[PEN-L:29993] Alternative media?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

In the late 80s I used to make occasional trips out to Los Angeles to 
visit friends who were part of a loosely organized Hollywood left. This 
included fairly successful writers like Michael Elias who grew up about 
5 miles from me and wrote "Young Doctors in Love", a memorable parody of 
hospital melodramas. It also included Jay Levin, the founder and editor 
of Los Angeles Weekly, a newspaper that combined radical politics and 
glitzy Hollywood lifestyle material. Like all such "underground" 
publications that were styled after urban weeklies that sprouted in the 
1960s, it walked a tightrope between commercialism and idealism. After 
Levin sold the paper to well-heeled investors, it fell off the tightrope 
and now offers a fairly conventional political analysis--albeit packaged 
in a kind of self-contratulatory "hipness" that reminds one of the New 
York Press. The New York Press never tires of lambasting the Nation 
Magazine for its out-of-date liberalism, but offers instead an "edgy", 
hard-line conservatism straight out of the Dartmouth Review. This 
amounts to bashing Al Sharpton and the Democratic Party on a weekly basis.

In the latest LA Weekly, there is a corrosive attack on the Nation 
Magazine that could have been appeared in the New York Press:

On Bubble Wrap
The Nation vs. The Weekly Standard
by John Powers 

An audience is like a broad. If you're indifferent, Endsville.

--Frank Sinatra

AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER THE NATION HAS been the journalistic 
lodestar of the American left. Now, in its 137th year, the magazine is 
on a commercial roll. Its subscriptions have risen steadily in the wake 
of the World Trade Center attacks. Its finances may actually break even 
(a miracle in the world of political magazines). And its publishing 
adjunct, Nation Books, is raking in money from two hot titles: Gore 
Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Forbidden Truth by 
Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié. Indeed, everything's going 
so well that I feel kind of churlish in pointing out what most on the 
left are unwilling to say: The Nation is a profoundly dreary magazine.

Just compare it to another thin, ideologically driven rag, The Weekly 
Standard, a right-wing publication currently approaching its measly 
seventh anniversary. A few months ago, I began putting new issues of 
each side by side on an end table and, to my surprise, discovered that 
while unread copies of The Nation invariably rose in guilt-inducing 
stacks, I always read The Weekly Standard right away. Why? Because seen 
purely as a magazine, The Standard is incomparably more alluring. As 
gray and unappetizing as homework, The Nation makes you approach it in 
the same spirit that Democrats might vote for Gray Davis -- where else 
can you go? In contrast, The Standard woos you by saying, "We're having 
big fun over here on the right."

full: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/41/on-powers.php

The Los Angeles Weekly made virtually the same kind of attack on 
Pacifica Radio, albeit from columnist Marc Cooper who fairly typifies 
Nation Magazine ideology nowadays. In a positively rancid article on 
Porto Alegre, Cooper also took people like Noam Chomsky and his 
supporters to task for lacking panache. If one has ever seen the gnomish 
Marc Cooper in person or heard his nasal, high-pitched voice, you would 
have to question his harping on style.

In a 1990 brochure to advertisers, here's how the LA Weekly described 
itself;

"Weekly readers like to buy, buy, buy. . . . They want Perrier instead 
of water; croissants instead of toast; Rolex instead of Timex. They earn 
champagne incomes to match their champagne tastes."

In 1994, the Village Voice bought the LA Weekly and deepened the 
orientation to the Yuppie set, both culturally and politically. At the 
time the Voice was owned by pet food magnate Leonard Stern, who had 
already pushed the tabloid toward the center. Today's owners package 
conventionally liberal politics with all sorts of articles about 
alternative lifestyles. In a distinct gesture to rightist politics, it 
contains regular dispatches from Sylvia Foa, a grating Zionist based in 
Israel.

The Voice is lashed from the right on a weekly basis by the New York 
Press, founded in 1988 by Russ Smith. Smith's motivation in challenging 
the establishment left was nearly identical to that described in the LA 
Weekly article cited above. In a profile in the Oct. 1, 1998 NY Times, 
Smith said the Voice had become ossified, full of "stuck-in-the-70's, 
left-wing stuff" and pompous writing. "What about the 20-year-old who 
just wants to hear about the Smashing Pumpkins' new album and doesn't 
want a four-paragraph discourse on Baudelaire or Thomas Carlyle?"

As somebody who enjoys rightwing entertainment, including radio shock 
jocks, I find New York Press simply unreadable. Most of it has little to 
do with NYC and consists of long-winded navel-gazing by some of the most 
boring people on the planet.

For example, in a piece called appropriately "First Person" in the 
current issue, we learn from Rich Rickaby that:

"My family is the black sheep of the family. My mother went through an 
embarrassing battle with alcohol while married to her second husband who 
was alcoholic enough for the entire family. Not that one has to be 
embarrassed about being alcoholic, especially since she overcame it, but 
when Mom has to crawl her way out of the family gathering it leaves an 
impression. Diane has three kids by two different men, both of whom are 
in jail now. One for beating up on whores and the other for conspiring 
with his father to murder someone. Her oldest son, Joe, has already been 
in jail by the age of 21 and has since fled for West Virginia."

I think I'll stick with Thomas Carlyle.

--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org