Are you guys at Seattle Weekly really that bad?

INCOMING EDITOR IS BRUSQUE, MAKES CHANGES

That article seems pretty unnecessary to me. It reads like something out of a blog.

Dan Savage is the only good thing The Stranger has going for it at this point. They've relegated the weekly Jim Woodring drawing as a black & white in the middle of all the classified section, and have pretty much outsmarmed even the smarmiest readers.

I think there are other ways the Seattle Weekly, overall, could improve too.

All in all, my feelings on the debate are: someone please let me win the fucking lottery so I can collaborate and start another weekly paper ourselves, so we can hire all our friends and live in heaven.

"Overnight I received an e-mail from Fudesco who said he recognized the quote from an interview he had done with Matos a while back for Gallery of Sound."

(italics theirs)

yeah, but she was hanging out at the cha cha with some guy from PGMG -- seems pretty important to me!

I mean, the more The Stranger is more hung up about what the Seattle Weekly is doing, and not vice versa, the better it is for the Seattle Weekly.

Nor the Stranger's Chris DeLaurenti, who recently turned in an effing phonebook - about as exciting as one, too - of all the experimental-type music folks in Seattle. He not only had the gall not to have ever seen the Sun City Girls, he also had the chutzpah to admit it in print. But those laptoppers - hasn't missed one. Jesus Christ.

In any case, the article's just another salvo in the intraurban rivalry, and should probably be ignored.

I mean, first of all, do bands ever really turn down interviews? I write for a paper owned by a much-reviled company that has been accused by some of trying to dismantly democracy. Yet when I call up even the most archly political of arch political punk bands, they're fine with talking to me. They know the difference between the owner and the worker, and they know that it's just a fucking interview.

Oh, and a caveat: The Stranger sucks major ass, and I'll still take Matos' section over that piece of shit any day.

Meltzer's column was boring lazy name-dropping crud that should've been ditched long ago; a guy coasting on the anti-charisma he already burned through several times over.

Also, the "Matos edited out personal anecdotes about a gay relationship" ---> "Matos must be a homophobe" bit at the end is a joke. Your arms' too short to make that kind of reach, Ms. Writer Person.

The Stranger, it seems to me, has always made a point of picking on the Weekly. And no wonder, because they've done some damage to that operation in terms of competition.

It's a fucking miracle, actually, that both alt-weeklies can survive in a city that small. One of them will be gone in the next five years unless SubPop blows up again.

Considering Meltzer's rep for the nasty (mailing people kitten fetuses or whatever), I don't know.

if i answered the phone brusquely with just my last name, people would just think they reached a surly ice cream store.

also i find this thread really inappropriate for reasons i can't put my finger on.

It holds with my belief that he's the gruffest friendly man ever. :-)

I'm glad you're here, Jess. I need you to prevent me from turning into trife on this thread.

haha mike, why? so I can turn into trife instead?

And no more inappropriate than the constant Lester Bangs ass-kissing or these new personal attacks on Chuck Klosterman (who's a pretty cool guy, actually).

Chicagoans who read our dominant alt-weekly The Reader may remember an article in their hot type section (which serves no other purpose than to cover and critique the 2 major dailies) about a month ago about the in-fighting at the Sun-Times between Jay Mariotti (The more DeRogatis of the two) and Rick Telander (The Greg Kot, if you will) and how they nearly got in a fist fight at a sporting event once. Apparently, the resentment between them is extremely personal.

Actually, Michael, the Hilton Kramer hiring makes perfect sense, given that the NY Post is now the newspaper of choice for the "Ann Coulter pinups on my wall" set.

But Jess, there’s loads more journalistic integrity in palling around with bands so they’ll play your sponsored events and give you quotes than in approaching them with any sort of critical ear. (And you guys are lucky out there in King – in Cook Country just using a stringer carries a minimum of two years!)

That said, yeah, I also adhere to the "consider the source" line. Her attempts at identifying the Stranger with the hip music is pretty damn laughable. No winners in this whole thing; the discussion it all inspires is what prompted the thread.

first of all, metlzer hasn't been either good OR "edgy" in decades. which seems to warrant him being shit canned pretty well to me. i don't see anyone tossing xgau or marcus, mostly because they haven't been churning out repetitive, self-parodic drivel (okay that's up for debate, even though i don't personally think so) for the miserly $$ of the free weeklies of the world for the last two decades while still claiming to hate all music.

secondly, as i remember, reighley wasn't "run off" at all. he was told "no more columns about your boyfriend or dog" (and unless he's fucking his [male] dog, i don't see how that could be homophobic) because frankly no one I know wants to hear about his boyfriend and/or dog in the context of whatever crap he was peddling that week. he balked at this and walked.

thirdly, people don't normally fire the editorial staff of a music section and bring in someone with a completely different agenda if they're happy with the way the music section is being run. INCLUDING the writers published.

fourth, like you said, consider the source. the stranger is hardly going to be giving a fair and biased account. i mean, how exactly did they track down that email to meltzer in the first place?

the basic lesson is, indulge people for too long and they'll get all sorts of inflated ideas about what the public actually gives a shit about. if you REALLY want to write about your dog (or be meltzer) then save it for the chapbooks.

click

Still though.. TS:
* making comments about one's physical appearance and implying one is a homophobe
vs.
* being outed has having one's bass playing influenced by the cure and siouxsie and the banshees

*i have never heard any of their other songs.

On this point, Matos and I are in the EXACT same boat (i.e. we both basically followed the same regime). So I understand the changes. I'm just talking about the bedside manner in doing so, that's all. Meltzer is still Meltzer, ya know?

Are you nuts? Credibility is king, and the fact Matos corrected that immediately on the Web site shows he gets it. Do you?

But yeah, they're not exactly a weekly. (by definition, duh)

We ain't rock n roll, dude. We're just dorks who write about it, which means we do adhere to civility if we wanna be respected.

but outside of "by e-mail," the manner/circumstances of the firing aren't known. (The quoted excerpt reads like a response by Matos to a protestation by Meltzer, but that's purely guesswork.)

also, keep your self-deprecation offa me.

Just kidding.

And good point on the email: That's presented as an out-of-the-blue missive, not as part of a larger argument. Something to reconsider on my part, then.

what the fuck is "personal" about me defending the removal of a dinosaur farting hot air into the aether?

Let's think about that one for a sec ... gun, foot, shoot ...

- i'm not the editor of the weekly
- i'm not on staff at the weekly
- (the weekly hasn't paid me for three weeks haha)
- i don't know richard meltzer
- i don't know kurt reighley
- i write freelance for the weekly and for a number of voice media papers (that's the full disclosure law)

(For the record, I have no idea who Meltzer is or why he's important or not, and i've been reading a lot of music press for decades)

Okay, be pissed off at me, but I found it funny you would say, "This isn't personal, but this guy is a farting dinosaur." Kinda like that joke in Orgamzo, "I'm not queer or anything, but you have a nice ass."

I'm not pegging you as the face of SW at all, since I don't know you or other writers there and am aware you contribute ably to many other publications -- I'm just throwing out arguments and reacting to the piece and countering your points.

And Matos doesn't owe me shit -- why would he? He's a paid writer and editor, as am I; there's no competition here. None of this is personal on my end, but I'm fascinated that someone else would bust on him like that publicly, and it makes me wonder about the content. Don;t balme you for defending him , though.

Jess: Well, if the line was "How the fuck is it personal if I think the man's work doesn't say aything fresh or original and is just really fucking inane," then you'd have a point, because then that's in the realm of valid criticism. But stuff becomes personal when the hyperbole gets ridiculous. How'd you like someone to make a comment like that about you, that you're "farting" for a living?

yes, exactly.

Respectfully Yours,

dave marsh?
m. matos?
NO--Andrew 'Dice' Clay! Hey, Strongo, you a HOMO? Ayyyyyy

Illuminate Me, O Great One.

(2) Kathleen Wilson's tone of voice in this piece makes me distrust her. (This is the first thing I've read by her.)

(3) But nonetheless she raises what would be a legitimate question about Michaelangelo's behavior if - big IF - the email quotation does indeed represent how he informed Meltzer of the column kill (the question is raised not because Meltzer is an important rock critic but because he's a human being).

(4) Even though the way she asked the question (she assumes without thinking that Michaelangelo inserted the quotation into Bonazelli's piece, whereas it might have been Bonazelli's idea, or something the two of them discussed) would invite just the response she got from Michaelangelo, nonetheless it is legitimate to try and find out if an editor is inserting things into writers' pieces that the writers didn't themselves put there.

(5) I'm not impressed with arguments that go, "Doesn't she realize that readers aren't interested in this sort of thing?" Readers should be interested in editorial policy, given that the policy is usually intended to make papers appeal to those very readers and so may, in fact, be a mirror of the readers themselves. And I (naively?) believe that enough readers would be interested in this sort of thing - magazines criticizing other magazines, writers criticizing other writers - if only it were done better. (E.g., the NY Press would have deserved praise for running critiques of me if the critiques hadn't been so stupid.)

(6) I never saw Meltzer's weekly column; for all I know, killing it was the only choice (and again, we don't know that Michaelangelo simply killed it). But Meltzer's a genius, and another choice might have been to help Meltzer make the column better.

(7) If an editor told me to get rid of the personal anecdotes in my writing, I might walk too. (Depends on how much money I had in the bank.) Again, this doesn't make Michaelangelo wrong in this instance. But if it indicates a general policy, then it raises questions.

(8) The music editor often isn't the person who sets policy. The Meltzer decision might not have been his; nor the instruction about boyfriend anecdotes.

But perhaps she doesn't; you know, if that paper wants to appeal to childish 20-something urban hipster assholes who don't ever plan to grow up, carry on. I have a feeling that's more than half the battle at some of these alt-weeklies, namely, trying to do any kind of solid, serious journalism or criticism when a good chunk of your readership thinks anything that seems serious and professional is like, really uncool.

Jess, why you insist on being so relentlessly confrontational is beyond me.

And that's the only reason I ever checked in on "the Seattle Weekly". Because I wanted to read what Meltzer wrote. Because I'm a fan of good stylists and I love the way Meltzer's writing bounces off a page - even if he's disdaining some meaningless rock garbage.

I mean, let's be frank .. did the previous regime really give Melzter any actually good, relevant groups to comment on?

Not that I can recall. It was the "Trip Shakespeares" and the "Tripping Daisies" of the world, if I recall. The fucking wan horseshit that deserved to be heaped with ALL the disdain, and more, that a master stylist like Meltzer can deliver.

Yeah, as a fan of Strongo, I am bummed by his lame "kill the father" pose on this thread. It's just so banal.

Frank makes too much fucking sense.

Hopeless rhetorical question: why are human politics (is there any other kind?) so consistently ugly?

Anywhere else you can ostensibly talk about something (music! we love music!) and yet not even actually touch on it? Yeah, that might sound naive, but, you know... fuck, never mind.

I guess that makes me "nu-ILM".

I'm just pissed at myself that I felt like I couldn't express my own feelings on this issue. That I had to sheepishly follow Frank. I mean, I did make a flailing attempt upthread... I didn't follow up. I guess I was scared of big, bad Michael Daddino "going trife" on me .. haha NO, not really.

Um, I do really respect Matos and Strongo ... like, a lot .. both as people and in their music writing, which is superb, the best. But yeah, I'm sorry ... this Meltzer thing has really bummed me out..

I'm glad for this thread because it has introduced me to the work of Meltzer, who I'd never read before. (I know, I know, I'm a very bad student of rockcrit. I find the more of it I read, the worse my own writing becomes.) Anyway, the first piece I clicked on by RM had him in the first or second paragraph reaching up a British journo's skirt and finding a bloody tampon string in lieu of panties. (This in a piece ostensibly about the Fall. I take it Meltzer is not a formalist, first and foremost.) If that's Meltzer being Meltzer, good riddance.

so...anyone going to bumbershoot?

so it could be that it is intended to say that ilx and seattle weekly are the same. to an extent of course there is truth in this, in that matos is a contributor to both and that many people here know matos personally. which makes me think that, although i dont think this post was intended to attack matos (and even if it was), people here are too closely connected to matos to comment objectively (hence strongos confrontationalism on the thread)

as for the article itself, it betrays personal antipathy, and, as such, is a critique of itself.

i approve of matos (near) silence on this thread. there is no reason for him to become embroiled in a public slanging match, and i'm not entirely sure that he is required to justify his editorial policy in public (or even to correct any inaccuricies stated about him) even though i am sure most of us are quite curious now

I'm not quite arguing this, Frank, because I'm not treating Wilson's column as a disquisition on editorial policy. The two most potentially lethal charges Wilson makes about Matos' decisions -- writer dropped in an extremely ungracious manner; another writer told to stop being so fucking gay -- don't get anywhere near the same amount of consideration as how Mehr was canned and Matos brought in, or how the SW was muscling in on the coverage turf claimed by The Stranger. And the latter two don't "say" anywhere as much about SW or TS' readership as the first two do. So I regard Wilson's article as something a whole lot less, gossip about the personal oddnesses of people most of the readership probably don't know much about.

(An article sort of like this, say, which could've been written to critique James Rogers Inc. for its failure of nerve or Condé Nast for the hold it has on James Rogers Inc., but given the context, seems more like an excuse for the New York Post to publish a deeply unflattering photo of a major player in the NY publishing world. A crucial difference here, of course, is that Anna Wintour is something of a...um...star. I guess.)

As for K B Reighley's column, perhaps there's an interesting story there - is the new policy at the Weekly that writers should not be overly personal in their music writing? Was it clearly stated and evenly applied to all writers? If so, nobody is at fault; writer can't accept new policies, writer walks. Or perhaps it happened differently, and if K Wilson is so good at getting inside gossip, she should have gotten the real story. But implying Matos is not nice to a writer because the writer's gay.. wtf?

What am I, chopped liver?

I cannot stop laughing

Matos consistent
in praise of Xgau/Eddy,
no iconoclast

can't shed any tears
for poor departed Meltzer,
world keeps spinning round

and thanks for the info Nate, I figured that was probably the way it happened. Maybe it was just a case of a discussion not going well, you think? :)

as for the facts of the thread, my feelings are still as follows:

- kathleen wilson is a waste of skin who's lucked into a gossip column at a free weekly.

- her "issues with edtorial policy" at the weekly were a flimsy nail used to hang typically petty stranger slings and arrows at both matos and the weekly, without ever really going into detail about the charges leveled. (shocker of shockers.)

- daria g otm about the stranger's toys-r-us kid hipster audience who thinks criticism or journalism is like, really uncool. (sound of me pulling my hair out.)

- at best, meltzer's dismissal was rude, not unethical. i never felt like i had to press charges or seek disciplinary action when i've gotten fired in a similar manner before.

- we're looking at a piece of the puzzle when it comes to the email exchanges between meltzer and matos (i know this for a fact, but it should be obvious from the article.)

- nate otm about why reighley was canned. (at least from my perspective. and good.)

- i will take a music section that writes about deerhoof, beyonce, luther vandroos, and dj/rupture any day over one that writes about the gin blossoms and zwan and deifies meltzer for his cranky old sour puss routine. (many of you probably have no idea how many weekly articles ended with some snappy aside about "the sooner we insert {blank} into the pop charts instead of britney the better." a yi yi. {poor britney. always the whipping girl, even still!])

and yeah, anyone who thinks that the politics of an industry (especially when they start out nasty) are going to stay sunshine and lollipops is being naive. (this is why i will never be an editor or a staff writer...because part of me just stops caring after a while. i could, conflict of interest again, tell you that i wouldn't give two fucks period if i didn't think matos was a good guy and the "charges" were bullshit.)

Aw. (With you on the Gin Blossoms point, though, that was a revival that needs shitcanning.)

As an occasional writer for the Weekly now under Mr. Matos's care, he's been a PERFECT editor, one of the best I have ever worked with. He points out unclear language, asks for better, trusts you to step up to the plate and praises you when you come through. Sometimes the tone of his e-mails can be short but he's a busy guy. On that point alone, he rules and this whole debate is tempest-in-teapot grade.

1. Thank you, Frank Kogan, for seeing the point of this whole exercise.

2. As for the question, yes the phrasing was an acknowledgment that contributors to SW are frequent posters to ILM. But I WAS NOT looking to pick specific fights -- that was pure gamesmanship.

3. Jess, thanks at least for confirming the Meltzer bit was part of a larger back and forth. Even so, as someone else pointed out here, names like Meltzer's help build a rep and an audience -- rather than be a snob to the Meltzer column immediately, perhaps a probation period with prescriptions for change could have been in order.

4. OF COURSE Matos' section is better! I've never in this thread talked shit about the actual section, which is a vast improvement so far over the previous regime (Again: A Gin Blossoms piece collaborated on by three former staffers/contributions to the Phoenix New Times -- my paper -- in Seattle was a huge red flag).

5. Perhaps I'm interested in this more than some because I face the same pallette of decisions and relations as Matos does.

6. No one is questioning anyone's talent here. If anything, Matos and a few of his underlings are among the best under-30 critics in the U.S., a group I'm proud to belong to (the under-30, not necessarily the "best;" not my call, I humbly say).

7. As for any lack of dignity to the thread, if I contributed to that, then my bad -- but if someone's gonna start blasting me for raising a valid question, then I will bust that person's balls and try to undercut the vitriol.

8. The lizard is still the coolest post in this whole thing ...

Some oil-wrestling, perhaps?

Why can't Meltzer write for other secs of the paper - I'm sure he cld write SOMETHING terrific somewhere, for somebody.

You mean, The Stranger? Maybe they'll be nice enough to allow him some corner space in the "Man To Man" classifieds.

(btw you can still read it here: http://www.chicagoreader.com/covers/vinyl.html)

Scott: So I wonder if, ironically, uh -- you use the last chapter of the book as a bowing out of the whole thing. But now you might start getting a lot of offers from magazine editors to start writing about rock again.

Richard: I don't know about that. There are some pieces I would still write. For instance, I would like to do a piece about the music that was playing during each of my major relationships: the girlfriends and the music that accompanied our dance, going back to the Beatles. I could go for 50, 70 pages on that. But basically when I did that "Vinyl Reckoning" piece, that was my way of dealing with weeding down my record collection again. I mean, there are certain ways I can revisit the whole thing. But I don't think there's anything that's gonna make me pay attention to uh, what's the word, uh, the whole FOREground of what's going on today.

[Richard:] It's like, there are so many DEAD points in -- I mean, Christgau could -- anyone who's listened to it continuously could probably point out dead points since 1972 or something -- whatever. But really, the '50s were 1956 to 1958 -- that's not ten years. The '60s were '65 to '67, you know -- '64 to '67. And so, to me the '70s were a couple years of punk, and so I just think I have no idea what the '80s and '90s were. (laughs) But I just feel like it doesn't MATTER, really, if nothing happened, even if something DID happen. But even if nothing HAPPENED, there was enough otherwise. It doesn't have to be -- I think I say in the piece "Vinyl Reckoning" that there are days when it occurs to me that it doesn't matter anymore that there'd be new rock records than that there'd be new brands of meatless lasagna. I just -- I don't think it matters.

http://www.rockcritics.com/meltzer_interview4.html

why is this lame?

And I'm positive the music section is better now - hell dumping Fred Mills accomplishes that trick immediately. (Also note nobody here is lamenting his loss - the difference is that he's an imbecile and Meltzer is/was, yes, a genius.) I guess I just would have liked to see RM stay. Did anyone ever ask him to write about jazz? Do they have jazz in Seattle?! I guess I'm a lot like Andrew L. up there in that, for better or worse, yeah I am a "fan" of Meltzer. Actually, I'm just sort of a fan of rock writing in general. I have a treasured collection of early Crawdaddies - issues 8-21. It's impressive how good the writing is in there at times .. not just Meltzer but even folks like Allen Lanier wrote some great stuff! Yeah, I thought "Vinyl Reckoning" was great, too. The Chicago Reader deserves big props for publishing that thing as a cover story.

Frankly I find the idea of a Philip Sherburne sneering down his nose at Meltzer to be flat out laughable. Sherburne is a "journalist" - fair enough. Meltzer was a thinker. For better or worse, nobody who has posted to this thread has written anything that compares to Meltzer at his best, with the possible exception of Kogan. Aesthetics of Rock was a major achievement because it invented whole new paradigms for thinking about records. All of his tongue pressures and things like that, fun stuff which forces you to use your imagination a little. He collapses distinctions between high and low culture, he invents big-R Rock as descriptor and then scuppers the project a couple pages later. Anyway, it's that kind of scope and vision which is too rare a commodity. Kogan similarly creates a new lens through which to view music and the social relationships we forge around it and the discourses that it provokes, when he writes of the classroom/hallway divide. Sinker's noise piece. Inspired - and inspiring - stuff. Why aren't there more articles along those lines? Because it's hard to write with that kind of vision.

Anyhow, you should read Aesthetics of Rock, Philip Sherburne. You could possibly find it inspiring. True, it's more enjoyable - it really comes alive - if you have spent any kind of time with a whole bunch of really old musty records. True, it asks you to consider what it meant to sit in the upper deck at Shea Stadium unable to hear a goddamn note of the Beatles, or just how important Ray Charles was, or possible linkages between Ornette Coleman and Blue Cheer, or why and how "Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong" could have possibly ever meant anything to anyone and how it invokes linguistics and Tristan Tzara. It's a fun book if you know or care how creative Barry Melton could be. But then I've never accused today's music journalists of a driven, immanent curiousity about the music of the past.

as for the idea that Sherburne isn't a thinker (not your exact quote but certainly what you're inferring), go find just about anything he's written for Neumu.net, or the Wire piece where he coined the phrase "microhouse," and we'll find out who's laughable here.

Incidentally, the "going trife" comment of mine had nothing to do with you whatsoever -- it was more about how the whole subject was riling me. Perhaps that doesn't need to be pointed out, but...

I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. Many of the people on this thread are a) friends with Matos (and/or write for him now); b) not big fans of Meltzer (at least Meltzer NOW). This doesn't disqualify anything anyone said of course, but I do think there's been a bit of a natural tendency to jump to the defense of Matos--which is fine, and I'm honestly not questioning motives here, but no one has really made a good defense for an editor's curt dismissal of a writer (assuming this is what happened, and I know that maybe it isn't). (And I disagree wholeheartedly with Jess's la-di-da attitude about being fired from ANY job. It more than sucks to be one day told "you're outta here." Meltzer CRIED for chrissakes when he got the boot from college. No one's said anything about "pressing charges.") Editor-writer relationships are complicated, to say the least, and the historical precedent is that writers are generally treated badly. Meltzer--not just because he's a legend or a genius or a human being--but also because he's the writer of a popular (I assume) column--would have every right to feel insulted by this...if indeed it happened as it was reported. (And Matos had every right to not want the column...but this isn't about "rights.") Try turning this story around and changing the names: Matos becomes X person who no one here knows; Meltzer becomes Mark Sinker or Frank Kogan or Robert Christgau. I honestly think the tone of the discussion here would be a lot different.

Kinda funny how Sherburne wound up getting lumps in here. I mean, wtf? Where's that implicit in the thread? He ain't even one of the "you guys." And what crack and heroin combo prompted that insight? ;-)

And long live the lizard ... he ain't never shitcanned nobody ...

I mean, I love dance music! but I'd rather shoot myself in the head than be so completely immersed in that world. I honestly can't imagine reaching the station of a Sherburne without having an innate curiousity about (much less ever having read) one of the guys who sort of helped to invent popular music criticism. How does that happen? Is that a necessary correlative to being a dance guy? That rock stuff just seems colossally unimportant? Is PS proud of that ignorance? Because see the thing is, what Matos accuses me of (not knowing what the fuck I'm talking about) is exactly what PS did on this thread - with his gratuitous post that accomplished nothing other than publically logging his disdain for a well-known writer whom he finally bothered googling, read a random piece, and dismissed.

I heart writers who can take a panoptical view, who are comfortable commenting on a wide range of music, who can tease out the connections and disconnections across genre lines. That's what I like and respect about my favorite writers. That includes you Matos, you big lug (your Voice microhouse piece was outstanding; your humility is endearing but totally unnecessary). It's why my two favorite music books of the last decade were Toop's Ocean of Sound and John Corbett's Extended Play. I think because I take a fundamentally materialist view of the world, I can't fathom not approaching music that way ... *sigh* god I can not wait for Sinker to finish his book.

Oh heck, I don't know. I think I'm gonna go reread those "fanaticism vs. dilettantism" threads. I don't have anything better to do tonight.

Regarding the "tampon" story, I don't think Meltzer writes that kind of stuff to impress anyone. He knows how loutish it looks. He knows it's a depressing, lonely way to move through the world, but he seemingly can't stop himself. That's always been the sad undercurrent anytime he's written about the various sordid situations he gets involved in. He's most assuredly unlike Tosches in that respect, in that the latter never allows that he's aware his behavior is in any way objectionable. I've never gotten the sense that Meltzer's particularly "proud" of his behavior. But he does write about it, and if you find it banal and uninteresting .. fair enough! I'm certainly not going to argue in favor of it, but it is just one part of the man.

I mean, we (most of the folks who post to ILM) love music, and we love writing about music (either we do it ourselves, or we read others doing it, or both), and we want others to appreciate the music we love (the community aspect), so why the fuck are people in that situation so mean to each other? Is it competition? I mean just competition?

Okay, "dignity", I'm a hypocrite -- being as capable of petty meanness as the next person, but I don't think I could ever stretch out vendettas and grudges like this and personalize it so much (not just on this thread, but that whole Pitchfork versus Village Voice thing that's gone on here lately).

As a non-regular, non-core-group ILMer, this opinion is probably not particularly welcomed, but I like the idea of this place, and it's helped bring into focus for me some key thoughts about music. I'd hate to see it shredded by cliquiness or elitism or by the demonization of the "other".

I ramble. I'm hopelessly earnest. Trapped by my own nature. Ha.

How does it happen that I've "reached the station of a Sherburne" (great phrase... I'm not sure whether that refers to my alcoholic brother, my deaf, retired father, or a train depot in Sherburne Plains, Alberta) without having ever read Meltzer? It happens! I went to Vassar, for what it's worth, and we didn't have core curricula.

For the record, I'm not a dance fanaticist, nor a staunch presentist, nor a critical know-nothing. And what bugged me the most in Meltzer's few Weekly columns that I hastily read is that they seemed to be all about Meltzer and his diminished place in a diminished world. When he says (in the bit Jess quotes above), "I don't think there's anything that's gonna make me pay attention to uh, what's the word, uh, the whole FOREground of what's going on today," that sounds -- given the skimpy context, anyway -- like a pretty advanced case of gleeful know-nothingness.

But I'll eagerly check out more of his work, and I'm sure I'll learn from it. S Woods, I had no idea he'd written on classical music, so I'm eager to see that. But in any case, none of this has anything to do with what I write about or how good it is (or isn't).

Then again, I didn't read all of Meltzer's most recent stuff, so maybe it does get depressing when taken as a whole.

:( When I read this I thought 'WHAT?!' then realised I don't look hard enough. I only wish I could afford to find lots of music to write about. I've not written in a whole month and it's not because I don't want to or am unable to (ho ho take yr potshots elsewhere) but because I haven't any new music (ie I don't know of any) to write about. I sometimes wish I was Chuck Eddy's mailbox.

Hey! ;-) But I tease.

But Stence, when Meltzer says in the interview quoted above that even if something *did* happen in the '80's or '90's, it wouldn't matter, because "there was enough otherwise" and the idea "that there'd be new rock records" excites him as much as the idea "that there'd be new brands of meatless lasagna"...well, that's something quite beyond skepticism. When you've wiped the battlefield clean, war ends; when you completely discount the possibility of excitement, criticism becomes impossible. (OK, terrible metaphor, I know.)

Also, I think I'd be the first to admit that my own curmudgeonly tendencies color a lot of this bias, too.

I'm definitely more likely to read a Meltzer review (unless it's one of those Dada bullshits) than a CMJ review because cynicism leads to better jokes. But a CMJ review never makes me assume talent is being wasted, becuz there's no implication of talent in the first place.