Mar 31, 2009

Beat Down

Former LA Times stalwart Don Shirley wrote to tell me that Los Angeles CityBeat, the most recent of several attempts to create a viable alternative to the LA Weekly, is "kaput," in his words. (LA Observed had the scoop, of course, but I missed it there.) The venue provided a post-Times forum not only for Shirley, a veteran of the L.A. theater scene with invaluable, irreplaceable--well, it could be called "institutional memory," except that now he's minus an institution--but also for classical-music titan Alan Rich, whose firsthand memory of the LA Philharmonic stretches back to the Mehta days. That's value you can't put a price on--and, sadly, these days it seems no one wants to.

1 comment:

Bob Thomas said...

Actually, Alan Rich is still writing up a storm on his Blog (www.soiveheard.com). It's not making him any money but he still has his platform and his acerbic pen has diminished only slightly (read his latest scribe on Zubin Mehta as a prime example).