I used to be a very fast writer. When I worked for KCMU radio I used this skill daily to my advantage. As the resident theater critic, in three years I averaged reviewing 205 plays a year.
That pace seems unsustainable but it wasn’t. I was young, just out of school, and working a sinecure job on the graveyard shift. I had literally all day to write, and early nights for theater viewing at a time when theater ticket prices were competitive with cinema.
I wrote quickly because I had to. But I also wrote quickly because it was urgent. Seattle was a theater Mecca (or at least a Medina) then. There were 104 producing theater companies yet virtually no press in Seattle covered the arts, much less theater. There was no Stranger. There was nothing called the World Wide Web, or as it would be known, Teh Interwebz. The alternative press were the Seattle Weekly and Seattle Gay News, and me — and those two rarely covered the things I was interested in.
Too, I had that wonderful sense of oblivion one can only have when one is young. I had a lot of things to say that I didn’t see being said anywhere else. Way before identity politics, I was a punk-ass Black kid with a certain amount of erudition and world travel that cared about the universal power of the arts to overcome time, distance, and cultural morality to put people into touch with the truths to be found in life. And as youth tend to be, I was shocked how no one else seemed to give the slightest care about the things I held to be most important.
So it was easy to write then, and to write prolifically — and, in all humility, quite well.
But, to quote Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan:
My guard stood hard when abstract threats too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now
My age has greatly increased since then but I’m not sure I’m older. Not like that.
I’ve read a lot more and traveled a lot farther. That stinging sense of lonesome righteousness I had in my teens and twenties has faded, or at least transmogrified into a more human-looking form. The world itself has changed too.
When I started as a critic I knew that if I didn’t write something then those productions, that period in time, that art would be lost to history because there was no one else to record it. That is no longer true. There is, allegedly, an alternative press now. I don’t have to be the person who covers alternative theater because in Internetlandia there are now dozens of writers who do so (or at least claim to). No one needs me to fill that role.
No one needs more opinions about theater or art (or anything) these days. Indeed the converse is true: there are too damned many written opinions, most of them unqualified. Standard social discourse has gone from “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like” to “Well, I spent two minutes on Google and I have a fully expert opinion about why all artists should be using copper pots to boil their oils for painting on Op-Deluxe linen canvas, and if you don’t think so then you are an ignoramus and probably an anti-woke pedophile who believes in white supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy.”
I do not get paid to engage this brand of omphaloskepsis so I don’t. Even if I did, my first response, rather than words, would likely be a fire hose. In my early 20s I would have been dumb enough to think such people could be made to see the error of their ways. I am no longer that foolish.
I am now old enough and wise enough to realize that a sizable part of my writing from my 20s relied upon that foolishness. “Here, let me correct you,” I thought. After all if I were that clueless, I would want to be corrected. I thrived on being corrected. I thrived on learning new things, new perspectives, new ideas, especially when they increase my ability to think about and enjoy things I previously could not. Consequently I can now appreciate Alain Resnais, Chantal Akerman, Willem de Kooning, Samuel Beckett, Tony Conrad, Sarah Kane, and a thousand other things because I was willing to change my mind if someone would only talk to me like I was a sensible person.
I am no longer sure that anyone is willing to be corrected — or, shall we say, educated as in “led forth” — as I so greatly desired then. A quick glimpse of virtually any series of posts on social media services makes me doubt such things. It also makes me doubt there is any space left in people’s lives for discussion. Discussion happens when people speak thoughtfully and listen thoughtfully not simply to respond but also to understand. A series of posts is not a discussion. Glib retorts are not discussion. Repeated argumenta ad hominem are not discussion. Strings of AI generated emojis are not discussion. But these are the body of SNS, and SNS currently takes the space and fills the role of what old-timers used to call “discourse.” I have zero interest in these particular tropes or these bullying tactics so I disengage.
In the contemporary environment in which I publish however fitfully The Seattle Star, I no longer feel a sense of personal urgency to write. I no longer feel essential to Seattle’s civic discourse about theater or anything else. I no longer have the sense that I can say things that have not been said before or elsewhere.
More importantly, I no longer lack the ability not to write. I have mastered that ability with aplomb. I can say to myself, “Hey, I don’t need to write today” and have it feel truthful. 25-year-old Omar would be shocked at such a statement. Omar of 2025 just nods.
So here I am. Thirteen years into publishing a magazine devoted to proving that a quality magazine could exist, could be online, could be freely shareable, could be freely accessible, and still be meaningful. And it still exists. It is still a quality magazine. It is still online, still free to read, free to share, free to remix. I am not so sure however that it is meaningful. I am not so sure it can be.
My friend Pete Cogle brought an end to his outstanding PC Podcast series last month. After 19 years and 863 regular episodes, he felt that its time had come. Both Pete and I can remember when something as avant-garde as the Clinical Jazz netlabel would release albums that had 250,000 or more downloads, where even a popular mainstream jazz CD might sell 5,000 if the artist were lucky. With Pete’s own PC Podcast regularly 100,000 or more people would download his podcast every two weeks. In the past five or six years however, those numbers have decreased to at time a couple dozen.
One could say this is because podcasts are outmoded, but that would be hard to support, considering the fad for them over that same period in which Pete’s PC Podcast fell into its lowest numbers by far. Because of the rise of streaming services and the stranglehold of corporate algorithms, Pete opines there simply is no place left anymore for a podcast about music. And indeed the numbers are on his side.
I wonder how true this is of my magazine. My numbers remain higher than Pete’s certainly, but they are nowhere near 2012-2015 numbers. When I have a fantastic cycle of translated poems from Károly Lencsés, or a brilliantly funny nonfiction piece like Michael Hickey’s piece on his father and Billy Joel’s sunglasses, or an incredible article by Margaret McMullan on how anti-democratic workers have corrupted the voting process, I feel like a father proud of his daughters and sons reaching the shortlist. Then I see the analytics, and I’m a bit nonplussed. Perhaps, like musical podcasts, there is no place left for the general purpose magazine in this world of niche upon niche upon niche and its obsession with hypertargeted advertising.
It’s easy to blame technology. AI makes it even easier to crank out tommyrot and, as Steve Bannon would say, flood the zone with shit. But that’s not actually the problem. The problem is American culture: its intellectual laziness, its obsession with bread and circuses, its complete inability to slow down and value anything other than hustle, as if we were still exemplifying Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic. American readers and listeners and consumers have simply let brainless corporate algorithms take over their decision making. After all it’s efficient.
The consequences are exactly what one would predict. Writing becomes popular — because it’s written by a person who’s already popular. People watch movies because they already know their contents. All the while, corporate bloodsuckers wave the carrot of “virality” in front of the obscure artist promising them they can make it too! But as Joan Westenberg points out:
Even if you “win” this game, you lose. Because once you’ve optimized yourself for virality, you’ve trained both the algorithm and your audience to expect increasingly extreme content. You become trapped in an arms race against yourself, always needing to push things a little further to maintain relevance.
This isn’t just bad for creators — it’s corroding culture itself. When the only path to reaching mainstream audiences is either extremism or pre-existing fame, we lose the vital middle ground where actual dialogue happens. We’re selecting for either the most outrageous voices or the most established ones, with nothing in between.
The alternative is to accept obscurity. And, I suppose, that is what I’ve done at The Star. Nothing I publish is going to go viral. Nothing is going to propel us to the readership numbers of The Atlantic or The New Yorker. Nothing will even make us self-sustaining, in the sense that all my writers and I will ever be able to sustain a minimum wage subsistence life based on our work here. Nevertheless, we continue. But for how long?
All we can do is wait and see and endure. In the meantime — well, there’s always the Sunday comics.
