Public Eye

After performance artist John Fleck's "Side Effects May Include ..." at the Boston Court Tuesday afternoon, LA Weekly theater critic at large -- his title since being de-staffed in an economizing move -- Steven Leigh Morris held an onstage conversation with him in front of Sasha Anawalt's latest class of NEA-funded arts writers from around the country.

Morris is a playwright as well as journalist, and had once cast Fleck in the lead in one of his plays -- a fact Fleck didn't recall. "You had to take a TV gig at the last minute," Morris recalled with a laugh. The prospect of real money -- always a threat to the not-much-pay production. (That's Fleck in a "Star Trek" TV role above.)

"It would be comforting to think we were in this mess because technology has made what we were before obsolete, a natural and healthy evolution," Morris said in an address on the state of the print media. "But I'm not convinced print media is obsolete," mostly because Buffalo, NY is very different from Beaumont, TX, and the universalism of the Web doesn't feel as local as the best sorts of local papers -- let's say The Stranger in Seattle -- do. ... "Our job as arts journalists is to stand shoulder to shoulder with artists. ... The inability to tell the truth is the greatest threat to journalism and a democratic and open society. Let's work together to reinvigorate this wonderful profession of ours."