Point, Counterpoint
[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 10:36 PM Eastern on 10 Apr. See below.]
Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, comments on his blog, On A Pacific Aisle, concerning the recent firing by the LA Weekly (or, rather, by its corporate owner, Village Voice Media) of its longtime, near iconic classical music critic, Alan Rich. Mr. Kosman writes,
It was reading his reviews in New York [magazine] throughout the 1970s that first made me want to get into this game. Imagine what an eye-opener those articles were — the smart, pugnacious prose style, the insatiable curiosity, the breadth of knowledge, and best of all, the passion for music (it's a fortunate critic who loves and hates as keenly as Alan does). They opened up whole new worlds, and continue to do so, week after week.
Mr. Kosman then links to and singles out for censure our post announcing that firing (another MSM classical music critic and blogger, honorably wanting to acknowledge the precedence of that announcement, for delicacy's sake refused to link to the post itself, linking to the main page of Sounds & Fury instead):
In a post from Bizarro World, ACD singles out for praise Alan's most regrettable recent episode, his shameful tirade against fellow critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles. True Richophiles would prefer to blot out the memory of that one; it was, in the memorable words of Tibor Fischer on Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, "not-knowing-where-to-look bad...like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."
It should have been crystal clear from the explicit context of our post that we didn't "singl[e] out for praise Alan's most regrettable recent episode," as Mr. Kosman put it, willy-nilly, faute de mieux, or because we're a "Bizarro World" insensitive clod. We singled out Mr. Rich's "tirade against fellow critics Adam Baer and Chris Pasles" (whoever they might be) because it neatly made our point concerning the courage of erudite Old School classical music critics to say in print what needed to be said no matter how offensive their readers may find it to be; the courage to "dirty [their] hands" and "muss [the] hair and distur[b] [the] digestion" of their readers, as we put it in this post.
In singling out for censure our post announcing the firing of Mr. Rich — not to speak of his censure of Mr. Rich's original "tirade" — Mr. Kosman has unwittingly made our other point for us; viz., that the "PC-contaminated, ultra-'civilized' crowd which today constitutes much of the mainstream classical music critical fraternity," also as we put it, are unworthy successors of their Old School progenitors.
Update (10:36 PM Eastern on 10 Apr): More Point, Counterpoint.
