Wednesday, September 06, 2006
I got my freelance career started after writing about my Spencer Tunick experience, and discovering that getting paid to see my words in print was a lot better than the occassional piece in the New York Bar Journal. I went to the editor of Spree and asked if I could write more for the magazine, and she generously told me that I could-- as long as I wasn't interested in writing about food or music. Apparently there is no shortage of people interested in being paid to write about those topics, which I suppose accounts, in part, for the Village Voice deciding to cut Robert Christgau loose. His firing had been in the wind for some time, but I'm still disappointed: "Consumer Guide" has been the best reason to read the Voice for years, and there isn't a better, funnier rock critic out there. Maybe you want to be Lester Bangs-- I'm with Jody Rosen: if you write about rock, we are all Christigauians. "With Pauline Kael, Christgau is arguably one of the two most important American mass-culture critics of the second half of the 20th century—yet he's devoted the majority of his working life to fashioning 100-word blurbs with letter grades. He's a public intellectual who unwittingly invented the reviews section of Entertainment Weekly."
// posted by Bill @ 1:00 PM 
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