Yalestar's All-Media Commentary

The older I get, (just turned 31, or as Matt Farnham says, "thirty-wonderful"), the more of a media junkie I've become. Left to my own devices, I'd happily spend the whole day reading newspapers, magazines, websites, and listening to the radio. I never have been much of a TV watcher, but I do manage to rack up 3 or 4 hours a week watching the ol' picture box.

So here's my commentary on various media sources I ingest nowadays. Some of them are Colorado-specific, so that probably won't mean much to people in the other, what is it, 32 states in the country.

Newspapers:
Reading the newspaper is one of life's greatest pleasures. Denver is one of a handful of cities that still has two newspapers (the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News), and until fairly recently they operated independently of each other, which led to some fierce competition that I think benefitted the public in a big way. About a year ago they consolidated their business operations to form the Denver Newspaper Agency, but they still operate independently in every other way. So it's kinda weird, if you subscribe to the Denver Post, you still get the Sunday RM News delivered to your house on Saturday. Another really strange thing about having two dailies is when one paper has a huge lead story, leading you to believe that something really drastic has happened, but then you look at the other paper and it's like on page five or something.

About the only thing I like the RM News is that it's printed up tabloid-style (i.e. folded like the Enquirer), which is easier to handle when you're reading it at a restaurant or on the terlet. But other than that it seems to be a lot like USA Today, lots of big color photos and little sidebars and other optical garbage. So I typically only read the News on Saturday or if someone leaves a copy behind in the cafeteria at my workplace.

The Post is more traditional in its design, and seems to me a much more substantial newspaper as well. It just got a new editor and he's claiming he's going to morph it into a world-class paper. The Post also has, in my opinion, way too many columnists. That would be fine if any of them had anything interesting to say, but they don't. Typically they spend 400 words re-wording a current news story, and then a few sentences of opinion. And they have this music writer that just makes me want to barf. In his photo caption he's wearing sunglasses and has this shit-eating grin on his face as if to say, "I am a very happening middle-aged man! Ask me about the Linkin Park!" Now, it'd be easy for me to cap on the guy for overestimating his own hipness quotient, but my real beef with the guy is his startling overuse of the most tired, banal rock journalism cliches. He's a perfect example of newspapers watering down their arts coverage so as to appeal to a wider audience, but failing to realize that arts readers like style and opinion, but the average elderly lady isn't going to read it anyway, so why bother dumbing it down for that demographic?

Then there's Westword, the local independent newsweekly. You know the type; every decent-sized city has one these days. The free paper where every headline is a bad pun and there's 60 pages of sex ads in the back. I fucking hated the Westword when I first moved here, but I've really warmed up to it recently. They've got some top-shelf writers who dig up some great stories and really flesh them out. And they just got a new restaurant reviewer who I look forward to reading every week, and several hundred restaurant capsule reviews, which are really helpful. The music writing is really on the ball, too, although I think we'd all benefit from less coverage of turntablists, since I think that's only music in the most nominal sense of the word.

Magazines:
I'm a big admirer of magazine writing and feature writing, but it seems like a great many magazines have started to really suck hard. But still I feel like I'm missing something if I don't at least leaf through as many magazines as possible. So when I go to the rec center to work out, I can read the magazines that people leave there, shit like Entertainment Weekly, Popular Mechanics, Mother Jones, and even People (aside: last winter I was housesitting and People was the only thing they had to read in the whole house. So later that month I went with Glenda to a doctor's office and there was a stack of People back issues, and I was ashamed that I had already read all of them) (second aside: a really funny thing about People is their letters section. People write such serious, heartfelt letters about the comings and goings of celebrities, you'd think it was a really pressing matter.).

One magazine that really chaps my ass is a local rag called 5280, which is one of those city-specific lifestyle/culture magazines. Most big cities have them nowadays. It seriously pisses me off that a periodical purporting to cover the spectrum of culture of Denver concerns itself solely with things that would appeal to rich white people at leisure. I'm tempted to write in and tell these people that yo, watching rich people recreate is not most peoples' idea of culture.

So anyway, these days I subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, and Wired. That keeps me plenty occupied. Of these, I'd say I get the most satisfaction from The Atlantic. The shit is almost always interesting, informative, and thought-provoking, not to mention superbly crafted. Back in February they ran an article about daily life in Iraq that was so intriguing that I think I've read it five or six times. And that column on the last page called "Word Court," where people write in with really abstruse linguistic questions is a total gem. Some people say The Atlantic has a left-wing bias, but I don't think that's too true. I think it's like NPR in that its content tends to appeal more to people of a lefty bent, but I don't see any blatant editorial bias. (Mother Jones... now there's a liberal bias for you).

I like Newsweek because it serves as a nice, easily digested re-cap of the week's events and they have a nice way of summing up topics I wouldn't ordinarily follow by reading the newspaper, such as stock market news and some international news. It's also good terlet and help-Yale-fall-asleep reading. I'm also fascinated at how they make all their articles sound exactly the same, almost as if they have a machine that takes in certain variables like location and type of story and then churns out the story. But I suppose that's true of any national magazine. Anyway, I'll probably let this subscription run out and then switch over to The Economist, which seems to have much more in-depth international news and less (if any) focus on Jennifer Aniston's tits or the latest developments in VCRs for your minivan.

Wired tends toward being annoying eye candy and gadget worship for people with teeny attention spans and lots of dispensable income. And I have to say I'm not a fan of really obnoxious design, and Wired takes that shit way too far. I mean, metallic silver text on a bright yellow background... fuck, do you want me to read it or dance to it? They do however usually run at least one really well-written feature every issue. And the subscriptions are really cheap-- 12 bucks a year.

Then there's quite a few magazines that I dig that I don't subscribe to. And I'm lucky enough to have a pretty bitchin' newsstand near my house, so I try to get over there once a month to browse and occasionally make a purchase. There are thousand of ephemeral, fly-by-night zines out there, too many to mention. But as regular periodicals go, The Big Takeover is probably the pinnacle of rock mags as far as I'm concerned. Skyscraper is a distant second, but is quite possibly thee most self-serious periodical I've ever read. I kinda like Hit List and Magnet's alright. I'm always surprised when I visit a newsstand to see that Maximum Rock'n'Roll is still alive. It was shoddy and doctrinaire enough to begin with, but then its founder Tim Yohannon died, and now I shudder to think to the depths to which it has sunk. If you ever feel like you need a heapin' helpin' of worthless, self-referential, dogmatic columnists and even more worthless, self-referential, pedantic record reviews concerning every shit-lip, fifth-generation Exploited clone band in every jerkwater burg in the world, read MRR. I'm ashamed to say that I used to purchase MRR religiously, every month. Looking back, it's hard to imagine why, but I guess it's because it was really the only thing I could get in Missoula, MT back in the early 90s.

Web:
The web is too fucking huge, man. I'll never get to the end of it. True, with the shit-stream of information out there nowadays, it's tricky to find a website you can feel comfortable enough with to trust and keep coming back to. So I don't really get much actual news from the web, but there are a lot of sites with good commentary out there. Metafilter is a good place to watch people argue, some very eloquently. The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles is a site done by "Geography of Nowhere" author James Howard Kunstler and is a scathing critique of the fat smelly spectacle that America has become. The Mike Farge site (and I have no idea why it is so yclept) is a multi-user --ahem-- 'blog done by former and present Missoulians, most of whom I don't really know that well personally. But I really dig reading the clever turns of phrase and drunken musings of these cats, which falls under the category of social commentary somehow, I figure. Then there's the USS Clueless, which to my knowledge is done by just one fellow who churns out a prodigious amount of political commentary pert' near every day. It's thorough almost to a fault, and you get the feeling that this fellow can crank it out faster than you can read it.

I like the writing and commentary on tpoh.org and I agree with just about everything the guy says. The chap insists on using the British spelling conventions (e.g. "neigbourhood"), though, which is weird, since I think he lives in Tennessee. I could do without that. Spell American! And of course there's the jerkslap over at yalestar.com who seems to think he can convince people that he knows what he's talking about by sprinkling whatever 25-cent words he may have cribbed from thesaurus.com that morning.

Television (or "TV")
I'm too restless to sit and watch TV for longer than about an hour at a time, but I do manage to let the pretty lights tickle my rods and cones a few hours each week. Glenda tapes "Blind Date" and "Elimidate" every day, which I sorta half-watch in between reading magazines while eating dinner. Both shows are entertaining as hell (in the train-wreck sense of the word) and both also serve to confirm that we are indeed a wicked and venal species that very much deserves whatever purgatorial fate that awaits us.

Most Sundays I somehow find myself watching the weekly political interruption-fests like "Meet the Press" while cooking breakfast. Then after those are over, there's two or three episodes of "Family Ties" on, which I cannot possibly tear myself away from.

Radio:
Like most cities, the Denver radio market is pretty much owned by Clear Channel and their flotilla of stations that play the most god-awful pablum. The university in Boulder has a great station, but it's on AM and doesn't have a strong enough signal in most of Denver. So I was an NPR-only man as far as Denver radio goes. And the public radio here has two stations: one for classical music and opera, and the other for news and information, and it's totally great. But two stations means double the fundraising, or so I would think. No, they have fundraising weeks FOUR TIMES a year here on public radio. It's pretty annoying.

But then last June, some enterprising people came up with a novel concept for the talk radio format. Heretofore, talk radio in Denver had been dominated by Clear Channel stations hosting extreme right-wing nutjobs. So they borrowed a bunch of cash and started up KNRC, a decidedly non-nutjob talk radio station. I was addicted to it within ten minutes of hearing it. They managed to wrangle some really interesting, level-headed hosts. It makes for some satisfying listening for my one-hour commute each way, and since I listen to music all day at work, I'm ready for some non-rock while driving.

Shit, this is way too long.

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