Author: Hans Eisenbeis

This past weekend, it was hard to escape the feeling that most of the art world showed up on our doorstep to help celebrate the gala reopening of the Walker Art Center. This had the feeling of a truly remarkable moment—an acknowledged world-class art center turns its operating volume up to eleven.

It is not enough, in these loud times, to merely toot your own horn to achieve this kind of harmonic convergence. You must call in your markers, and judging from the guest lists, the turn-out, the general commotion emanating from Vineland Place, the Walker people could not be better connected. This morning, we are counting ourselves lucky to associate ourselves with them. (Together with the Minnesota Book Awards—where our own Jennifer Vogel received heavy metal in the memoir category for “Flim-Flam Man,” hurray!—we feel mighty proud to be so close to the center of the universe.)

It’s important for patrons of the arts to celebrate their besieged communities. And if we occasionally seem immodest about it, well—you only get a fifty million dollar art-center addition once a generation. On the other hand, we found this story about the return of legendary graffiti artist “Revs” a very interesting counterpoint indeed. Speaking with friends here from New York, we ran through the paces of our usual arguments about the tension between, say, the paintings of Sigmar Polke (so good to see again!) and the sculpture of Claes Oldenberg (uh…)—the latter showing many signs of incipient childishness, commercialism, and general superficiality for several decades now. So few successful artists actually have the courage to continue to evolve, even after they’ve become the art world’s equivalent of rock stars. It’s not clear why this must always be the case—although we now have a pet theory that says artists are lousy money-handlers, and desperation is the single biggest ingredient in the recastable mold.

Anyway, the point of the Times piece on Revs resurgence is that it is very refreshing to transcend the normal boundaries of media-PR-self-promotion, and discover an honest-to-god outsider artist who relishes his outsider status, uses it to resist the corrupting influence of money and celebrity. Perhaps the answer is as simple as unionizing all visual artists (after teaching them how to work steel). We have no truck with the romanticism of the “starving artist,” but we also don’t have a lot of patience with the overfed artist, either.

We were a little sad that our old friend Ted Genoways (Virgina Quarterly Review) didn’t manage to pull off an upset and bring home a National Magazine Award yesterday, after being nominated in two categories. Likewise, the upstarts at 5820 did not win—but these small, passionate puiblications can certainly make plenty of hay out of their finalist status.

In today’s Washington Post, Peter Carlson yawned at the results of the NMAs. He notes that watching the New Yorker win five awards reminds him of the 1927 New York Yankees. We have two thoughts about the New Yorker’s success. First, it’s vaguely possible that there really are no other magazines doing the sort of quality work that the New Yorker does, and it is certainly true that there are no magazines that use better writers. The New Yorker really is the Yankees of the magazine world, in the sense that anyone who is at the absolute top of their craft will eventually find a way into the magazine. The brand is thus self-sustaining. (Downside of this is that it is left to other magazines like, say, the National Journal and Mother Jones and Virginia Quarterly to find and publish the next generation of New Yorker writers.) Second, the New Yorker’s success among its peers is probably a positive sign that editors everywhere (or at least the editors who jury the NMA’s) still have old-fashioned values about what constitutes good, quality magazine journalism. (Downside of this is that most editors are presumably frustrated non-Yankees who wish they had the freedom to look less like Lucky and more like the New Yorker.)

Mildly related note, before getting back to the bottle-washing room: We’ve finally got around to reading Ian Frazier’s wonderful little book, “The Fishes Eye,” a collection of his essays about fishing and fishing-related subjects. We’ve always enjoyed Frazier’s work, and can’t think why he doesn’t immediately spring to our lips when people ask who we like best in the world of writing. Frazier has won a fistful of NME’s himself, most recently for a wonderful piece published in Outside magazine about… ice. Yes, frozen water. That article actually made the anthology of NME winners that ASME publishes each year—one of those books we tend to avoid on some vague principle of avoiding industrial antholigies.

We’re big fans of our TiVo, but we don’t hold much stock in its ability to recommend and record shows it thinks we’ll be interested in. To be fair, we haven’t really done our part—by constantly jabbing the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button every time we’re watching the tube. This is a function of being fully immersed in TiVo behavior; we simply don’t channel surf at all, going instead straight to the current playlist of shows we’ve specificially asked TiVo to record. No passive TV watching, no ratings, no meaningful associations or recommendations. People we know who do not have TiVo (or any of its inferior copycats) often say they aren’t interested in digital video recorders because they don’t want to increase their TV viewing. But this is precisely the point of TiVo—it allows you to watch only the programs that you want to watch, when you want to watch them, accelerated through the commercials and the slow bits. We watch a lot less TV than we did before TiVo. (We’ve reached the point where we wish reality had that ingenious button that sends you back in time thirty seconds.)

Still, the TiVo can’t help itself from quietly recording things, apparently to keep itself occupied, and if you scroll down your playlist, you’ll notice what it’s been doing in its downtime. Last night, we noticed that TiVo had speculated that we might be intersted in a new program called “Tom Friedman Reporting,” which turned out to be a camera crew following the Times’ best columnist (and Minnesota native) around, watching him do his job. This was on the “Discovery-Times” Channel, a cable channel we’d never heard of before. Anyway, the estimable Friedman was, in this episode, sauntering around Europe trying to answer the question “Does Europe Hate America?” Well, not ten seconds into the program the answer becomes painfully clear: Yes! With gusto! But it is Friedman’s particular genius that he spends the next hour speaking with everyone from Americans at Oxford (Rhodes and Marshall scholars) to islamic high school students who claim Osama bin Laden as a personal hero. Much of this material Friedman turned into a series of columns a few months ago, but gathered into one place and one TV program, it was an artful piece of reporting. Friedman brings together a tremendous amount of material, and he’s sharp enough to debate even the most convincing Parisian peace activists (“You are against using force always, even if it means to displace a violent tyranny? How do you feel about America liberating France from Hitler?”; “The EU is shutting out American cosmetics companies for trace carcinogens—and yet, you can’t eat in a French cafe without having smoke blown in your face the entire meal?”)

Like any great acrobat, Friedman makes his job look easy. With clear, clean prose, he handles the world’s most pressing issues with a compassionate and reasonable voice, and he does enough behind-the-scenes reporting to have a firm grasp of the issues. (Behold, the rise of the EU and China, and the twilight of America.) Friedman is loyal to no party, he is merely loyal to the facts. If we could establish an award for “most trusted news analyst,” he would not only be at the top of our list, he would be the only one on our list.

We got a kick out of DC SOB’s funny item today, “Washington’s Most Loathsome.” And while the SOB pins the tail on many high profile asses—like Robert Novak, Michelle Malkin, and Charles Krauthammer—we were especially gratified to see syndicated “advice columnist” (and Washington Post typist) Carolyn Hax on the list, described thusly:

“11. Carolyn Hax: Are there any among the lovelorn who aren’t sorry after they’ve taken their plight to this Fen-Phenned harridan of hackery? Operating from the position that there’s no better medicine than woefully uncalled for ridicule, she generously peppers her advice with belittling barbs. It might yet be amusing if she wasn’t recycling the same old put downs week in and week out, but she’s too damn dim to notice she’s about eight short of playing the dozens. Of course, her own marriage was no great shakes, though to her credit, once she managed to break her ex-husband illustrator, he stayed broken. Still, it’s impossible to see her column as anything other than the bitter remodeling of her own glass house.”

We couldn’t hope to say it any better than that. Now, we have it on good authority that at least one co-worker here in the office is a serious fan of Carolyn Hax (who is included no doubt in some sort of syndication package over at the Star Tribune—you want Friedman? You gotta take Hax! No Hax no Friedman. Oh, and Family Circle stays, capiche?), which certainly beggars the imagination. One of the crosses we bear as editors is the steady trickle of writers and would-be writers who wish to write an advice column. As with every proposal that comes through the door here, we try to seriously entertain the idea. We read clips and cover letters, we skim resumes, we chew on it and sleep on it, and in the end we most likely have to say “thanks very much, but we’re not in the market for another column.” This is undoubtedly heartbreaking, but it is for the best for everyone concerned.

We have a number of standard replies, but we have not tried this one out: Be careful what you wish for. Just look at that harridan of hackery, Carolyn Hax! A column, especially an advice column, may look like a gilded throne, but the pressure of regularly producing something—anything, much less anything worth a damn—can certainly be a millstone around one’s neck. No matter what the frequency (monthly, weekly, daily),even a professional writer will often find herself in a tight spot from which no amount of prestige or artistic freedom or compensation can save her.

Well, we’ve now managed to write a lot more than we felt inspired to write about twenty minutes ago. Confidential to Reilly: You’re lucky to have the couch, bud.

We have not had a chance to read Jon Gertner’s entire article from yesterday’s Times Magazine on the Nielsens, Arbitrons, and other media-measuring devices—but we’ve enjoyed what we’ve read so far. It comports with some of the bones we’ve been gnawing on around here in recent days.

In two very important ways, these sorts of industrial devices for measuring how people use media can never really be adequate—and for one very big reason. First, even the “People Meter” described by Gertner, now in use by Arbitron in some markets, merely measures a person’s exposure to certain media—it cannot make any qualitative measurement of that person’s reaction to her exposure other than simple duration. You keep watching or listening, presumably you are not irritated enough to change the channel. But you may not be ~able~ to. In other words, if I am in a bar trying to have a conversation with a friend while Brit Hume natters self-righteously in the background, my PPM may tell Headquarters that I watched Fox News Channel for an hour, whereas I spent most of that hour highly irritated by the twelve overhead televisions and their constant lap dance distracting me from a meaningful conversation.

Second, it cannot meaningfully measure what a person’s reaction is to the ~advertising~ she is exposed to in the course of her media day. Thus the advertiser and the media that sold that advertising are inextricably linked—maybe more closely than ever before. Here in the wretched world of print, we are frequently considered the “lowest rung” in the ad world, because we are doing front-line work, trying to educate small business owners about what advertising is and does. Most intelligent people who are potential buyers of advertising want to know what kind of return they will get on their investment—if they sell widgets, they’d like to believe that advertising will increase their widget sales, and presumably they will, if everything falls into place as it should. But there is frequently not as direct a relationship as advertisers would like to see. The only answer seems to be a certain kind of co-branding reasoning: You buy ads with us, you tie your fortunes to us. As the water rises, both of our boats rise with it.

There is an important shadow-dance going on which we’ve described before. In an attention economy, you charge your advertisers for raw exposure, but the more they want to know and the more you can tell them about ~how well~ their ad may (or may not) be working, the more nervous everyone gets. Their are billions and billions of dollars at stake in the media and advertising business, all tied up in ~passive~ consumption of media, with the advertising piggybacking along for the ride. If we suddenly converted to an on-demand attention economy (like, say, the public radio model; in print, it would mean inverting the modern circulation model and charging real money for subscriptions, rather than giving away a lot of deeply discounted inert gas), lots of people would lose lots of money. The only way to prop up a passive-measurement industry is to spend more money, not less.

Even the next-generation technology called “Apollo” has its limitations. This cutting edge measuring device is supposed to close the circuit entirely—first measure the media and advertisments a person is passively exposed to, and then measure her active buying habits. But one can certainly hear both the advertisining and the media industries holding their breath. What happens when we find out that there is actually a complicated, unpredictable agent—a living, breathing person with her own history, self-image, brand loyalties, bad hair days—standing between an advertisment and a purchase?

There is still only a small, frail man behind that curtain—but what a curtain it is!

As far as tempests in teacups go, this is pretty good—and we’ll just assume that the tea party is now permanently adjourned. We’d link to them to show you just how idiotic and desperate they have become (Last post: “Could We Have Some Facts, Please?”—no shit) but we’ve pledged never to do that again.

See, these people still don’t understand just how odious it was to have an allegedly conservative government arrogantly insinuate itself between husband and wife (“this judiciary is out of control!” Um… wrong branch, fella)—seeing it first as a political opportunity, and then (even worse) trying to blame the politicization on a non-existent partisan conspiracy.

Boys: A turd is a turd, and you’ve got it all over yourselves, which is a pretty neat trick, given where you live in that impregnable hall of mirrors. Begob, there’s our bus. Goodbye.

It’s the first we heard, but apparently Dan Kennedy is leaving his post as media critic at the Boston Phoenix. Over the years, we’ve enjoyed reading him—especially his smart, clean copy about the rivalry between the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.

One of the best things about the alternative press is its self-conferred (and now somewhat disingenuous) outsider status, which you can always recognize by its generally relentless advocacy and polemicism. It also allows a paper to write about “big media” competitors without pulling any punches, and in a town like Boston, that is certainly the least readers expect. The Phoenix has been around long enough that both of Beantown’s daily papers keep a close eye on it, and have not missed their own opportunities to shake Steve Mindich’s tree to see what sort of rotten fruit falls down.

Here in our genteel berg, we have no good counterpart to Dan Kennedy. The serious media beat seems to be a dying breed, which we think is a mildly frightening canary-in-the-coal-mine omen. Despite the financial health of the Star Tribune, the reinvigorated anger of City Pages, and the terminal stasis of the Pioneer Press, no one in print is writing about print with any regularity. Of course, we have our own selfish reasons for wishing it were otherwise—and we certainly wish to count our blessings. But it is a somewhat odd consequence of Minnesota Nice that there seems to be a gentleman’s agreement among all parties to go easy on each other—that is, to not write about each other at all.

Tronnes and Levine had, for some time, been keeping a lively grip on the neck of all local media, and those silly men at Powerline have their little spats with Nick Coleman, and someone named Hugh or Howard something-or-other claims to be hosting a permanent “swarm” on the Strib, and City Pages admits to reading the daily papers each day, so there is some hope—we suppose—for the world of media criticism as it pertains to print.

But when we point our finger, of course, three fingers point back at us, and we have to admit that this here blog may be the best place for regular hit-and-run commentary of an industrial sort. We have always had a strong feeling that readers care a lot less about us as people—working at desks in our shoes with our petty complaints and triumphs—than we think they do, and we have never seriously thought about migrating regular print-media criticism to the pages of the magazine.

That doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be doing it. To pretend that “media criticism” should be limited to TV, with the occasional bit on Tom Barnard or Gary Eichten—that is being part of the problem, not the solution.

Today, the New York Observer pulls a nifty stunt. Media writer Tom Scocca recreates the masthead of The New Yorker, which has never published such a thing in its seventy-five years of publishing. We wish we’d thought of that. (We’re thinking Spy magazine must have thought of it before, too; they used to publish the hilarious and informative “Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker” at a time when The New Yorker still did not publish letters from readers, either.) Then we realized what a Herculean task of research it must have involved, poring through contributors notes—also added just a few years ago under the reign of Tina Brown and her celebrity editorship—book jackets, lecture flyers, and so forth.

People who are obsessed with magazines often wonder why The New Yorker does things in such an odd, backward way. There have been lots of other examples, though most have slowly been evolved to resemble how other magazines are built. For example, for more than fifty years, the magazine had no Table of Contents. Bylines came at the end of long articles, and most shorter items had no byline at all.

When they were asked about this sort of thing, editors Harold Ross and William Shawn usually said they did these things simply because that’s the way they had always been done. Famously, Ross said of the TOC that no one ever thought to do it in the early years, and the oversight just seemed to gain momentum. But we have a sense that this was just a deflection, and that in the star chamber of the editor’s offices, there were plenty of justifications for marching to the beat of their own drummer.

There are three very good, old-fashioned reasons not to publish a masthead. First is to subsume the egos of all who contribute and participate in the magazine to the larger project, to the sum of its parts. We live in an age of self-aggrandizement and instant gratification; the age of Me as a personal brand, free of loyalties to anything larger than ourselves. The New Yorker’s non-masthead is a reminder, if anyone needs one, that the magazine comes before any of the individuals responsible for producing it. Second, one of the subtle services a masthead performs is to sustain the longterm employability of its staff—other people in the industry tend to obsess about mastheads, and they poach from each other, and often times it’s the only public credit a hardworking editor gets. Anyone who has ever worked at The New Yorker does not have this worry; they are at the top of their game at the top team in the league, and they subsit on prestige. Don’t call them, they’ll call you. And that’s the third reason: the moment you make public a handful of names at your magazine is the moment you are inundated, by name, with dozens and dozens of queries from writers, press releases from record companies, and fat promotional folders from Manhattan crystal shops.