[contextly_auto_sidebar] NOT long ago I wrote a story about the arts in LA since the Great Recession. I spoke to so many people, some at length, that most of my reporting ended up lost in my notebook. One of the more intriguing conversations I had was with David Sefton, the former head of UCLA Live, now running arts festivals in Australia. I asked Sefton -- whose early years involved booking … [Read more...]
The Arts in Los Angeles, 10 Years After
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOME of you may know me as the author of a reasonably gloomy book on the arts, the recession, digital technology, and our fraught cultural future. When I was approached recently by the Los Angeles Times to take a look at how cultural institutions, large and small, and individual artists had experienced the 2008 crash, the belated recovery, the ensuing housing crisis, … [Read more...]
Ten Years After: Remembering The Recession
[contextly_auto_sidebar] A GREAT number of Americans have "moved on." Their lives are fine, and the Great Recession is just a bad, dimly recalled memory, like a really bad winter flu from years ago. But for a number of us, it was one of the defining events of our lives -- something whose consequences we deal with every day or every week. Over the last few days, the press has run a number of … [Read more...]
The Strange Death of the Alternative Press
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR the last few months I've been meaning to revisit some of the abiding concerns of this blog and the book that inspired it. Mostly, I'm talking about what we used to call the press and now typically describe as the news media. My overall sense is that some parts of the creative economy have healed since I began writing my book in the teeth of the recession and … [Read more...]
Guest Columnist: Empty Room at the Top
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Here is the latest piece by CultureCrash's regular guest columnist, Lawrence Christon. Christopher O'Riley, of course, is best known to some of us for his classical-piano interpretations of Radiohead, Nick Drake and Elliott Smith. EMPTY ROOM AT THE TOP By Lawrence Christon For years it’s been routine, whenever possible, for me to make … [Read more...]
Indie Publishing With Hat & Beard
[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of the things I'm most interested is how non-corporate, non-mainstream culture can survive after the 2008 crash. My conversations with J.C. Gabel -- the intense, passionate publisher of a small LA press called Hat & Beard -- give us all a glimpse of both the challenges to independent culture merchants as well as the possibilities. Hat & Beard is about to … [Read more...]
The Music of Inequality
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Remember the recession? A lot of Americans had their lives turned upside down by it. But popular music -- however you define the term -- never really engaged with the crash itself, or the widespread suffering and steep inequality that followed. In a new story for Vox, I looked at a wide range of American music released over the last decade, since the stock market crash … [Read more...]
Handguns, the Press, and Annapolis
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Almost a quarter century ago, I worked as intern, in my last year of journalism school, at the Baltimore Sun. This was a rough few months for me -- I earned nothing for five-days-a-week in the paper's features department, the city was experiencing a crime wave right up to the edge of my neighborhood, and I was breaking up with a pretty serious girlfriend during just … [Read more...]
The Sacred Art of John August Swanson
[contextly_auto_sidebar] EVEN as a lifetime religious skeptic, I've long been fascinated by artists, writers and other culture-makers who bring religion, spirituality, and related matters into their work. Most likely, the art impulse and the urge to worship and praise originated in tandem; what we now call religion and culture were almost seamlessly joined for many centuries. (The agnostic or … [Read more...]
The Bookers: Performing Arts in Los Angeles
[contextly_auto_sidebar] It was on returning back to town in 2016, after a year away, that I was startled to see how much the performing arts scene had changed since I originally landed here in the late ‘90s. Some things about L.A. were worse, but this was more, better, more wide-ranging. Instead of a simple cultural geography that mostly involved downtown L.A., the city had de-centered: Now … [Read more...]