CAPITAL & MAIN-The last two decades have seen the downsizing or demise of countless American print media outlets, leaving many of us resigned at reports of the latest corporate consolidation or private equity takeover of a beloved publication.
Though I unhappily count myself among the jaded, one precursor to the 21st century erosion of the Fourth Estate still carries a particular sting and important lessons for our time.
In June 1996, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin swaggered into a small newsroom in West Los Angeles where a group of journalists had gathered for what they expected to be a living wake for their paper. Starting in Arizona in the 1970s, the two men had built the largest chain of alternative weeklies in the U.S. through a series of aggressive acquisitions. Though the founders of New Times tried halfheartedly to put lipstick on a pig with reassurances about their intentions, the staff’s worst fears were soon confirmed.
Both Eddie S. Glaude's Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own and Bill V. Mullen's James Baldwin: Living in Fire are organized around what Mullen calls the “arc of change, reflection, and evolution” in Baldwin's life story.
For most Americans the terms “environmentalist” and “liberal” are more or less synonymous. For many historians the set of ideas called environmentalism and the set of ideas called liberalism are similarly and for similar reasons connected. But it is not at all clear why these associations make sense. The environmental historian Roderick Nash provides one explanation for the pairing of environmentalism and liberalism in
The Rights of Nature, where he argues that “one can regard environmental ethics as marking out the farthest limits of American liberalism.”
1 For Nash, the association is a direct one: environmentalism and liberalism are related because the one is an expression of the other. Liberalism, in Nash’s view, centers on granting rights based on intrinsic worth to the previously marginalized and defenseless. As liberal thinkers have argued for the moral consideration of more and more subjects a process that Nash calls the “ethical extension of liberali
April 07, 2021 at 4:14pm
Visionary media arts theorist and critic Gene Youngblood, whose prescient 1970 book
Expanded Cinema reshaped the fields of art and communications, predicted technological advances in filmmaking, and offered the first serious recognition of video and software-based works as cinematic art forms, died on April 6 in Santa Fe at the age of seventy-eight.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1942, Youngblood spent most of the 1960s in Los Angeles variously working as a reporter and film critic for the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, as a reporter for KHJ-TV, and as an arts commentator for KPFK. In 1967, he was hired at $80 a week as associate editor at the
Expanded Cinema, by Gene Youngblood. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 464 pages.
WHAT IF FILM CRITICISM could be read as science fiction? The thought crossed my mind as I was revisiting Gene Youngblood’s influential 1970 survey,
Expanded Cinema. Republished by Fordham University Press on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary after decades out of print, it’s a book that functions as history and augury at once. Youngblood offers, as the title suggests, an integrative approach to some of the most radical nodes of moviemaking in the 1960s, bringing together bodies of work that might otherwise be understood in contradistinction Stan Brakhage meets Bell Labs and elucidating them with ideas drawn from communication and design theorists such as John McHale, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller, who provided the introduction to