Robert Christgau: Poptastic Bye-Bye: Posted on March 27, but I didn't notice until today. Evidently, Blender is no more. Not sure when I got my latest copy, but it's not so far back I had started wondering when the next one would arrive. But then I haven't been very conscious of that sort of thing lately. I'm still working on cramming the Consumer Guide for April into the database, with May likely to appear, like, tomorrow. I'll second Christgau's judgments on Blender. I never read much outside of the review section, which was a good deal better than any other rock zine I've read in a long time -- well, maybe not better than Mojo, but the English still expect criticism, where we're lucky and dumbfounded whenever it appears. I've long thought I should get in touch with Tannenbaum and see if I could get something in. (One fantasy would be to do a supershort jazz-for-rockers list, but I thought of that more in terms of Rolling Stone, and they turned in house to David Fricke for that sort of thing.) Maybe one of those big retrospectives -- Lou Reed or Brian Eno would be good for me, or any of a long list of jazz artists (Armstrong, Ellington, Hawkins, Davis, Coltrane, Coleman, Pepper, Murray, Vandermark). Never got to it, so I never even got rejected. Reminds me that I had finally got an invite to write for Creem just as Lester Bangs quit and moved to New York and the magazine fell into chaos. Reminds me that my gig as music editor at St. Louis Today was to begin the week after they folded.

The future of rock criticism, for better or worse, will be on the web. Christgau is likely not only to be the first but also the last person to make a whole career out of rock criticism in print, and even he was aided by a long-term editing job and a part-time job in academia. On the web we can try to do more while losing less, but the best I can figure is something tangential, maybe even orthogonal, to making a living. Michael Tatum has agreed to work with me on resuscitating Recycled Goods -- it makes some sense to try to tackle big problems with teams, and doing so will help keep me on an even keel. To make it work we need a publisher with some visibility. How we go about doing that is a mystery to me -- the only places I've ever published at are places that invited me, not the other way around. Blender opens up a gap. Would be nice to fill it someway, because otherwise we're just slumping into a Dark Ages stupor, for no better reason than we're too dumb to change business models that don't produce any more.