A Restless Critic Moves On
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Ben Kim notes with pleasure the development over the last few years of both zines and the on-line world; they’re democratic alternatives to the cultural hegemony of media like the two dailies and even the Reader. His contribution to the phenomenon, and personal twist, was to simply declare himself a rock critic. He did it in 1991 by entering–as a private citizen, so to speak–the de facto establishment of the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll; he continued by peppering the Reader with letters, some directed at yours truly. Like a good critic, his opinions were challenging and original, and prompted a continuing dialogue with other letter writers. Later he actually got published as a critic. He wrote freelance pieces and then took over as Raw Material columnist for New City, the alternative weekly he leaves this week. “As the zine explosion proved,” he says, “there’s not a lot of barriers to entry to being a rock critic. You can just appoint yourself a member of the club, if you have the aesthetic and the writing style to put it across.”
Kim’s leaving New City, he says, more than a bit vaguely, “to refocus my priorities.” Though he plans to continue freelancing, he’s taken a full-time job with Chicago’s Asian-American Institute. Apart from rock, Kim’s other interest is in all things Asian. With Seam’s Sooyoung Park and William Shin, he released a compilation of music by Asian-American rock bands, Ear of the Dragon, this year, and he’s also a contributor to Asian-American magazines like A and Yolk. At the institute, he’ll oversee the Asian American Film Festival. He’ll try to increase the profile of that event in particular and of Asian culture in Chicago generally. “There is a sort of parochialism on the coasts,” he says, on the part of the arbiters of Asian-American culture. “Chicago, and everything between the coasts, really, is seen as somewhat secondary.”
