I left Jim Walsh a message today, after learning that one of the first acts of new City Pages management was to can him and his column. I worked with Jim for a few years over at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and always liked the guy. I thought of him as one of those souls blessed/cursed with the sense/express jones. He’s a guy who wants to tell people how he sees the world, how it feels to him, and how he is working his way through it. A blogger’s sensibility, you could say. But in his case, authentic and genuine, and driven by true artistic compulsion. He has a compulsive need to describe his responses.
I had been at the Pioneer Press a few years before Jimmy arrived, and I remember thinking at the time that his hiring spoke well for the paper. The Pioneer Press, then led by Walker Lundy, still had a reputation as a “writer’s paper”. It could never compete with the Star Tribune in quantity, but it could still make a credible claim to something like literary quality. Lundy understood and appreciated what bringing Jim Walsh into the fold meant for the company brand. But modern newspapers are highly utilitarian vehicles, and management regimes change frequently. “News you can use”, was one of a dozen operative and quickly forgotten catch-mantras that flared and expired while Walsh and I were there.
The Pioneer Press liked Walsh for his encyclopedic personal history with the Twin Cities’ music scene, which he mined reliably. But, burdened with an artistic sensibility, the sensibility of all good writers, Walsh wanted to push his time on the planet beyond reviews and formulaic features, the grail of stale newspapering. He wanted to talk about living in the Twin Cities as he sees, hears and feels it.
Soon, Walker Lundy was gone. For all his corny, old school folksiness, Lundy thought of himself as a character and therefore responded well to the writer-characters on his staff. But he was replaced by a team of remarkably drab, talking point managers, with little if any background in the artful craft of writing, no end of training in decimal points and, I’m sorry to say, no detectable sense of joie de vive. These would be the Meatball Ladies, (see “Back Door Lovin’” below), a startlingly dour and joyless clutch of characters with no affinity at all for anything other than what had been specifically prescribed by the Knight-Ridder management training seminars that formed the bedrock of their journalistic heritage.
They treated Walsh badly. Hell, foully. And now, with this City Pages action, I understand completely why he doesn’t return calls and tells the Star Tribune’s Deborah Rybak in an e-mail that he’s, “sick of talking about myself and the media”.
From the way Jim did talk the last time we spoke, I could tell both he and ex-editor, Steve Perry, (see below), knew their days were numbered. But that doesn’t make new management’s decision any smarter.
Playing Objective Participant here, the rap on Jim’s Pioneer Press stuff was that it was “too personal”, “too emotional” and “too weird”. The Meatball Ladies always seemed to know exactly what, “our readers” wanted to read. What struck me was how what “our readers” wanted pretty much always mirrored exactly whatever they were reading, watching or listening to at that moment, and how all of it was consumer driven. Needless to say, none of them got out much. Not much clubbing. Not much new music, unless you count maybe catching the latest Indigo Girls concert. Not much hanging out at bars chatting up odd characters just for the hell of it. And never … ever … discussing love and sex, like an adult, like Walsh did.
My counter argument in support of Walsh — not that anyone cared or ever asked — was that considering all the inane crap that ran every day in the paper; redundant listings, celebrity gossip, 24-hour old “breaking news” and trainloads of fashionista-wannabe trend-watching, an impressionistic, Jim Walsh getting-the-feel-of-a-St.Paul-neighborhood-bar piece, or whatever, even once a week, was more than justified. Cultivate it a little bit and it would build an audience, much like the restaurant listings.
But The Meatball Ladies were running the place by then, and the simple fact was they wanted him gone, never mind that when they made their move on him he had just returned from a prestigious Knight Fellowship (for creative writing) at Stanford. That’s “Knight”, as in “Knight Ridder”, the Pioneer Press’s owner at the time. No matter. In a classic line, laden with irony if you knew the particularly desiccated, misanthropic editor in question, Walsh was told, “You must think you’re special.”
God forbid! What newspaper could possibly survive with columnists who think themselves, “special”? Echoing Roman Hruska, the gargoyle-like Nebraska Senator who once suggested that mediocre people deserved mediocre Supreme Court judges, the post-Lundy Meatball Ladies of the Pioneer Press committed themselves to the mission of exorcizing idiosyncrasy. Walsh was gone.
But what is City Pages excuse? Last time I checked it was an “alternative” weekly, allegedly a place where, unlike mainstream dailies, readers should be able to find distinctive, off-beat, idiosyncratic writing that, who knows, might leave them with the afterglow of a specific person’s passion? The sort of stuff that, yes, might occasionally make them feel uncomfortable with its’ perspective, subject matter and approach. But the sort of writing and sensibility that might also make them ask a question other than, “Where can I buy a ticket?”
Jim Walsh will survive just fine. In fact, tonight, like every Friday night, Walsh will host and play with a rotating crew of local musicians in the basement of Java Jack’s coffee house, 46th and Bryant, south Minneapolis. Its his Mad Ripple Friday Night Hootenanny. A crowd of about 75-100 soaks it all in from 6:30-8:30.
Drop in. Its free.
