Martin, short: We Read Martin Cizmar So You Don't Have To
From PHXated correspondent Tucson Toby, one of Young Martin Cizmar™’s biggest fans:
Green Day at Cricket Wireless Pavillion Last Night
I saw Green Day last night. I saw them first when I was very young and liked them a lot. I still like them though they have changed. (Inappropriate literary reference). They played this song and this song and this song. This song is from this album. I would have liked it if they played this song and this song.
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9:19 AM
The NYT on New Times
David Carr, the New York Times' media columnist, takes a look at the debilitating war in San Francisco, between New Times' SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian, pegged mostly to a visit in SF with the latter’s founder, Bruce Brugmann:
Once New Times arrived, a ferocious newspaper war ensued, with charges and countercharges. SF Weekly produced deeply reported articles with no particular political point of view, while The Bay Guardian stuck to its progressive knitting, hacking at the power companies and the daily newspapers.
“They came riding into town out of Tombstone,” Mr. Brugmann said, alluding to the fact that the chain is headquartered in Arizona, “and they started shooting up the place, and now they are going to have to pay the consequences.”
The column offers nothing new on the long legal battle that ensued, but it links to a well-reported take on the fight, from the Seattle Stranger.
New Times, now thirteen papers strong, stretching across the country, and renamed as Village Voice Media, wound up with a $15 million judgment grown to $22 million as appeals go on. (New Times has been losing them consistently.)
6:54 AM
Joe Watson, New Times writer cum "Salon Bandit," get twelve years
It’s a sad story—a by-all-accounts good and agressive writer brought down by a gambling addiction that turned him into a guy who cornered solitary women in stores and robbed them.
Watson, who was a New Times staff writer, was given twelve years for nine armed robberies and one attempted armed robbery.
[Watson] was arrested at the gaming tables after his fiancee recognized him in surveillance video played on television news and called police.
On Friday, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge sentenced Watson to 12 years in prison. He had already pleaded guilty to nine armed robberies and one attempted armed robbery.
“I know what I did was stupid and selfish and just so I could go back to the casino,” he told Judge John Hannah. Though his fiancee left him, Watson thanked her for saving his life by turning him in.
The story doesn’t mention the other odd media angle: The fiancee was Phoenix magazine editor Ashlea Deahl.
A New Times story with a lot of background on Watson is here.
The extensive comments, particularly, provide a comprehensive, if fractured, portrait of Watson.
12:43 PM
Young Martin Cizmar™, Intrepid Journalist, stands by his story!
Young Martin’s post on the New Times blog about how Body Count’s song “Cop Killer” has never been available is engendering a lot of comment.
PHXated discussed the many ways Young Martin was wrong here.
We understand Martin’s too busy to read all the stuff we write about him, so we were happy to see a commenter, doing business under the name “anonymous,” bring up some of the same issues:
nice research martin.
according to wikipedia, it was on the original release of the body count album, then Ice T himself decided to recall it and release the album without the song because the controversy eclipsed the musical merit of the album.
i’m no journalist, but even i can use wikipedia. first, you’re wrong in saying the song was never available, it was. next you say it was censored, which implies someone in power wouldn’t let iced tea release the song, which is not the case at all.
Martin responded with Cizmarian asperity:
Martin Cizmar says:
I never said what you’re claiming I said.
This is way too complex for you, but I’ll break it down:
/1. The list is about things that have never happened during the lifetime of the college class of 2014.
/2. During the 18 years those kids have been alive the recording has never been available in any format whatsoever.
/3. Obviously it was originally released or there would never have been a stink to begin with — this was pre-leak, pre-internet — in order for a song to become an issue it had to actually be pressed and sold. It was. Duh.
/4. Pressure was put on Ice-T and his record label to remove the track. Do you or I know what happened exactly? No. But the fact that Ice-T released it, and people started threatening the people who run his record label with boycotts, and they control his paychecks, creates the censorship. It’s more what’s known as a “chilling effect” from non-government actors than state-sponsored “you can’t say this” type censorship.
So, yes, I was exactly right in that I said it has never been sold during the lifetime of these kids (which is EXACTLY WHAT I SAID, READ THE POST) and that the song has been successfully censored since.
After all, how would that argument about the album and the musical merit, etc. apply to a 99-cent iTunes download?
Martin’s response is a keeper for Cizmarologists.
The insult to someone who had taken the time to write in and correct him.
The doubling down on stupid.
The numerous inaccuracies.
As PHXated noted, Martin’s main crime was not to have explained the Mindlist Mindset List zen correctly. He does in his response. He didn’t in the orignal post.
Yet Martin says he’d been “exactly” right.
When Martin uses the word “exactly,” it reminds me of that line from The Princess Bride:
“I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
For example:
So, yes, I was exactly right in that I said it has never been sold during the lifetime of these kids (which is EXACTLY WHAT I SAID, READ THE POST) and that the song has been successfully censored since.
There are many wrong statements there. He never said it had never been sold during the lifetime of those kids. The word lifetime doesn’t appear in the post, and neither does any similar construction.
It is, in fact, what he didn’t say.
His repeating the assertion, even in capital letters, doesn’t make it any truer.
Neither does the word “Duh.”
Also, as PHXated explained, the song wasn’t “censored.” It was released! That’s the other reason I don’t think Marty knew that the song actually had been available.
How could anyone (Warner Brothers, I guess) censor something when… they had released it?
And even if they did it hadn’t been successfully censored because … as PHXated noted, it’s widely available on mp3 blogs, and even on iTunes in a live version.
Also, the record had been out a long time. it’s not like there were only 10,000 copies sold or anything. You could get it in a used record store. Or steal your older brother’s copy.
Martin’s account of his use of the word “censorship” is interesting. What he calls “chilling effect” I call free speech.
Ice-T, who is a bonehead, is allowed to record a song called “Cop Killer.” Folks who don’t like it are allowed to protest it.
Warners, in turn, is allowed to stop selling the song if it wants. It’s a free country!
May we say, in conclusion, that Our Marty could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d just said:
“Oh, of course. I should have made that clearer in the original post. Will fix.”
p.s.: The Beloit College thingee is called the Mindset List. I called it the Mindlist originally. Will fix!
9:24 AM
Confidential to Young Martin Cizmar™: Don't believe everything you read on the internets!
Young Martin Cizmar, Award Winning Journalist™, was stunned to learn about a searing instance of censorship yesterday.
He immediately took to his digital press in the sky to protest.
Young Martin is a watchdog, of sorts, on this issue.
We blush to remember that even PHXated has come under a discomfiting Cizmarian gaze for similar crimes.
Martin was misinformed, of course, but still.
In his latest case, Our Martin had just been informed that an old song called “Cop Killer,” done by Ice-T’s then metal band, Body Count, waaay back in the early 1990s, had never been available on a recording.
“Wait, You Still Can’t Buy a Copy of "Cop Killer” By Ice-T and Body Count on ANY Format?
Young Martin was stunned:
That’s right, Ice T’s controversial song, recorded with his LA Metal band Body Count, has been successfully censored for 18 years.
That’s despicable.
Martin learned this from a silly little report called “The Mindlist,” done by some folks at Beloit College.
The Mindlist marvels that time has passed and things change.
The setup is that incoming students, being only eighteen or so, aren’t familiar with things that happened more than, uh, eighteen years ago.
To enjoy the list, you have to pretend that incoming college students have no sense of curiosity and don’t avail themselves of the myriad information services at their disposal to learn about the past, but whatever.
Its examples range from the thuddingly obvious:
Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
… to the thuddingly labored:
“Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.”
Young Martin jumped on this entry:
‘Cop Killer’ by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording.
He seemed not to apprehend—and in any case didn’t vouchsafe to readers—what PHXated just explained, that the list-makers were looking at that narrow eighteen-year period.
He didn’t seem to appreciate that “Cop Killer' had of course been released.
It was on the Body Count record, which came out, uh, nineteen years ago.
Ice-T was trying to be controversial and push the envelope in the naughty rap realm of the time.
He succeeded, and got his little nosed burned in the understandable furor that erupted. He said then, and says now, that it was his decision to pull the song off the album, not that of his label, which was Warner Brothers.
Also, even if Warners had made him pull the song, it’s not “censorship.” It’s their label, and they can release or not release what they want.
And they put it out in the first place!
After all the work Beloit and Young Martin put into this non-issue, it feels a bit churlish to point out …
… the song is available all sorts of places. You can get a live version of it on the iTunes Store, for example.
Or download it from one of more than a dozen mp3 blogs listed just here, on Elbo.ws.
And finally, let’s remember that some of these tough-talking anti-police rap guys, Ice-T prominent among them, were chuckleheads.
The complete PHXated Young Martin Cizmar™ archive is here.
7:44 AM
Memories of the Sombrero Playhouse: The Complete Saga
Here’s PHXated’s chat with Gary Gohring, the manager of Phoenix’s ‘70s-era art-movie mecca, the Sombrero Playhouse, in its complete form.
I’m fascinated by the work that’s been done to chronicle the work on the Vanishing Phoenix front; you can read Yuri’s thoughts on it here and here.
Today I’m beginning a four-part interview with Gary Gohring, who longtime Phoenicians will remember was an early film critic of New Times, waaay back in the 1970s.
Gohring was also the manager of the Sombrero Playhouse, a former live theater that became, in the late 1970s, the city’s most vibrant movie theater.
There’s not much about the Sombrero in the archives of the local papers, thought I did find this bit of comments on it on a site called Cinema Treasures.
I recently contacted Gohring, who now lives in San Diego; he was kind enough to agree to the following interview, which I’ll post in chunks over the next few days.
As I note in the chat below, the Sombrero was a key part of the Valley’s cultural life in the barren 1970s, and deserves a more prominent place in our cultural memory.
-- Bill Wyman
PHXated: Gary, thanks much for answering a few questions about the Sombrero Playhouse.
Gary Gohring: You’re welcome.
PHXated: Can you tell me something about the Sombrero during your time there? When did it turn into a movie theater? What was the sort of mission statement? Am I right in remembering it was really the only place to see art films like that in Phoenix proper? (Leaving aside the Valley Art and occasional movies at the museums.)
G.G.: I think the Sombrero Playhouse became a movie theater sometime in 1977. I am not really sure about the exact date as I became involved after it was already established. Morey Levine was the owner of the theater, and he could probably provide the exact date. (I do not know how to get in touch with him.) I don’t recall a particular mission statement, but he may be able to provide that as well. We were the only repertory movie theater in the Phoenix area (outside of the Valley Art) from when it opened to when we finally shut down in 1981.
PHXated: The owner was Richard Charelton, right? Didn’t he have something to do with the Woolworth family? Do you know where he is now?
G.G.: Richard Charelton owned the property on which the theater was located. I have no knowledge of either his connection to the Woolworth family or where he is now.
PHXated: What were the logistics of the place? What did it cost to rent a Fellini movie for a couple of showings? How did you get the films… were they flown in or mailed in? Any showings that were notable or that you were particularly proud of? Did you ever book films no one was interested in? Besides Rocky Horror, what were the most popular things you showed?
G.G.: I cannot recall the exact logistics of the place. I want to say we could seat 350 or so maximum for a showing, but that is just a poor remembrance. We used a booker out of Los Angeles to get our films, but I did most of the programming through him when I started working at the theater, first as assistant manager, then as manager, in 1977-78. (Morey and our booker deserve all the credit, though, for bringing in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was already playing before I started.) We received the majority of our films just as other theaters did; they were flown in (often the night before). Occasionally, a non-major distributor like New Yorker Films would mail a 16mm title to us. Costs varied, depending on the popularity or availability of the film itself.
We tried to bring a diverse lineup of movies to the Phoenix area, most notably those American, cult, and foreign films that had been popular or overlooked in previous limited runs n the Valley. We also occasionally brought in a few premieres, and we would have festivals around a particular actor, director, or theme. In fact, I basically became the programmer because I suggested they do a Woody Allen film festival, which proved a big success for the theater. My own particular tastes ran (and still run) towards the more obscure, out of the mainstream foreign films, and (not too surprisingly) these generally proved to be the movies not too many people were interested in. Off the top of my hear, our biggest successes, outside of the Friday and Saturday midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show, were the double-bills of King of Hearts/Harold and Maude and Emmanuelle 2: Joys of A Woman/Story of O.
PHXated: It was a long time ago, but I have a sense that a certain amount of care was taken with presentation and projection at the Sombrero—-particularly in contrast to that of other theaters in town. Is that a fair impression? Did you have decent equipment? What kind of projectors were they?
G.G.: The theater had a great, dedicated staff, and it was blessed with about four projectionists during my tenure there who did wonders with the prints we received, many of which were in pretty bad shape. We had standard 35mm projectors for the day.
PHXated: Going through some old boxes a while back, I found a frequent film-goer card from the Sombrero, with dates marked by hand—something like “5/14 …. 5/17 … 5/18 … 5/23.” That shows you how often we went! To me, the theater was a major cultural institution in town at the time, and I have memories of seeing so many classic, foreign, cult and (not least) rock movies there. Is this an overinflated impression of its role in the valley’s cultural life at the time?
G.G.: The discount card you referenced was indeed marked by hand. Ten admissions for $20, I believe it was. (The discount card I now get has 5 admissions for $40.) As I mentioned, we did attempt to bring a diverse collection of films to the Phoenix market, trying to accommodate a wide variety of tastes. In many cases, we were successful, and in some cases, we were not. I know for sure we did not appease the customer who kept requesting more Oliver Reed films. "He made other films besides Women in Love, Tommy, and The Devils,“ one of the person’s notes lifted from the suggestion box stated. As for leaving a cultural legacy, I think that other than being known as the place where The Rocky Horror Picture Show first played and as the movie theater that had no parking, we probably did not leave much of a cultural legacy. At least not the cultural legacy I would have liked. However, it is good to hear that there are those like yourself who not only remember but do so with fondness.
PHXated: Specifically, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a big deal for my high-school friends; in such a culturally conservative and homogeneous city, as a bunch of misfits in a high school drama club, I felt it was a place where we could meet similar quote-unquote creative kids our age. What was your impression of RHPS at the time? Was it fun or a nightmare to oversee?
Gary Gohring: I am not really the person to ask about The Rocky Horror Picture Show as I was neither a fan of it or all the attendant fan involvement with it, but I certainly recognize that for many, many people in their teens and 20s in the mid-to late ‘70s it was the cult film and an important social bonding experience.
Additionally, its financial success helped the Sombrero prosper and ultimately stay in business as long as it did. It certainly allowed me to indulge my aforementioned tastes and book films such as [Bresson’s] Diary of a Country Priest and [Ozu’s] Tokyo Story, which hardly drew the same crowd, enthusiasm, or grosses.
The assistant managers usually ran the theater on Friday and Saturday evenings; I only worked those RHPS showings they missed. The theater was a nightmare to clean up on the mornings after, and we lost more than one cleaning crew in large part because of it.
PHXated: I remember the Valley Art, of course—particularly the afternoon showing of The Graduate where they accidentally showed an X-rated preview of Screw on Screen before it. (Sheer chaos resulted.) As I drive around town, I also think of the (literally) underground screens at Los Altos mall, the big Bethany theater, the Kachina in Scottsdale, the Cine Capri …
I’m not nostalgic that much about it (there are so many more movies available these days through so many sources), but there was something larger than life about seeing Star Wars, or Alien, at the Cine Capri, or Annie Hall at the Bethany. Any theaters you remember fondly from the time?
G.G.: What I remember most about moviegoing in Phoenix during the ‘70s was not so much the theaters themselves but the evolution of the moviegoing experience itself, disintegrating from the big movie houses such as Cine Capri, the Kachina, etc. into the multiplexes. And in some cases, this was done extremely poorly, with a single cinema being butchered into an awkward five or six screen theater. Mann’s Christown, I am looking at you.
The ‘70s also became the decade that ushered in the financial mega-blockbusters, where success has become measured more in terms of stratospheric box-office receipts on the opening weekend rather than solid financial gain and/or quality.
I enjoyed (still do) going to foreign movies and off-beat films, so I generally most liked going to NEEB Hall at ASU, the Valley Art, and Dan Harkins' Camelview Cinemas, and as I lived in Tempe at the time, I did not mind driving to the other side of town to the Bethany Cinemas to see the likes of [Peckinpah’s] Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia or to the UA 6 Cinemas to see [Monte Hellman’s] The Cockfighter in their exclusive Valley runs.
PHXated: How did you come to work for New Times? What did you do after that? What do you do now?
Gary Gohring: I sent three sample movie reviews to the New Times in the Fall of 1973 in the hope of writing movie reviews for them. The editors at the time were kind enough to ignore their mediocrity and asked me to write a small column listing all the films currently in town.
Being an ASU undergraduate at the time, I jumped at the chance to earn a whopping $15 a column. I eventually ended up writing movie reviews for the New Times on a sporadic basis from 1973 through early 1977, and then on a regular basis from April 1978 to April 1982. I really appreciate the opportunity Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey gave me when they took back control of the paper in 1978.
I tried to write reviews that would get readers to look at a movie and its creators in a new and original way. For me, the best movie reviewers do this. Unfortunately, most readers of movie reviews (sadly, an ever shrinking number) and advertisers want reviews that reflect their taste and universal opinion. I was not successful in accomplishing what I wanted, and I never did fit the other model.
I was fortunate, though, during my tenure there to work with a great staff and some terrific writers, most notably Bart Bull, Bob Boze Bell, Sandy Lovejoy, and Dewey Webb.
I have quietly faded into oblivion since then, having moved from Phoenix in 1992. However, I still go to movies and enjoy viewing and discussing them as much as ever.
PHXated: I moved away in the late ‘70s, came back soon after to visit and … the Sombrero was just gone, with nothing there but a vacant lot. What lead to its closing?
G.G. Disagreements between Richard Charleton, the property owner, and Morey Levine, our owner, most notably concerning our showing of soft-core fare such as Emmanuelle 2, came to a peak in the summer of 1978. The most immediate result was that we lost our parking and had to lease a not-too-convenient lot nearby.
These conflicts, inconveniences, and subsequent costs to deal with them escalated, driving away patrons and affecting both programming and the bottom line.
Then we lost our exclusivity to show The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Also, there were only so many times we could show King of Hearts. The theater closed in early 1981.
Even had we not encountered the problems we did, we would probably have been buried by the coming video revolution. I believe the property was subsequently sold, but to whom I do not remember. I know the building was subsequently torn down, but I do not recall when or by whom.
PHXated: Gary, thanks again for responding!
G.G.: Hope this incomplete recollection helps in some way.
4:18 PM
Memories of the Sombrero Playhouse, Part 4: The Final Chapter!
PHXated has been speaking with Gary Gohring, who in the late 1970s, managed the Sombrero Playhouse, at the time the only place in Phoenix and one of the few places in the entire Valley one could see art-house movie fare.
In the final segment, Gohring talks about his career at New Times, where he was film critic, and the end of the Sombrero.
Part one is here.
Part two is here.
Part three is here.
PHXated would love to hear your memories of movie-going in Phoenix at the time, or see any old Sombrero schedules you have!
PHXated: How did you come to work for New Times? What did you do after that? What do you do now?
Gary Gohring: I sent three sample movie reviews to the New Times in the Fall of 1973 in the hope of writing movie reviews for them. The editors at the time were kind enough to ignore their mediocrity and asked me to write a small column listing all the films currently in town.
Being an ASU undergraduate at the time, I jumped at the chance to earn a whopping $15 a column. I eventually ended up writing movie reviews for the New Times on a sporadic basis from 1973 through early 1977, and then on a regular basis from April 1978 to April 1982. I really appreciate the opportunity Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey gave me when they took back control of the paper in 1978.
I tried to write reviews that would get readers to look at a movie and its creators in a new and original way. For me, the best movie reviewers do this. Unfortunately, most readers of movie reviews (sadly, an ever shrinking number) and advertisers want reviews that reflect their taste and universal opinion. I was not successful in accomplishing what I wanted, and I never did fit the other model.
I was fortunate, though, during my tenure there to work with a great staff and some terrific writers, most notably Bart Bull, Bob Boze Bell, Sandy Lovejoy, and Dewey Webb.
I have quietly faded into oblivion since then, having moved from Phoenix in 1992. However, I still go to movies and enjoy viewing and discussing them as much as ever.
PHXated: I moved away in the late ‘70s, came back soon after to visit and … the Sombrero was just gone, with nothing there but a vacant lot. What lead to its closing?
G.G. Disagreements between Richard Charleton, the property owner, and Morey Levine, our owner, most notably concerning our showing of soft-core fare such as Emmanuelle 2, came to a peak in the summer of 1978. The most immediate result was that we lost our parking and had to lease a not-too-convenient lot nearby.
These conflicts, inconveniences, and subsequent costs to deal with them escalated, driving away patrons and affecting both programming and the bottom line.
Then we lost our exclusivity to show The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Also, there were only so many times we could show King of Hearts. The theater closed in early 1981.
Even had we not encountered the problems we did, we would probably have been buried by the coming video revolution. I believe the property was subsequently sold, but to whom I do not remember. I know the building was subsequently torn down, but I do not recall when or by whom.
PHXated: Gary, thanks again for responding!
G.G.: Hope this incomplete recollection helps in some way.
9:31 AM
Sarah Fenske leaving New Times
At the end of Fenske’s typically unputdownable last column for the paper*, she tells readers she’s leaving town.
Her next gig will be as managing editor of the Riverfront Times, the New Times paper in St. Louis**.
Her envoi:
SO LONG, FAREWELL
In case you haven’t heard, I’m leaving Arizona to work as the managing editor at New Times' sister paper in St. Louis, the Riverfront Times. And it’s fitting, I suppose, that my final column in Phoenix is about the Housing Authority of Maricopa County.
To me, this story exemplifies everything I hate about Phoenix — as well as everything I’ve grown to love. I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the country where con men prosper so quickly, where rules are broken so casually, where the rule of law is something that’s enforced only on the poor and the alien.
In almost any other big city, a guy like Doug Lingner would still be setting tile, not given the keys to a major nonprofit organization. In other places, people would be up in arms demanding Joe Arpaio’s resignation. (Say what you will about immigration, but this clown has squandered $45 million in lawyer fees and insurance payments! $45 million!) In other states, too, a guy facing a credible threat of disbarment — ahem, Andrew Thomas! — would not be considered a viable candidate for state attorney general.
Let’s face it: Shysters thrive here. Too many people are transplants who don’t care. Too many people hew too closely to ideology and have no interest in getting at the truth.
And yet, I’ve met more brave people in this state than anywhere else I’ve lived. It’s been easy to be a reporter here. For every con man, there’s someone willing to turn him in. For every Doug Lingner, there’s a Janet Belfield.
I may not miss the dry white heat of Phoenix summers. But I will miss having this weekly soapbox. And I’ll miss the brave people of Arizona, too.
* It’s about how the woman in the Maricopa County Housing Authority who has been fired after helping bring down former director Doug Lingner, who was driven out of the agency after numerous investigations and press exposes. Fenske:
Belfield, a longtime agency employee, is the one who blew the whistle on Lingner. And last week, she was fired by the housing authority. No severance. No chance to resign.
There’s not a doubt in my mind that her treatment is directly related to her attempts to expose Lingner.
** The New Times parent company is technically called Village Voice Media. It’s run out of Phoenix and Phoenix New Times remains its flagship.
7:01 AM
For Young Martin Cizmar™ fans only!
The good news is that Young Martin Cizmar, Award-Winning Journalist, writes a big New Times story today, all by himself.
The bad news is that it’s about a Twitter war between himself and, I’m not making this up, Frankie Muniz’s girlfriend, a publicist whose only client is Frankie Muniz.
(If you don’t know who Frankie Muniz is the article is mighty fine reading indeed!)
4:34 PM
Young Martin Cizmar™—Author!?!
From Grub Street, NY mag’s food blog, emphasis added:
The requisites of hipsterdom are ever-changing (you can’t like things once they’ve gone mainstream), but the demographic’s one constant is and always will be a whip-thin physique — the better to rock a look of apathetic disdain while zipping around on your fixed-gear. So those whose super-skinny jeans encase seriously uncool love
handles will give thanks that writer Martin Cizmar has sold Chubster, which Publishers Marketplace describes as an “appropriately snarky weight-loss and lifestyle guide for hipsters looking to shed pounds and stay cool,” to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Expect the core program to center around a regimen of street-cart tacos, Old Granddad, and cigarettes. [Publishers Marketplace (subscription required)]
PHXated does not portend to comment on physical attributes; but it is fair in this context to mention that sources close to Young Martin say that he has, through no little internal fortitude and strength of character, lost some hundred pounds recently and is eminently qualified to write such a tome, at least personal-experience-wise.
PHXated must say as well that, at our summit last week at the New Times party, Cizmar looked pretty good—much slimmer than Mouth by Southwest’s shot of Martin, above.
4:36 PM
Dark deeds at PHXated! Young Martin Cizmar™ alleges nefarious comment censoring!
Young Martin Cizmar, Award Winning Journalist™, has posted a classically Cizmarianistic comment on PHXated, in response to my recent post about his fascinating essay on the Beach Boys.
I want to repost it here so it gets the attention it deserves, in all its one-paragraph glory.
I will have more to say about it later, but for the nonce I want to address just Young Martin’s charge in his first few indignant sentences to the effect that your host is not publishing all of the site’s comments.
There are exactly two legitimate comments in the site’s queue that have not been posted.
Both, I must confess, are about Young Martin.
But since they take as their chief point of departure the subject of Young Martin’s Penis™ or Young Martin’s sucking someone else’s penis, respectively, I didn’t think they were appropriate to post.
I wanted to encourage a more elevated tone in PHXated’s comments fora.
I would also note that in the past when Young Martin has commented, PHXated has bent over backward to give them their own post. The first time, in fact, this reposting was accompanied by this:
“The note below was originally placed here as a comment, but it deserves a higher profile. I had my say; It’s only fair that Cizmar have the last word.”
Hardly the actions of a dastardly comment-denier!
Anyway, Young Martin’s latest missive follows.
His Beach Boy’s essay is here.
PHXated’s comment on that essay is here.
PHXated’s complete commentary of the life and work of Martin Cizmar is here.
First, Bill, I’m going to echo comments I’ve heard privately from others and vow that if you don’t remove the vetting process for your comments I’m done leaving them here. I’ve heard allegations of you not posting certain things which, in addition to being intellectually dishonest, is ridiculous. I’m sure the 12 readers you get a day won’t mind looking at a few spam comments from time to time if that means we can freely discuss your work without threat of a heavy-handed moderator. Second, perhaps not surprisingly, your basic point about homerism is undone by your misunderstanding of the word. Not being very familiar with sports jargon, and apparently not being resourceful enough to put it in proper context with the use of the interwebs, you write that" “‘Homerism,’ as I understand the term, is derived from the more common word ‘homer,’ a slang term for someone who would give brownie points to something for being local.” The problem? Like most things you write about, you’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle. A “Homer” is not someone who gives “brownie points.” That would probably be called a “Fanboy,” depending on the context. From Urban Dictionary: “Someone who shows blind loyalty to a team or organization, typically ignoring any shortcomings or faults they have.” The whole point of calling someone a “homer,” you can hopefully now understand, is that you’re alleging they’re unaware of their subconscious but obvious preference. They’re blindly loyal. In the reverse of that, “reverse-homerism,” I called it, someone shows blind preference to the more exotic offering. So, working with that definition (we’ll call it “The Accurate Definition”) you can see that your whole argument falls apart. The non-coincidence I’m talking about is not a “dark international deed,” nor could anyone who knows what the word Homer mean think that. It’s about the fact that most American critics tend to laud British artists a little more than their own, and vice-versa. It’s a weird phenomenon, but hopefully one you’re familiar with. I’m hesitant to make any bigger points about this to you given your inability to understand the basics. So, yeah, you seem to be asserting that I’m some sort of tin foil hat idiot who is assigning dark motives to Rolling Stone editors when, in reality, the problem is that YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT ANY SLANG TERM COINED AFTER 1993 MEANS! Paired with your desire to criticize people for using words that are too old (my use — in a COMMENT, mind you — of the obsolete but more charming definition of “portend”) it makes you completely insufferable. Actually, looking at it this way, you’ve probably libeled me, at least according to the definition your little troll friend Tyler uses. Then again, neither of you have ever made much of a point to learn what words mean before acting nutty about them. Like the time you failed to understand how I meant straw man as “an opponent set up so as to be easily refuted or defeated.” Ugh. Like I said, insufferable. Honestly, Bill, when you do stuff like this is makes me question how you could ever make a living off the written word. It’s not that you’re an idiot, Bill, it’s just that you don’t read enough. At least not enough stuff outside the narrow world of your obsessions. So, yeah, I’m sorry for using syntax you’re only kinda-sorta familiar with in my work, as it tends to offer you irresistible opportunities to look like a jackass.
10:21 AM
Young Martin Cizmar™, the Beach Boys, and "reverse homerism"
Dear Martin:
In your much-anticipated inquiry into Beach Boys Party!, there was a part I got hung up on.
It’s the emphasized phrase below.
Pet Sounds […] has been called the best rock record ever made by most of the top British music mags — NME, The Times and Mojo among them. America’s top source for all things ‘60s, Rolling Stone, in a perhaps non-coincidental case of reverse homerism, put it at number two, behind Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Let’s try to parse it out!
“Homerism,” as I understand the term, is derived from the more common word “homer,” a slang term for someone who would give brownie points to something for being local.
In this case, I think you are referring to the U.K. vs. the U.S.
If the editors of Rolling Stone were being “homerist,” they would vote for Pet Sounds over Sgt. Pepper. In this case, they didn’t, so they weren’t being “homerist”; they were being, in Cizmarianistic terms, “reverse homerist.”
By the same token, one might call you a “reverse prose stylist.”
However, this was not merely generic “reverse homerism'; it was a "perhaps non-coincidental” incidence of it.
Again, let’s take a step back. First, “coincidental.” Coincidental with what?
This is a truly cosmic question, second only to whether The Times is a “British music mag.”
I believe you are referring to the U.K. papers' having similarly reverse homeristically lauded the American Pet Sounds over the indisputably British Sgt. Pepper; in this context, Rolling Stone is unquestionably (and amusingly) coincidentally (and parallelledly) being precisely as reversely homeristic.
Yet you do not take this at face value. You delve deeper.
Could the Rolling Stone plaudits of Sgt. Pepper over Pet Sounds “perhaps” be “non-coincidental”?
I believe you are raising the question of its being … deliberate. Intentional. Planned, even.
Aha! I can hear the editors of Rolling Stone thinking. Those British papers wanna play coy, hmm? If they put Beach Boys number one, why, we’re gonna put the Beatles number one!
Young Martin’s point is finally plain.
Dark international deeds were afoot in the Rolling Stone offices, and Brian Wilson may have been cheated out of a transatlantic sweep had not this “non-coincidental reverse homerism” stolen away his rightful place at number one.
Perhaps, anyway.
Previously in PHXated!:
April 22: Confidential to Young Martin Cizmar™
April 15: Cizmar-apalooza!
April 14: Young Martin Cizmar™ update!
April 9: Should KJZZ play indie rock?
April 2: Martin Cizmar: ‘Dost thou portend to know what was notable?’
April 1: McCartney Mania! New Times' Martin Cizmar responds!
March 31: The curious Martin Cizmar
12:48 PM
Phoenix New Times' thumbs-up to PHXated
You can’t expect the captain of the ship to play cheerleader, which is no doubt why PHXated’s jefe Bill Wyman hasn’t taken a bow for the kudos handed out yesterday by New Times' Amy Silverman to PHXated.com on NT’s new culture blog Jackalope Ranch.
Or perhaps it’s because Mr. Wyman, as a veteran editor of SF Weekly, Salon.com and National Public Radio, refuses to indulge in mixed metaphors.
Ms. Silverman, Phoenix New Times' managing editor, was even tolerant of Bill’s incessant ribbing of NT’s music editor, Young Martin Cizmar™ . Thanks, Amy, you’re a good sport. Read her post here.
11:25 PM
Thoughts on New Times' 40th anniversary
New Times notes its 40th anniversary this week; there's a party for staffers this weekend but otherwise the paper isn't doing much to mark the occasion.
So I will.
“New Times” means two things these days, and for one of them it’s not even the right term. There’s New Times the paper, which Phoenicians have read for forty years now, and New Times the newspaper chain, which now comprises some fourteen papers and is in fact called Village Voice Media, after the ground-breaking NYC alternative weekly the chain bought four years ago.
There was a time when the very idea of New Times owning the Voice or its counterpart on the west coast, the LA Weekly, was pretty unthinkable.
(I speak as a longtime veteran of the alternative newspaper industry who worked for one of its philosophical rivals for many years and was then hired and fired by New Times itself, so take that into account as I continue.)
But the combination of poor management of the Voice papers, upheavals in the newspaper industry, and the focus and ambition of the New Times' owners, the colorful and lacerating Michael Lacey and his rather-less-well-known but arguably even-more-formidable partner, Jim Larkin, who built the pair’s business, made the two of them acknowledged titans of a significant corner of the U.S. newspaper industry.
Why was it so unlikely? I’ll tell you.
As a teen growing up in Phoenix in the years after the paper started, I didn’t understand how unusual it was; I liked the attitude, the reporting, the critics, the crusades.
But it was unusual, not least because of its catholic appeal; my parents, right-wing Republicans, liked the paper too. New Times didn’t even distribute the way others did in big cities. There wasn’t a hip part of town the weekly dominated; it was available everywhere and never felt the need to kowtow to one constituency, or play to its prejudices.
Another key factor was that the paper had a sense of fun and humor; I’m sure I’m not the only person who remembers writers like Dewey Webb and Dave Walker with some fondness.
The Phoenix paper grew and, one by one, the paper expanded into somewhat similar cities: Denver; Houston, Dallas, Miami.
As the 1980s became the 1990s, there were basically three alternative-newspaper industry models. One had the Voice as an avatar and included papers like the LA Weekly and the Boston Phoenix. They were aggressively, crusadingly, leftist.
They had national pretensions, often covering national issues and, not infrequently, international ones. Their arts sections were unashamedly intellectual and sometimes academic. Many writers became national figures. As the industry grew and consolidated the Voice became a chain and eventually took over the LA Weekly and papers in Seattle and Minneapolis, among others.
A second model was that of the Chicago Reader and its associated and offshoot papers, in San Diego, for a time L.A., Berkeley, and Washington D.C. (I worked under the Reader’s aegis for more than a decade.)
These papers were generally locally focused as well but (sometimes irritating) unattuned to civic events. They were nowhere near as editor driven or politically doctrinaire, and they generally prized contrarian opinions; indeed, they became known for letting their writer corps essentially write whatever it wanted, at whatever length.
New Times was different. Their papers' staffs were directed to produce investigative reporting—and created more of it than any other weeklies in America, and of course far more than their daily-newspaper competition. There was no advocacy journalism, and no overweening liberal and leftist columnizing; attention to affairs on the national level, much less international, was almost entirely absent.
Virtually everything in each city’s paper was about that city and nothing else, with the focus unerringly on difficult storytelling about government or corporate malfeasance, leavened with occasional traditional features. (The local New Times, for example, offers regular cover stories on local visual artists.)
Readers might not appreciate how difficult those long investigative features are to produce. There’s a reason light and trivial fare populates the pages (and, more importantly, the covers) of most publications. It’s cheap to produce, and readers (and advertisers) like it.
By devoting staff time and cover space to such stuff, New Times was investing financially in the work deeply in several ways.
And finally, where the other papers displayed their nonconformity and distinctiveness like some many pirate colors, the New Times papers were for the most part rigidly formatted and run.
As Lacey and Larkin’s empire grew, their ambitions did as well; they kept picking up papers across the country—San Francisco, St. Louis, Cleveland, Kansas City—and finally were able to put a deal together to take over the Voice chain.
There was a downside to a lot of this, but this isn’t the time to go into all of that.
Over the last decade, the alternative weekly industry has imploded even more severely than the daily one has; Craigslist, particularly, vaporized a lot of the personals and classifieds the industry’s profit margins were based on.
This is of course the fault of the industry itself, and the long-term repercussions of this have yet to fully play themselves out; the Chicago Reader chain, for example, has been bought and been through bankruptcy.
There’s always people in the industry who will mutter darkly about New Times’ future as well; the chain is a private company and no one knows what its finances are. While many of its papers make money, many might not, and the company has not only to worry about the debt it took on to buy the Voice but a nagging legal battle going on in San Francisco, where it has a $21 million (and growing) predatory pricing judgment against it.
But right now the chain remains that unlikely titan. Lacey, the editorial chief, oversees as formidable a corps of reporters as exists in the country. I think Lacey and Larkin are the only editor-publisher pair who have been jailed for practicing journalism. (It’s symptomatic of how under the radar the pair are that their arrest at the hands of Joe Arpaio on entirely spurious grounds was not front-page news across the country. Can you imagine what would have happened ten years ago if a Manhattan DA had hauled the editor and publisher of the Village Voice off to jail?)
I have no reason to suck up to the pair, so I’d like to say this: Aren’t they everything we supposedly value about the press in the U.S.? They are idiosyncratic and uncorruptible, uncompromising and fearless; unlike a lot of places that adopt the motto, Lacey and Larkin really do print the news and raise hell. And as this troubled time for a troubled industry continues, they just may end up being the last men standing.
1:21 PM
Arizona Press Club awards—Young Martin Cizmar™ is a winner!
They say that a young journalist with a dream in his heart and a shaky conception of the meaning of words and phrases like “portend,” “rhetorical” and “straw man” can’t get a break in this older man’s and woman’s game.
But Young Martin Cizmar™, the Phoenix New Times music editor, who writes with authority, if not knowledge, about 80s synth pop and press releases, among other things, is a multiple winner in the latest Arizona Press Club awards.
He came in second place in the opinion blog category for his contributions to Up on the Sun, the New Times' music blog.
“A voice this clear and bold is unusual in modern criticism,” the judge said. “While some may disagree with the opinions, the writing is hard to put down.”
Our Martin was also cited, somewhat redundantly, as a contributor to Up on the Sun, the New Times' music blog, in the Best Feature Blog category, in first place …
… and, even more redundantly, in third place as well, as, um, a contributor to the Up on the Sun, the New Times' music blog.
But Young Martin also scored in the best music arts writing category. One of the pieces cited was “An ode to 1994: Green Day’s Dookie and the Peak of Western Civilization”, whose thesis is that the albums Martin liked in seventh grade are the best. albums. ever.
Congrats, Marty!
Complete list of Press Club winners is here.
A postscript to Young Martin’s essay on 1994: Now, any critic is entitled to his or her opinion, and Young Martin’s seventh-grade perspective is of course valuable, as are those of anyone the first year they try marijuana.
But most critics would say 1994 represented a lull in pop music after the exciting early years of that decade.
Public Enemy and Dr. Dre had released their signal albums. So had MBV and Pavement. Lolla had lost its luster. Warhorses like U2 and R.E.M. had already revivified themselves with Achtung Baby and Automatic for the People. Girl rock had peaked with Liz Phair and PJ Harvey and the Breeders. And I’m forgetting something …
… oh yeah, and Nevermind had come out three years prior, turning the music industry upside-down in the process.
Other than that, 1994 was an important year.
p.s.: I got one of Young Martin’s award categories wrong above: it was for best arts writing, not music writing.
1:44 AM
New Times is funding the ACLU's lawsuit against SB 1070
So write the company’s owners, Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey:
Village Voice Media [that’s the name of the Phoenix New Times' parent company, which owns 15 papers across the country] is underwriting the cost of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona’s forthcoming litigation against Senate Bill 1070, as well as two other immigration lawsuits.
Senate Bill 1070 mandates that a police officer who has “reasonable suspicion” that someone is a Mexican must detain that person. The cop must ask: Are your papers in order?
Similar legislation is under discussion in seven other statehouses.
The pair note you can make a fully tax-deductible contribution to the case online at the ACLU’s local web site or via mail at:
American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona Foundation P.O. Box 17148 Phoenix, AZ 85011
1:02 PM
PHXations--Friday, April 23, 2010
New Times Stephen Lemons, probably the best chronicler of the bill’s progress through the legislature, writes an opinion piece for CNN online this a.m.
Lemons notes the statement of some activists who chained themselves to the fence around the state capitol: “Our purpose is to expose Arizona’s apartheid legislation, and to uphold our dignity and human rights.” He continues:
If the use of the word apartheid seems extreme to the uninitiated, all I can say is that you have to know this bill, and this state, to understand that it is, unfortunately, all too correct. Brewer should veto this dangerous, abhorrent and costly measure.
The Arizona Republic slams the bill around in an editorial this a.m. as well but, oddly, never comes out and advocates that the governor not sign it.
Arizona faces sticker shock and buyer’s remorse if Gov. Jan Brewer signs the immigration bill on her desk. […] If the governor signs it, this bill will cost the state in many ways."
If she signs it. If …if …
So she should veto it. Right? Right?
Meanwhile, President Obama this morning called the proposed Arizona law “irresponsible”:
“Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others,” Obama said at a naturalization ceremony for service members. “That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”
What will Brewer do?
There are signs she is laying the groundwork to veto the bill. Here’s a report from MSNBC.com:
*** Brewer in the spotlight: A TELEMUNDO reporter last night asked Gov. Brewer if she was concerned that the immigration bill would lead to racial profiling in the state. Her response: “I am … am looking at that particular bill. I’ve been meeting with lawyers, and I’ve been looking at it very diligently. And when I make my decision, you will be one of the first to know.” The reporter followed up by asking if she was concerned that Arizona is sending the wrong message to the rest of the country with the bill’s potential for racial profiling. Brewer’s reply: “You know, I think that we should be concerned about racial profiling. Um, it’s illegal.”
6:05 PM
Confidential to Young Martin Cizmar™
… Alice Cooper is not a “shock rocker”.
He, uh, stopped doing that thirty years ago. Now he’s a vague cartoon no one outside of Arizona has thought about in thirty years.
Many readers, however, may find Young Martin’s wise-beyond-his-years careful and authoritative ranking of celebrity-themed restaurants useful.
Cooperstown, you might not know, is Cooper’s jarringly conceived sports bar cum goth restaurant. It’s on Jackson just behind the basketball arena.
The waiters wear funny eye makeup but the rest of the place is all sportsy.
It. makes. no. sense.
They have a menu item there called a “‘Caesar’s’ Salad.” We couldn’t figure out why the word “Caesar’s” was in quotes.
Once when we were there someone ordered some sort of “super wiener” and the poor staff had to run around while sirens blared to deliver it.
How goth. How … “shocking!”
Anyway, Young Martin Cizmar, Discriminating Celebrity Restaurant Aficionado™, says that Cooper’s place isn’t as good as Carlos Santana’s Maria Maria, but that he would “concede it’s better than, say, a Planet Hollywood.”
8:42 AM
New Times' "Jackalope Ranch" arts blog is live
Managing Editor Amy Silverman says of the new blog:
New Times already blogs all about news, music and food in this town. It’s time for some culture. Whether it’s funky Grand Avenue or swank Scottsdale — intellectual pursuits or after-dark diversions — bargains on vintage or the place to see cutting-edge contemporary art — creative pursuits in the suburbs or great architecture downtown, we’ll have it for you here.
11:53 AM
PHXations--Tuesday, April 20
New Times is starting a new culture blog. It will be called Jackalope Ranch and will focus on all of the arts except music, our source says.
Music will remain the purview of the current Up on the Sun blog, with your host Young Martin Cizmar, Portending Rhetorical Journalist™.
The new blog goes live tomorrow. I assume it will be at this url, though it’s not live yet. The New Times blog home page is here.
Want to help the Fair Trade Cafe at Civic Space Park decide its hours? The owners are asking for suggestion on this Facebook page.
The next PechaKucha is moving to a bigger venue--the Irish Cultural Center. The previous venue was Fractal. The address is 1106 N. Central, on the west wide of the street just south of the I-10 overpass and just north of Portland. Details here. It's April 29 at 7 p.m.; the doors open at 6 p.m.
9:35 AM
Cizmar-a-palooza!
Young Martin Cizmar, Easily Amazed Journalist™; a detractor; and a defender comment on PHXated’s recent exegesis of a Cizmar blog post.
PHXated prefers comments that disagree with him, but for variety’s sake will start things off with Young Martin’s detractor:
Tyler Hurst said on Wednesday, April 14, 2010:
He’s a criticizer, not a critic. He’s sole job is to piss people off and get the community riled up.
I suppose being really bad at what you do is one way to get attention.
Also, why do so many journalists treat blogs as shitty first-person accounts? Can’t the words and phrases they string together in a blog format be clear, concise and interesting? That’s what bloggers do!
PHXated responds: This is a good point. PHXated’s tendency is to refer to himself in the third person, using the blog title, which seems somehow to be not as solipsistic as the straightforward use of “I” and yet also serves to irritate people already predisposed not to be fans, so I can’t claim innocence on this count. That said, there is something searchingly banal about constructions like “As a press release I got today pointed out….”
Dan Gibson said on Wednesday, April 14, 2010:
Bill, ignoring for a moment the quoting of press releases, why wouldn’t George Strait be worthy of a blog post?
Admittedly, I wrote a feature about Strait for the New Times so my perspective is already on record, but there is something interesting about a career with the longevity and accompanying success he has achieved. After all, there are few country, pop or rock acts who have topped the charts in both the early 80’s and in recent years. Obviously there’s going to be some distinction between popularity and chart success, but dismissing artists offhand based on the fact that they actually have fans or radio spins (“Quality is what matters, not chart performance”) seems just as lazy critically.
PHXated responds: Dan, thanks for writing in. I didn’t say Strait wasn’t worthy of a blog post. He is worthy of a blog post and a feature article like yours. The point was that there was nothing in the blog post to warrant its being a blog post.
If you will recall the redoubtable piece of journalism that that blog post was, it told us that Young Martin Cizmar™ did a radio show on Strait, and that he did it in the face of those who might have found fault with it.
How brave he seemed!
Then we got the regurgitated press release, the news value of which I covered in my original post, and then we were left with the comforting realization that Young Martin Cizmar™ was on a first-name basis with the singer. (“Congrats, George.”)
So George Strait is worthy of a blog post in the same way anything is worthy of a blog post, when the writer of the blog post has something interesting to say about it.
Now, being a blogger himself, PHXated (and Hitsville!) knows that not every post is tip-top. But we expect better things from Young Martin than, you know, regurgitated press releases.
I don’t understand what you mean about the “distinction between popularity and chart success.”
As to your final point, I think that Strait is an unmemorable artist but an efficient and implacable country music star. As I noted originally, the undemanding country audience is actually quite loyal to artists like him; empty hats with thirty-year careers aren’t that unusual. (Serious people have them as well; Hank Jr. had a massive run, for example, and remained frequently surprising.) I didn’t say anything about your article. I’m in favor of serious features on artists of every sort. I’m not in favor of regurgitated press releases.
Speaking of which, why are we “ignoring the quoting of press releases?” Isn’t that what my item was about?
Martin Cizmar said on Wednesday, April 14, 2010:
Bill,
I talked extensively about Strait during my hour-long guest DJ slot, where I played a lot of his best songs. Also, Dan Gibson wrote a piece for us putting Strait’s greatness in perspective. Also, my concert review discusses a lot of your rhetorical questions. It’s not like this is the first and only thing I’ve ever written about him, and the questions you ask aren’t answered elsewhere.Cizmar’s comment continues below….
PHXated responds: Dear Martin:
Thank you for that edifying account of your recent activities. The next time you write in, feel free to address the point of my post, which was that you were recycling meaningless commercial benchmarks from a record-company press release, and getting a little choked up about it besides. (“Congrats, George!”)
p.s. I did not portend to ask any “rhetorical questions.”
p.p.s.: I want to commend you on your recent tweet: “Off-Brand Fudgsicles: Always a Mistake.”
… Cizmar’s comment concludes:
Tyler,
Still haven’t heard from your lawyer! I did, however, hear from two lawyers who were quite amused by your post and our back and forth… they suggested I should actually sue you, since calling a journalist “a defaming liar” is actually defamation, in their book. Pretty funny stuff. Don’t worry, though, I’m not a little bitch.
PHXated responds: Readers who find this all opaque should know that Young Martin Cizmar™ is referring to a recent blog post by Mr. Tyler Hurst, of whom PHXated is a fan, raising some somewhat heated questions about libel after Young Martin said Mr. Hurst, a freelance marketing consultant, “con[ned] idiotic businesses into paying […] to teach them basic stuff.”
Mr. Hurst then said Young Martin was a “defaming liar,” and barristers have apparently been consulted. PHXated will keep readers apprised of any ensuing legal developments, or duels.
Previously in PHXated!:
April 14: Young Martin Cizmar™ update!
April 9: Should KJZZ play indie rock?
April 2: Martin Cizmar: ‘Dost thou portend to know what was notable?’
April 1: McCartney Mania! New Times’ Martin Cizmar responds!
March 31: The curious Martin Cizmar …
9:33 AM
Young Martin Cizmar update!
Regular readers have followed with perhaps varying degrees of interest PHXated’s back and forth with Young Martin Cizmar, Attitudinal Journalist™, the music editor of the Phoenix New Times.
Here’s Young Martin’s latest bit of music criticism.
It’s a blog post about, for some reason, George Strait:
As a press release I got today pointed out, Strait has accomplished what no other artist in the history of Billboard charts has — 30 years of consecutive Top 10 hits.
Cizmar, a youngster, doesn’t have the perspective on the music industry that would help him deal with the informational gold contained in press releases.
I’m here to help!
1) He could throw the press release away. Who cares what record companies say? A critic’s job is to say something interesting about art, not repeat PR talking points.
2) Press releases contain information with a negative value—i.e., information that people pay to have disseminated. (As opposed to pay to learn.) Repeating it just helps the PR departments going.
3) Press releases contain untrue and half-true information. For example, Cizmar’s account of Strait’s supposed record omits the word “country” before “Billboard charts.” The country charts are not the pop charts. The country audience is notoriously artist-friendly. Basically, once you’re a star, as long as you show up for fan day and suck up to the key radio programmers you’ll have hits until the day you die.
4) Any number of country artists have had hits for decade after decade after decade. I’ll stipulate that Strait perhaps might claim the consecutive string of “top ten” hits, but even that’s not all that impressive given how common hit-making longevity is in that world.
5) Why does popularity matter in any case? Quality is what matters, not chart performance.
6) I love the euphony of the phrase “As a press release I got today pointed out….” It’s poetry, sheer poetry.
7) Did i mention how pathetic it is to quote press releases?
8:49 AM
Should KJZZ play indie rock?
The New Times’ Martin Cizmar and Steve Chilton, a local music promoter, debate the issue on a podcast.
I personally can’t imagine taking the time to listen to it, but Cizmar’s distillation of their discussion he puts thusly:
Martin: Give me indie rock or just shut that shitty station down.
Steve: “I would love to see an indie rock station here. I would like that. I just don’t want to see it come at the expense of jazz.”
I don’t understand this debate on two levels. One, KJZZ is a public-radio station, dependent on listener donations to survive.
Unlike a lot of public-radio stations, it has recently been hiring more actual reporters, and ramping up its news coverage in a way that’s going to make a big difference in the quality of the news its audience gets.
Calling it “shitty” seems not entirely accurate.
And in any case, the directors and programmers need to think about the station’s future, particularly in this difficult media climate. Playing “indie” music” seems not likely to be attractive to the sort of audience that will shell out money for the station.
Still, financial issues aside, the question might be, can KJZZ serve the community better? Is there’s a niche there? Is the indie scene underserved?
Seems to me there’s more outlets for indie music than there ever has been in, like, the history of the world.
Everything’s online … there’s a million online radio stations and then Pandora; friends can pass you thumb drives or discs with hundreds of songs on them. MP3 blogs have just about any tune you can think of for free. You can stick it all on your iPod and listen to it in the car, outside, at home, wherever you want.
And the indie-rock audience, of course, is more conversant with these technologies than the jazz audience, which skews a lot older.
Who cares if a dying medium doesn’t play indie rock? And why be so derisive of about the last local quality outlet of that medium?
12:44 PM
Stephen Lemons: Remember Brisenia and Raul Flores
The New Times columnist is noting that amid all the political points being made over the killing of border rancher Robert Krentz, perhaps by a drug smuggler from Mexico, the right has forgotten other border violence coming from its side:
But such hatred, xenophobia and immigrant-bashing has a price: a price paid last May by nine year-old Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul, allegedly murdered by minutewoman Shawna Forde and two of her cohorts, Albert Gaxiola and Jason “Gunny” Bush.
The murders took place as part of a home-invasion robbery in Arivaca, Arizona, about 11 miles north of the border. Forde was the leader of the aptly acronym-ed M.A.D., or Minuteman American Defense, and was well-known in wingnut and nativist circles.
6:55 AM
Martin Cizmar: "Dost thou portend to know what was notable?"
PHXated and the New Times’ Martin Cizmar have been billet-douxing back and forth about the latter’s review of a recent Paul McCartney show.
Much of this discussion has involved a nagging fixation on Cizmar’s part on a song called “Ob-La-Di Ob-la-da,” which is a tune from a long time ago originally done by Wings, or the Hollies, or something.
Anyway, the note below was originally placed here as a comment, but it deserves a higher profile. I had my say; It’s only fair that Cizmar have the last word
Even if that word is “portend” and he’s not 100 percent clear on its meaning.
My original post here. Our back and forth here.
--
Martin Cizmar said on Thursday, April 01, 2010:
Bill,
I think you might be confused about what was going on here… Wrestlemania and Paul McCartney were on the same day in the same complex. Jobing.com held it’s lots back and gave free parking to fans, as it always does. This is about the other lots, the ones owned by U of P, Glendale, Westgate and the tax payers (ahem). I wasn’t parking as a McCartney goer, I was parking as a wrestling goer. So all your bullshit about the hummers, etc. isn’t on point.
As for what the government could do to make things easier. Well, governments can do a lot of things to make things “easier,” to avoid ugly signs, to delegate police powers to non-sworn officers. Unfortunately for people like you, people like me keep pointing to this crusty old constitution which makes such things illegal. Sorry, dude, but even Joe Arpaio can’t just do whatever he wants for convenience state, though ignorant voters like you do their best to try and give him such powers.
I’m not sure if you are accusing me of literally pulling something from a press release, but I didn’t read any press releases on the tour. McCartney made that point from stage and it struck me. It still strikes me. That’s a song I, and a lot of other people, have been intimately in touch with for years and years. It’s a classic probably above anything in, say, U2’s catalog. As I stated, this wasn’t a “Monkberrien obscurity” it was Ob-La-Fucking-Da! Comparing that to the some B’side from the WAR album is either shamefully ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
Now, about your fuzzy math: The Beatles wrote, by my count, a total of 191 songs. 108 of those came out after Shea. So, no, he couldn’t have played 20 or 30 of those for the first time on every tour. Beyond that, I’m not talking about fucking “Sea of Holes” here, I’m talking about a very, very well known song!
And it had never been played live in the U.S. before. The reason, of course, is the fact that the Beatles stopped playing outside the studio after Shea Stadium, but it’s still telling to me. The fact that other people do a shoddy job of imitating that angle (this particular pair of pants, etc.) just reinforces for me how special McCartney is. What a class above he is.
I’ve seen McCartney twice in less than a year. You’ve seen him, what, a decade ago? Yet you portend to know what was notable?
11:06 AM
McCartney Mania! New Times' Martin Cizmar responds!
The New Times’ Martin Cizmar responded to PHXated’s recent pontifications on his coverage of the McCartney show.
It was too good a missive to leave down in the comments, so I’m reposting it here.
Along, uh, with my response to him below.
Original post here.
Martin Cizmar:
Bill,
Thanks for reading and thanks for keeping this blog – I truly appreciate anyone’s efforts to critique the pretty sad state of music journalism in this state, even if they’re going after me.
Regarding specific points:
1. I don’t think the lede is THAT boring. It’s not my best work but I don’t think it’s too long or wordy or anything.
2. Do you seriously not find anything offensive about people being stopped by private security guards on a public street? I think that’s pretty much illegal.
3. The end is intentionally hyperbolic and yuppyish. I’m fond of that voice.
4. It’s been years and years since I was accused of being too blowjobby in a review of anything. Seriously. If you look in the comments you’ll see people suggest it must have been PAINFUL for me to write such a glowing review. It really was an incredibly good show. Not to offend, but I think maybe as a rock writer of another generation you tend to skim a lot of what I write about people who aren’t legends. Even legends get bashed a lot. Heck, I hated McCartney at Coachella, but this was a special show.
5. “Just about every time anyone has toured, ever, in the history of the world, they do songs they haven’t done before.” That’s simply not true. Even a little bit true. Maybe the first night of any tour, but not after that. When’s the last time U2 played something totally new?
However, my broader point was that “Ob-La-Di,” (a song I played in seventh grade band for God sakes!) was being played for the first time in the U.S. The song is 30+ years old and very, very well known. Do you really not find that surprising?
6. You’re absolutely right about him still having stuff to make us tingly, and parceling it out bit by bit. Personally, I find that impressive. Most people cash it all in a lot sooner. Having an “Ob-La-Di” to pop on us? Sorry, that’s pretty cool. Perhaps you think I’m easily impressed, in which case you should read more of what I write.
PHXated responds:
Hey Martin:
Thanks for taking the time to write:
Still.
1) Being from another generation, I know that ledes that are a variant of “I’m the kinda guy who …” are seldom promising. Those that continue into the writer’s personal, uh, parking philosophy? I’m just thinking a guy like you has better things to write about.
2) Fine, let’s talk parking. I can’t believe I’m doing this. The issue is a large nearby concert venue bothering the neighbors. Or, to put it another way, rich folks shelling out hundreds of dollars to see someone who hasn’t recorded a good album in 25 or 35 years trying to save a few bucks on parking their Hummers on side streets and making life even more difficult for the—what was the word you used?—"rednecks" living nearby. The city could put up ugly permanent signs and so forth, or create a neighborhood parking district. Or they could make it easy on everyone, and hire a minimum-wage security guy to deal with the random asshole who still tried to park there.
3) Yeah.
4) Being someone from another generation, I’ve seen Paul McCartney a lot. I’ve even done my own (rather wordy) apologia for him. It’s right here!
It’s fine to like the show. Your angle—that stuff about him not playing certain songs before—was something out of a press release. (I doubt that you personally have been keeping track of the Beatles songs he’s been doing since Wings Over America. )
Being someone from another generation, I’ve seen so so many tours of heritage acts being touted with such tired “angles.” It’s not criticism. It’s not even hype. It’s just … something to fill space with. "This is the first time "Rod Stewart/David Bowie/U2/Neil Diamond/Page & Plant/Pink Floyd has played this particular song/with this particular person/in this particular town/wearing this particular pair of pants.”
5) Please tell me you don’t think that McCartney, U2, the Stones or just about anyone besides Bob Dylan plays a different set list each night. Shows on this scale are not seat-of-the pant affairs. The vast majority of the say two-dozen-song set list is written in stone for each tour. Even the racy optional spots are typically filled by one or two choices. That’s not to say a machine like the E Street band can’t play anything Springsteen wants on a given night. I’m not following McCartney’s career closely any more and maybe I’m wrong … maybe his tours in the 2000’s have been anything-goes affairs. But I doubt it. Paul McCartney isn’t calling audibles on stage.
I don’t know if it’s still true but at least up until recently fans of Bob Dylan, who has probably played more different songs at more different shows than any other major artist by a factor of four or five, had a list of songs he’d never played live.
From a cursory look at this U2 fan page …
… it seems that the band only has one album from which they’ve played all the songs in concert.
Now, off the top of my head (again, I’ll cop to it if I’m wrong) I’ll bet cash money McCartney could have played fifteen or twenty new different Beatles songs in each of his previous tours and still had a few ‘Ob-la-fucking-di’s to play.
In fact, I’ll bet money this would apply just to McCartney-written Beatles songs.
Note that that would mean no repeats of ‘Hey Jude,’ ‘Get Back,’ ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ ‘Fool on the Hill,’ ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ ‘Long and Winding Road,’ ‘Let It Be’ etc. etc. etc. And that there would be almost no room left for classic songs from his own solo oeuvre, much less the hot new tunes from his new album—so you would still be able to be amazed by the inclusion of ‘1985.’
He has dozens and dozens of albums (and in his case an incredible number of non-album hit singles) behind him. He’s toured five times in forty years. Paul McCartney doesn’t take requests from the stage of a stadium with a crew of hundreds trying to get the sound and video right for 60k people. Of course he hasn’t played everything he’s ever recorded live. Jesus.
6. I don’t think you’re easily impressed, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with liking a Paul McCartney show.
But I don’t know, maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with frothing about ‘Ob-la-di’ in the lede. It’s not like you went back to it and beat the issue into the ground in the last three grafs of your review as well.
Oh, wait …
2:46 PM
The curious Martin Cizmar ...
… devotes some three pages of digital real estate relating his almost astonishingly uninteresting adventures trying to avoid paying for parking at the Paul McCartney concert at Jobing Arena last Sunday.
This may be the most boring lede of any story I’ve read recently:
I’m one of those people who prides himself on never paying for parking. Toss me anywhere, anytime, and I’ll find a reasonably safe spot to stow my car while I attend to whatever business I’m there for.
Parking is often a mess at the arena and stadium in Glendale; it’s a huge drag for music fans.
Cizmar is writing about something different: going from place to place in the areas surrounding the venues in an unsuccessful search for a free spot, griping like an elderly snowbird about his rights being violated along the way.
In the end, like a pompous yuppie, he vows not to patronize the Westgate mall any more:
First, let me start by saying that I’ve patronized Westgate businesses before. Two weeks ago, in fact, I bought a $23 Cleveland Indians hat at the complex before a game at Camelback Ranch. That’s the last dime anyone at Westgate will get from me.
Is this really the state of rock criticism in Phoenix? His piece on the show itself was kinda … blojobby, too. Here’s the lede of that one:
After nearly a half century in the spotlight, it’s surprising to see Paul McCartney do much of anything new. How about two new things in a single night, as McCartney did while kicking off his Up and Coming Tour with a stellar sold-out show at Jobing.com Arena? Maybe I’m amazed.
The former Beatle managed to play two classic songs live for the first time on American soil in Glendale. Those songs weren’t Monkberrian obscurities, either. One was “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” a hit from the Beatles studio-only years — the Beatles’ last real concert was four years before the band’s split, so a few such songs exist. The other was Wings’ “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five,” the closing track on the group’s epic Band on the Run album. Wings toured extensively, making the fact that the song’s live debut came more than 35 years after it was released something of a surprise.
Now, think about it for a second. Just about every time anyone has toured, ever, in the history of the world, they do songs they haven’t done before.
It’s one of the most tired PR angles around. Why is this remotely interesting, much less amazing?
For someone like McCartney, it’s an even stupider thing to say. Why?
Because McCartney has toured the U.S. five, maybe six times in the forty years since he left the Beatles. (I’ve seen him four times, if I’m remembering correctly.) He’s probably played fewer than one-tenth as many shows as, say Bob Dylan has, for example, over that same period.
Given a fairly consistent setlist for each outing, McCartney could have played nothing but all different new Beatles songs alone on each of his previous U.S. tours and still have news ones in his pocket for Cizmar to get all tingly over last weekend.
2:34 PM
An in-depth story on the Great New Times San Francisco Range War
New Times bought the SF Weekly, an alternative paper in San Francisco, in 1995 and instituted a now-fifteen-year-long fight with a longtime local operation, the Bay Guardian. It’s still going on.
The Seattle Stranger, which has the distinction of being run by Dan Savage, of Savage Love fame, has a very long look back at this fight, with a starring role played by New Times exec editor Michael Lacey.
PHXated worked for SF Weekly during this period. (Hired and eventually fired by Lacey.) I’m not done with the story yet, but I have some major issues with it. More on that later. Still, it’s a fascinating read for Laceyologists. I’m one.
8:31 PM
New Times music guy bashes former freelancer!
Martin Cizmar, the New Times’ music writer, trashes a former longtime NT music contributor in this blog post.
Now, the point of all of this very long post is difficult to follow, because way too much of it has to do with the finer points of the last ten years of history of a band, Alice in Chains, whose artistic and commercial heyday had ended long before.
But it’s kind fun to read nonetheless. Here’s how the jeremiad begins:
I find it hard […]to respect a journalist who gets totally snookered by [guitarist Jerry] Cantrell’s publicity machine. A puff piece in the Arizona Republic advancing Wednesday’s Alice in Chains show at Dodge Theatre seems to suggest former longtime New Times freelancer Dominic Salerno (he employed the pen name “Serene Dominic” at NT) got taken for the proverbial ride.
6:35 PM
More on the Marquee-Hoodlums ticket-fee war
The Republic and the New Times are catching up on the stand Tempe’s Hoodlums record store has taken against Lucky Man Productions, which operates the Marquee rock club. The store, which collected a reasonable $1 for each ticket it sold for Marquee shows, balked when Lucky Man tried to add on an additional $3.
The store’s blistering original statement post here. PHXated’s December story on it here.
The Republic story is here, with a consistent statement from Hoodlum’s co-owner Steve Wiley:
Wiley […] stresses he’s not on an anti-Marquee crusade.
“It’s not a personal thing,” he says. “We’ve had a great relationship with those guys at the Marquee for many years. I’m not against service fees. We charge a one-dollar service fee for carrying the tickets at our store, and everyone is fine with that. But if the Marquee or whoever needs to charge $28 in order to make ends meet, then I’m a businessperson, I don’t have a problem with that. Just make it $28 dollars. But don’t put $25 on the tickets and the Web site and then expect me to collect an extra $3 for you.”
New Times blog post on the issue by Martin Cizmar is here. Besides being late and misinformed, it’s about a tenth as good as the Republic story, which is a little embarrassing.
PHXated’s previous posts on the outlandish ticket fees charged by the Marquee are here.
8:00 PM
Is the Phoenix New Times “facing bankruptcy”? No.
I’m seeing talk on blogs and on twitter that the New Times paper is in financial trouble based on a court case in San Francisco. I think the reports are overstated.
New Times went into SF in 1996 or so, buying a small local weekly and going up against an established paper, the Bay Guardian. The Guardian eventually sued, saying, essentially, that New Times was deliberately selling its ads at a low price to try to put the Guardian out of business. The papers have been locked in a debilitating (and costly) range war for nearly 15 years.
I used to work at SF Weekly but was fired after some editorial disagreements; I find the muddy, unattractive battle between the two papers over the ensuing decade interesting, but won’t bore you with the details.
New Times lost the case, and a $15 million or so judgment has now increased with interest to some $21 million. As you can imagine, the Guardian is saying “Pay us the money” and New Times is saying, “Screw you, we’re appealing.”
You can make the case that New Times’ prospects aren’t good: A jury heard the case and ruled for the Guardian, and a judge doubled the penalties. On the other hand, to a lot of people, the ruling doesn’t make sense. Newspaper advertising is a different commodity than widgets, and I can testify from having worked there that the main plan for success involved putting out a better paper.
Whatever. In any case, after a recent hearing, stories have come out suggesting that New Times was about to be forced to pay or at least post as a bond the entire judgment. Locally, the Espresso Pundit has jumped on it. New Times has posted this response.
(Over the years New Times has bought up most of the major alternative weeklies in the U.S. and ultimately changed its name to Village Voice Media, after its most famous acquisition. Most people in the industry still call it New Times, and the company is run out of the New Times building downtown.)
New Times’ contention is that if the judgment were to be affirmed on appeal, it would in any case be held against the holding company of the San Francisco paper, which the company says doesn’t have much in the way of assets. In other words, it’s saying that its legal structure would prevent the Guardian from collecting its money.
This may all just be a fiercely argued lie, or maybe after the company loses the appeal a judge will say, “Oh, that’s just a financial facade”—I"m not a lawyer. But it’s also true the company lost the case two years ago, and nothing has changed in the years since to make a potential bankruptcy an issue. The hatred of the Guardian inside the company runs so deep that it’s hard to believe the case will be resolved any time soon.
7:00 AM
The Arpaio Follies begin to get some national reviews
Both the LA Times and Talking Points memo have major pieces up on Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, the Dimmer Twins.
The Times story concentrates on the continuing range war between arpaio and his political enemies, with a special focus on just trying to lay out the scope of it all. The thing is 1200 words long and still manages to glide over a lot of Arpaio’s nuttiness.
You don’t hear much about the the tag team legal brutality he engages in with Andrew Thomas, and the the story doesn’t even mention the late-night arrests of the owners of the Phoenix New Times.
The result is long passages like this:
has escalated his tactics in recent months, not only defying the federal government but launching repeated investigations of those who criticize him. He recently filed a racketeering lawsuit against the entire Maricopa County power structure. On Thursday night, the Arizona Court of Appeals issued an emergency order forbidding the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office from searching the home or chambers of a Superior Court judge who was named in the racketeering case.Last year, when Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon called for a federal investigation of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement, the Sheriff’s Office demanded to see Gordon’s e-mails, phone logs and appointment calendars.
When the police chief in one suburb complained about the sweeps, Arpaio’s deputies raided that town’s City Hall.
My biggest criticism of the LAT piece is its over-reliance on he-said/she said balance.
Sure: We hear lines like, “It’s just extraordinary, the kind of thing that takes place in Third World dictatorships”—but they come not from a neutral observer but from Don Stapley’s lawyer, which minimizes the force of it in readers’ minds.
Further, the story contains no hint of what will be Arpaio’s ultimate role, which will be target of a federal investigation. When the criminal sheriff is ultimately removed from office, stories like this will seem pretty timid.
Meanwhile, Talking Points Memo has a good overview of the current shenanigans created by the Dimmer twins in a new round of intimidation tactics against local judges. The writer, is less complacent about federal intervention:
The Justice Department could step in and end Arpaio and Thomas’s reign of terror, which threatens the integrity of the entire judicial and law enforcement systems for the nations’ fourth-most populous county. But DOJ appears to be working at a leisurely pace: its probe has been underway for over a year, and there’s no sign that it’s having any effect in checking Arpaio’s actions.
And finally, speaking of New Times, Michael Lacey, the chain’s top editor and one of the owners who was arrested in 2007, has an expansive cover story this week called The Pink Negro.
The title is a reference—one I find pretty indigestible—to Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro.” (The idea is that Obama is a buttoned-up preppy black.)
Leaving that aside, Lacey’s thesis is that the Obama administration is taking too long is investigating:
Yes, [Obama’s] federal investigators are here examining the assaults against human rights perpetrated by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas.
But, after 20 months, we must ask: Are they unearthing evidence or burying it?
There is, as yet, no remedy, no redress, no recourse.
President Obama, unwittingly, put the glacial timeline of his Arpaio/Thomas investigation into perspective during his speech to America last week. He said his troop surge will see our soldiers depart Afghanistan after 19 more months of combat. In other words, the war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban will end triumphantly in less time than the feds have spent — without result — probing Arpaio and Thomas.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon formally summoned a Justice Department task force in April 2008. As we usher in 2010, federal officials have yet to contact the very first political victim of the sheriff and the county attorney. Critical documents remain unexamined.
In the source of making its case the extravagantly long piece is an effective overview of the current state of Arpaio’s many, many criminal enterprises.
7:00 AM
Joe Arpaio at the Cronkite School: The zoo approacheth
The Arizona Republic and KPHO have both posted stories about Monday’s live “Meet the Press”-style interview of Joe Arpaio at ASU’s Cronkite School of journalism.
Arpaio’s going to be questioned by three profs from the school at 7 p.m.
Both stories are pretty incompetent. The Republic story says that interest in the event will surely swamp the smallish school atrium where the interview will be held, so the school’s going to show it on a large video screen and stream it over the internet.
The paper doesn’t bother to tell readers where the screen will be, or what the web address for the stream is.
For the record, the video will be shown in the public mall just south of the Cronkite building, which is on the east side of Central Avenue between Polk and Fillmore.
The video stream will be here, according to the school.
The KPHO story is equally unhelpful; worse, it lets the sheriff natter on about how good he is with the press:
“There have been blips about some weekly newspaper — we didn’t give an answer to a request — but that’s been straightened out. But I think it’s great. If there’s anyone who has an open door policy, I think it’s the sheriff,” said Arpaio.
As anyone who reads the New Times knows, there are three inaccuracies in merely the first sentence alone. The KPHO reporter doesn’t bother to ask him about them.
The Republic story doesn’t mention that some students plan to protest the event; the KPHO story does, but neither note that local Tea Party activists are showing up as well.
PHXated’s background on the event is here and here.
12:00 AM
Local twitterer says he wants to shoot President Obama
The Feathered Bastard has the story:
Lemons says the guy’s real name seem to be Eric L. Arteaga. who he says is a Scottsdale musician.
6:00 AM