The Paperwork Explosion

Media watch Pt 1

Was listening to an archived
interview by the irrepressible Kim Hill with journalist Michael Wolff on National Radio, as I made mexican meatballs the other night.

Any of Kim Hill’s podcasts are worth checking out: she is an institution in New Zealand radio. At times dry and confrontational, yet quick to make sly jokes and be chatty: your grandmother would think she was a hoot. This interview isn’t notable so much for Wolff’s character defences for media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, so much as for the comments about what makes a good sellable paper and the future of newspapers in general.
According to Wolff, there isn’t one.
He’s hardly the first person to pronounce doomsday, withmany newspapers closing or cutting staff numbers in the USA in 2008, and others outsourcing journalistic work on top of technical labour to India. But it’s always sobering to hear such a hopeless prognosis.

Of course, there’s no doubt, it’s much more time-economic to click through one’s favourite sections online, especially when there are slide shows of hypo allergic architecture in towns called Snowflake to look at. (Did I really say time-economic?)

Whether they maintain an online presence or not, I suspect the demise of print editions of newspapers like the New York Times will end a golden age of writers who were rewarded, however meagerly, for penning standfirsts like the following:

“Living with the clones of a dead dog has its surprises. The DNA may be the same but the behavior is another story.”

Media Watch Pt. 2

I’ve ranted incoherently about American Vogue before. But on December 31, 2008, Cathy Horyn did us all a favour by expressing the shortcomings and strong points of Vogue more delicately, in this article in the NY Times.

(Images by Scott King as posted on www.creativereview.co.uk. King is an artist-slash-graphic designer who has recently exhibited at Ps1 in NYC and the Kunstverein in Munich)

Top Game

Pictured: Erik recording Babu’s set for RBMA Radio in the Brewery Studios.

A week or two ago I interviewed Babu, a Filipino-American producer and turntablist best known for his work with Dilated Peoples and the Beat Junkies, who was in town to promote his new album Duck Season Vol 3.

The Beat Junkies released some bangin hip hop mixtapes back in the day that me and my friend Emi-chan loved, informed by an understanding of the breakbeat that stretches into hemispheres and rhythm structures from Clyde Stubblefield and David Matthews to Iranian rare grooves. Along with other crate diggers like Cut Chemist and Egon, they’re like some kind of west coast hip hop intelligentsia.

I’ve always found that crew to be impeccably polite and engaging, but with his buddha-like good looks and stoic expression, Babu has always seemed a bit less approachable than the others. And since I hardly possess nerd-level knowledge of rare funk and soul 45s, I asked my workmate Davide (who used to be editor of Juice) to contribute a few questions for my notebook.

Davide’s questions were pretty much the same as the ones I had scribbled down already: general, open-ended queries about how Babu put together the line up of guest features on the album, and how he saw the state of turntablism nowadays.

On-mic Babu turned out to be as classy and professional an interview subject as you could hope for. He spoke about the challenges of being a producer: how if MCs are working with someone like Dre they’ll automatically bring their top game, but the rest of the time you have to challenge them to step to the plate. (You can hear the recording of the interview soon on RBMA Radio.)

Interviewing renowned crate diggers might not be as hard as I thought – OK, it’s not like we talked about the rarest platters from Sao Paulo’s Galerias, but still, Babu didn’t have to be challenged to give thoughtful, entertaining answers. When you have an album to promote, it’s all part of the game, but it was a pleasure all the same.

Meta-Musto

Three of my favourite scribes contribute columns to New York’s Village Voice newspaper. One of them, Michael Musto, recently wrote a blog post about the passing of Paul Weyrich, in which he posts an outtake of a story he wrote some 14 years ago. He quips: “You can tell how old the story is by my incessant use of the phrase “information highway,” for which I apologize.”

Also, his post about a YMCA member getting his kit off is an amusing titbit. I am now fascinated about the readership demographics of Playgirl.