Pour Out A Little Liquor

Somehow I missed this, but Culture11 is no more. Sad to see. Even on the web, it takes money to keep the ship afloat. People who care about this stuff should check out Charles Homans autopsy. (H/T The American Scene.) There's a great scene in there where some of Culture11's editors tackle Jonah Goldberg. It's not great because they're tackling him, but because it shows the price modern conservatives pay for walling themselves off from popular culture. In Culture11's wake, something more traditionally conservative has popped up:

It was a grimly funny coincidence that around the time Culture11's financial well was running dry, another Web site sharing its subject matter debuted to much greater fanfare in the right-wing media than Kuo's project ever received: Big Hollywood, an entertainment and politics blog created by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Los Angeles-based Internet entrepreneur who helped launch both the Drudge Report and Huffington Post. Beneath an angry vermillion-colored banner, the blog offers recurring features like the "Celebutard of the Week"--tracking the latest vapidly liberal political utterances from the likes of Cher--and clips of the best conservative moments in film interspersed with rote breaking news from the entertainment industry. It's supposed to eventually host cultural musings from such notable film critics as House Minority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor; commenting on a scene in the new thriller The International in which the characters shoot it out in the Guggenheim Museum, one Big Hollywood contributor coos approvingly, "I love seeing modern (phony) art destroyed."

But for all the bluster of all-caps headlines like "GLOBAL WARMING PROPAGANDA SINKS 'UNDER THE SEA 3D,' " it's a far less courageous site than the comparably nonconfrontational Culture11; beneath the patina of combativeness, it's really just a support group for 24 fans. What Big Hollywood does isn't criticism, or reporting--it's ideological accounting.

While the inability to confront culture is particular to the right, the problem of ideological journalism is not. My ideal is really Norman Mailer in Armies of The Night. Mailer was anti-war, but that didn't stop him from panning the anti-war protests, or panning himself. And he did it while reporting

I'm a lefty. That political bias informs my story selection and my interests. But I'm in the business of storytelling, not of converting people. Journalism is certainly informed by political beliefs, but even more so, political beliefs should be informed by journalism. If they aren't, you start claiming knowledge of masses of people you've never met. You get lazy, your mind slows and you become self-congratulatory and limited.

I always thought Culture11, at its best, was at war with that mentality. I'm sorry to see them go.