Notebook: Alt Writing II

David Carr, from the documentary, Page One: Inside the New York Times. Salt Lake City Weekly editor John Saltas remembered of David Carr, “Smokers are moths, attracted to other smokers. Twenty years ago, there were lots of us blowing smoke, literally and figuratively, as we young lions, and lionesses, too, shared our successes and failures about this thing called ‘alternative journalism’ to which we were all wed. Editors, publishers, production artists, sales reps, it didn’t matter. So long as you smoked, you were welcome to join in any such spontaneous ‘board meeting’ where you might enter with a new idea for compensating distribution drivers and leave with a cover-story idea that worked in Cleveland.” David Carr is wearing a Washington City Paper hat.

Read Part One of this post here!

Perhaps the archetypal alt-weekly editorial trajectory was that of David Carr, who went from writing for Minneapolis’s Twin Cities Reader to editing the Washington City Paper and on to become a beloved and feared media critic for The New York Times, where he exerted, with a warmth and humanity—and improvisatory ferocity—that recalled his days close to the news’s sources on the streets, serious influence throughout the profession. Many stories about David Carr involve his being mistaken for a vagrant while on the job. He wrote a harrowing memoir of his years of addiction that he researched through third-person accounts, The Night of the Gun. His predecessor at City Paper, Jack Shafer, recounts that, as a reporter, “he used his guise the way an anglerfish uses the wriggling growth on its head to attract and then devour other fish.” David Carr ran City Paper during the flushest years of alt weeklies, from 1995 until 2001. It was reading, when he was mostly remembered as a bravura stylist and critic in his own right, about his efforts to recruit to City Paper young Black writers, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jelani Cobb, whom he hired as interns, that got me going on this subject. David Carr’s City Paper arts editor Glenn Dixon wrote of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s arrival at City Paper:
The parameters of the job were clear. You had to ask a novel question about your surroundings, whether literal or cultural, and you had to answer it as best you could. There was no template, no method. You were free to make your own approach. “That was huge for me,” Coates said in a recent interview. “I can’t imagine myself here right now without City Paper. I just can’t. I don’t know what would’ve become of me … I was not doing particularly well at Howard,” he continued. “I had not really done anything in my life up to that point that I’d been particularly successful at.”