Boston News Today - DEAR READER: 5/5/2016

DEAR READER,

I heard about the latest round of Boston Globe buyouts while sorting through my collection of more old magazines and newspapers than a person my age should probably own. Though I often make my gripes with the local newspaper of record public, it still pains me to see any cutbacks and downsizing in the dailies and across media in general. So it’s that much more depressing to hear such news in the middle of flipping through throwbacks of everything from The Source magazine, which in the ’90s dispatched someone to the Middle East to cover Palestinian hip-hop, to National Geographic, which survives but under the ownership of the repulsive Rupert Murdoch. There’s a lot of wisdom in those yellowing pages, from the Boston Phoenix and other iconic Mass alt mags like The Avatar (look it up!), to the OG cornball teenybopper rag Dynamite, a zine ‘for the ‘’80s kid’ that my mom just found in the closet (the cover story was about Tony Danza, and purported to get to the bottom of the “Who really is the boss?” conundrum once and for all). I’m no Luddite, and have covered the future of music and reading for years; I even have four e-books for sale, which I encourage you to cop on Amazon or iTunes. But as somebody who really loves to hold everything from encyclopedias to moldy newspapers to pamphlets, it saddens me to see the options of my daily catch diminish. At one point, this city had at least a dozen publications like this one. Now, including online alternatives, I can count the number of trendsetting culture publications on one paw. Don’t misunderstand me—I’ll always cherish the relics, and hope to one day open up my archives and collection to the public in a place where they can be appreciated. For now, I guess I’m just reminding you to support your print pubs that are still around—whether scrappy indie ones like the Dig or the wretched good-for-nothing neoliberal hackbots at the Boston Globe.

Chris Faraone, DigBoston News + Features Editor

OH, CRUEL WORLD

Dear Poser,
That’s right—you’re such a goddamn poser that I had to break the word out of my ‘98 bag. While we’re speaking about cultural icons that haven’t received nearly enough mention in the past couple of decades, please remind us—are you the biggest Prince fan in the world? Or are you the biggest David Bowie fan? According to different posts on your Facebook wall (with roughly five months in between of you posting nothing but the lamest trend-mongering contemporary indie rock crapola), you’re the world’s leading appreciator of both, which is seismically impossible—especially for somebody who had to ask where they could stream Prince albums online. Epic poseur. That’s you.