Broad Street Review
A new Philadelphia arts publication with some old names - edited by Dan Rottenberg, written by former Inky critics Daniel Webster, Leslie Valdes and other scribes - has splashed down into the roiling online scene. Called the Broad Street Review, it styles itself "The Internet for Grown-ups." It addresses some old scores.
Rottenberg I've read since he edited something called the Chicago Journalism Review. Since then he's been at the helm of the Welcomat (now called Philadelphia Weekly), Seven Arts magazine and Philadelphia Forum, and been a top editor at Philadelphia Magazine. The first piece that caught my eye is by Dan Coren, a former Penn music department professor, who assesses The Philadelphia Orchestra, from Ormandy to Eschenbach, in 1,567 words.
The piece is pleasantly episodic, and iconoclastic. It slaps around The Inquirer's coverage of the orchestra, and concludes with this notion:
It remains to be seen whether or not sheer musical excellence is enough to save the city's orchestral music in today's circumstances. But, it seems to me, Philadelphia's music lovers should be singing hymns of thanks for Christoph Eschenbach.
(For the record, Peter Dobrin and David Patrick Stearns alternate weeks in covering the Philadelphia Orchestra's concerts. A phone call could have saved The Review from that missed note.)
The Review is too new for letters, so Rottenberg stocks that column with an old one, a response to something he wrote in 2003 in Philadelphia Style about Robert Driver and the Opera Company of Philadelphia. That's kind of curious. In it, Jane Nemeth, a former assistant director of the company, shares her disgust for the state of the cultural institution.
Elsewhere, a Rottenberg review of Munich manages to dismiss the Spielberg film and the Jewish Exponent's concerns that the Palestinians are depicted too sympathetically.
My favorite read so far: A farewell to Alan Halpern, the editor who defined the city magazine. Rottenberg writes:
When Alan Halpern became editor of Philadelphia Magazine in 1951, magazines were largely a national phenomenon. It was the heyday of Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post. City magazines and local alternative weeklies as we know them today didn't exist. Philadelphia itself was a bland Chamber of Commerce giveaway that engaged in some of journalism's most corrupt practices, like selling adulatory cover stories to any Chamber member willing to pay the going price. To be sure, America's cities then enjoyed robust competition among local daily newspapers. But in most of these places— including Philadelphia— the papers avoided disturbing the local status quo or each other, preferring to practice the Gentleman's Code of the journalism profession, i.e., "Don't you tell on me, and I won't tell on you."
Amid this intellectual torpor, Halpern seemed an unlikely revolutionary. He was a shy introvert who once described himself as "a hermit progressing to a recluse." Like another famous introverted editor— William Shawn of the New Yorker— Halpern shrank from direct engagement with the world and so relied instead on his writers to feed his curiosity. In the process, Halpern invented the modern urban monthly magazine— stylish, sophisticated and abrasively irreverent toward the local establishment— and consequently changed the face of American journalism. During Halpern's 29 years as editor, Philadelphia evolved from a Chamber of Commerce puff sheet with no editorial budget and just 6,000 readers to an innovator in investigative reporting and finally to a fat and trendy merchandising tool with 142,000 paid circulation by the time he left in 1980.
The Review's categories seem a little stuffy to me - lots of high art, but not so much of those lowly popular arts where much juicy life resides. Still, you've got to like a publication that has a sense of history.