Hustler of Culture
Please note the following passage from a story in today’s New York Times about big losses at General Moters…
Since 200, G.M., Ford and the Chrysler Corporation have cut or announced they would eliminate up to 140,000 jobs, or a third of their payrolls. Earlier this week, Ford announced that it would cut 30,000 jobs and close 14 plants over the next six years.
It seems GM has been eliminating 14,000 since the waning years of the Roman Empire.
I found out from this article in the NYT that The New Leader a stalwart publication of left-leaning political analysis is shutting down after 82 years of publication. The New Leader has published many of the great thinkers of 20th century including George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Bermingham Jail.”
No doubt it’s a tough time to publish a magazine borne of political climates of the past. But I was particularly taken by these three paragraphs about Myron Kolatch, the magazine’s editor since 1961…
Mr. Kolatch, 76, is a small, soft-spoken man with old-fashioned manners and the kind of mustache that leading men used to wear in the movies. He occupies what is surely the most antiseptic office in New York: no photographs, no rugs, not a sheet of paper out of place. And in all his years there Mr. Kolatch never got around to hanging pictures on the wall.
“Every day I walk in here and say, ‘These naked walls – something should be done about them,’ ” he said. “But I’m a perfectionist, and I’ve always worried that if I started obsessing about pictures, I’d never get the magazine out.”
It was a similar concern, he added, that contributed to what he regards as one of his great failings as an editor – his tardy embrace of the Internet. “I didn’t have the foresight to realize the importance of being there,” he said. “If you’re a magazine like ours, and you’re not there, you almost don’t exist. But I can’t do anything halfway. It’s just like the walls. I felt that if we were going do an Internet thing, it would have to be top-of-the-line, and we couldn’t afford that. We could barely afford the domain name.”
The New Leader has no Internet presence. None. This would have been excusable in 1998-9 when the first dot com boom probably seemed like a lot of empty hype. In 2006, it is inexcusable. I have worked for nonprofits, some in publishing, often headed by an Executive Director a generation or two removed from the coming of the Internet. All knew they needed to be online. When they didn’t have the money, they raised it. When they didn’t have the time, they farmed out the job to interns and young staffers who knew these things.
Often their first efforts weren’t perfect. Far from it. But they knew they had to be there. Because otherwise, like Mr. Kolatch pointed out, “you almost don’t exist.”
I had never heard of The New Leader before I read its obituary. I may not be its target demographic but at least it would have rung a bell had I seen it linked from someone’s blog or mentioned at Arts Journal. But that’s impossible if it’s not online itself.
I don’t like to rejoice in anyone’s failure. But I can’t say I’ll miss The New Leader because I never knew about it until now. Worse still, I can’t say I didn’t see this one coming.
Fascinating article in the New Yorker this week by Tad Friend about Los Angeles and its culture of high speed car chases. Real ones, not those in the movies. Though for some idiotic reason, the magazine’s website has included this Q&A with Mr. Friend about the article instead of the article itself, it still left me curious enough to ask the following questions…
1) Would there be high speed chases if we couldn’t see them on television? In other words, is the fact that they draw huge television ratings a big part of why this article was written?
2) Mr. Friend concludes that technology exists or will soon where you can simply shut off a car’s engine remotely. When the cops can do that, will that be the end of the high speed chase?
3) Will you be sad about it?
4) What is the best high speed chase on film ever and is the answer strict geographic chuvanism? Because the answers I usually here are Bullitt (San Francisco), To Live and Die in L.A. (Los Angeles), The French Connection (New York) and The Blues Brothers (Chicago).
5) Have you met or have a six degrees connection to someone who stood beside the freeway as OJ passesd yelling “Go Juice Go!”
6) Why does Mr. Friend, who lives in New York, keep writing “Letters from California” as if California is a foreign country instead of the most populous state in the union?
Answer any and all.
“God’s Extravagant Welcome”
I don’t know what that means but I like the sound of it.
I signed up for Dodgeball last week because I wish to be voluntarily stocked by people cooler than I and because my mobile phone, pre-Dodgeball, wasn’t nuturing the insecure pre-teen within me (NUTURE!). So today Suzan and I are at the supermarket and I innocently post to DB than I’m, well, at the supermarket.
5 minutes later, I’m staring at soy milk and a voice says “Ok, fine don’t turn around.”
It was my buddy Eris, in the neighborhood and my first Dodgeball meetup. I nearly cried.
Also, today, my podcast got not one but two new subscribers who weren’t people I’d begged to sign up. Heck, I don’t even think I’ve met them. So Elena Charles and David Milam, if you’re out there, I love you both.
What a red letter day for technology wanking. And lord, am I sad.
seems to be the theme of the day…
First two articles via New Media Musings. The first, about peer recommendations profiles Pandora, Musicplasma, Neflix and other media companies working on the “If you liked this, you’ll like that” model. The second, on the habits of the “digital generation” (I can’t tell if that’s me or not), had this to say.
In addition to thumbing his nose at notions of “prime time” by downloading his favorite shows (without commercials), Mr. Hanson almost never buys newspapers or magazines, getting nearly all of his information from the Internet, or from his network of electronic contacts.
“Papers are so clunky and big,” he says. If those words are alarming to old media, they are only the beginning of a larger puzzle for today’s marketers: how to make digital technology their ally as they try to understand and reach an emerging generation.
Hear that?
Elsewhere, Scott Andrew, weary of more rants about the imploding music industry has this to add
And then there’s that remaining core of artists that really do believe that the CD Is Never Going Away¹, that People Won’t Pay For What They Can Get For Free², and that Internet == The Devil’s Xerox Machine³, etc.
What I’d like to do is shove all these people into a time machine and send them back to 1990, where you could charge $20 for a CD but commercial radio ruled everything and the only way to be known in Australia was to go to Australia. And then when they weren’t looking I’d teleport back to the present and blow up the lab. Ha ha!
Still not convinced the music industry is on a collision course with its Day of Reckoning? Here’s an example of how ardent music fans are relating to it these days.
Thank you, Sam Cooke. The change has come.
Things are humming over at the Litblog Co-op with their new Read This! selections out. They’re doing podcasts, online discussions, buncha stuff. Impressive (via TEV).
Havoc (2005): “The first entry in the ‘It sucks to be young in Los Angeles’ Film Festival.”
What else would you enter?
Episode 4 of my podcast “Your 10 Minute World” is up.
You can sign up to receive it my dropping this here link into iTunes or the podcast reader of your choice.
So I had a swell time guest blogging at Powells.com this week. They give you and email address say, “write something that has something to do with books” and you go. Here’s what I came up with.
My fried Sarah and a Sarah I’ve never met both read along. Not sure who else but it doesn’t really matter. Hard work but I think if I beg, they’ll let me do it again.
Up next, gotta finish the 4th episode of Your 10 Minute World wherein I continue to ride the word “pulchritude” into the ground. Stay with us.