews and articles for Playboy, there's a part of me that's really excited about this,” Spitznagel enthused. “Because every time I write something for Playboy and try to share it on social media, invariably somebody says, ‘What, you mean that magazine has articles too?’ Ha ha ha, funny, I get it, you're talking about the boobies. Yep, Playboy has lots of boobies, but also words too.” The real question is, who’s going to stick around to read them—and who will pick up the magazine for either the first time, or the first time in years? In Playboy.com’s announcement of the change, they argue that there’s room for a new incarnation of the magazine, one that draws inspiration from its online presence: “Last year we re-launched Playboy.com as a safe-for-work site and discovered something about our readers and our identity: The Bunny transcends nudity…Yes, we’re taking a risk by going non-nude, but this is a company—like all great companies—that has risk in its DNA. It was built around a magazine virtually no one thought would succeed, yet now it’s impossible (for us, anyways) to picture a world without Playboy.” But is it really? Or rather, can the magazine innovate while leaving what made its brand so iconic behind? In comments on Playboy’s Facebook page, many readers aired their disappointment over the decision. “It was fun while it lasted, this seems eerily like a ‘political correct’ move for the PC world we live in. Looks like you gave into the system you fought so hard against,” wrote one commenter, while another called it “the death of tasteful nudity.” Lux Alptraum, former editor and publisher of Fleshbot, told Salon the magazine has to figure out what it stands for, if it’s no longer riding on what she calls its “'Mad Men'-era charm.” The legacy of the bachelor with a bevy of girlfriends lifestyle that founder Hefner embodied—and still tries to—as represented in the magazine’s pages, has to evolve with the times if it’s going to succeed. “If Playboy doesn’t have nudity, what is Playboy?” asked Alptraum. “If Playboy is a magazine for men that’s smart cultural commentary, why am I going to read Playboy rather than GQ or Details or The New Yorker or The Atlantic? They’re at an advantage because people know what Playboy is and it’s a strong brand, but if they’re changing what that brand is about, it’s potentially amazing and potentially disastrous.” While Alptraum doesn’t think it was necessary that Playboy get rid of its nudes, “I understand why they did it,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think the presence or absence of naked pictures matters. Playboy is in this weird middle ground. They had the naked photos for so long because that made them edgy and different and special, and then that ceased to make them edgy and different and special. To me, the question is, what makes them special now? I think taking the nude photos out gives them the ability to compete in a more mainstream environment, but that also means they have more competitors.” When I mentioned to former Penthouse executive editor Peter Bloch, my old colleague when I was an editor at Penthouse Variations and contributing editor at Penthouse, that my first reaction to this is that it’s either a “crazy or brilliant” move on Playboy’s part, he dismissed both those options. Instead, he called it a “desperate gamble” to save the magazine, whose circulation has dwindled to 800,000 from 5.6 million in 1975, as the Times noted. “They used to have great interviews and they still do from time to time, but so does everybody else,” said Bloch. “I don’t see the rationale for somebody who hasn’t been buying Playboy to now say Oh, they don’t have the girls? Well now I’m going to buy it.” Bloch said the change could succeed, but will be an uphill battle. “It sounds like they’re going to be competing directly with GQ or maybe Esquire. To go head to head with them, it’s going to take a lot of resources and a lot of great editing. I would guess if they can get some really great innovative young photographs to do great sexy pictures that don’t have overt nudity, people might be interested in looking at them.” The Times says Playboy is eager to court the 18-30 age group, and women are certainly a part of that desired readership. Chief content officer Cory Jones told the Times they plan to run a sex column by a “’sex-positive female,’ writing enthusiastically about sex.” Last year, Jones explained to Columbia Journalism Review the worldview of its safe for work website, Playboy.com, which relaunched in August 2014: “Playboy is about being a gentleman…I think it’s very inclusive. We have had feminist writers forever; we’re extremely pro-women.” CJR pointed out, though, that Jones “declined to describe the brand as feminist in an interview.” If Playboy is trying to reach millennial women, 27-year-old writer Gaby Dunn is among their target market—young, hip, feminist and plugged in. She’s the co-star of YouTube show "Just Between Us" and has written for Playboy’s website about her fondness for dick pics. Dunn told Salon, “I'd like them to get back to the literary history they enjoyed when they had really good authors writing for them. Maybe make themselves the sex version of The New York Times Magazine.” Dunn was less impressed with their plans to try to claim a feminist-minded tone. Her advice for the magazine? “Playboy's audience today strikes me as enlightened bro, so maybe lean into that? Every magazine has a sex positive woman writing a column. If I want that content or if I want to write that content, why would I go to Playboy and be the one woman on a staff of men when I can go write the same article for a magazine that is edited by women and where I can surround myself with women writers?” As for Spitznagel, while on a personal level, he cops to being “a little sad that there'll be less boobs” in the mag, he dismisses that as pure “nostalgia” for a time that’s come and clearly gone. “I'm also sad that my 4-year-old will never know what it's like to wait an entire week to watch his favorite TV show. Saying ‘Playboy can't get rid of the naked women’ is like saying ‘My son can only watch Bugs Bunny on Saturday morning, because that's the only time I could watch it as a kid.’”
Good news for the Village Voice: The paper’s unlikely new 1-percent owner could invigorate the alt-press pioneer
A trio of odd developments have dropped in the world of print an online media over the last day or two, and none of the three were even conceivable five or 10 years ago. First, magazine giant Conde Nast – which publishes Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker – has bought the music website Pitchfork. Second, Playboy will no longer print photographs of nude women, conceding the role to the Internet’s ample offerings. Third, the Village Voice, the New York-based symbol of the American alternative press, has just been purchased by a man whose flagship publication is a 50,000-or-so daily newspaper in Pennsylvania’s fifth-largest city. Given the heft the Voice still occupies in the imagination of bohemians, lefties, and writers who came of age from the ‘50s through the ‘90s – as opposed to the paper’s 21st century reality -- this one may be the most startling of them all. Here’s the New York Times:
The Village Voice, the storied alternative weekly newspaper that helped usher in a new era of journalism after its creation 60 years ago, but that has been struggling to find its way in an era of declining circulations and ad revenues, was sold on Monday to a scion of one of America’s wealthiest families with a long history in newspaper publishing. Peter D. Barbey, through his investment company Black Walnut Holdings L.L.C., bought the paper from Voice Media Group, which owns a string of weeklies around the country.Now, there are reasons to be shocked and appalled that the mighty Voice -- which once had a circulation around 250,000 – was sold to the Berks Co.-dwelling publisher of the Reading Eagle, a paper you probably haven’t heard of unless you live in southeastern Pennsylvania. How can some provincial rich guy, who comes from an old family with no apparent ties to bohemianism – you might be asking -- take over a publication that’s served as an important forum for Beats, hippies, radical feminists, early hip-hop culture, identity politics, avant-garde fiction, and lots of other stuff? But as seemingly straight as Barbey and his company may be, this is about as good an outcome for the Voice as I can imagine in 2015. Print publications of all kinds have had a tough time in the 21st century, but alternative weeklies have been especially hard hit. The demise of the record stores and video shops where people used to pick them up hasn’t helped, but it's mostly been about advertising leaving print, and the inability of these (mostly) free publications to raise their cover prices to make up for declines in ad revenues has limited their options. The Los Angeles weekly I once worked for (owned by the company that just sold the Voice) folded in 2002, and things never really got better for the field after that. During and after the economic crash, the extinctions increased, and the papers that survived got thinner. The once-robust Boston Phoenix died in 2013 after losing roughly $1 million per year. The same year, the Voice’s two leading editors resigned rather than layoff a large proportion of the staff. The collapse or shrinking of other alt-weeklies has continued on schedule; the Philadelphia City Paper printed its final issue last week. So why does the Voice news make an ink-stained wretch like me uncharacteristically hopeful? First is that the company that has owned the Voice for the last decade (once called New Times, now, confusingly, called Voice Media Group) was not quite the ideal owner. I worked with talented and serious journalists at New Times, but these guys never really got the Voice (which, admittedly, had been drifting even before the purchase.) The New Times gang let go countless gifted writers including Robert Christgau, who helped invent rock criticism. “They seemed motivated by hatred of everything the alternative press stood for,” former Voice culture-and-politcs writer Tom Carson told me when I wrote a story about trouble at the paper two years ago. “The leftwing politics, the countercultural sensibility, the value placed on intellectualism. These guys were just aggressively demolishing everything that weeklies were good for.” This is the paper that had once published Jane Jacobs writing on urbanism, Nelson George on "post-soul culture," Manohla Dargis and J. Hoberman on film, as well as pioneering work on the AIDS crisis and the rise of the paranoid right. I don’t put all the blame on the ownership; market forces were tearing the Voice, and other weeklies, apart as well. These are not likely to abate. By comparison, some dailies have had better luck through owners that do not require them to make quarter profit reports. Britain’s Guardian became the most credible source of news in the English-speaking world during the years it was owned by a trust. The Boston Globe, which almost collapsed not long ago, seems stable and healthy under the ownership of businessman John W. Henry. Whatever damage he’s done with Amazon, Jeff Bezos has in most ways been good for the Washington Post, and under his ownership that paper has hired rather than fire journalists. So when Barbey – who has been reading the paper since he was in prep school -- says he’ll invest in the Voice and bolster the staff, it’s worth taking him, for now, at his word. Can he make the paper as vital as it was in its heyday? No; the times are too different. Would it be better if publications of all kinds were supported by ad sales and paid circulation, like most of them used to be? Sure. Even with the huge number of online outlets, the Voice can still be important. At its best, the alternative press was often sharper at pop culture coverage than mainstream dailies. And while online sources cover some things well, they tend to ignore local reporting and subjects like theater, classical and experimental music, architecture, the coverage of arts institutions and other things not directly tied to celebrities and commerce. There is absolutely a need for a smart and vigorous paper, with a print and web presence, paying attention to overlooked subjects. Let’s call this unlikely purchase, then, the first good news that this decimated sector has heard in years. Readers – and writers too – could be better for it.A trio of odd developments have dropped in the world of print an online media over the last day or two, and none of the three were even conceivable five or 10 years ago. First, magazine giant Conde Nast – which publishes Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker – has bought the music website Pitchfork. Second, Playboy will no longer print photographs of nude women, conceding the role to the Internet’s ample offerings. Third, the Village Voice, the New York-based symbol of the American alternative press, has just been purchased by a man whose flagship publication is a 50,000-or-so daily newspaper in Pennsylvania’s fifth-largest city. Given the heft the Voice still occupies in the imagination of bohemians, lefties, and writers who came of age from the ‘50s through the ‘90s – as opposed to the paper’s 21st century reality -- this one may be the most startling of them all. Here’s the New York Times:
The Village Voice, the storied alternative weekly newspaper that helped usher in a new era of journalism after its creation 60 years ago, but that has been struggling to find its way in an era of declining circulations and ad revenues, was sold on Monday to a scion of one of America’s wealthiest families with a long history in newspaper publishing. Peter D. Barbey, through his investment company Black Walnut Holdings L.L.C., bought the paper from Voice Media Group, which owns a string of weeklies around the country.Now, there are reasons to be shocked and appalled that the mighty Voice -- which once had a circulation around 250,000 – was sold to the Berks Co.-dwelling publisher of the Reading Eagle, a paper you probably haven’t heard of unless you live in southeastern Pennsylvania. How can some provincial rich guy, who comes from an old family with no apparent ties to bohemianism – you might be asking -- take over a publication that’s served as an important forum for Beats, hippies, radical feminists, early hip-hop culture, identity politics, avant-garde fiction, and lots of other stuff? But as seemingly straight as Barbey and his company may be, this is about as good an outcome for the Voice as I can imagine in 2015. Print publications of all kinds have had a tough time in the 21st century, but alternative weeklies have been especially hard hit. The demise of the record stores and video shops where people used to pick them up hasn’t helped, but it's mostly been about advertising leaving print, and the inability of these (mostly) free publications to raise their cover prices to make up for declines in ad revenues has limited their options. The Los Angeles weekly I once worked for (owned by the company that just sold the Voice) folded in 2002, and things never really got better for the field after that. During and after the economic crash, the extinctions increased, and the papers that survived got thinner. The once-robust Boston Phoenix died in 2013 after losing roughly $1 million per year. The same year, the Voice’s two leading editors resigned rather than layoff a large proportion of the staff. The collapse or shrinking of other alt-weeklies has continued on schedule; the Philadelphia City Paper printed its final issue last week. So why does the Voice news make an ink-stained wretch like me uncharacteristically hopeful? First is that the company that has owned the Voice for the last decade (once called New Times, now, confusingly, called Voice Media Group) was not quite the ideal owner. I worked with talented and serious journalists at New Times, but these guys never really got the Voice (which, admittedly, had been drifting even before the purchase.) The New Times gang let go countless gifted writers including Robert Christgau, who helped invent rock criticism. “They seemed motivated by hatred of everything the alternative press stood for,” former Voice culture-and-politcs writer Tom Carson told me when I wrote a story about trouble at the paper two years ago. “The leftwing politics, the countercultural sensibility, the value placed on intellectualism. These guys were just aggressively demolishing everything that weeklies were good for.” This is the paper that had once published Jane Jacobs writing on urbanism, Nelson George on "post-soul culture," Manohla Dargis and J. Hoberman on film, as well as pioneering work on the AIDS crisis and the rise of the paranoid right. I don’t put all the blame on the ownership; market forces were tearing the Voice, and other weeklies, apart as well. These are not likely to abate. By comparison, some dailies have had better luck through owners that do not require them to make quarter profit reports. Britain’s Guardian became the most credible source of news in the English-speaking world during the years it was owned by a trust. The Boston Globe, which almost collapsed not long ago, seems stable and healthy under the ownership of businessman John W. Henry. Whatever damage he’s done with Amazon, Jeff Bezos has in most ways been good for the Washington Post, and under his ownership that paper has hired rather than fire journalists. So when Barbey – who has been reading the paper since he was in prep school -- says he’ll invest in the Voice and bolster the staff, it’s worth taking him, for now, at his word. Can he make the paper as vital as it was in its heyday? No; the times are too different. Would it be better if publications of all kinds were supported by ad sales and paid circulation, like most of them used to be? Sure. Even with the huge number of online outlets, the Voice can still be important. At its best, the alternative press was often sharper at pop culture coverage than mainstream dailies. And while online sources cover some things well, they tend to ignore local reporting and subjects like theater, classical and experimental music, architecture, the coverage of arts institutions and other things not directly tied to celebrities and commerce. There is absolutely a need for a smart and vigorous paper, with a print and web presence, paying attention to overlooked subjects. Let’s call this unlikely purchase, then, the first good news that this decimated sector has heard in years. Readers – and writers too – could be better for it.A trio of odd developments have dropped in the world of print an online media over the last day or two, and none of the three were even conceivable five or 10 years ago. First, magazine giant Conde Nast – which publishes Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker – has bought the music website Pitchfork. Second, Playboy will no longer print photographs of nude women, conceding the role to the Internet’s ample offerings. Third, the Village Voice, the New York-based symbol of the American alternative press, has just been purchased by a man whose flagship publication is a 50,000-or-so daily newspaper in Pennsylvania’s fifth-largest city. Given the heft the Voice still occupies in the imagination of bohemians, lefties, and writers who came of age from the ‘50s through the ‘90s – as opposed to the paper’s 21st century reality -- this one may be the most startling of them all. Here’s the New York Times:
The Village Voice, the storied alternative weekly newspaper that helped usher in a new era of journalism after its creation 60 years ago, but that has been struggling to find its way in an era of declining circulations and ad revenues, was sold on Monday to a scion of one of America’s wealthiest families with a long history in newspaper publishing. Peter D. Barbey, through his investment company Black Walnut Holdings L.L.C., bought the paper from Voice Media Group, which owns a string of weeklies around the country.Now, there are reasons to be shocked and appalled that the mighty Voice -- which once had a circulation around 250,000 – was sold to the Berks Co.-dwelling publisher of the Reading Eagle, a paper you probably haven’t heard of unless you live in southeastern Pennsylvania. How can some provincial rich guy, who comes from an old family with no apparent ties to bohemianism – you might be asking -- take over a publication that’s served as an important forum for Beats, hippies, radical feminists, early hip-hop culture, identity politics, avant-garde fiction, and lots of other stuff? But as seemingly straight as Barbey and his company may be, this is about as good an outcome for the Voice as I can imagine in 2015. Print publications of all kinds have had a tough time in the 21st century, but alternative weeklies have been especially hard hit. The demise of the record stores and video shops where people used to pick them up hasn’t helped, but it's mostly been about advertising leaving print, and the inability of these (mostly) free publications to raise their cover prices to make up for declines in ad revenues has limited their options. The Los Angeles weekly I once worked for (owned by the company that just sold the Voice) folded in 2002, and things never really got better for the field after that. During and after the economic crash, the extinctions increased, and the papers that survived got thinner. The once-robust Boston Phoenix died in 2013 after losing roughly $1 million per year. The same year, the Voice’s two leading editors resigned rather than layoff a large proportion of the staff. The collapse or shrinking of other alt-weeklies has continued on schedule; the Philadelphia City Paper printed its final issue last week. So why does the Voice news make an ink-stained wretch like me uncharacteristically hopeful? First is that the company that has owned the Voice for the last decade (once called New Times, now, confusingly, called Voice Media Group) was not quite the ideal owner. I worked with talented and serious journalists at New Times, but these guys never really got the Voice (which, admittedly, had been drifting even before the purchase.) The New Times gang let go countless gifted writers including Robert Christgau, who helped invent rock criticism. “They seemed motivated by hatred of everything the alternative press stood for,” former Voice culture-and-politcs writer Tom Carson told me when I wrote a story about trouble at the paper two years ago. “The leftwing politics, the countercultural sensibility, the value placed on intellectualism. These guys were just aggressively demolishing everything that weeklies were good for.” This is the paper that had once published Jane Jacobs writing on urbanism, Nelson George on "post-soul culture," Manohla Dargis and J. Hoberman on film, as well as pioneering work on the AIDS crisis and the rise of the paranoid right. I don’t put all the blame on the ownership; market forces were tearing the Voice, and other weeklies, apart as well. These are not likely to abate. By comparison, some dailies have had better luck through owners that do not require them to make quarter profit reports. Britain’s Guardian became the most credible source of news in the English-speaking world during the years it was owned by a trust. The Boston Globe, which almost collapsed not long ago, seems stable and healthy under the ownership of businessman John W. Henry. Whatever damage he’s done with Amazon, Jeff Bezos has in most ways been good for the Washington Post, and under his ownership that paper has hired rather than fire journalists. So when Barbey – who has been reading the paper since he was in prep school -- says he’ll invest in the Voice and bolster the staff, it’s worth taking him, for now, at his word. Can he make the paper as vital as it was in its heyday? No; the times are too different. Would it be better if publications of all kinds were supported by ad sales and paid circulation, like most of them used to be? Sure. Even with the huge number of online outlets, the Voice can still be important. At its best, the alternative press was often sharper at pop culture coverage than mainstream dailies. And while online sources cover some things well, they tend to ignore local reporting and subjects like theater, classical and experimental music, architecture, the coverage of arts institutions and other things not directly tied to celebrities and commerce. There is absolutely a need for a smart and vigorous paper, with a print and web presence, paying attention to overlooked subjects. Let’s call this unlikely purchase, then, the first good news that this decimated sector has heard in years. Readers – and writers too – could be better for it.
Pop-up newsstand in Times Square gives nod to city’s gritty past
In the middle of Times Square nestled between digital billboards, flashing lights, and wall-to-wall consumerism there is a relic of the past - T Sq. Newsstand. Spearheaded by artist Kimou “Grotesk” Meyer in association with Victory Journal, Juxtapoz Magazine, and other visual artists the T Sq. Newsstand is an art installation that embodies nostalgia for the almost forgotten visual landscape of New York City before the 90s. The installation is a fully functional newsstand complete with tags from well-known graffiti artists. The idea is “to bring some culture to Times Square,” and to “raise question and conversation between people,” Meyer comments. “I built my fantasy about what was New York when I was 10,” Meyer went on to explain that he grew up in Switzerland and for his tenth birthday his father gave him two gifts: a book by photographer Henry Chalfant (leading NYC graffiti photographer and co-producer of the film ‘Style Wars’) and a book on New York City architecture. These new visual influences heavily impacted Meyer’s artistic aesthetic. Meyer came to the states in 1999 and recounts, “when I came here everything was pretty much gone, I had more like a visual fantasy about the New York I was hoping to see and the newsstand was kind of the last piece of real estate … that had that kind of grittiness.” Meyer, along with guest artists, will be at the installation everyday from 4-7 to display art, sell prints, and interact with the community. The T Sq. Newsstand will run through October 18th and is located within the Broadway Plaza between 44th and 45th Street. In the middle of Times Square nestled between digital billboards, flashing lights, and wall-to-wall consumerism there is a relic of the past - T Sq. Newsstand. Spearheaded by artist Kimou “Grotesk” Meyer in association with Victory Journal, Juxtapoz Magazine, and other visual artists the T Sq. Newsstand is an art installation that embodies nostalgia for the almost forgotten visual landscape of New York City before the 90s. The installation is a fully functional newsstand complete with tags from well-known graffiti artists. The idea is “to bring some culture to Times Square,” and to “raise question and conversation between people,” Meyer comments. “I built my fantasy about what was New York when I was 10,” Meyer went on to explain that he grew up in Switzerland and for his tenth birthday his father gave him two gifts: a book by photographer Henry Chalfant (leading NYC graffiti photographer and co-producer of the film ‘Style Wars’) and a book on New York City architecture. These new visual influences heavily impacted Meyer’s artistic aesthetic. Meyer came to the states in 1999 and recounts, “when I came here everything was pretty much gone, I had more like a visual fantasy about the New York I was hoping to see and the newsstand was kind of the last piece of real estate … that had that kind of grittiness.” Meyer, along with guest artists, will be at the installation everyday from 4-7 to display art, sell prints, and interact with the community. The T Sq. Newsstand will run through October 18th and is located within the Broadway Plaza between 44th and 45th Street.
