Ferment, flourishing and fun: My 25 years with the City Pulse
I’m sitting at my dining room window one morning in November 2013, nervously waiting for Yo-Yo Ma to call me. In my hand is a 3 x 5 card scribbled with carefully researched questions.
The phone rings. I pick it up.
Courtesy
“Hey, Larry, this is Yo-Yo,” chirps a cheerful voice. The tension in my gut starts to relax.
“You’ve interviewed two of my favorite people in the world, Dave Brubeck and E.O. Wilson. Did you speak to E.O. Wilson recently? I just read his book, ‘Letters to a Young Scientist.’”
Whaaa? Yo-Yo Ma, the world’s most famous classical musician, cellist for popes and presidents, was asking me about stuff? He took the trouble to look into what I’ve been doing?
I forgot about the card. We started talking about ants.
“They can teach us so much,” he said.
To avoid dropping the first footnote in the 25-year history of City Pulse, I’ll quickly note that E.O. Wilson was a distinguished biologist and the world’s top expert on ants. Brubeck, of course, was a great jazz pianist and creator of the classic hit “Take Five.”
Both were also great humanitarians, like Yo-Yo Ma.
I’m digging this memory up now because I’ve been asked to write something personal about my 25 years with the Lansing City Pulse and this is the best way I can think of to get a foothold.
The quarter-century arc of City Pulse, its remarkable survival against so many odds, is a grand occasion for amazement and gratitude.
To look at it another way, each of the thousands of stories I’ve written in those 25 years — amounting to over two and a half million words by my rough count — is a tiny occasion for amazement and gratitude.
I climb down from this inky mountain like Moses, my hair white with age, if not wisdom, my face baked red with bright memories of thousands of amazing interviews and encounters.
Yo-Yo Ma, and many other wonderful people, taught me there is no such thing as a routine encounter or an uninteresting subject. At some point, he must have made up his mind to make sure that every interaction with other people — even his 700th interview with a pesky local journalist — meant something to both parties.
And did I mention that his concert was sold out? He didn’t have to do a press interview at all.
I’ve been very lucky to talk with amazing people like Ravi Shankar (courteous and warm), Tony Curtis (a manic extrovert who loved to drop f-bombs), Neil deGrasse Tyson (the consummate explainer), Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull (would not STFU and let me get back to work) and on and on.
But all of that was just a sideshow. When I look back on the last 25 years, it’s not the famous people I’ve interviewed that stick with me the most.
In greater Lansing, we are graced with more talented, good and generous spirits than a legion of journalists could ever adequately recognize and describe.
Musicians, artists, writers, poets, businesspeople, scientists, architects, activists — there have been so many I dare not name one, or even a few, and leave out so many others.
Both the MSU Jazz Studies program and the Lansing Symphony Orchestra embarked upon a golden age just as I settled into the front row, and that’s just for starters. Whether it’s visual arts, the poetry scene, the folk scene, local theater, public art — name any cultural delight humans come up with, it’s probably flourishing here, punching well above the city’s middleweight statistical status.
I’m also amazed and grateful for the many wonderful people I’ve worked with — especially the arts and entertainment (aka arts and culture) editors, a long line of hard-working, generous and talented people that gravitated to City Pulse and gave it their all.
Again, it’s tempting to unroll a long scroll of names, but if I started, there would be no end to it, and some important people would surely be left out.
However, there is one name it would be criminal to omit. City Pulse founder and publisher Berl Schwartz kept the paper going through a brutal recession, a direct challenge from a faux alternative weekly bankrolled by Gannett, a never-ending onslaught of local and national turmoil, and, finally, a crippling and nearly fatal pandemic.
It was always thus. The day before my first published story appeared — Sept. 12, 2001 — well, you know what happened.
Berl not only took a chance on an unproven writer with a modest initial assignment (to write reviews of the Lansing Symphony) — he kept on pushing me into bigger fields of clover. He encouraged me to do off-the-wall things like a crazy Christmas story called “I Took a Jew to Frankenmuth” and didn’t balk at headlines like “Kitschy Coup” (about an exhibition of velvet art).
City Pulse gave me the opportunity to dive into hundreds of in-depth arts and culture stories, giving me the space to write a profile or cover story at magazine length, when so many other outlets were cutting back.
Sometimes even a cover story wasn’t enough. Along the way, we created massive special sections detailing the quarter century’s biggest local architectural triumphs, the conversion of the Art Deco Ottawa Power Station to the headquarters of the Accident Fund and the construction of the MSU Broad Art Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid.
I feel nothing but outrageously lucky to have been in the perfect perch to observe and describe so cultural ferment, flourishing and fun.
I have a great photo of Hadid smiling at me while glamorously getting into a car after the Broad Museum’s opening ceremony, with my bicycle in the background, parked next to a Dumpster.
Oh yes, the bicycle. Lansing being Lansing, connected by miles of excellent trails and still relatively sane when it comes to road traffic, I’ve been able to do most of my reporting in the past 25 years by bicycle. Nice work of you can get it.
And I’m still chasing stories on that bike. City Pulse’s miraculous longevity reminds me of Michael Corleone’s remark about the aging gangster Hyman Roth from “The Godfather Part II:” “He’s been dying of the same heart attack for 20 years.”
Only City Pulse isn’t dying at all. Now, to my surprise, the future holds renewed promise.
My latest cause for amazement and gratitude is that City Pulse’s new owner, the Michigan Independent Media Group, has not only carried on the paper’s support for in-depth arts and culture coverage, but is looking to expand and deepen the paper’s community ties and its political and cultural reach.
Amazingly, City Pulse zooms on, like that jet-pack-wearing mascot who appeared on the very first cover in 2001 and returns for the cover of today’s 25th anniversary issue.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. The first line of my very first City Pulse story in September 2001 read, “Even the grandest house of music falls the minute the air ceases to vibrate.” (It took a couple of years for me to cut some of the chicken fat out of my prose.) This 25th anniversary brings me back to bittersweet thoughts of transience.
One of the deeper things Yo-Yo Ma and I talked about is why music is so great. I suggested to him that music comes into being, has a duration and ends, just like life itself — that it’s a simulacrum of life.
“Exactly,” he said. “You hit just the right notes.” (I recall resolving never to wash my left ear again after that.)
Nothing reminds you of the fleeting nature of life like a big, round number. Nearly every week for the last 25 years, I worried that I would survive City Pulse, as it hung precariously by one thread or another, but now it’s beginning to look like the reverse.
I’m amazed and grateful that I, and the paper, have made it to this point. But I’m even more amazed and grateful to see a new chapter unfold in the story, and see a crop of younger writers sprout up, ready and eager to take up the never-ending chronicle. Here’s to the next 25 years.
