An Open Letter To Ricardo Baca

Unsolicited Advice for Hiring the Denver Post’s Pot Critic

Unsolicited Advice for Hiring the Denver Post’s Pot Critic

Dear Ricardo Baca,

I gather from this New York Times story that you’ve been getting lots of unsolicited advice in your new job as “Marijuana Editor” at the Denver Post. It’s inevitable. Americans are experts on everything to do with recreational pursuits – football, whiskey, BBQ, now pot. It’s going to get tiresome, hearing from every so-called “authority,” so please summon some patience. Remember this is all uncharted territory. You’re in rarified air up there – there are still very few job titles that include the word “marijuana.”
I’m encouraged that your overlords at the Denver Post have seized the chance to cover this unique story, and it sounds like they’ve given you the budget to build a team. As you assemble this crew of bright-eyed (or not!) journalists, please, hire a real critic.

For all I know, this could be the only new hire in journalism to carry the title of “critic” all year. Make it count. Throughout the media business, critics have been downsized and redlined and sent to toil in distant boroughs covering cops and courts and the occasional Miley Cyrus dustup. Conventional thinking in commercial media holds that the Internet has replaced criticism – in any given field of endeavor, there are millions of authoritative consumer voices, each spilling countless bit-torrents on the relative pros and cons of new releases. In the eyes of upper management, there’s really no reason to employ someone to watch television, for example, when so many seemingly knowledgeable college grads are engaged in the endeavor, posting reams of pithy commentary for free. It’s a brave new world of nonstop nattering, in which the actual insights coming from any one source are continually subsumed by the next hot and fresh verdict. Opinion churn now happens in nanoseconds; if you disagree with one crank, just wait a tweet or two – someone with more sensible views will appear. And then disappear.

In the olden days, one role of the critic was to cultivate discernment, to shine light on aspects of a work that the curious ordinary person might have missed, or wish to know. At its best, as practiced by George Bernard Shaw or Pauline Kael (names your candidates should at least be able to drop convincingly), critics did more than champion new works with a shorthand thumbs up: They helped educate audiences about new and emerging thinking in a given discipline. They provided a framework, a way to understand an artist’s intention, some context. They fostered a protracted conversation between creators and audiences, with the goal of enhancing appreciation.

Your new critic should ideally be able to handle the basic Job One imperative of criticism – the task of describing sublime, sometimes strange, often wondrous abstract experiences in words. Said candidate should be on the lifelong (and, alas, often unfulfilled) quest for the ultimate buzz, and as devoted to the aesthetics of the discipline as any literary criticism major. Someone who’s inherently curious about not merely the buzz but the nuts and bolts and the science of marijuana – how it works on the mind and the body, and why certain strains do certain things. This is an expensive recreational pursuit, a bit like skiing – so let’s find someone who can evaluate the endless parade of gear, the bongs and vaporizers and all the rest.

Please, leave the one-paragraph reefer referendums to the wake-and-bakers doing record reviews at the free weeklies – your coverage should (pardon the pun) aim higher. Don’t grant the job to one of these Purple Kush indie snobs who know everything about their preferred strain and can’t be bothered with anything else. Don’t hire a trust-fund nerd who only cares about the pure organic high, or a greybeard who believes that all the really good pot happened in the late 1960s. And whatever you do, please don’t hire a Pitchfork wannabe who can describe, in painstaking detail, what every minute of the buzz felt like to them, and how each new insight somehow relates to that messy breakup with the formerly angelic bread-baking Emily from Williamsburg.

Thanks for reading this, and good luck. The future of criticism depends on you.