Retreat may be masterly

The demise of Newsweek was almost inevitable. While it is not complete – the 79-year-old magazine will only be available in digital form from 1 January 2013 – the thinning of the once-powerful newsweeklies has been dismal to watch. To be on the cover of Newsweek – and more especially, its older rival, Time – was to be on a billboard throughout the world.

Even to the late 1960s, when TV news footage of important events such as the moon landing had to travel in film canisters to New Zealand, the newsweeklies could be up to date with a week’s events. For all their regurgitated prose, there was some great writing: Newsweek journalists were awarded bylines first, while at Time, Jay Cocks on film and music, and Robert Hughes on art, were stylists at the height of their game. Newsweek may have had a circulation of 3,130,600 in 2006, falling to 1,524,989 by 2011, but it has been on the ropes for years. Sometime in the 1980s, the Australian and New Zealand edition was subsumed into The Bulletin, itself now dead for five years.

In my archive I have a collection of “pony” Time and Newsweek magazines from the Second World War. They were given to me in 1977 by Bill Alexander, a friend of my father. These are miniature versions of the real thing, just 21cm x 15.5cm, that were available to Allied troops on subscription. As a clever reaction to a changing market, they are not unlike the decision to go digital. (Though whether the subscription model will work is doubtful.) The Newsweek featuring the Allied leaders comes from 13 December 1943, while the Time with Field-Marshal Fritz Von Manstein is dated 10 January 1944. (The cover caption reads, in Time-ese: “Retreat may be masterly, but victory is in the opposite direction.”) Click on the image to see Boris Chaliapin’s great illustration in detail: he turned out one of these most weeks.

Both magazines were slow to cover the pop music revolution of the 1960s. The Beatles didn’t appear on the cover of Time until 1967, although Jay Cocks wrote an excellent cover story on the Band at the time of Stage Fright in 1970, and an influential cover featuring James Taylor would follow in 1971. Both Time and Newsweek famously featured Bruce Springsteen on the cover in the same week in 1975, which must have caused some boardroom teeth-gnashing. My favourite story of pop and the newsweeklies comes from 1969, when a planned cover story on Janis Joplin was bumped from Newsweek when the former President Eisenhower died. Joplin wailed: “Fourteen f----- heart attacks and he had to die in my f------ week. In MY week!” She eventually made the cover two months later, on 26 May 1969.

Fish wrapping

1. I Read it in a Magazine

Salient – Victoria University’s student magazine – is these days stapled, A4 and 48 pages. It is smartly edited (Asher Emanuel & Ollie Neas) and also elegantly designed (Racheal Reeves), albeit imitative of The Believer. But whereas much of The Believer is unreadable due to its slippery, affected prose, with Salient it’s simply the typography. Grey type on bleached white paper, black type on dark grey paper, and all in 4 point. Don’t they want their writers to be read? A pity, as the content is strong, like much of the student media (see Peter McLennan’s summary of a Craccum campaign about an Auckland University scandal here) – though we are yet to see the effect of the vindictive voluntary student unionism bill. Two items from the October 1st “Power” issue:

2. ‘The Measure of a Manhire’

Rob Kelly interviews Bill Manhire the mild-mannered Superpoet on his departure from VUW. Manhire describes the 1960s at Otago, when – thanks to the university’s Burns fellowship – a few New Zealand writing role models finally entered his sphere (they weren’t part of the English curriculum at the time): Baxter (“behaving badly”), Janet Frame (“scuttling along corridors”), Maurice Gee, Hone Tuwhare. These writers “became very influential, but more as examples of people who had committed their lives to doing the thing that mattered. So it was great to go to the Captain Cook and drink beer with Hone, but also you knew that … I mean, he would arrive with poems and sort of hand them out, and all the local alcoholics would give him advice and he’d go away with a much worse poem than he arrived with. A sort of anti creative writing workshop.”

3. ‘I Moustache You Some Questions’

Chris McIntyre interviews TVNZ’s Mark Sainsbury, just prior to the news that Close Up is closing shop. Is it hard defending his throne against the likes of Hosking and Henry? “It’s one of the top jobs, so people want that job, but they can’t have it … Paul Henry made no secret he wanted that job, he’s now working on breakfast in Australia. I mean, draw what you like out of that.”

4. Must Try Harder

We’ve all made mistakes, rushing to judgement on a new album, film or book, only for it later to be declared a classic. Michael Schmidt is devoting his spare time to collating “Rolling Stone’s 500 Worst Reviews of All Time”.

He actually comiserates rather than scores points as he finds Lenny Kaye dissing Exile on Main Street, Jon Landau underwhelmed by Sticky Fingers, Langdon Winner finding After the Gold Rush rushed (“I can’t listen to it at all”). And Ed Ward, who was often excellent (on the Band, Texan country rock and 1950s rock’n’roll) on Abbey Road:

Side two is a disaster ... The slump begins with ‘Because’, which is a rather nothing song ... the biggest bomb on the album is ‘Sun King’,which overflows with sixth and ninth chords and finally degenerates into a Muzak-sounding thing with Italian lyrics. It is probably the worst thing the Beatles have done since they changed drummers. This leads into the “Suite” which finishes up the side. There are six little songs, each slightly under two minutes long, all of which are so heavily overproduced that they are hard to listen to ...

Ward wasn’t alone of course, in the New York Times Nik Cohn agreed, though not about the “Suite” (“For 15 minutes, tremendous”), and two years earlier Richard Goldstein dissed Sgt Pepper, following it up in the Village Voice with a similarly well-argued piece about the reaction called “I Blew My Cool Through the New York Times.”

Rolling Stone’s response? The managing editor Evie Nagy sniffed: “I say this genuinely without bias, that person's time could have been so much better spent. At least make it funny.”

5. Gambling with Gout

Speaking of the Fabs, I remain to be convinced by Magical Mystery Tour, though the connections with Python are plausible. But just released, by the BBC’s Arena programme, are five minutes of outtakes in which the Beatles buy fish’n’chips while on their bus journey (think Ken Kesey meets Beano).

It reminds me of another fish’n’chip/musician/tour bus story, about Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. When Kenny Rogers couldn’t get arrested, he toured New Zealand often and regularly appeared on NZBC-TV. Circa 1971 Rogers and the First Edition were travelling down the West Coast; it was a Sunday night and dinner time. So the New Zealand promoter got requests from the band and stopped at a local takeaway, somewhere between Karamea and Franz Josef. When he returned with a big cardboard carton, he walked down the bus aisle, saying to Rogers and his band, “Chicken and chips? That’s $1.30. Two fish, a fritter and chips? $1.75. A hot dog and chips? $1.20 …”

There'll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’ is done.

Tour de Farce

1. Dot Comedy of Errors

The D*tc*m saga seems destined to channel surf through the popular culture possibilities, from the Keystone Cops to SWAT. Now, it’s Austin Powers. Scriptwriters would turn away in horror from such a polyglot set up, in which a government (led by Mr Magoo) chases fruitlessly after a baddie who looks like a Teletubby. So perhaps it is time to acknowledge the professionalism of someone who is more used to dealing in this spooky territory. Nicky Hager’s 2011 book Other People’s Wars (Craig Potton Publishing) is remarkably readable, considering the obfuscating jargon beloved by its characters: defence departments and spy agencies. Hager has taken an enormous amount of fresh research and built a compelling case out of unpromising material. Military acronyms and bureaucratic phrasemaking don’t trip up the narrative. Much of the material comes from reluctant, obstructive, leaked or anonymous internal sources, but Hager’s cross-checking and referencing is exemplary. Much of the criticism has been personal or politically driven, dismissing Hager rather than addressing his points. Hager was courageous to take on this topic, not just personally but to achieve some clarity out of the material. His strengths as a researcher are well-known, but his abilities as story teller and scene setter kept me captivated, against the odds. Other People’s Wars addresses issues of lasting importance to the community: how governments treat the truth, how bureaucrats and the military abuse language, and a relationship between the military and its politicians can veer between loyalty and manipulation.

2. Citizen Pope

In just 74 years, Jeremy Pope achieved an enormous amount: for New Zealand, and internationally. A lawyer, he spent much of his life campaigning for human rights and the environment, and against corruption. At Te Ara’s Signposts blog, Jock Phillips has posted a tribute that details much of it: his work on the Save Manapouri campaign, as a legal adviser to the 1975 Maori land march, and editing – with his wife Diana – the hugely successful Mobil travel guides to the North and South Islands, which ran to several updated editions. Pope left New Zealand in about 1981, one of many refugees from the reign of Muldoon (he had been involved with the “Citizens for Rowling” lobby). New Zealand’s temporary loss was the world’s gain: Pope co-founded the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International. A 2009 interview with him can be heard at Radio New Zealand below.

 

3. Hang on a Minute

I can’t imagine two more different characters stuck in a hut together than bushman-writer Barry Crump, and Alex Fry, an elegant if irascible essayist for the New Zealand Listener for over 30 years. While Crump acknowledged poet Kevin Ireland for encouraging him to start writing, it was Fry who knocked his manuscript into shape. Crump’s debut story collection A Good Keen Man went on to become one of New Zealand’s best-selling books ever. Fry was recruited by Reed’s editor Ray Richards after at least two other publishers had rejected the manuscript, which Richards described as arriving “grubby and single spaced but with a ‘magic’ about it”. After the book’s massive success, Fry was rewarded with a percentage of the royalties – and a punch in the nose from Crump. Victoria University’s Electronic Text Centre has a fascinating annotated index of material about A Good Keen Man’s publishing history. The bibliography reminded me of the cold sweat experienced when reading the chilling 1962 story ‘That Way’ (later published in Crump’s Warm Beer and Other Stories). James K Baxter described it as “a story by Barry Crump far more hard-hitting than anything he has turned out for money”.

4. Publish and Be Damned

An email arrives from Oxford American magazine in Alabama, saying its new editor is a Brooklyn, New York-based ex-editor of Harpers who grew up in Texas. I noted his trimmed beard, and wondered what happened to the founding editor Marc Smirnoff: for over 20 years he was the driving force behind the always troubled, occasionally pretentious, but deep-hearted and lively quarterly. Besides its generous website, the magazine’s award-winning annual music issue features a savvy CD compilation, alongside often inspirational editing, design and writing (except for the pieces that were all about the author rather than the music). Smirnoff could be verbose himself, and had a predilection for too much memoir-as-fiction from creative writing grads; it was also noticeable that the mag seemed to employ lots of interns with good teeth.  The Oxford American’s latest rescuer was new to publishing, and his puff pieces read like tone-deaf mission statements from an aspirant Republican candidate. Googling Smirnoff’s name, the computer instantly filled in another word": "Fired". An hour was quickly lost reading the results: sexual harrassment is alleged, and Smirnoff and his life/work partner – the magazine’s managing editor – were both sacked. Smirnoff has responded with a new website which features a massive document responding passionately to his accusers and employers, the OA board. Publishing this was perhaps unwise; calling the site Editors in Love certainly is. Perhaps this was a board waiting for its moment. Still there must be some other opportunities out there for experienced editors who are musically minded.

Quid Pro Quo

Mark Ellen, editor and/or co-founder of Mojo, Q, Smash Hits and now his own (independent) The Word, writes in the latest issue:

I'll never forget being taken for lunch by the new MD of all the titles I was involved with at EMAP [publishing behemoth], a tiny little man who looked like Mr Burns from The Simpsons.

“Why are there so few five-star reviews in Q magazine?” he enquired.

Because there are so few five-star records.

“So five-star reviews have enormous value?”

They do indeed.

“Why don’t we sell them then? If people want five stars, they can pay for them.”

It was going to be a long lunch. And the starters hadn’t even arrived.

Grooving With Moog

When Rip It Up celebrated its 10th anniversary in 1987, publisher Murray Cammick suggested that we run a story about New Zealand’s earlier rock magazines. I interviewed Des Dubbelt, then in his 60s, and Roger Jarrett, in his mid-30s. Both had sharp, curious minds, more interested in the present than the past. Their homes suited their lifestyles. Dubbelt’s house in West Auckland was full of books and his Bechstein piano had a Bach prelude ready to play; he had a free-flowing garden that was a work of art, and a source of food. Jarrett, a keen surfer, was renting a flat on Takapuna Beach; his workroom was neatly cluttered with graphic art in progress, while the latest Prince record played. Sadly, both erudite men – who contributed so much to New Zealand music and journalism – are now dead.
Grooving With Moog: New Zealand’s Music Press
By Chris Bourke (Rip It Up, July 1987)
Two things were different about going to a movie in the 1960s. First, you were obliged to stand up for ‘God Save the Queen.’ And at half-time, there were advertisements for Playdate, only 2/- at the Nibble Nook bar.
Owned by Kerridge Odeon, Playdate developed out of their house organ Cinema in 1960. Very similar to Shake! in format and content, its coverage extended to music and other youth topics. Playdate is New Zealand’s most successful young person’s magazine ever. The magazine lasted 12 years, and in its heyday had a circulation of 75,000 copies, with a readership of four or five times that number.
Although Playdate was the idea of Cinema’s editor Sid Bevan, he left shortly after the magazine started, and for most of its life Des Dubbelt (right) was the editor. “I felt that to go anywhere, the magazine had to shed the feel of a handout, it had to have a consumer feel,” he says. Dubbelt describes his employer Sir Robert Kerridge as “a true impresario, not an accountant” – so the magazine was not limited to KO films, but also covered Amalgamated’s releases and television stories, with genuine criticism, not just publicity. “Kerridge saw you’ve got to go with the flow. If you’re in show business, it doesn’t make sense to ignore your competition.”
The magazine was aimed equally at males and females, though the healthy advertising (some issues nearly reached 200 pages!) was mainly cosmetics and clothes (Slimryte Rolls! Bri-Nylon!) for the young Slenderella. “We followed our own interests a lot,” says Dubbelt. “We thought if it interested us, it would interest our readers. There were no readers’ surveys. We were enthusiasts.”
With Dubbelt at Playdate was Tom McWilliams as assistant editor (later executive chief sub-editor at the Listener), and young reporter Sally (who later worked for the Beatles at Apple in London).
Reflecting the explosion of the decade, music became a major part of the magazine. “It was a natural progression,” says Dubbelt. “The pop films started happening. Cliff Richard and so on, bolstered by personal visits. When the Beatles arrived, it was like the millennium.” Dubbelt remembers taking Gene Pitney to Kerridge’s Pakatoa Island resort for a story, and accompanying Tom Jones to a nightclub after his Town Hall concert – and Tommy Adderley singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’ as Jones entered.
The burgeoning local music scene was covered, particularly the summer package tours. “Mr Lee Grant was mobbed in a way comparable with any visiting big name.” Shows such as C’mon made New Zealanders pop stars. “Any TV show wouldn’t have done it,” says Dubbelt. “Kevan Moore was a brilliant producer – those shows were excellent.”
As any magazine should, Playdate’s layout reflects the design of the era. The change from hot metal to offset printing meant some radical layouts were possible: white type on black, photos bled to the edge. “We were dealing with a visual market: movies, fashion, rock, and this technology meant we could look different from the things the Woman’s Weekly were doing. The readers saw this – they didn’t want something that reminded them of their mother’s magazine.”
The innovations of Playdate meant the magazine attracted work from the “young, adventurous” photographers of the day, such as Max Thomson, Rodney Charteris, and Roger Donaldson. “We couldn’t have afforded them, but they liked the type of layouts we used, and to see their work well presented.” While they were using Mondrian grid layouts and plenty of white space, Dubbelt and McWilliams looked with envy at overseas magazines – the San Francisco Oracle even had psychedelic inks!
But the times eventually caught up with Playdate. By the early 1970s music and movies had got more permissive, and the magazine could reflect that in its illustrations – to a point. “It was just the way things were going. Take Woodstock. It was a pretty raunchy film, with a permissive attitude towards drugs and lifestyle. Tom and I felt we couldn’t cover the way the rock scene was going.
“That was about the time Rolling Stone came on the scene. They seemed to have no ‘no-nos,’ with star writers such as Hunter Thompson who seemed to be doing all the drugs, too. The youth market had diversified into heavy rock, with the accompanying drug scene, and teenybopper pop. We couldn’t and didn’t want to go into those areas.”
Playdate’s circulation was still healthy when the magazine was sold to the Auckland Star in 1972, but six months later the new owners decided to close the magazine down. Ironically, on the day Rip It Up interviewed Des Dubbelt, the Star’s parent company New Zealand Newspapers announced the closure of their 1980s teen magazine, Dolly.

New Zealand’s first rock paper of significance started in October 1967 – a month before Rolling Stone. Called Groove, it was edited in Wellington by Dene Kellaway for the publishers Lucas Print. He’d been the editor of Teenbeat, which had closed down the month before.
Efforts to trace Kellaway (left) didn’t succeed, but in 1968 an interview with him appeared in another short-lived New Zealand music magazine Third Stream (a curious mix of mainly classical music, plus folk and pop; it lasted four issues). Its headline read, “EDITOR RELUCTANTLY GIVES UP GROOVE.” Kellaway’s reasons were pure 1960s: his own pop career was getting off the ground … and he’d been drafted.
While Dene did his 14 weeks of national service at Waiouru, the magazine appears to have gone into recess. What happened to his pop career (NZBC didn’t buy his first single, ‘I’m Going Nowhere,’ reported Groove) is also a mystery.
When Groove reappeared in August 1968, it continued its hip coverage of the overseas and local pop and rock scenes. Although the Monkees were on the first cover, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd were also cover stories in the magazine’s first year – using illustrations drawn by readers.
For their 10 cents each fortnight, each Groove reader got a 16-page tabloid with plenty of pix and pinups, reviews and news, of pop stars and movies. Except for the paper’s news from Sydney – where Dalvanius was their correspondent – most of its overseas coverage was taken from press releases, or syndicated from other music mags. But what’s remarkable is the paper’s coverage of local music. As the nostalgists keep reminding us, then we had pop stars: Simple Image (“will they keep ‘Spinning Spinning Spinning’ till 1968’s Loxene Golden Disc?”), the Avengers, the Fourmyula, the Underdogs, Hi-Revving Tongues, Ray Columbus, John Rowles, and especially Mr Lee Grant (who wore suede boots laced at the side to an interview!).
Radio DJs were also stars, and one of Groove’s bandwagons was pirate station Radio Hauraki, with their “good guys.” When the bill legalising private radio was passed in 1968, Kellaway wrote: “Groove is very pleased about the new bill and will be giving full support to any new stations that start up. In the long run it is going to be a good thing, and with the heavy competition it will bring the standard of our local productions will improve and more local talent will local talent will be uncovered and given a good fighting chance.”
But interviewed on the way to Waiouru, Kellaway talked of giving up Groove, as his contract with Apollo Records required him to be free to travel around the world. He was going to cut singles with his band the Vibrons while on weekend leave.
“I ran Groove alone, and did most of the writing myself. I did all the record reviews too, so it was a bit hectic,” he said. “I was doing Groove for the love of the work. I wasn’t drawing a wage off it; I had another part-time job on which I was living. Because I had been trying to sing for so long, I realised just how difficult it is, and how important, for the groups to get recognition in this country. I was plugging that side, trying to help the New Zealand scene. It wasn’t really a paying proposition. It could be, but I had gone as far as I could as a one-man band; it was a 24-hour-a-day job. I had about two days a week to myself.”
In August 1969, Kellaway moved on to concentrate on his recording career. The paper’s blues columnist Barry Francis Jones took over as editor, but that’s where RIU’s collection of Groove ends.
One year after the imported Rolling Stone magazine contributed to Playdate’s demise, New Zealand had its own edition of the San Francisco mag. Published by Alister Taylor of Little Red Schoolbook fame, the NZ RS lasted six issues in 1973.
But in February 1974 an all New Zealand owned rock magazine arrived. It had the delightfully 1970s name Hot Licks.
Hot Licks was started by Aucklanders Kerry Thomas, of Direction Records, and Radio Hauraki co-founder David Gapes. They asked graphic designer Roger Jarrett to edit the paper. “They thought of the idea of a free music mag, thinking it would be in their interest to promote music,” says Jarrett (right). “They said, ‘go for it’ – the first couple of issues I virtually wrote myself, then I found other writers. It was a different industry then for music. As far as marketing went, it wasn’t nearly as sophisticated.”
The magazine featured the best of 1970s music, from Bowie and Lou Reed to Little Feat and Joni Mitchell. “It was an enthusiast’s not a journalist’s magazine: a lot of the critical writing was blatantly biased towards favourite acts. But occasionally you got people who could actually write, such as Tim Blanx, who went off to England with Roxy Music. He was into the pre-punk music of the mid-70s, like Roxy, the Velvets and the New York Dolls, whereas I liked the more country influenced American music, and dance music.”
Split Enz were the first local cover story, followed by Mark Williams and Waves. But local music was difficult to cover, says Jarrett, “because we never had any journalists employed, so the only person who could go out and do interviews was me, and there wasn’t the time. There’s far more consciousness about a New Zealand identity now.”
Because of Jarrett’s background, the graphics were a crucial part of Hot Licks. As photographs didn’t reproduce well on newsprint, covers were done by illustrators such as Frank Womble, Dick Frizzell and Colin Wilson, and the page layout was extremely complex. Although the magazine quickly had a weighty masthead of contributing writers, Jarrett found himself doing everything else: subbing, proofing, paste-up, “the whole shebang. It was very time-consuming, and visitors would come in constantly. Very soon people thought I was an authority.”
Advertising was slow in the early months. “For a start, the record companies had to have their arms twisted to advertise.” They thought [the record store] Taste and Radio Hauraki were calling the shots. “There was a lot of politics involved,” says Jarrett. “Far too much. The whole record industry’s like that. But after six issues, they realised it wasn’t going to go away.”
Hot Licks lasted 27 issues, “quite an achievement, with no budget,” says Jarrett. But towards the end the magazine charged 40 cents an issue. That was a mistake, really, but not the reason it folded. It was still all down to me to do everything, and I was exhausted by the whole process. Plus I had family commitments.”
The circulation reached 8000, distributed through record stores around the country, though in Auckland, through Direction shops only. “It was a bit of a political football, between the purchase of records in the stores, and the amount of publicity in the mag, and advertising. Also, Direction became a distributor of overseas labels like Virgin, Casablanca, ECM – that got right up the noses of the record companies. It became too political – that’s where I lost interest.”
With the management of Direction and Hauraki having changed, there also wasn’t the commitment from above, the returns being difficult to evaluate.
“The only thing about Hot Licks that I believe is of value is that it’s an accurate reflection of its age, and what people thought about at the time,” says Jarrett. “I hate nostalgia. I’m not nostalgic about the magazine at all. It was good self-expression, and I really enjoyed it, but I really like being now, being current.”
© Chris Bourke 1987
Russell Brown writes a detailed tribute to Des Dubbelt and Playdate here. Quotes and information from the above article have appeared elsewhere without attribution (once by a senior academic who should have known better). Feel free to use it, with acknowledgement of the original source.

Village person

Legendary journalist Nat Hentoff has been sacked by the Village Voice after 50 years. He doesn't seem bothered; he'll keep on writing. "See you somewhere else," he says. Hentoff is 83.

For decades Hentoff's writing has concentrated on his passion for civil rights and the freedom of speech. But he first became known as a music journalist in the 1950s. When I started reading about rock'n'roll, there were hardly any books in the libraries, just Hunter Davies' book on the Beatles, Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop (one of the first pop histories, written in six weeks in 1969 and still brilliant). But there were plenty of books on jazz and blues, and many of them had Hentoff's name on them. Oral histories, straight reportage: Hentoff's music writing was about the musicians themselves, rather than what went on in the listener's head. He sat in on sessions by Ellington, Armstrong, Mingus and Davis. Later, he wrote the liner notes for Bob Dylan's first albums, and conducted the myth-making 1966 Playboy interview with him ("A candid conversation with the iconoclastic idol of the folk-rock set").

Hentoff approached his advocacy journalism with courage and an intellectual rigour; he has never been afraid to challenge the left as well as the right, and to take unfashionable positions. He doesn't overburden his music writing with the cerebal analysis of his political work, but the connection is the concern for humanity that comes through both. You don't always get that in music writing.

The Voice at least did the right thing by not just showing him the door with a security guard, struggling with cardboard boxes. (Looking at his desk in the above NY Times pic, I'm pleased to see that it is messier than mine at its worst.) He got the chance to write a gracious farewell column, and the paper printed a lengthy selection of his "greatest hits". Voice colleague Alan Barra penned a tribute, "50 Years of Pissing People Off." As Hentoff himself says, "I'll be putting on my skunk suit at other garden parties, now that I've been excessed from the Voice."

The Voice has a long, distinguished and disreputable history, which Louis Menand details - in a flat-footed kind of way - in the January 5 New Yorker (not on-line). He doesn't concentrate too much on the present but - like so many other inkies - the Voice is in trouble. However pointing the finger at the internet as the sole cause is just publishers shifting the blame; in case after case, proprietors have bought venerable titles and saddled them with debt. They saw golden geese, bought them, then killed them. Marc Cooper's lengthy report behind-the-scenes at the LA Weekly - a recent stable mate of the Voice - indicates some of the problems. At the Voice there has been a revolving door for several years, with long serving staffers either sacked or walking. The magazine survived Rupert Murdoch's ownership, but perhaps won't survive its purchase by New Times Media (which promptly changed its name to Village Voice Media: it liked the cachet of the name, if not the paper). Almost three years ago the New York Observer wrote:

As the dissident Voice staff tells it, the new management is a bunch of out-of-town bean counters bent on dismantling a precious 50-year-old journalistic institution. The new management, in turn, depicts the paper as a haven for thumb-suckers, with a staff so self-satisfied that it refuses to stop writing left-leaning commentary and go out and do some reporting.

The Voice isn't without its faults: its partisanship can be as wrong-headed as the New York Post's, just from the other side. But its influence has been enormous. It created the template for a feisty, useful "city mag" now seen in every city. Its arts criticism could be among the best anywhere, and some of the worst: pretentious and incoherent. Its "Press Clippings" column has been widely copied, as has former music editor Robert Christgau's long-running "Consumer Guide" and his annual critics' poll. The Voice's "Rock Music Quarterly" is the father of the (London) Observer's excellent Observer Music Monthly.

Although Menand concentrates on the Voice's far-distant past - its 1950s beginnings with Norman Mailer and cartoonist Jules Feiffer - in his stolid way, he summed up the issues:

Of course, the paper will share the fate of every other print medium in the digital age, whatever fate that is. Still, more than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere - whose motto might be "Every man his own Norman Mailer" - and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium. It opened up an insecure and defensively self-important profession. Until its own success made it irresistible to buyers who imagined that they could do better with a business plan than its founders had done from desperation and instinct, it had the courage to live by its wits.

Three for the road

1. Attitude

I'll never forget being the only white guy in a rundown picture theatre in Astoria the summer of 1989 when the afrocentric Do the Right Thing came out. The papers - well, the Voice - were talking about nothing else (black critic Stanley Crouch panned it). There's an excellent profile of Spike Lee in the September 22 New Yorker which captures his still burning attitude, and how that has hindered his career. It closes with the writer John Colapinto asking Lee why he hasn't directed a TV ad for the Obama campaign: after all, the Obamas went to Do the Right Thing on their first date:

“You gotta be asked to do that stuff,” Lee said. “Look, if they need me, they know where I am. And in a lot of ways they might—” He paused. “You know, that shit could be used against them, too. ‘Spike Lee, the man who said so-and-so and so-and-so. Now he’s doing commercials for—’ ” He shrugged and smiled. “Sometimes you might be a liability,” he said finally. “Just got to lay in the cut.”

Elsewhere, he says that having a black president would change everything, people's psyche, and specifically African-Americans: “They don’t have to be shuckin’ and jivin’—doing the tap dance—to make a living. And I mean that ‘tap dancing’ figuratively, not literally, because no disrespect to the world’s greatest tap dancer, Savion Glover.”

I don't know Savion Glover, but the quote reminded me of a great black variety performer who grew up in the dying days of minstrelsy and ended up being patronised by Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack. A while back I came across this clip, in which Sammy Davis Jr paid tribute to a host of other performers, with Harold Arlen's timeless 'One for My Baby'. I must read Davis's autobiography ... that's odd, it was called Yes I Can. He achieved a lot in an era when he couldn't stay in the same Las Vegas hotels in which he was performing. What would he have done in this era?  

2. Mrs Brown's Daughter

The jury is still out on Tina Brown's new site The Daily Beast. Smartly designed, exuding that mix of brains and glitz, you can see why the investors went for it. But so far it feels a little corporate. The Huffington Post probably has similar backing and Rolodex of contacts, but has a guerilla madness about it that gives it an edge. The Huff's shrillness is off-putting, so maybe it's just a left alternative to Fox News; as a Hoboken friend pointed out to me in the 80s, yes the Village Voice has some good stuff in it, but so often it just seems like a smart, far-left answer to the (sensationalist, right-wing) New York Post. But this piece from The Daily Beast is an excellent use of the web: "How McCain Can Still Win". The design is so simple but clever: just by rolling your mouse over the image, you can read a precise of what several well-informed pundits think of McCain's chances. Despite what the polls say in the battleground states, hearing what the more rabid Republicans are saying - the ugly face of a more widespread, hidden racism - I'm not putting my share portfolio on an Obama victory. Oh that's right, I don't have one.

3. Type Cast

My first awareness of Helvetica was early in 1968 when a quasi-relative in the US sent out some buttons from RFK's doomed campaign. At the time the font seemed so fresh, so bold, so obviously from somewhere else than New Zealand in the era of Holyoake and one-channel TV. If you haven't seen it, the documentary Helvetica is fascinating. Here's a montage.

There are other viruses that we could eliminate first, but the use of Arial is certainly somewhere on the list. It's the rich man's Helvetica - Bill Gates is responsible - but the poor man's sans serif. Minnesota graphic artist and type designer Mark Simonson has an elegant site sharing his knowledge - and love - of classic type faces, and he has a great piece called "The Scourge of Arial":

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world. Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

Also worth checking out is his obsessive take on the errors film designers make when being lazy about the retro type faces they use. And recently he has cast his eye over the type in Mad Men: it must be very distracting looking at everything through a typographer's eye, sometimes you couldn't see the woodblock for the trees.

I read it in a magazine

1. Degrees of separation

At the New Yorker they talk about "church and state": the separation between the editorial and advertising departments. In its past life, the magazine kept those involved in the sordid task of paying for it on a separate floor of their building. Even in its current Conde Nast phase, interaction between the two areas is done with discretion and is always apparent to the reader. In an education into the inner workings of glossies I once - briefly - worked for an Australian publisher that almost required its editorial employees to ring the advertising dept to tip them off to product placement in any articles. And if there wasn't any mention of an interviewee's Louis Vuitton handbag, then why not?

But it is unwise to stay aloof from the advertising dept, even though they - accurately - just see editorial as the stuff in between their work. Last week's pulping of the Star-Times' Sunday magazine is a case in point: "themed advertising and editorial about breast cancer awareness month" does not sit well with a cover story about that burning issue, sunbeds. The answer is a simple mock layout of the magazine's contents with pencilled-in notes of what advertising sits where, before placing the editorial in the grid. But probably go-betweens with pencils don't exist anymore. Still, the Star-Times sensibly quit while they were ahead, so they didn't feel like the publishers of Nature magazine when eating their cornflakes, and spread their mag out to use as a placemat.

2. Raban parses Palin

After his excellent 1992 essay on Bill Clinton's language shifts during that election, I have been hoping that Jonathan Raban would turn his linguistic ear to the Palin phenomenon. He has just done it: in a recent London Review of Books Raban contributes "Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill". He is perfectly placed to do so, having lived in Seattle for nearly 20 years. In that time he has seen the dot-com boom come and go, and witnessed the societal shifts since 9/11, writing two excellent novels based there around those topics. He has perhaps despaired about the Bush administration as only an informed English intellectual in exile could do. From "Cut, Kill":

What is most striking about [Palin] is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile.

This was written, of course, before the vice-presidential debate, and Tina Fey's parody, which now blurs with the real thing. Negative reaction to the extraordinary governor of Alaska may be past media burnout already, and there could be a backlash at the electoral box-office, though ratings appear to solidifying in this easy-to-understand guide to the battleground states.

3. Cover lines

There's something deeply satisfying about picking up a magazine that knows what its doing, when all the elements fall into place: the perfect mix of light and dark, the surprise extra effort that rewards readers for their loyalty. This is one reason The Word continues to give so much pleasure: there is so much thought put into it, right down to its picture captions. And its extremely funny podcasts - basically raves between veteran editors David Hepworth and Mark Ellen - are an "added value" idea that keeps people coming back. (This one, about Ellen accidentally taking Lucinda Williams out to dinner on Valentine's Night, is a classic). There's a great display of the year's best magazine covers up for an award to be decided this week. Although this example (right) perhaps doesn't have instant impact for New Zealand readers - very view of whom would recognise disgraced governor Eliot "Ness" Spitzer - the simplicity of it catches the eye immediately, and for its intended audience, it's perfect.

4. Cooke's Tour

A few months ago I mentioned the impact of reading, 11 years after the event, Alistair Cooke's account of being in the room when Robert F Kennedy was shot. The Guardian has just published a selection of his classic talks: the showdown over Cuba, the revulsion over Joseph McCarthy, the cost of the Vietnam War, plus Ronald Reagan v Darth Vader (oh, and Bill and Monica, by which stage it was getting brutally obvious that it was time for the 90-year-old Cooke to close his correspondence). A friend of mine once had the job of editing Cooke for print, and it was the highlight of his week revelling in Cooke's prose to make it suit the written word, in the space available. The Guardian also offers archive audio of Cooke's deeply moving Letter From America just after JFK was assassinated, which explains the shock, and also what was lost when the New Frontier was shut down. In a succinct introduction, David Dimbleby considers the master's idiosyncratic style:

He would almost invariably open his Letter from America for the BBC with an anecdote or a description of the seasons or perhaps a reference to jazz or his favourite game, golf, "the Scottish Torture" or to the World Series. Sometimes these opening passages would last so long they reminded me of langorous days at school studying the similes in Matthew Arnold's epic poem Sohrab and Rustum and wondering, as with Arnold's long passages, where they would lead. They never disappointed, always, however circuitous the journey, finishing at some pertinent point which illustrated and so enhanced one's grasp of how the political system or culture of the United States worked.

5. On the good foot

If Bill Clinton thought he was Elvis - remember his Raybans and sax solo, like a bad Tom Cruise movie - then is Obama channelling Muhammad Ali or James Brown here? Is he showing admirable restraint for a man in a suit? I think the Obama campaign has missed the boat on its campaign song, though: all those earnest wimpy new-folkie types like Jack Johnston and Ben Harper and, who knows, Gwyneth Paltrow and other impact players blending the world into one big melting pot. Sounds like an old Coke ad. With such a perfect slogan, why not get on the good foot with the guy who - as his producer Allen Toussaint said - always sang with a smile on his face. Here's Lee Dorsey, backed by the Meters, with the title track of his great album Yes We Can. It inspired the Band to use horns on Rock of Ages.

Thieves Like Us

The hippest book in our high school library was Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book. It was funny, anarchic and full of subversive advice about how to get free petrol, food or even land in late 1960s Amerika. It also had great illustrations by Robert Crumb. Like Tim Shadbolt’s Bullshit & Jellybeans it is a classic of the counter-cultural era. It was well read at school – its philosophical contradictions didn’t occur to 14 year olds – and, for some strange reason, no one seemed to steal it.

There were soon claims – of course – that Hoffman himself had stolen the book from other authors. An anniversary edition gave co-credit to a writer/researcher, Izak Haber. Perhaps Hoffman was just ahead of his time; the “liberation of resources” concept of the book has spawned an imitator on the net, Steal This Wiki, and of course is now rife in music.

When it comes to plagiarism, the thieves will always get caught out. Unless you’re a politician pretending to be Jackson Pollock, though, it’s usually not something that makes the front pages. Academics have seen so many essays re-written they probably know some classics by heart. And good lines in journalism tend to stay in the brain, so when they crop up again without attribution, they get attached to the line in the memory, like a footnote. But those who spot it don’t need long memories any more, now that we have Google.

I have just read a convincing “gotcha” on this topic by Slate writer Jody Rosen: “Dude, You Stole My Article”. With meticulous research, he dissects the persistent plagiarism by a staff writer on a small (circulation: 20,000) “alternative” Texas weekly, The Bulletin. Also the disinterest from the editor when the claims and evidence were put before him.

Plagiarism isn’t a hanging matter, except perhaps in academia. Compared to some non-violent crimes, such as investment companies swindling their customers, or property developers and councils letting shoddy workmanship send people into debt and misery, stealing words doesn’t really steal the food out of the mouths of children.

But it does stick in the craw. Also in Slate, Jack Shafer lists “Eight Reasons Plagiarism Sucks”. It rips off the readers as well as other writers, undermines the credibility of journalism, and sees the thieves get promoted for the work of others (and five other reasons).

Music journalism is not one of the most respected areas of the trade, with good reason. But still, there are readers and advertisers paying for the work, and they expect some kind of honesty: in opinions and in methodology. I always remember my disappointment when I found out a line, ostensibly written by a trusted critic, came from somewhere else. Referring to the prevalance of “Astral Weeks helped pull me through” stories is a good line, and US writer John Grissim deserves credit for using it first, in 1972. Comparing Bono’s singing to the sound made by a “constipated stoat” was childish enough when the late Tony Tyler used it in his entertaining 1984 rant I Hate Rock and Roll, but why you’d steal it later rather than think up a fresh insult is unfathomable.

When new editors settle into a job, they get inundated with offers from freelancers who weren’t used by the previous incumbent. The new editors also often find themselves with an “empty cupboard,” so quickly over-commission to keep things moving, and deal with the consequences (of those eager freelancers) later. I once noticed that the new editor of a magazine was using a lot of book reviewers with unfamiliar names, and their bylines were about as believable as spam emailers. Their copy read like puff pieces, with meaningless adjectives a real critic would never use. So I got onto Google, and searched some of these phrases. They all lead directly to publishers’ websites.

When I called the editor about it he said, “Oh, I’ll have a word with those writers.” The magazine went on to win an award in its category, which shows how flaky awards can be, although it did reflect the hard work of the previous editor who had turned it into a magazine of substance. But an “award-winning editor” was on his way: thankfully, overseas.

Roo burger

The Bulletin has been shut down. I’m gutted, mate. In the week it was to celebrate its 128th birthday, the staff was called together by its foreign owners, private equity firm PBL (does that rhyme with EMI?) and told to pack up their pencils. Magazines can’t survive on their historical laurels, but the Bulletin never tried to. (It celebrated its history, but not all of it: incredibly, up to the early 1960s, it had on its masthead the slogan “Australia for the White Man”.)

The magazine was as feisty in recent years as it had been when it began, or the in the 1970s and early 1980s when I read it a lot: brash but eloquent, intelligent and witty. Its columnists could be Aussie larrikins or sophisticates; it had a self-confidence we rarely managed to pull off. Sharp-eyed humorists such as Ross Campbell, Keith Dunstan (their man in Melbourne, nicknamed Batman), and Ron Saw. The latter wrote about all sort of things but his most unforgettable piece was about having a stroke in his 40s, and how he slowly recovered. They turned it into a book.

They had an excellent film reviewer, Sandra Hall, and columnist Phillip Adams who balanced the irresistible in-house snob David McNicol. The latter was an ACP grandee from the days of Frank Packer, and editor-in-chief of the whole organisation at one time. He had a waxed moustache, a bright red face and an indestructible liver, with the politics to match: he was an Aussie arch-Tory in the Menzies school, and could tell stories from Don Bradman to Dawn Fraser, anybody who shared his dinner table. The only one I ever met was the wonderfully named Dorian Wilde, who was briefly their gossip and food columnist: with a name like that, what else could he be?

The Bulletin was the Australian Time magazine, plus it had a long literary tradition going from Banjo Paterson to David Malouf. It still reflected that in summer specials; the final issue has pieces by Thomas Keneally and Frank Moorhouse, on “nationhood”. On Australian and Asian/Pacific politics, sport, cultural history, literature and the (high) arts, the Bulletin was unbeatable. It broke stories without ever needing to be a scandal sheet such as, for example, the wonderful but short-lived left-wing National Times.

But as we have witnessed with Time magazine, the need for a current-affairs weekly with strong literary and photographic values has been sorely tested since the arrival of CNN and the internet. Reinventing yourself is well-nigh impossible as the readership walks away, ages or literally dies. The Bulletin subscriptions department could surely have offered an insight into how things were going, as each week magazines would be returned, marked with: “Subscriber deceased. Please cancel.”

Because one area that the Bulletin never quite managed to get right was popular culture (for all that it gave birth to several generations of Australian cartoonists such as Petty or Oliphant, who went on to dominant newspaper cartooning internationally). The Bulletin could be stultifyingly serioso: that’s what happens when political journalists have the strongest editorial lobby. They think everyone is interested in what goes between Bowen and Molesworth streets. Not for nothing has Fairfax hired all those yoof bloggers for Stuff.

Magazines need to evolve with the zeitgeist to stay afloat. The New Yorker is better now than it was in 1980s, thanks to the sacreligious shake-up by Tina Brown which has evolved into the stable, intelligent editorship of David Remnick. Rolling Stone now makes more money than ever by kissing goodbye to its earnestness, and embracing fashion and bimbo acts. That’s what brings in the advertising, enables a magazine to survive, and journalists such as David Fricke and Rob Sheffield to keep their jobs. I may not like it, but I’m not its audience (and it is less embarrassing than the current NME). Jann Wenner knows he’s in the ruthless mass-market magazine business, and bimbos like Britney pay the bills and keep him in yachts.

It’s a shock to read that the Bulletin weekly circulation was around 55,000 on a subscriber base of 45,000: this in a country of 21 million. Which makes the Listener circulation of 69,300 in a population of 4 million respectable. Even with strong advertising, sending journalists around that massive country to break stories – and they did, right to the end – and supporting a gaggle of name columnists isn’t possible without a sugar daddy.

Until recently the Bulletin was kept alive by having a stroppy, wealthy owner, Kerry Packer. His firm ACP subsidised it to the tune of $AU 3 million a year, propping it up with the profits of the Australian Women’s Weekly and the tackier end of the magazine market. Once the Goanna croaked, his son James divested the firm of its media interests, preferring to gamble the family fortune on gambling. It’s a strange day that Rupert Murdoch is made to look good, but at least he has kept the (UK) Times and Sunday Times afloat. And it is Murdoch’s paper, the Australian, which has produced the most generous and informed coverage on why the Bulletin was so important, and why it failed.

But to feel the quality, check out the Bulletin’s glorious back pages: the rise of the Holden, Edna Everage, Bob Hawke, Bondi Beach, Ian Botham and Peter Garrett.