This time the offending culprit is LA Times staff writer Patrick Goldstein in an article titled "The End of the Critic?" published with a nice picture of Pauline Kael, who it should be noted died quite awhile ago. Goldstein's criticism is as about as current as the picture of Kael.

Criticism is changing, it's always changing. For it to sossify in newspapers, the way it has is a tragedy. One that critical discourse should hardly mourn. The nature of criticism is different than it was five minutes ago. Popular culture was never on our team. Popular press only pretended to have a critically informed opinion or at best hired someone to gild their journalistic credentials. In the end, the critic has always been fighting to be heard, and personally, I would never want ten million readers hanging off my every word. It sounds like some megalomaniacal disease. I want to talk to people who want to listen, many of whom share my same penchant for the written word and critical discourse. If I had five thousand readers, I'd feel like a bloody rockstar.

Who knows? I've never checked the numbers for this site, maybe aggregately I've had five thousand readers. Or a few hundred a day. This is amazing to me. Most of the newspaper critics that Goldstein invokes who got fired or retired were bad. Trying to be smart about bad culture to keep the advertisers happy. Maybe occasionally saying something nice about an experimental masterpiece from a century ago, but hardly spending a line to promote experimental work of our time.

Goodbye to all that. We can decide our own culture. We don't need the newspapers anymore, who's owners were usually jerks anyway. We have each other. And we, us writers and readers alike, can decide for ourselves which critic we think has good and interesting things to say. And if you want to be a professional critic, it's not the easiest or the most difficult thing in the world to achieve. The money has never been that good.

If the music review in the newspaper is dead, goodwrittens, it was never in touch with my sensibility anyways. Has Patrick Goldstein ever heard of Pitchfork Media?
Pitchfork Media's sensibility is more contemporary, smarter, funnier, and more insightful than just about any music journalist writing for the newspapers.

Now it's time we pay attention to critics not because a newspaper says they're good or has enshrined them, but because they say things that are important to us and we vote by reading the website everyday.

The old system was a poor one, I hardly lament its loss, or any of those still clinging to its hull as it slips into the icy sea.

Critics are only as good as their readers, not their print runs or any other nonsense about the death of criticism that Goldstein is trying to pawn off. Like I said yesterday, we need spend more time thinking and less time complaining about our irrelevancy. The system is against this kind of conversation, but we can do it ourselves anyway. It's harder, but I'm not writing because it's easy, or a quick buck, or because I crave celebrity. I write because I have things to say and hopefully I write in way that attracts people to stay and listen.

That's my screed for the week. We now return to regularly scheduled programming.