I'm registering myself for protection under the Endangered Species Act. That's my response to reading this insightful article in Slate about the demise of the music critic. It seems that my days are numbered.
The Slate essay, by Joseph Weiner, expands upon a similar piece I wrote a year ago by adding greater context about the struggles of publications such as Rolling Stone, Paste, Spin, Vibe, and Blender. After reading Weiner's story, half of me wonders why I'm spending part of this week reviewing albums by Sunny Day Real Estate, Porcupine Tree, and Florence + The Machine for the next issue of FILTER magazine. (The current issue -- see left -- includes reviews of new albums by Imogen Heap and Son Volt by yours truly.)
Truth is that I review albums because I love the challenge. It's difficult. One has to describe something that is essentially ethereal -- and, if possible, doing so without using insider-y jargon (you won't hear me describing a band as "Nu-Balearic"), cliches (phrases such as "sun-dappled guitars" should be summarily banned by all music editors), and lazy comparisons ("it sounds like Radiohead meets Sigue Sigue Sputnik with Sun Ra on vocals"). So, what I love about writing reviews is the challenge of getting creative with the writing. But, of course, it takes time and effort and, most of all, a passion for music.
The best music writing makes me want to run out to a record store immediately. I highly recommend Alexis Petridis of The Guardian, who has an incredible wit and a pair of honest ears that are seemingly immune to hype or trendiness (too many reviewers, alas, don't have the courage of conviction). UNCUT and WORD magazine excel at reliable recommendations and thoughtful critiques.
Forget the polar bear, it's time to add movie critics to the Endangered Species List. At least, the professional kind that writes for old media. Newsday, Newsweek, and The Village Voice are the latest publications to lay off critics like Detroit autoworkers. I think, in large part, newspapers and news magazines feel they can afford to shed film scribes because there's often a huge disconnect between reviewer and reader anyway. Not even Michael Bay's ego could fill the gap between the tastes and views of ordinary viewers and the rarefied, discerning opinions of professional reviewers who, let's face it, might strike readers as jaded or distant or haughty in their critiques.
That gulf may be a lot narrower at, say, cosmopolitan metropolitan institutions such as The New Yorker and NYT, publications where movie critics seem to have a brighter future. In the meantime, amateur critics will continue to proliferate on the Web where, Variety's Anne Thompson notes, peer-to-peer recommendations are more relevant to younger auds.
But I wonder how many of those younger blog critics can provide the sort of context that comes from a deep encyclopedic knowledge of film that encompasses bygone eras and international cinema? They may know their Luketic, but do they know their Lubitsch? Professional film critics skew older in age and have the advantage of decades of cinema-going to draw upon, whereas a younger set of critics will struggle to keep up with the hundreds of releases in any given year, let alone keep up with Netflixing films that fall beyond the scope of a good film-course curriculum. Quentin Tarantino once said he learned everything he knows about cinema from reading Pauline Kael. Can any up-and-coming director make the same claim about Harry Knowles?
I like what Ty Burr, formerly of EW, is doing over at the Boston Globe. Burr is astonishingly good as a critic and if he doesn't net a Pulitzer one day then the committee isn't paying attention. (Oh, and talking of encyclopedic knowledge: there's a reason why EW picks up the phone to call Burr every time it needs a historial obit piece.) Not only is Burr's writing a witty and literary delight in every piece – even if the movie is a non-hazard-pay assignment such as "Bratz" – he's also able to offer really thoughtful critiques that make one see each work in a fresh perspective. Take, for example, his clear-eyed critiques of "Junebug" and "Anatomy of Hell."
He clearly understands where the average Globe reader is coming from and engages the reader by making him or her feel as if he's talking to them, not above them, as a critic. He's educating his audience about film, but gently doing so in a way that the reader feels part of a colloquial conversation. It's the difference between the kind of professor that holds a seminar with his students on the college lawn and the bow-tied one that dictates to a class from behind an auditorium podium.
The Globe's movie site has a nice video feature in which Burr and talented second critic Wesley Morris do an Ebert 'n' Roeper routine each week – always nicely done. And I really like their blog, too. It's the model of what critics, if they're to survive, will need to do to form a personal relationship with their community of readers.
I recently attended a forum about the future of (professional) critics that was held at the USC Annenberg school for Communication. A number of top critics were on the panel, including LA Times music writer Ann Powers and EW's Chris Willman. For the most part, the writers lamented the decline of readership in the Internet age and how the general devaluation of critics in print publications.
I recently wrote about this phenomenon and so David Browne, formerly head music critic for EW, and now a full-time author (most recently of the definitive Sonic Youth biography"Goodbye Twentieth Century") sent along the following trenchant observation about the state of music criticism:
"Hey Stephen: Very interesting piece--I was wondering when someone would write about the decline in music critics in the same way they've covered the falloff of film and TV critics. Consider yourself a pioneer! I bet lots of people will read this--and then write their own versions. So good for you.
I would add one note to the piece: The problem with music criticism isn't just the influx of Internet voices--it's the fact that those new voices are actually opinionated. "Music criticism" in most print publications is, to me, dead. It's over. Everything is three-stars and up. Everyone champions everything. When was the last time you read a mixed review of a major new release in RS, Blender, Spin, Paste, etc. etc.,,etc.? It's very, very sad. At least the Stereogums and blogs of the world will tell you if something is good or sucks. No one else does anymore."
Is Ken Burns, the brilliant documentary maker, a secret propagandist for socialism? In a piece titled "Socialized Nature," TIME magazine writer James Poniewozick claims that Burns' new PBS series, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, "makes a simple case for an idea that is wildly controversial in the year of the tea party: That we need government to do things the private sector can't or won't."
Warming to his theme, Mr. Poniewozick continues:
The national parks — and 'The National Parks' — are based on ideas that are classically, if not radically, communitarian: That the free market doesn't always act in the public interest. That it's good that every American shares ownership of and responsibility for the most exclusive properties in the country. And that it is right for people — through government — to protect them from business interests and even from the people themselves (like the early visitors who shot game and scratched their names on ancient rocks). A series on a public-TV network that calls a government program America's best idea? Has no one alerted Rush Limbaugh?
Indeed, Poniewozick is entirely correct in noting that few people oppose the idea of government-run national parks.
Well, I do. And I reject Poniewozick's premise entirely. Ah, I shoulda mentioned earlier that this is going to be a fairly controversial post.
National Parks are certainly a great idea. But I'd rather they were privatized (gasp!) and put into the hands of The Nature Conservancy or Audubon Society. Or a for-profit corporation.
Unfortunately, America's national parks are poorly managed -- the inevitable result of central planning.
A few damning examples:
* National Parks have a poor track record of preserving their ecosystems: In Yellowstone, a decision to cull the wolf population in the park has triggered an ecosystem chain reaction that has decimated Apsen trees. (Read about it here.)
*The government officials in charge of the parks are prone to decision-making by lobby groups: Earlier this summer, a page one story in The Los Angeles Times explained how the US government tried to kill off the gray wolf in SouthWest America at the behest of wildstock interests. Moreover, when the government attempted to reintroduce the gray wolf, now an endangered species, into the Gila National Forest, it botched the effort.
*Smokey Bear's worst enemy: The Forest Service: Remember the catastrophic fire at Los Alamos in 2000 that burned 80 square miles of New Mexico including over 400 homes? Started by an arsonist? Nope. It was deliberately set by the Forest Service. In fact, they've started a good number of wildfires that quickly got out of control and wrecked havoc. It's all part of a policy called, ironically, "controlled burn."
As environmental economist Terry L. Anderson and Reed Watson opined in Forbes: "Decades of fire suppression by the Forest Service have disrupted natural fire cycles and turned many western forests into tinderboxes waiting to burn. Dense stands of spindly deadfall and underbrush now occupy land once characterized by open savannahs and large, widely spaced trees. One result is larger, more intense fires that burn the publicly owned forests to the ground. Indeed, by the Forest Service's own estimates, 90 to 200 million acres of federal forests are at high risk of burning in catastrophic fire events."
*National Parks are overrun by tourists: Every year, there are more than 280 million visitors to America's national parks. Why? It's cheap. Just $25 for a car to enter Yellowstone, for example. Sure, you already pay for the national parks with your tax dollars and so, understandably, you may not like the idea of paying more. But the fact is that there's an overwhelming demand due to the low cost of entry.
As Manuel Lora points out in an essay titled, "If You Love Nature, Desocialize It," the great economist Ludwig von Mises showed economic calculation is impossible under socialism. Lora writes, "How much should people be charged to enter the park? Should they be charged at all? How many families or cars should be allowed per season? Or should they be allowed at all? These are all critical questions that end up being answered politically."
By contrast, entrepreneurs, using prices, can determine the balance of supply and demand. A private park owner would want to protect his resources and would better determine the balance between trampling tourists and park preservation.
* The parks are poorly maintained -- despite a staggering budget: In their Forbes op-ed, Anderson and Watson point out: "Every year, U.S. taxpayers spend billions of dollars on public land management, but the way in which these funds are allocated--through the congressional budgeting process--ensures the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service respond to the will of politicians.
The result is what has been called "park barrel politics," which persists while the National Park Service maintains an estimated $9 billion backlog of construction and maintenance projects. Lest you think financial mismanagement is confined to the Park Service, consider that between 2006 and 2008 the Forest Service lost on average $3.58 billion each year. Similarly, the Government Accountability Office testified in Congress that in 2004 the BLM earned approximately $12 million in grazing revenues but spent $58 million implementing its grazing program."
The real reason why Teddy Roosevelt created the national forests was that he thought America would one day run out of timber. As Reason magazine points out, "To Roosevelt and his circle of progressive central planners, the solution to the impending national timber famine was a government program-national forests managed by a new federal agency, the U.S. Forest Service." Read the rest of the piece to learn how Federal timber sales turned out. Another reason of why these resources are best taken out of public hands.
National Parks are the ultimate example of "the tragedy of the commons." These parks are supposedly owned by each and everyone of us. But, as Fred L. Smith of The Competitive Enterprise Institute pointed out in an article I wrote on this very topic, "When everybody owns something, then nobody feels particularly responsible for it. Each of us hopes that others will take care of our common responsibilities."
Putting America's parks in the hands of private owners may just be the best idea of all.
I'm registering myself for protection under the Endangered Species Act. That's my response to reading this insightful article in Slate about the demise of the music critic. It seems that my days are numbered.
