Scott Timberg's Blog, page 31

Phil and Dave Alvin Play the Blues

YOUR humble blogger just caught the former Blasters playing a short set from their new Big Bill Broonzy (pictured, right) record, at the Federal Bar in North Hollywood.

This exceeded my expectations — Phil (who almost died a few years ago) was in good voice, not just on the blues numbers, but on a Jimmie Rodgers song (complete with yodel). Much of the chatter among my posse before the show involved disappointment with the new James Brown biopic, so it was appropriate when their encore closed on “Please Please Me.” Never would have thought Phil could sing that, but he hit it hard.

The highlight for me was Dave’s fingerpicking — intricate and forceful on a Resonator guitar. Sheesh! No wonder they hired him to play with X years ago.

Besides several Broonzy numbers (including “Key to the Highway”), the played Willie Dixon’s “Bring it on Home” (best known from Sonny Boy Williamson) and the early Blasters song, the rave “Marie Marie.” (They also played a number from 1929 they called the first rockabilly number ever recorded — I did not catch the song or artist.)

There was a recent full-band show at the Troubadour, I think, but this little gig, part of Gary Calamar’s Mimosa series, showed “the power of two.”

These guys are of course major figures in the history of Southern California music, especially in the revival of roots music in the years after punk.

Here is a bit of them playing “All By Myself.” Eager to hear the whole album.

Silicon Valley’s New Robber Barons

THERE’S a  very fine new piece in the August Harper’s in which Rebecca Solnit draws a straight line between the 19th century robber barons and Silicon Valley’s cyber-utopians. The common denominator, she writes, is Stanford University. The relationship between the early kings of the railroads — who were given free reign across much of California — and today’s enormous tech corporations is “genetic,” she writes.

The way monopolists like Southern Pacific Railroad bought politicians, overpaid themselves and burned their accounting books resembles the huge market share companies like Google have captured.

The old railroad barons, Solnit writes, “grew rich even when they created chaotic, dysfunctional corporations that ill served the public.”

And while Silicon Valley does not literally buy politicians, “Google spent more on lobbying the federal government in 2012 than any other corporation except General Electric.”

Similarly, despite the number of free-market-loving libertarians that roll out of Stanford, the federal government funds roughly 85 percent of the research that takes place there! (I should point out I have no gripe with the institution, exactly; I was born at Stanford hospital while my father was attending the graduate journalism school.”

Most of Solnit’s piece is behind a paywall. She concludes it this way: “Technology was supposed to bring us forward — remember Bill Clinton’s ‘bridge to the twenty-first century slogan…? Fourteen years into that century, it looks a lot like the nineteenth.”

I urge CultureCrashers to find the new Harper’s and read this story in full.

“An Arts District without artists?”

WE’VE heard this before, but it’s always painful when it happens: The visual artists who have helped tame downtown Los Angeles and given it a hip sheen are now being forced out by gentrification and rising rents. The process is just starting, but it seems destined to pick up speed quite soon. A new story in the Los Angeles Times describes the process.

Then a decade ago, what started with a new restaurant on this block and then another up that street, turned into an avalanche of development. Warehouses became condos, including a one-time sugar beet storehouse that when converted caught the eye of real estate-savvy actress Diane Keaton. A new coffee shop moves in every month or so, and it’s hard to walk two minutes in any direction in the 52-block neighborhood without finding a blue-and-white filming notice announcing an upcoming car commercial or episode of “New Girl.” And soon, the One Santa Fe complex will be open.

THE growth of downtown LA has been fun to watch; in many ways, it’s better (and certainly safer) than it was as decade or two ago. Some of the story describes the loss of a small-community “vibe.” That’s always sad, but my bigger fear is that artists won’t be able to live and work there at all. Creative communities are important, and being physically close to other artists in one’s field is crucial to learning and growing. It also balances the often solitary and introspective work of art-making with some sense of camaraderie and connection that the Internet can’t replace.

But visual artists (like dancers, and theater folk) need space to do what they do. As rents rise — and bankers and hedge-fund guys, typically taxed less than artists) buy condos — they have to leave. How long will that take? “For sculptor Heath Satow, the answer is not long,” the Times article says. “He pays $3,900 a month for a roughly 5,700-square-foot warehouse at the neighborhood’s edge, but he knows that a gallery up the street pays three times as much. When he gets priced out — and he knows that day is coming — he said he’ll probably move somewhere with lots of cheap warehouse space, like Vernon.”

This story– which has hit even harder in San Francisco and Berkeley/Oakland — is being repeated all over the country.

The Return of the the Clientele

IT’S something I never expected: Another tour by the spooky, chiming English folk-rock band The Clientele, who sort of broke up a few years ago.

For a handful of reasons — the 25th anniversary of the band’s label (Merge), the reissue of their first LP, some new songs — the Clientele made a small U.S. tour, which on Saturday came through the club I still think of as Spaceland. (It’s now called the Satellite and is still reasonably intimate and with good sound, important for a band as reverb-drenched as the Clientele.)

The show was mostly hypnotic and triumphant. This is a group dominated, on the surface, by the Tom Verlaine-meets-Nick Drake guitar playing of its lead singer — melodic and bizarre arpeggios that seem like they could be developed forever: There’s something mysterious and open-ended about Alasdair Maclean’s playing. At the same time, they have one of the toughest rhythm sections I know, which grounds the songs from being shapeless or jam-band-like.

It was nice to see the place packed with loyal and enthusiastic Clientele-heads.

The band this time was a three-piece. This allowed us to hear the songs stripped down — the friend I was with (a formidable drummer/bassist himself) said he preferred to hear the Clientele, who are often quite lush on record, with a more minimal lineup that exposed the structures of the songs. I must admit, as good as this was, I missed the violin that Mel Daisy provided on their last Satellite show. My ear wanted some kind of string voice.

The other smaller disappointment: They didn’t play one of my favorite numbers, the title track to their last album, Bonfires on the Heath. I spoke to Maclean very briefly after the show and asked him why; he shot back, “Too new!”  (These shows are in part designed to celebrate their early record Suburban Light. My interview on the subject here.)

The best thing about the night was the appearance of a new song. Rumor has it this is one of five or six new ones, a few of which are likely to end up on an EP. Maclean has said he won’t keep the band going unless it seems to be moving forward artistically, which I can respect even though it saddens me to think we may’ve heard the last of them.

But it seems like the Clientele may have a future after all.

 

What is the Ivy League For?

SOMETIMES a writer is attacked so widely and vigorously I can tell he’s right. That’s the case with William Deresiewicz’s New Republic essay about the fallacy of elite college education, and  Ivy League schools in particular. I don’t mean I agree with every word of his piece, and I know the Ivy League only from a distance. (For what it’s worth, my upcoming book is on Yale University Press.)

This all said, I recognize in this piece by the Columbia-educated and formerly Yale-employed scholar and scribe a great deal of wisdom. I especially concur with his lament for a society that’s lost its values, even at what is supposedly the highest level. In some ways, his critique chimes with that of Christopher Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites, one of my favorite recent books of social criticism.

Anyway, here is Deresiewicz, who I expect will explore these subjects in more depth in his upcoming book Excellent Sheep:

Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education.

Some readers of CultureCrash may wonder what this has to do with the arts and culture. The connections are profound. The Ivy Leagues educate leaders in most sectors of American society, and academic is increasingly a harbor for the fine and literary arts as the marketplace withers. And when students become so pragmatic, culture pays the price. The audience for much of the arts and culture comes from schools like these.

Deresiewicz pains a pretty grim picture of today’s Ivy League students. “So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success,” he writes. “The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them.” Many of them, he writes, are “entitled little shit[s].”

As luck would have it, I’m also reading a book about liberal arts education by Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University. (Deresiewicz praises Wesleyan — my alma mater — in his article, though also calls it a “second-tier” school.) I’m hoping to post on Roth’s Beyond The University in the near future.

Most of the dismissals of his piece have struck me as defensive and shallow. The one that seems to me smart is also in the New Republic, by an official at a Virginia private school, and argues, in response to the huge number of Ivy Leaguers who go to Wall Street:

…Deresiewicz concludes that the Ivies don’t engage students or teach them to be more curious, to take risks or fail. Perhaps, but the recent reduction in job security, working conditions, prestige, and salary for the professions he cites as neglected by Ivy Leaguers—clergy, professors, social workers, teachers and scientists—accompanied by the rapid inflation in the same for Wall Street would be an alternate explanation. It is not Yale’s fault that our society at large has radically devalued the professions Deresiewicz and I prefer, and it is not at all evident to me from the limited data he presents that the education is the cause.

I look forward seeing Excellent Sheep.

Celebrating the Power of SLAKE

HERE at CultureCrash, we’re longtime fans of the Los Angeles literary magazine Slake, which put out four smart, handsome, forceful issues full of art, fiction, memoir and poetry. Editors Joe Donnelly and Lauria Ochoa — both formerly of the LA Weekly — did something not easy to pull off in sprawling LA: They galvanized a community around the written word. (And threw great parties.)

So while we’re sad Slake is gone, we’re pleased to have the new anthology We Dropped a Bomb on You: The Best of Slake I-IV.

Saturday (July 26) at 5, Skylight Books will host a We Dropped a Bomb event at which several Slake contributors — including celebrated food writer Jonathan Gold — will read.

We spoke to Donnelly (a onetime editor of yours truly who went on to helm the soon-to-be-shuttered Mission and State) about this experiment’s past, present and future.

Q: You put out four issues of Slake. What made you want to compile the best of ‘em into a book? Is it for original Slake fans, new ones, some combination?

A: Well, to be clear, RareBird Lit, Tyson Cornell’s heroic, LA-based book publishing concern, put the book together. Tyson approached my Slake partner, Laurie Ochoa, and me with the idea last fall, I believe. He felt the Slake effort deserved a lasting place on bookshelves, or at least in the Library of Congress, or wherever IBNs go to die. Tyson is a real maven and Laurie and were happy he wanted to honor Slake in this way.

I hope it’s for everyone. I mean, to my mind, it’s a great summer read. Great writers, great stories, and something you can easily take to the beach with you. Whereas, carrying all four issues of Slake could get heavy.

You couldn’t put everything in here. What criteria did you use to select the stuff that went on to have a second life?

Obviously there’s much that could have or should have or might have been in this collection. It’s tough to leave anything out because all of it was the best as far as Laurie and I were concerned. Laurie and I submitted our recommendations to Rarebird and Tyson and his editors made the final calls. Obviously some of our favorite stories didn’t make it, due to space, flow, or perhaps those stories have appeared in other publications more than once, etc. But what’s in there is all killer, for sure.

I’m sure you’re proud of everything in We Dropped a Bomb on You. But can you describe a piece or two that you’re especially fond of?

Oh, man, so hard to pick just one or two. I loved being surprised. I’m going to pick a piece that wasn’t in there, because it had appeared in another Rarebird collection – Jerry Stahl’s “American Girl”, which I think is devastating and different from what you might expect from Jerry. That’s what Slake did. I mean, John Albert’s “A Lifetime of Van Halen” is everything a piece of memoir should be. Matthew Light’s “The Niglu” is one of the best short stories to appear anywhere in the past several years, in my opinion. Luke Davies’ “Cisco Kid” still takes me away. Matthew Fleischer’s “Mushrooms to Mecca”, hilarious and sad… the journalism of folk like Hank Cherry, Cindy Carcamo, Ben Ehrenreich and so many others I’m doing a disservice by not mentioning. Slake was full of surprises and I think that’s what made it fun.

The Slake events I attended were well-stocked and excited to the point of rowdy. Did the response to these surprise you?

It’s funny when you worry if anybody’s going to come to your little party, like we worried about when we had that that first launch party at Track 16, and then 600 people show up like it’s a rock show. But, I wasn’t altogether surprised. We had a hunch LA was hungering for this sort of thing. Plus, Slake was defiantly optimistic. Who doesn’t want to do that?

You’ve now worked for the LA Weekly, Slake, and the soon-to-be-disbanded site Mission and State. All of these places were really different. Have you drawn any conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the for-profit, non-profit and shoestring models?

I don’t know if it’s possible to draw conclusions when you’re still stuck in the middle of things like we are. Everything is changing, but nobody really knows how, or where things are going. I do know that good story telling continues to resonate. The LA Weekly, before the takeover and then the crash, almost seems like a golden, utopian time when we had money, talent and the will to do great things, and we did, and the public responded.

Slake was the thing everybody told me not to do, but I was tired of waiting for money or permission from other people, so we dove in. I may be still recovering from that, financially, but I think the positives associated with doing Slake will far outlive that that.

Mission and State was a good lesson, too. We had considered going nonprofit with Slake, but didn’t want to be bogged down with board peccadillos, and boy did I learn something about those.

Were you surprised when Mission and State announced its closing?

No, it became clear early on when board members attempted to censor or take up the cause of subjects we were reporting on that this was a compromised situation.

Is there a future for Slake?

I don’t know. I’d do it all over again if I could, but the future is now, for now.

 

How Do Writers Make Their Living?

AFTER a long period in which authors and other scribes shied away from going public with their finances — perhaps not wanting to seem like they were “in it for the money” — the economics of the literary life have become more transparent lately. This is partly, I suspect, because of the greater concern for economics that arrived with the Great Recession (including the emphasis on income inequality) as well as increasing difficulties for novelists, journalists, and other members of the creative class.

A new story — part of the New York Times’s Op-Talk series — considers the issue from a number of angles. “This spate of talk about writing and money,” Anna North writes, “has opened up broader conversations about who can afford to enter the profession today, and who gets shut out.” From her piece:

Manjula Martin, the cofounder of Scratch, told Op-Talk that “there has always been this tension for writers around how to make a living and how to make art.” However, she said, growing job insecurity in writing professions and beyond may have led to a new wave of anxiety: “As the economy is changing and as things just feel more precarious in our culture, that bleeds through to the literary culture. And I think a big part of that too is a question of, ‘is literature and are the arts going to continue to be valued in ways that we have perhaps always just assumed they would be?’”

The television writer and journalist Cord Jefferson told North that he sees the issue as broader than just writers, broader even than the creative class. “Everyone’s talking a lot more about money. The financial crisis really rocked a lot of people to their core, and I think people considering these kinds of issues is a broad societal thing more so than it is just a writerly thing.”

He’s right. And it didn’t have to be this way. There are no shortage of culprits, but when you turn the economy (or the real-estate market) into a casino, allow corporations and tech firms to do whatever they want, and allow book publishing and print journalism to get crushed, someone’s gotta pay the price.

The Joys of Record Collecting

IN these digital days of downloads and streaming, it seems like a truly ancient pastime to seek out old chunks of vinyl. Two new books get into the motivation and culture of collectors who amass 78s and 33s.

I’ve not read either, but this New York Times review makes me want to check them out. It also reminds me how lucky I was to come of age at the tail end of the era where one could hunt through used stacks to find rare or overlooked gems. Used-vinyl shops, of which my town, Los Angeles, offers a decent choice, still give some of that thrill.

The books in question are Amanda Petrusich’s DO NOT SELL AT ANY PRICE: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records and Eilon Paz’s DUST & GROOVES: Adventures in Record Collecting.

Reviewer Larry Rohter begins her review by describing how Petrusich got bitten by the same collecting bug as the collectors she was interviewing:

“Eventually, I started to want what they wanted,” she writes. “For me, the modern marketing cycle and the endless gifts of the Web had begun to feel toxic,” its surfeit of always-available music leading to a response that surprised her: “I missed pining for things. I missed the ecstasy of acquisition.”

Anyone remember the blues record collectors from Ghost World?

Jazz and Classical Musicians vs. Streaming

WE’RE starting to hear a lot from musicians about how music streaming destroys their ability to make a living. So far, it’s been harder to find out how it’s affecting jazz and classical music.

I tried to get into the subject with a new story for Salon. I speak to a number of musicians (including pianist Jason Moran) and observers, including an insightful woman from the Future of Music Coalition. Here it is.

UPDATE: I was traveling in Oregon over the weekend, so had to edit this story on my cellphone, which I’m not very good at. There’s at least one typo, which may be fixed by the time you read this, but if not, an otherwise puzzling line should read this way:

Or, if you want music written the Russian late romantic, do you want Rachmaninoff, or Rachmaninov?

 

Will Amazon Crush Publishing?

RECENTLY I’ve written a bit about Amazon and other giant tech companies and how they have begun  to crush the world of culture, and the people who make it, while the Department of Justice and other regulatory agencies sleep. These are longstanding  concerns of mine, as a journalist who writes about music and the arts, as well as the author of the forthcoming book Culture Crash, which tries to take the long view on the whole thing.

A powerful new essay on the subject gets at Amazon — which now handles two-thirds of all e-book sales — in specific, and urges the DoJ to bring this beast to heel before it destroys the publishing world. The piece, in The Nation, is written by my editor at Yale University Press, Steve Wasserman. Steve points out that we’ve had a few years now to see that the online bookseller was dangerous: “While big is not always bad, there was much about Amazon that was troubling: its labor practices, for one; its cutthroat business dealings, for another. Bezos once joked that Amazon ought to approach small publishers ‘the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle’.”

Today, Amazon so dominates the marketplace that it feels free to bulldoze the competition, dictating terms to suppliers and customers alike. With respect to publishing and bookselling, Amazon is increasingly a vertically integrated company, at once a bookseller, a reviewer, even a publisher, and as such it poses a uniquely disturbing threat. It has achieved a worrying hegemony, having successfully laid siege to traditional bricks-and-mortar bookstores not only in the United States but also in Europe….

But it’s no longer enough to critique, he argues: We need federal action.

The entire ecology of publishing is at risk. Conglomeration proceeds at a dizzying pace: Random House and Penguin (which includes, among other imprints, the Viking Press) merge; Hachette buys the Perseus Group (which distributes Nation Books, among others). Little fish are gobbled up by bigger fish, and they, in turn, face even larger predators. There is blood in the water. But the Obama Justice Department, seemingly mesmerized by visions of a digital utopia, is oddly blind to the threat to publishing posed by Amazon’s growing monopoly. Attorney General Eric Holder and his staff seem to regard Amazon as a benign giant whose machinations, so far, offer more benefits than disadvantages. Amazon, for its part, insists that it has only readers’ interests at heart and is merely providing books at the lowest possible price, absorbing huge losses in order to do so.

It’s time for the DoJ to wake up, he says.

This piece is essential reading and chimes very much with my point of view. For what it’s worth, this article caused me to take out a subscription to The Nation: You can’t read it if you don’t. And, as I may not have to point out to readers of CultureCrash, we don’t get journalism — or culture — if people don’t pay for it.