Late Summer Musicale

We’re taking a little vacation, so I won’t be posting here for about a week. I’m actually hoping, halfway, that the place we’ll be staying doesn’t have Internet access.

In the meantime, let’s pretend you’re at the Hollywood Bowl, or at Tanglewood, under the stars on a warm night…

1. Yehudi Menuhin with Sir Adrian Boult and ??? Orchestra, Beethoven Romance for Violin in F Major

2. Gidon Kremer with Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic, Brahms Violin Concerto (third movement)

3. Sharon Kam with ??? Orchestra, Mozart Clarinet Concerto (second movement). Unfortunately, it cuts off abruptly, but it’s still worth hearing.

4. John Williams & Julian Bream, Debussy, Clair de Lune, arranged for two guitars.

5. Sergei Nakariakov with Concertgebouw Orchestra, Jean-Baptiste Arban, Carnival of Venice.

Drive home carefully!

Because Wendy McCaw Needs the Money?

According to the LA Times (h.t. LA Observed), Wendy McCaw, owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press, has sued her former editor, Jerry Roberts for $500,000.  The story is a bit undernourished:

The owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press has filed a legal action demanding $500,000 in damages from former editor Jerry Roberts, sources at the newspaper said.

The claim on behalf of Publisher Wendy McCaw’s Ampersand Inc. was filed with an arbitrator, as required in Roberts’ employment contract. It accuses him of breach of contract and causing damage to the News-Press.

This is the same Jerry Roberts who will be in Chicago tomorrow night, accepting the ethics award from the Society of Professional Journalists on behalf of himself and nine other former News-Press staff.  McCaw reportedly tried to stop SPJ from making these awards.

Editor & Publisher this afternoon got Roberts’ reaction to McCaw’s claim:

Roberts responded this afternoon with an e-mail statement that declared, in part, “I categorically deny any wrongdoing alleged in this arbitration demand. I consider this action by the News-Press nothing more than an attempt to silence me and to threaten my family’s financial future in retaliation for speaking out about ethics at the paper.”

The News-Press also issued a statement objecting to the public release of its claim against Roberts, calling the demand for $500,000 part of a “private arbitration process.”

The Santa Barbara News-Press was disturbed that a private arbitration matter involving former employee Jerry Roberts is being discussed publicly. The News-Press has maintained the confidentiality of this proceeding in accordance with the policies of the American Arbitration Association (AAA) guidelines.

The paper suspects that details may have been leaked by Mr. Roberts or his representatives since the News-Press did not make any public disclosures about the case. It is unfortunate that the privacy of these hearings has not been upheld.

Mr. Roberts signed an employment agreement with the News-Press which included a provision that both parties would submit to binding arbitration in the event of any disputes evolving from Mr. Roberts’ employment or resignation.

As a private adjudication proceeding, the rules of the AAA are very clear. Unless the parties agree otherwise, confidentiality of the arbitration must be safeguarded by the arbitrator, the parties and their representatives. All proceedings and awards are private and confidential and releasing confidential information can undermine the arbitration process.

The Santa Barbara News-Press is fully committed to the AAA dispute resolution process to settle employment-related issues in a private, confidential manner and without extensive litigation. The paper respects the confidential nature of the arbitration and will have no further comment on this proceeding or the outcome.

I know, it’s PR 101.  Whatever your position is, make it seem like the high road, like you’re upholding a value everyone shares — in this case the, harrumph, “the AAA dispute resolution process.”  But, jeez, when the recipient of the third largest divorce settlement in the history of the world tries to shake down a working editor for half a million dollars, that’s hot stuff she should expect to see in the paper.  If the publicity is disturbing, then back off.  The demand is plainly unjust — and has a snowball’s chance.

Thank You, Del Biagi, Wherever You Are

If you are an environmentally-minded kind of person, this is a thrilling story, and an unbelievable accomplishment.

State officials announced Thursday that California has finally achieved its goal of reducing landfill waste by 50%, thanks to diligent recycling by residents and businesses.

The milestone culminates a 16-year campaign by the state to persuade people to separate recyclables out of the trash.
The state passed a landmark law in 1989 mandating that communities establish waste-management plans for residents and businesses that would ultimately divert at least 50% of all recyclable trash from landfills. California was supposed to reach the goal in 2000, but preliminary data released Thursday show that the goal wasn’t reached until last year.

A total of 88 million tons of solid waste was recycled in 2005 for a 52% recycling rate, said Jon Myers, a spokesman for the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board. In 2004, 76 million tons were recycled, or 48%.

Though some cities still lag behind, other communities that are now diverting 60% or more of their waste to recycling centers made up the difference.

That 1989 law would never have passed unless, a year earlier, my boss, the late Mayor Tom Bradley hadn’t publicly commmited the City of Los Angeles to recycling (or “beneficially reusing”) at least 50 percent of its trash. And Mayor Bradley wouldn’t have had the nerve to make what seemed like an outrageously ambitious commitment if his Bureau of Sanitation director Del Biagi hadn’t said to me, and then later to the mayor, “What the hell, why don’t we just tell everybody we’re going to recycle half our trash?”

Up til then, Biagi had been a reluctant supporter of recycling. A few short months before these conversations started, Biagi was still trying to talk me out of telling the mayor he should abandon the trash-burning LANCER project. Biagi was running a small pilot recycling program on the Westside. To appease me, he said he’d be willing to expand it. “Into every council district?” I asked, since I knew none of them wanted to be left out. “Grrr,” said Biagi. We used to have these bantering conversations in the awful food court in City Hall Mall, eating baked potato and salad from Leon’s.

I wish I could take the credit for talking Biagi into his new position, but I think it was his staff — the sharpest bunch of garbagemen you’ll ever meet. Or maybe it was Biagi’s refined sense of which way the political winds were blowing. Biagi was, to me, the quintessential city department manager in Los Angeles — a Zen surfer on shifting currents. In real life, he was a surfer, and I think he found peace in imagining himself shooting the curl whenever a councilmember was berating him in public, which happened frequently.

Whatever happened, over yet another baked potato, Biagi pulled the 50 percent rabbit out of his hat. Within a few weeks, Bradley and several members of the Council announced the goal. It led to the development of a citywide curbside recycling program to be phased in over, I think, about seven years. When it was done, it was the largest municipal curbside recycling program in the country, and due to LA’s size, it probably still is.

I don’t know if the state of California would’ve had the courage to propose such an ambitious goal if the biggest city in the state hadn’t gone first. And I don’t think I would have had the balls to tell Mayor Bradley to announce a 50 percent goal if Biagi hadn’t sprung it on me first. It was like Babe Ruth calling his home run in the 1932 World Series. The chances of failure were a lot higher than the chances of success, but Biagi knew his team could make it happen.

So if you are into recycling and are happy that California’s stopped filling canyons with our trash, tip your post-consumer chapeau in the direction of Del Biagi, the reluctant environmentalist, now retired, and hopefully enjoying some tasty waves in a secluded cove somewhere off of Orange County.

(Meanwhile, after my vacation, I’ll try to find out the fate of Councilman Greig Smith’s pledge to divert 100 percent of our waste and his new ideas on trash-burning, which I wrote about here.)

Update on Swag Bags and the IRS

Randi Schmelzer’s piece in PR Week (link for subscribers) on the IRS’ position that “swag bags” are taxable straightens out some of my own confusion in the previous post on this topic. The IRS has determined that the swag baskets are not gifts, and that is why they will be taxed from now on. From Schmelzer’s story:

If any organization is truly benefiting from this news, however, it’s the IRS. Focusing on both recipient reporting and the filing of Form 1099 by merchandise providers, the IRS’ outreach program includes letters to entertainment industry groups and tax professionals, an online FAQ, and plenty of media relations, according to Nancy Mathis, a DC-based public affairs specialist at the IRS.

“Any individual’s requirement is to pay tax on income,” she said. “You are not required to pay taxes on gifts, [but] our position is that these… are items given with the expectation of something in return, that use by a celebrity will enhance sales, and the products themselves serve as compensation.”

Okay, I’m a celebrity, and I get a gift basket that has some items in it I wouldn’t be caught dead using. Can I return them so I won’t have to pay taxes on them? And, if am given an item I don’t want, can I avoid taxes by declaring that I un-endorse it? “Hi, I’m a celebrity, and for the record, I never wear Axe body spray. The gallon of Axe body spray I was given in a swag bag went straight down the kitchen sink.”

Schmelzer’s piece includes quotes from PR firms whose business is focused heavily on filling these bags with swag:

Everyone is talking about it,” said Kari Feinstein, whose eponymous PR firm organizes brand, charity, and Young Hollywood-melding “style lounges.” “Even the guy at the car wash asked me about it.”

General consensus among celebrity gift-oriented firms is that while there is reason to proceed with caution, the demise of swag may be greatly exaggerated.

Feinstein said brands want to be in touch with stars, and vice versa. “That [won't] stop,” she added. “It’s too beneficial.”

“The whole intersection between Hollywood Boulevard and Madison Avenue isn’t going away,” added Lash Fary, founder of LA-based entertainment marketing firm Distinctive Assets. “It’s too important to the brands I work with.”

It might be important to the brands, but the key question is: Is it important enough to the celebrities to go through the hassle and expense of taking these products home? Celebrities are smart enough to understand that they help sell the products, but if you make it hard for them, why would they bother?

The art of real-life product placement is that you slip these products into celebrity hands stealthily, and then make sure someone else sees it, hears about it and photographs it. The celeb is working for you, and it’s only costing you the wholesale price of the item you gave them. If it’s costing the celebrity? Seems like that changes the dynamic, and puts us back in the world of paid endorsement contracts. But maybe the PR pros who specialize in this business are more creative than me.

The Snark Effect Claims Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise’s production deal with Paramount was terminated with extreme prejudice by Sumner Redstone yesterday. He didn’t just end the relationship. Redstone bombed it by saying things like this:

The latest high-profile Hollywood breakup is between Tom Cruise and his studio. Sumner Redstone, whose company owns Paramount Pictures, said the studio would sever its 14-year relationship with Cruise’s film production company because “his recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.”

“As much as we like him personally,” the Viacom Inc. chairman told The Wall Street Journal, “we thought it was wrong to renew his deal.”

(snip)

In the past year or so, the usually guarded actor came under intense scrutiny after he jumped up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch while proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes, openly advocated Scientology, and criticized Brooke Shields for taking prescription drugs to treat postpartum depression. The religion founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard opposes psychiatry and its medication.

Redstone estimated that Cruise’s off-screen behavior cost his latest movie, “Mission: Impossible III,” $100 million to $150 million in ticket sales, even as he praised the film as “the best of the three movies” in the action series.

“It’s nothing to do with his acting ability, he’s a terrific actor,” Redstone said. “But we don’t think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot.”

In assessing this development, the New York Times’ reporters said this:

While Paramount’s decision was a shock to the Hollywood status quo, the way in which it was revealed was another sign that movie studios are playing rougher with stars they once coddled, one senior movie studio executive said.

Most recently, ABC canceled a production deal with Mel Gibson’s company for a mini-series about the Holocaust after he made anti-Semitic statements while detained for drunk driving. And the head of Morgan Creek Productions wrote a scathing letter scolding the actress Lindsay Lohan for unruly behavior during a movie shoot; the letter was quickly leaked to the news media.

“I think the press has become the weapon of choice for these people,” said the studio executive. “These companies are sick of being pushed around. This is indicative of a huge paradigm shift in the industry in terms of what constitutes a star and how much power a star has.”

My guess is, the Hollywood suits have wanted to pull the plug on unruly stars since the days of Charlie Chaplin. So what’s different now?

PR programs at major universities will study this endlessly. But my answer is one word: SNARK.

For decades, the gossip columns and later the tabloids hounded stars, sometimes peddling blatantly false stories to protect them from public condemnation, sometimes keeping them in line with threats, sometimes taking bribes, effectively, to hush things up. But there was a limit. The gossip media and the studios were really in business together, the business of celebrity mythology. They all made money by supporting the myth that movie and TV stars were living a glamorous, sexy, affluent, elevated life to which most of us aspired. The gossip-mongers and the star-makers sometimes had skirmishes, but usually stopped short of doing anything that would cost anyone serious money.

Now the gossip industry has grown an offshoot, the snark industry. Snarky means “irritable or ‘snidely derisive,’” according to Wikipedia; “a witty mannerism, personality, or behavior that is a combination of sarcasm and cynicism,” according to Urban Dictionary. But in this context, the derisive attitude is always aimed at celebrities and the powerful.

Right now, many of the most popular blogs are pure snarkiness; sites like Gawker (media snark), Wonkette (political snark), Defamer (Hollywood snark), Deadspin (sports snark), Valleywag (tech snark), The Smoking Gun (snarky stolen documents and legal filings) and their many imitators. The snark media is gaining credibility, breaking stories like Mel Gibson’s arrest, and pushing the mainstream media to follow their lead, and change their own style of reportage.

These sites don’t have the symbiotic relationship with the stars or the studios that the gossip sites of old had. They don’t play with the myth; they destroy it. If one big star goes down in flames, so what? There will be others in line, waiting to embarass themselves.

Snarky sites had no interest in helping Tom Cruise’s PR reps save Cruise from himself, in hopes of getting an “exclusive” at a later date. The self-immolation of Tom Cruise was more entertaining from a snarkist’s perspective than any movie he has ever made; and, to them, more profitable. The worse, the better, from this media’s point of view. There’s no fun to be had in helping him dig himself out through extolling virtuous acts — in case he’s tempted to go off planting trees or saving Africa. Snark is the black hole of celebrity PR, sucking bad and good news into its gravitational wake.

To an increasing share of the movie/TV audience, every star is presumed to have a humiliating secret, whether they do or not. And it’s distracting to the moviegoer and TV-watcher, as Sumner Redstone suggests.

Cruise wasn’t acceptable anymore as a bold action hero, after the corrosive effect of reading over and over the bizarre stories of his religion, his peculiar courtship, his baby (the weird stories suggesting it might not even exist!) and any number of belittling things proved or unproved, but discussed openly in the snark media, which doesn’t even claim to be telling the truth in every case, just passing things along that you, the reader, might find amusing.

In the old days, er, five years ago, Team Cruise would have been able to counter all this. But I think the collective weight of the snark has diminished him, perhaps finished him, and certainly made it easier for a major studio to envision the future without him. Same with Mel Gibson. It is hard to imagine someone who has made so much money for himself and other people reaching the end of his career, but from now on, every move he makes will be written about purely in the light of his awful, drunken anti-Semitic rant, by snarky chroniclers who will be totally unimpressed by his acts of penance. Studios feel much safer passing on him now.

I’m sure Cruise and Gibson’s PR people thought at various points during the past few months, “It’ll all blow over. It always has before. They’ll be knocking on my door, desperate to meet my price.” Maybe they still think so. But the old PR strategies seem to have failed, and I’m not sure new ones yet exist to replace them.

It’s For…the Children! (and other bad PR practices)

There are some PR tactics that are still widely used even though they are counter-productive.

One of them was on display in today’s LA Times story about attempts by former LA Mayor Richard Riordan — among others — to amend the legislation that would allow current Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to have more of a say in the operations of the LA Unified School District.

Riordan’s endorsement and support are crucial to Villaraigosa. He’s the mayor’s wingman on the right, and his link to Gov. Schwarzenegger. Also, Riordan has a long record of involvement in education and LAUSD specifically, whereas Villaraigosa’s involvement is of more recent vintage. The change Riordan wants is technical, but significant.

But Villaraigosa, for reasons the Times doesn’t satisfactorily examine, opposes Riordan’s change. (My guess is that it’s part of the deal he cut with the teachers’ union.) But the mayor doesn’t want to confront the ex-mayor directly. So he sidesteps him, sending forth his spokeswoman to say this:

“We have not accepted that amendment,” mayoral spokeswoman Janelle Erickson said.

“We need to shift the focus away from legislative maneuvering and put it back to the classroom,” she added. “This is really the best chance at reforming the schools that Los Angeles has seen in decades, and we must not lose sight of that.”

Gag me!

Does the mayor’s office really think that all rational discussion ends if you invoke “the classroom?” Do they really think Riordan will slap his palm to his head and say, “Damn it, you’re right, Antonio. What was I thinking? All those big fancy words in that legislation — they’re unimportant! What’s important is the classroom. Thank you for setting me straight.”

If you’re a PR person, know this: When you resort to a weepy invocation of “the children” in a serious policy discussion, it makes me think you’re trying to distract me from something you don’t want me to find out.

(Now, if only reporters would start thinking the same way.)

Wal-Mart Day at the LA Times

Two pages of the LA Times, two constrasting views of the Wal-Mart issue that, together, illustrate tremendous confusion in the Democratic Party over an issue where clarity would help them: Health care.

First, the Times’ lead editorial, which chastizes the Democratic Party for its “shameful demonization” of the discount retailer:

Most Americans do not want their politicians ganging up on one company. Wal-Mart may be a behemoth that employs 1.3 million people in this country and earned $11 billion in profit last year, but it still looks like bullying when politicians single out one business to scapegoat for larger societal ills. And when they start passing laws aimed at their scapegoat — as the Maryland Legislature did when it passed legislation forcing Wal-Mart to spend a certain amount on employee healthcare — the judiciary rightly balks. A federal judge struck down the regulation, holding that it violates laws requiring equal treatment of employers.

But there is no stopping the campaign rhetoric. At an anti-Wal-Mart rally last week in Iowa, Biden noted that the retailer pays people $10 an hour, and then asked: “How can you live a middle-class life on that?” It’s clearly the company’s fault, at least from a skewed senatorial perspective, that all Americans cannot live a comfortable middle-class life. How dare it pay prevailing retail wages? Bayh, who appeared at another rally, was quoted as saying that Wal-Mart is “emblematic of the anxiety around the country.” That may be true. But if it’s the emblem he’s worried about, he should stay in Washington and work to make healthcare more affordable for working families.

The gusto with which even moderate Democrats are bashing Wal-Mart is bound to backfire. Not only does it take the party back to the pre-Clinton era, when Democrats were perceived as reflexively anti-business, it manages to make Democrats seem like out-of-touch elitists to the millions of Americans who work and shop at Wal-Mart.

But then, on the facing page, columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan performs a rather difficult pirouette: Defending former UN Ambassador Andrew Young’s racially insensitive comments to the LA Sentinel, made on behalf of Wal-Mart, while condemning him for making those comments…on behalf of Wal-Mart. Get it?

After sapping the local economies of rural and semirural America, Wal-Mart set its sights on the urban market — corporate-speak for big, diverse cities like Chicago and Los Angeles that are densely populated with middle- to low-income black and Latino consumers. It swooped into Inglewood two years ago and put an initiative on the ballot that would have allowed one of the first Wal-Mart Supercenters in the state to be built — and would have allowed Wal-Mart to do it with virtually no city oversight. Inglewood voters rightly rebuffed the measure, rejecting Wal-Mart’s pitch that $5 T-shirts and $7-an-hour jobs would be the most transformative thing to happen to downtrodden black folk since the civil rights movement.

In such a context, bringing in former civil rights hero Young to do damage control, to belatedly lend some black credibility to the “urban” effort, seemed like a bad joke. Wal-Mart obviously missed the irony. The famously suave Young didn’t blink an eye.

Then he found himself face to face with the Sentinel crowd, which tends to be deferential to any black dignitary but which also includes a few skeptics, especially on the Wal-Mart issue. Undoubtedly thinking he could speak frankly to his own — that he could keep it real, as it were — Young repeated what blacks have said for generations: that members of other ethnic groups account for a disproportionate share of the merchant class in their own community.

He said it badly, and in painting all those merchants as uncaring and unethical, he said it too broadly. But he had a point. The chronic lack of business ownership among blacks in black communities is a real problem, and it was a major factor in civil unrest in 1965 and in 1992.

Young’s comments were called racist, and I don’t entirely agree. Certainly it’s despicable to exploit racial and economic anxiety in order to convince the black media that Wal-Mart is a solution. Being racially or ethnically specific, however, is not the same as being racist.

In ’92, people talked openly about the friction between Korean shopkeepers and their black customers in South L.A. because, well, it was there. It had consequences. That window of public discussion has closed; now, discussing racial or ethnic groups in any forum less dry than academia is considered almost vulgar. In condemning Young as racist, we also killed the messenger.

Don’t get me wrong: Young paid the appropriate price. But the real vulgarity is the dire economic picture in black and brown neighborhoods represented all too well by the overabundance of “stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables” that Young cited. Loaf for loaf, a Wal-Mart Supercenter might have better food. But it — and Young — hardly have the right stuff.

Kaplan’s circular reasoning unintentionally supports the Times’ editorial position. Young was fired for making a reasonable point in an unreasonable way, using unacceptable ethnic stereotypes to illustrate a larger truth: The “Mom and Pop” stores in lower-income communities–the stores that Wal-Mart critics say they are worried will be run out of business–don’t deserve special protection if they aren’t serving their communities.

More broadly, Young was blowing the whistle on the sham aspects of the campaign against Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart Watch and WakeUpWalMart.Com are components of a “corporate campaign,” which is a term used by both labor and management to describe a labor-funded PR campaign to denigrate a company in order to force that company to agree to labor demands that can’t be won via collective bargaining or traditional organizing of workers.

In most cases, corporate campaigns are dishonest and border on blackmail. About a decade ago, I represented a health care firm that was targeted for a corporate campaign. The union running the campaign wanted the firm to waive its rights and make it extremely easy for the union to represent the firm’s workers. These workers had rejected the union up to now, but the union wasn’t willing to take no for an answer. So they started a corporate campaign against my client.

The corporate campaign never mentioned the plan to organize the workers. Instead, it accused my client of killing its patients. Since my client ran a chain of nursing homes for the elderly, it was not hard to find dead former patients to talk about. But the union figured that if it said “patients die” enough times, business would suffer, and this prospect would cause the company to change its position. The corporate campaign was damaging, but unsuccessful.

Labor has good reasons to be concerned about Wal-Mart. I don’t begrudge the labor movement getting into a fight with the retail giant. Wal-Mart poses a direct threat to union-won high wages and good benefits for workers at grocery chains like Ralph’s and Vons, as we saw with the grocery strike of a few years ago.

Wal-Mart can cut prices because they don’t pay their workers as much, and don’t lavish benefits on them. Over time, to stay in business, other retailers will have to match Wal-Mart’s wage and benefit structure — and they will find workers who are willing to take jobs that pay less. Unions want to forestall that trend because it will put yet more private sector workers out of their reach.

Wal-Mart’s policies are hastening a day of reckoning that has been looming for decades. The idea that employers should be responsible for our nation’s health care is a historical oddity; a byproduct of World War II-era wage and price controls, and political decisions that benefits should not be taxed as income in order to allow unions to win increases employee compensation without increasing their take-home pay.

Now that most Americans don’t work for big companies or belong to labor unions, this jury-rigged, inefficient and unfair model for providing health care is getting exposed — ironically, by Wal-Mart, which takes the position that consumers shouldn’t be forced to pay a premium price for a product in order to subsidize the health care of the workers who sold it to you.

So, who should?

The LA Times apparently thinks liberals have gotten off track with their attacks on Wal-Mart. They’re saying: Stop trying to force Wal-Mart to subsidize health care — and start working on a plan to get the federal government to do it. Democratic politicians fighting Wal-Mart are defending a status quo that doesn’t exist anymore. Organized labor is sending its political supporters in the Democratic Party down a primrose path to serve its own, narrower ends.

If Wal-Mart disappeared tomorrow–or if Wal-Mart suddenly decided to give all its workers health care coverage–that would still leave tens of millions of American families without anyone to subsidize their health care coverage. The Times, I think rightly, is chiding Democratic politicians for taking cheap shots at Wal-Mart as a substitute for doing anything to correct that basic injustice.

Perhaps, as Evan Bayh suggested, Wal-Mart is a symbol. But if your children get sick, symbolism can’t cure them. Developing a universal health care plan won’t be an easy thing, but if Democrats want to win in 2006 and 2008, they’d better start. Attacking Wal-Mart is a distracting indulgence in demagoguery.

Tower Falls

How should I, a lifelong music fan and major customer of Tower Records over most of the past 35 years, feel about the company filing for bankruptcy?

Nostalgic? Definitely. I’ll never forget the sweet redhead clerk at the Berkeley store who leaped over the counter to kiss me when she saw from my ID that I was buying myself an album on my 18th birthday.

A visit to Tower Records on the way home from work was a sure-fire way to beat the blues–especially if I walked out with a trademark yellow plastic bag with a new platter inside. The classical Tower that used to be a stand-alone on Sunset Strip expanded my musical horizons. (Yes, you read that right. Just down the road from the Whiskey A Go Go and Gazzari’s was a store devoted to classical music.)

Guilty? Probably. Like most of their former customers, I buy most of my CDs from Amazon nowadays; and increasingly listen to music I’ve downloaded from Rhapsody via my subscription.

I’ve never bought a CD at Wal-Mart, the rival cited in most stories, but to me a Wal-Mart would never be competition for Tower, because Tower’s music offerings were vastly deeper than Wal-Mart (or Target or K-Mart). I have only been to Wal-Mart twice, and my purchases were mostly T-shirts (although I did get an external hard drive for $14!).

I still like to stop and browse the Torrance Tower sometimes, however. And I visit their Santa Monica Promenade location every time I go there.

Will I patronize “the brand” after it is taken by its new owners into cyberspace only? Who knows, but it doesn’t sound promising. Virtual shopping I already know how to do. It was the browsing through Tower’s aisles, flipping through the stacks and finding things I didn’t know existed that made Tower special. And it’s probably not a good business model to keep all that inventory around in the world of 2006:

“The brick-and-mortar specialty music retail industry has suffered substantial deterioration recently,” Tower said in court papers.

So that’s what Tower’s bankruptcy and imminent disappearance from the brick-and-mortar world makes me feel:

Substantially deteriorated.

Old.

Bin Laden’s Crush

The benign word “fan” comes from “fanatic,” and there’s no bigger fanatic than Osama Bin Laden. Now Whitney Houston will know what Jodie Foster and J.D. Salinger felt like. From a wire service story:

Troubled pop diva Whitney Houston has a new fan – America’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.

Kola Boof, the terrorist’s former sex slave, claims in her new book that he was obsessed with the troubled How Will I Know singer.

She revealed to Harpers Bazaar magazine: “He told me Whitney was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“He said that he had a paramount desire for her and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting.”

I can just picture it. Osama, pulling up to Whitney’s house in a limo…emerging from the back seat with a basket of poppies… and a submachine gun…

Kola – who until recently wrote for US soap opera The Days of Our Lives – also says Osama wanted to shower her with gifts and convert her to Islam.

The 37-year-old explained: “He said he wanted to give her a mansion he owned in a suburb of Khartoum.

“He would say how beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband – Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women’s husbands killed.”

Kola added: “He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his colour rule and make her one of his wives.”

News From the Desert, News From the Sea

Today’s LA Times has a distressing take on the damage the Sawtooth fires wrought on the Mojave Desert’s populations of juniper, piñon and Joshua trees, and raises questions as to whether the fires are a preview of coming attractions in a climate-changed world, or a rare event caused by the especially rainy conditions in the desert winter before last combined with the especially hot conditions earlier this summer. 

Scientists do agree that it will take centuries, if not millenniums, for the desert to recover.

“It won’t be on a timeline we humans would like, but it will happen,” said Tasha LaDoux, Joshua Tree National Park’s botanist.

Inside the park, new growth provides fodder for the debate over whether the fragile, arid landscape is undergoing dramatic change.

At the scene of a 1995 fire, not a single juniper or piñon pine seedling has come up after 11 years. But healthy, 3-foot “pups” have sprouted from the roots of once seemingly dead Joshua trees. The pups may or may not survive, scientists say, because in drought years they may be gnawed by thirsty rodents and ground squirrels. Meanwhile, native apricot mallow, bright-green cheesebush and golden California marigold are blooming even in August.

Along a sandy road in the western section, the scene of a 1999 blaze that scorched 14,000 acres, a beige sea of grasses spreads beneath burned Joshua trees bleached silver by sun and rain. The new growth consists of native bunch grasses and a pair of noxious, ankle-scratching weeds.

These two nonnatives, known as red brome and cheatgrass, form highly flammable carpets between native shrubs and trees, and many scientists believe they are the main culprits behind increasing fires.

“These invasive grasses fill in the spaces between the desert plants. They carry the flame through at a very high rate, and much hotter. It spreads a lot faster,” Sall said.

(snip)
Native to Mediterranean Europe and Asia, the weeds were probably blown across the West by the wind, tracked in by hikers’ boots and construction equipment, and excreted by livestock. Researchers at UCLA and elsewhere say the weeds appear to capture nitrogen from smog-laden air more readily than native plants, eventually choking them out. 
 

The whole story is worth reading.  Disagreement is rife among the desert ecologists the Times interviewed.

Meanwhile, while the California deserts become more flammable, the ocean is getting noisier, according to a UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography study cited in Science Blog:

Mark McDonald of WhaleAcoustics in Bellvue, Colo., and John Hildebrand and Sean Wiggins of Scripps Oceanography accessed acoustic data recorded in 1964-1966 through declassified U.S. Navy documents and compared them against acoustic recordings made in 2003-2004 in the same area off San Nicolas Island, one of the Channel Islands more than 160 miles west of San Diego.

The results showed that noise levels in 2003-2004 were 10 to 12 decibels higher than in 1964-1966, an average noise increase rate of three decibels per decade. The culprit behind the increase, according to Hildebrand, appears to be a byproduct of the vast increase in the global shipping trade, the number of ships plying the world’s oceans and the higher speeds and propulsion power for individual ships. The noise detected off Southern California originates from ships traveling across the entire North Pacific Ocean. According to Lloyd’s Register figures quoted in the JASA paper, the world’s commercial fleet more than doubled in the past 38 years, from 41,865 in 1965 to 89,899 in 2003.

“We’ve demonstrated that the ocean is a lot noisier now than it was 40 years ago. The noise is more powerful by a factor of 10,” said Hildebrand, a professor of oceanography in the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps. “If we’ve doubled the number of ships and we’ve documented 10 times more noise, then the noise increase is due to both more ships and noisier individual ships than in the ’60s. And that may be because the ships are now bigger, faster and have more propulsion power. The next step is to understand what aspect of modern shipping has resulted in more noise per ship,” said Hildebrand.

Is there an impact on marine life?  The scientists don’t know, but it seems to this non-scientist that it could have a profound impact.  The suggestion that the noise impact of ships be regulated, and/or that shipping lanes be re-routed, will likely soon appear on the environmental global policy agenda.

The PR Tax (UPDATED)

Swag bags are part of popular culture now. Both “Entourage” and “The Sopranos” built episodes this season around the lavish gift-giving to celebrities at awards shows and film festivals. So it stands to reason that the IRS, which sometimes functions as a Ministry of Envy, would decide to start taxing these gifts that can be worth as much as $100,000, and would probably have continued to escalate if the government hadn’t stepped in. From the LA Times’ coverage:

“There was an awful lot of publicity about the ever-increasing value of these baskets,” IRS Commissioner Mark V. Everson said. “And somebody said, ‘Why don’t we do something about this?’ It was just so clearly taxable we felt we had to step in.”

The IRS reminded Oscar presenters before this year’s ceremony that noncash compensation was just as taxable as a paycheck. Everson said the effort was linked to his drive to bring “a sense of fairness that resonates throughout the system. You can’t let the rich get away with something.”

Legally, these baskets might be deemed gifts, but in gift-giving, it’s the thought that counts, and the thought behind swag bags is purely mercenary — product-placement PR. The thought being that if Will Ferrell wears the sunglasses or wristwatch, while enjoying the comp week at a pricey resort, someone might see it — in People magazine, or the National Enquirer. That’s a huge bang for the buck, worth more than advertising at a fraction of the cost. Guests visiting his home might enjoy his new plasma TV and want one like it. Friends might smell his new cologne and ask him for its name. That’s “WOM,” word-of-mouth publicity. All to give brands the right kind of visibility, and associate it with the coolest of the cool.

The product-placement concept is growing in many directions; I wonder if the IRS’ decision will have an impact.

For example: If you read the PR blogs about PR blogging, you frequently see giveaways mentioned as a key strategy to get bloggers on your side. The suave PR person is supposed to note that a trusted someone is blogging about electronic games, say; or maybe writes a lot about wine. An e-mail is sent: “I’m enjoying your blog tremendously. You’ve got a lot of cred. Hey, would you like to try …” and offer (never unsolicited!) a free sample, a beta test, whatever. If the blogger likes it, the suave PR person will encourage them to write about it.

Will these giveaways also be taxed? I detected a note of panic in these comments:

“Wow — this is insane,” J. Dubb, the marketing director for Five Four Clothing, the maker of high-end urban apparel, said when informed of the IRS announcement. (At this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Five Four was handing out cartloads of clothing in its crowded freebie suite.)

“It’s hard to say what the impact will be, but it will definitely be a hit,” Dubb said. “But we think [celebrities] like our stuff enough that they’d be willing to pay tax.”

Britt Johnson, whose Los Angeles events company Mediaplacement organized a freebie suite at last year’s Golden Globe Awards, said past recipients of swag may soon hesitate when offered ostensibly free products. “You are going to see a lot of people turning things down,” Johnson said, “and a lot more people donating to charity.”

I agree with Johnson, not Dubb. The prospect of paying a tax will be a massive disincentive. For the marketers, the idea that their gift baskets would be auctioned off for charity is also somewhat of a disincentive, because the point was to adorn celebrities with these items, not a bunch of nobodies who win silent auctions.

The solution is obvious. Every item in every gift basket should come accompanied by an endorsement contract. Be a little more business-like, folks. I’m not a tax accountant, but it seems to me that if you get the celebrities to sign something that says “I will wear your high-end urban apparel to assist in your promotional efforts,” then it’s no longer a gift. Perhaps there is another tax consequence, but since it’s an upfront exchange of value, I would guess it’s more favorable.

UPDATE:  Randi Schmelzer’s piece in PR Week (link for subscribers) straightens out some of my own confusion, as well as the Times’.  The IRS has determined that the swag baskets are not gifts, and that is why they will be taxed from now on.

If any organization is truly benefiting from this news, however, it’s the IRS. Focusing on both recipient reporting and the filing of Form 1099 by merchandise providers, the IRS’ outreach program includes letters to entertainment industry groups and tax professionals, an online FAQ, and plenty of media relations, according to Nancy Mathis, a DC-based public affairs specialist at the IRS.

“Any individual’s requirement is to pay tax on income,” she said. “You are not required to pay taxes on gifts, [but] our position is that these… are items given with the expectation of something in return, that use by a celebrity will enhance sales, and the products themselves serve as compensation.”

Okay, I’m a celebrity, and I get a gift basket that has some items in it I wouldn’t be caught dead using.  Can I return them so I won’t have to pay taxes on them?   And, if I return an item I don’t want, am I required to publicize that fact?  “Hi, I’m a celebrity, and for the record, I never wear Axe body spray.  The gallon of Axe body spray I was given in a swag bag went straight down the kitchen sink.” 

—————

On the same subject, I enjoyed PR Week’s Julia Hood’s humorous editorial on product placement in “Entourage.” You have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

As soon as a program becomes popular, it is apparently doomed to become little more than a platform for a parade of brands. Entourage in particular has transformed from a sly comment on the peculiar balance of power and egos in Hollywood into a fantasy camp for young guys who suddenly have unlimited sums of money to spend in the shopping mecca of the planet. Motorcycles, video games, flat-screen televisions, and Las Vegas have all been promoted through the adventures of our winsome foursome, and the producers are secure in the knowledge that their marketing partners are gleefully reaping the benefits of reaching their target demographic.

In truth, it probably doesn’t matter that someone like me is put off by the preponderance of stuff that Entourage, and many other programs, is awash with. I’m not in the elite group of 18- to 25-year-old boys these marketers covet. But this is an example of a program that is buckling under the weight of its own success, forgetting that consumers are savvier today than they used to be and will see right through those curiously blank beer bottles the boys of Entourage seem partial to, as opposed to the lovingly displayed wine label of choice.

I’m speculating that the “curiously blank bottles” are to be filled in later (perhaps for syndiction) with digitally-added brand names, as described here, and that I mentioned here.

Off To A Flying Start, LA-style

I guess this must be my day to pick holes in half-baked electoral strategies.

On the Los Angeles city ballot this fall will be the measure to change term limits by allowing incumbents to run for re-election not once, but twice. I wrote about the movement to let councilmembers stay in office four years longer a couple of months ago. Since then, the measure has gotten onto the ballot, despite the fact that it excluded the City Attorney, City Controller and the Mayor from being able to serve three terms, which appalled City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and created suspense over whether Mayor Villaraigosa would allow the vote. (He finally did.)

Besides feeling left out, Delgadillo told the council that their measure would not survive a legal challenge because it contained two subjects: Extending term limits and some changes to the ethics laws for lobbyists that councilmembers say will “toughen” them.

This is a classic strategy. Whatever the public policy merits of relaxed term limits, the council figured the voters would see their ballot measure as purely self-serving. So they threw in some sugar to allow advocates to campaign for the measure as an ethics reform and downplay the part about councilmembers staying in office longer.

Except they forgot about the city’s Ethics Commission, which was never given a chance to review the ethics changes. Now, according to the Daily News (hat tip to LA Observed), when finally given a chance to review the measure yesterday, the commissioners were told they couldn’t say anything about it that might be construed as a judgment on its merits.

Vice President Bill Boyarsky kicked off the discussion by asking how the ethics reform measure on the Nov. 7 ballot would affect the city’s existing rules.

“So instead of strengthening the lobby control laws as the proponents of this measure have claimed, could it be said that it actually weakens it?” Boyarsky asked after staffers advised him that some lobbyists might be exempted from registering under the new rules.

But Deputy City Attorney Renee Stadel interrupted him to warn that, because the ethics package has already been placed on the ballot, city employees or public resources cannot be used to support or oppose it.

And that includes using “valuative adjectives” during an Ethics Commission hearing.

“I am concerned that by using words such as `strengthen’ or `weaken,’ it becomes an advocacy on either side of the issue,” Stadel said.

Effectively, if the councilmembers campaiging for the measure say it strengthens ethical standards, the Ethics Commission can’t contradict them–even if councilmembers are misrepresenting its provisions. I’m not sure how far this rule goes. I guess they can say what they want on their own time, but I don’t know if they can identify themselves as city ethics commissioners.

Seems like a clever plan, except did you notice the point Boyarsky was making? The “tougher” lobbying rules aren’t “tougher.” The sweetener designed to bait the voters turns out to be a bitter pill, if Boyarsky is correct. So LA voters get two reasons to dislike the new measure, instead of just one. Three, if you count the “silencing” of the commission, which is sure to rile the media.
Brilliant!

Off To A Flying Start

The Democratic Party’s hopes for 2006 got a huge boost last week when anti-war candidate Ned Lamont defeated “Bush love child” Sen. Joseph Lieberman for the Democratic nomination. Activists were thrilled. With the pro-war Lieberman laid low, nothing could now stand in the way of the party making the 2006 election a referendum on Bush’s unpopular Iraq quagmire.

Sure, Lieberman had said he would run as an independent candidate, but that could easily be positioned as sour grapes from the “Sore Loserman.”  The Democratic party would formally line up behind Lamont, and, at the urging of activists, Lieberman would be threatened with reprisals if he continued the race. Eventually, facing humiliation, the rejection of his colleagues and defeat at the polls, Lieberman would drop out, leaving the field open for Lamont, and allowing the true voice of the people to be heard. The Republican candidate was a non-entity involved in scandals. Lamont would win by acclamation.

So far, it’s not working out quite that way. As this NY Times story and the poll cited in this story demonstrate, Lieberman is not only still a viable candidate, he’s ahead in the polls. Suddenly, Lamont doesn’t seem so fresh as he seems inexperienced and mistake-prone. And, it could turn out that Lieberman is now free to tap into another interpretation of the true voice of the people: That they don’t like the ideologues of either party.

In a state where Republican and independent voters make up a majority of the electorate, Mr. Lieberman is still developing a message about bipartisanship, but his aides say it will involve adopting positions from both parties and being willing to criticize Democrats as well as Republicans. Meanwhile, Mr. Lamont, a Greenwich millionaire, now has to calibrate his own identity as self-described liberal.

As Lieberman starts to look like a possible winner, the chance that Democratic party pressure will be applied to get him to quit the race diminishes to zero. The party’s real goal is to take back the Senate. If they do, it will be close. They’ll have 51 or 52 seats according to the most optimistic scenario. The last thing the Democrats want to see happen is for a re-elected Lieberman to align with the Republicans in a closely-divided Senate. The Dems could lose control at the very moment they’ve gained it.

So the Democratic Party is now going to have to spend a lot of money that could be used to beat Republicans, trying to help a Democrat beat another Democrat in a Democratic state. Brilliant!

Bob Barker’s Weird Place in the Pantheon

The other day, I wrote what some readers must have thought was a very strange post comparing two famous octogenarians, Tony Bennett and Fidel Castro. The point was entirely personal. Here are two famous men who were part of my earliest memories, who still share this planet with me, and still do what they’ve been doing since I started paying attention to the world outside my sandbox.

If I’d thought of him, I might have added another: Bob Barker.

Bob Barker was my companion through the days and weeks of my youth in Illinois and Connecticut whenever I was too sick to go to school. I was healthy most of the time, but when I got sick, I got really sick. The way I remember it, both strep throat and pneumonia seemed to hit me at least once each winter, and put me in bed for a week or two. Actually in my parents’ bed, where it was easier for my mother to bring me juice and crackers, to make sure I took my medicine; and where I could watch TV.

Cartoons ended each day by 9. The Three Stooges and Soupy Sales wouldn’t come on until about 3. Soap operas, with their crescendoing organ accompaniment and long, meaningful looks, were a joke to me.

That left game shows: Allen Ludden hosting “Password.” Hugh Downs hosting “Concentration.” Art Fleming hosting “Jeopardy!” with Don Pardo as the off-screen announcer. Bill Cullen hosting “The Price is Right.” Gene Rayburn hosting “The Match Game,” in the innocent years before every question became a sexual double-entendre. Monty Hall hosting “Let’s Make a Deal,” with Carol Merrill massaging the air around the bedroom sets and convertible sofas they gave away as prizes.

Bob Barker hosted the strangest game show of the era, “Truth or Consequences.” Suave, Brylcreemed Bob would ask contestants an impossible question, and give them virtually no time to answer it. Then he would order them to participate in a humiliating stunt — cross-dressing was a typical theme, in an era when a man never wanted to be seen wearing an apron. But debonair Bob, he made it all seem okay. As a kid, I yearned to be that smooth.

Later, after I pretty much stopped watching game shows, Bob switched to “The Price is Right,” which is still on the air. (The only broadcaster to be on the air continually longer than Barker is the Dodgers’ Vin Scully.) Under Barker’s reign, “The Price is Right” became yet another show where Bob could be cool while the contestants embarassed themselves. A smart movie producer should have cast Bob Barker as the Marquis de Sade or Torquemada. Apparently, his act wasn’t universally admired, as he spent much of the 1990s battling lawsuits for sexual harassment and discrimination. However the litigation turned out, he is still on the air.

Barker turns 80 later this year. What prompted me to think about him was seeing the following video on YouTube; a clip from a recent episode of “The Price is Right” that, if you stay with it, will make you laugh. The title of the clip is “One of the Worst ‘The Price is Right’ Players in History.” So bad, that even the unflappable Barker has to take a seat.

The Democratic Party’s Foul-Weather Friends

I’m a Democrat, but the persistence of intense Bush-hatred as a political force has always made me nervous.  Not just because there is something unnerving about “hate” being directed at the elected leader of our country regardless of party, but also because in my experience hatred ultimately becomes toxic to the hater. 

Hatred is like a drug; it’s a rush.  It becomes addictive.  But it wrecks the heart and soul and fogs the mind. Hatred leaves you with nothing to build on; just a spiritual hangover.

George W. Bush’s poll ratings are low right now, thus hopes are high among Democratic leaders that Bush-hatred is now so widespread, it will cost the Republicans control of Congress.  The defeat of ”Bush love child” Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary is seen as the first tangible sign that the Bush-hatred has finally coalesced into a mass political movement, from which the Democrats will prosper.

And yet — there’s unease among some Democrats, expressed today in reliably liberal columnist E.J. Dionne’s op-ed:

The Democratic Party has a self-image problem.

Talk to Democrats at every level about the strong position the party is in for this fall’s elections and the conversation inevitably ends with a variation of: “Yeah, if we don’t blow it.” Karl Rove’s greatest victory is how much he has spooked Democrats about themselves.

It’s not a particularly brilliant column, actually.  Dionne is so reluctant to challenge his Democratic Party sources, he always seems to be stepping quietly around the elephants in their office suites. But this section was telling:

(Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm) Emanuel is especially frustrated with large donors such as billionaire George Soros, who donated heavily to such organizing efforts as America Coming Together (ACT) two years ago. “These guys — where are they?” a frustrated Emanuel asked in an interview. After John Kerry’s loss, Emanuel said, “they walked off the field.”

Steve Rosenthal, who was ACT’s chief executive officer in 2004, said his organization’s financial backers were “very candid that they weren’t in it for the long haul and never said they were.” Nonetheless, Rosenthal worries about what the missing money will mean this fall.

Here’s the connection Dionne is reluctant to make:  George Soros was the ultimate Bush-hater.  He was never very interested in the Democratic party except as a vehicle to demolish the Bush administration.  In 2004, the electoral process gave Soros his best chance to take Bush down. He tried.  He spent hundreds of millions.  But it didn’t work out, so he’s moved on.  Bush isn’t on the ballot in 2006, and he won’t be on the ballot in 2008, so Democratic success in those election cycles won’t give serious Bush-haters like Soros the fix they need. 

To be sure, there are plenty of Bush-haters who are very pumped up about 2006. With Democrats in charge of Congress, who knows what hell they can wreak on The Hated One?  Bush could be impeached.  Investigations will be launched.  We’ll finally find out who Cheney met with to write his energy policy.  We’ll learn the truth about the secret deals with Halliburton, Enron, the oil companies, and K Street lobbyists.  Maybe some of Bush’s other love children will end up in jail.

But I’m dubious about this strategy.  I’m guessing most Americans don’t want a political bloodbath in the next two years.  Some voters who tell pollsters they disapprove of Bush will be content to just wait out the final 30 months of his administration.  In other words, the low approval rating Bush-haters constantly cite doesn’t necessarily equate to widespread Bush-hatred.   For some voters, it’s more like: Bush-disappointment.  Bush-weariness.  Bush-frustration. Bush-don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out.

The onus is still on the Democrats to do more than just tap into the range of negative feelings Bush inspires.  The Bush-haters might turn out, like Soros, to be foul-weather friends. The key is to develop a coherent set of policies that reflect the world as it is today, which embodies the basic values of the center-left.  Why do Democrat leaders act as if that’s too much to ask?  As John Lennon might say, “Imagine there’s no Bush/It’s easy if you try.”

Memo To My Teenage Son: Multitasking Isn’t Learning!

It’s actually pretty safe to say my son doesn’t read my blog.  Most of what I write about is incredibly boring, according to him:  Politics, PR, baseball, science…yawn!  So I might have to pay him to read this:

Multi-tasking affects the brain’s learning systems, and as a result, we do not learn as well when we are distracted, UCLA psychologists report this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn,” said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Our study shows that to the degree you can learn while multi-tasking, you will use different brain systems.

“The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember,” Poldrack added. “Our data support that. When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don’t learn as well as if you had paid full attention.”

Shouldn’t that be obvious? 

I’ll tell you something else:  If you want to know why business and government are making so many bad decisions nowadays, you can blame the same thing — this absurd faith high-level people have in their own ability to multi-task.  Writing an e-mail, while having a meeting, while reading a report, while monitoring a conference call…this is how busy executives feel important.  They even multi-task while they’re on vacation!  Because, my God, if that phone ever stopped ringing, if those e-mails stopped flying over the transom, you might cease to exist!

But back to my son, who tries to tell me he’s doing work when, in fact, five Instant Message windows are open and actual dialogues are taking place; and he’s playing music; and talking on the phone.  Here is a snapshot of his brain:

Different forms of memory are processed by separate systems in the brain…. When you recall what you did last weekend or try to remember someone’s name or your driver’s license number, you are using a type of memory retrieval called declarative memory. (Patients with Alzheimer disease have damage in these brain areas.) When you remember how to ride a bicycle or how to play tennis, you are using what is called procedural memory; this requires a different set of brain areas than those used for learning facts and concepts, which rely on the declarative memory system. The beeps in the study disrupted declarative memory, said Poldrack, who also studies how the types of memory are related.

The brain’s hippocampus — a sea-horse-shaped structure that plays critical roles in processing, storing and recalling information — is necessary for declarative memory, Poldrack said. For the task learned without distraction, the hippocampus was involved. However, for the task learned with the distraction of the beeps, the hippocampus was not involved; but the striatum was, which is the brain system that underlies our ability to learn new skills.

The striatum is the brain system damaged in patients with Parkinson disease, Poldrack noted. Patients with Parkinson’s have trouble learning new motor skills but do not have trouble remembering the past.

“We have shown that multi-tasking makes it more likely you will rely on the striatum to learn,” Poldrack said. “Our study indicates that multi-tasking changes the way people learn.”

The researchers noted that they are not saying never to multi-task, just don’t multi-task while you are trying to learn something new that you hope to remember.  (emphasis mine)

Because, dude, this is so on the test!

A Perfect Sunday Evening at Dodger Stadium

Could it be that after 18 years of frustration, the Los Angeles Dodgers finally have a team it’s fun to root for again? Based on Sunday night’s game against the San Francisco Giants, which I attended with my wife, my brother and my 4-year-old niece, the signs are good. 

(O, muse, give me the wit and skill to write this post that people indifferent to baseball might enjoy it!) 

Greg Maddux is a famous pitcher, who spent most of his career with the Atlanta Braves.  He turned 40 this year, which is old for a ballplayer.  This season, Maddux was pitching for the Chicago Cubs, who are having a dismal season.  Maddux was having the kind of year a great pitcher usually retires on; a few brilliant outings that brought back reminders of past glories amid a succession of bad games that made fans think, “He’s done.”  Despite Maddux’s apparent descent into mediocrity, on the last day of July Dodgers’ GM Ned Colletti traded for him.  

Maddux’s first Dodger game was startling; a no-hitter against the Reds that he was forced to leave due to a lengthy rain delay after seven innings.  His second game was also successful, though not as brilliant.  His third game was last night, against the Dodgers’ longtime rivals, who were pitching their best pitcher, Jason Schmidt, and it was magical.  

Maddux started the first inning by giving up a hit, a solidly struck single by Randy Winn.  The next batter hit a fly ball that was caught, but the third batter, Ray Durham smacked another single.  Up came Barry Bonds, another old player possibly in his last season, but still a threat to hit a home run or at least a bases-clearing double and put the Dodgers in the hole.  And Bonds did hit the ball hard, but Maddux reflexively reached up and caught it, and then threw to first base to get another out; and the inning was over.

From that point on, Maddux did not allow another hit. He didn’t walk anybody. No Giant reached base.  He was perfect the rest of the way, until he was taken out for a pinch hitter in the bottom of the eighth.  The only reason Maddux had to come out then was that the Giants’ pitcher, Jason Schmidt, had shut out the Dodgers to that point as well.  Schmidt pitched a great game.  It was one of those 0-0 games that only real baseball fans can love.

It wasn’t just that Maddux was perfect.  It was the efficient way he achieved perfection.  Maddux no longer possesses a real fastball.  The Dodgers have several pitchers who can throw the ball 95-97 miles an hour.  Maddux fastest pitch is about 85 mph.  What Maddux can do is aim the ball exactly where he wants to aim it, and vary the speed of the ball enough so that the hitter can never feel confident that if he just swings in a certain location, he’ll hit the ball hard.  And, he threw strikes, almost exclusively, so the batters knew that if they didn’t swing, they’d be struck out. 

As it happened, Maddux only struck out four, but he didn’t have to do more than that to completely dominate the Giant hitters.  They would swing at his first or second pitch, and hit it weakly, right at somebody. He needed a few good defensive plays to help keep runners off the bases, including another one of his own. Bonds almost hit a home run off him in the seventh, but it didn’t go quite far enough, and it was caught for an out.

It is hard to convey to a non-fan how amazing the following statistic is:  In his eight innings, Maddux threw 68 pitches, and 50 of them were strikes.  (In the same number of innings, Schmidt threw 114 pitches.)  Most starting pitchers are taken out after they’ve thrown 100 pitchers, and they usually hit this threshold by the sixth or seventh inning.  The high ratio of strikes to balls is amazing.  If you divide these numbers by the eight innings he pitched, an “average” inning by Maddux last night consisted of only 8.5 pitches (to get three hitters out), of which 6.25 of them were in the strike zone.  That is a level of finesse you just never see. In his 20-year major league career, I doubt Maddux has ever pitched with such precision.  Nor have many other pitchers, ever.  

Schmidt also eventually gave way to a pinch-hitter, and so lesser pitchers for both teams finished the game.  The Dodgers’ relievers maintained the shutout.  But in the bottom of the tenth, the Giants’ pitcher — a guy named Vinny Chulk — gave up a home run to the first batter he faced, the Dodgers’ 23-year-old rookie catcher, Russell Martin. 

Martin’s home run was certainly dramatic, and very gratifying to the 55,000 people who attended the game, most of us Dodger fans.  It symbolized a part of the 2006 Dodger story — the flood of new young players. That’s the angle the Los Angeles Times emphasized in its headline and story.   

The Times’ headline was bizarrely obscure: “This Victory is Grade-Eh.”  Unless you happen to remember the 1970s SCTV characters The McKenzie Brothers, two drunken Canadians who punctuated every sentence with “eh,” and unless you happen to know that Russell Martin is Canadian, you would think the Times was saying, “This victory was so-so.” 

The bigger miss, however, was the Times failure to emphasize the exquisite artistry of this game. I can say sincerely that if the Giants had managed to win, I would have been just as amazed and moved by what I saw.  It was the greatest baseball game I have attended in person in my life. 

An Inconvenient Truth…but a Very Convenient Travel Schedule

What is it about the most prominent environmental activists? Especially those who speak out on climate change? Why do they need private planes? And so much air conditioning?

I realize this op-ed was written by someone who is hostile to liberals, so it’s fine to take it with a grain of sea salt. Maybe everything he says about Al Gore is a pack of lies, although I’ve yet to hear anyone refute it:

For someone who says the sky is falling, (Gore) does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film’s distributor, pays this.)

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore’s office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

Eco-celebrities’ use of private planes was chided a bit more gently in this editorial in today’s LA Times:

In Hollywood, carbon offsets are the successor to the Prius: the hippest way for stars to flaunt their conspicuous non-consumption. Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters offset tour emissions by protecting forests. Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt invested in trees too. The producers of “Syriana” got into the act. This year’s Super Bowl was “carbon-neutral” — and so was the World Cup.

But why let the famous people have all the fun? Regular folks can buy carbon offsets too, using any of a number of Internet-based calculators to measure their own carbon footprints and purchase affordable mini-offsets, which might run anywhere from $30 to a few hundred dollars. Some websites will even send a decal or sticker suitable for the bumper of a Prius. Or Hummer, as the case may be.

It’s a nice idea, as far as it goes — a little consciousness-raising can be a good thing, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to get more windmills spinning on the grid. But as some environmentalists have noted, this kind of do-gooder consumerism doesn’t necessarily achieve an overall net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (which is, after all, the ultimate goal).

That will take regulatory oversight and global coordination. Not to mention a dose of real sacrifice from all of us — including those of us who live in 15,000-square-foot estates in Beverly Hills and travel in private jets.

Unless you are travelling to extremely remote places, private planes are utterly dispensible. If you’re doing a PR tour to launch a movie in major metropolitan markets, you can probably get there on a commercial flight.

It seems bizarre to have to explain this, but in case Arianna Huffington, Al Gore or Cameron Diaz are reading: Commercial flights are like mass transit, except in the air. The idea is, for the same amount of fuel (and pollution) that your private plane uses to get you, your make-up artist, your flack and other members of your entourage from LAX to JFK, a commercial carrier can take hundreds of people!

“B-b-but what about carbon offsets? I’m cool if I use those, right?”

Well, as the LA Times says, yeah, I suppose, technically. But how about this idea? Calculate how much carbon offset you would have to buy if you took your private plane, and go buy it. Then, take a commercial flight anyway. That way, you haven’t just evened the score — you’ve actually made a difference.

More importantly, global warming skeptics won’t be able to dismiss your cause by pointing out what a big hypocrite you are.

Hear me now and believe me later: Celebrities who claim environmental leadership but take private planes hurt the environment. They hurt it. I’ll say it again: You’re hurting the environment. You might as well just vote for Republicans. You might as well be in a secret meeting with Dick Cheney. You might as well be BP, spending millions on the “beyond petroleum” PR campaign while skimping on Alaska pipeline inspections. You make the real environmentalists, the men and women who work for grassroots organizations for low wages, look foolish.

If you just have to take private planes, if First Class just isn’t first-class enough for you, that’s okay. There are plenty of other good causes to choose from. But stay away from the environment.

Now don’t get me started on the stars with multiple residences who keep all of them air conditioned like meat lockers….

UPDATED: Spin This? Society of Professional Journalists Honors Ethics of Resigned Santa Barbara Editors & Writers

The Society for Professional Journalists bestowed its highest ethics awards on nine editors and writers from the Santa Barbara News-Press, including former Executive Editor Jerry Roberts and longtime columnist Barney Brantingham, who all resigned “rather than accept and enforce a series of top-management decisions…they they believed violated provisions of the SPJ code of ethics.”

From the SPJ’s news release:

When they left the News-Press in July, all nine journalists, including five top editors and a veteran columnist, cited improper ownership and management meddling in the editorial content of the privately owned newspaper. They pointed specifically to sections of the SPJ Code of Ethics that call upon journalists to “distinguish between advocacy and news reporting” and to be “accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.”

SPJ traditionally steers clear of management-employee disputes, and understands the prerogatives that come with newspaper ownership. It does not take a position either way on formal workplace grievances or union activity resulting from internal disputes.

Nevertheless, the Society has concluded that the tumultuous events that led to collective resignations at the Santa Barbara News-Press were precipitated by breaches in the newspaper’s foremost ethical obligation – to its readers – and is proud to support those who have put ethical convictions above professional security.

According to SPJ President David Carlson, News-Press owner Wendy McCaw was interviewed by the organization’s investigating team before the awards were decided.

Roberts will accept the awards at a SPJ president’s installation dinner August 26 in Chicago. In addition to Roberts and Brantingham, the ethics awards went to:

• George Foulsham, former managing editor.
• Don Murphy, former deputy managing editor.
• Gerry Spratt, former sports editor.
• Michael Todd, former business editor.
• Jane Hulse, former city editor.
• Colin Powers, former presentation editor.
• Scott Hadly, former reporter.

A little more than two weeks ago, McCaw issued a statement that “Violations of our paper’s policies and standards are what brought on this conflict.” She’s talking about the same policies and standards that the editors and writers — and now, the Society for Professional Journalists — have deemed to be “breaches in the newspaper’s foremost ethical obligation.”

Stay tuned. I assume McCaw will have something to say about this.

UPDATE: It looks to me like McCaw pre-reacted to the awards. On August 10th, the day before the awards were announced, McCaw issued a press release concerning employees’ filing a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to initiate a unionization vote. McCaw painted this as a victory, because it meant the union was giving up on a “corporate campaign” to pressure management into conceding to a union. (All unionization battles go through this stage. Unions don’t like the NLRB process because they think it gives management an edge.)

In the release, McCaw takes another swipe at her former employees:

The employees who resigned have been replaced and won’t be a part of this process. Some of those who resigned were under investigation for employee misconduct.

We reject the charges about a breach of journalistic integrity and meddling on the part of management. This is merely a smokescreen and cover-up to hide personal agendas and vendettas.

“The real cover-up is how these people have been hiding behind these issues,” said Mrs. McCaw. “Our paper’s journalistic standards have been in place for more than 100 years and will continue to be as long as I own this newspaper,” she added.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics award renders the “smokescreen and cover-up” rhetoric inoperative, don’t you think?

Ned Lamont and “Message Clarity”: A Winning Formula for the Democrats?

A few months ago, I complained about “Lieberman-hatred,” and my bafflement at the virulent rhetoric being aimed at a good man; but I have to admit his critics identified a personality flaw in the Connecticut senator. To paraphrase Peter Beinert: Because Bin Laden and Hussein are clearly worse than George W. Bush, Joe Lieberman believed anyone who criticized the president’s conduct of the war was helping Bin Laden and Hussein. So it was Joe Lieberman’s duty to boost Bush, despite disagreements, despite party differences, despite everything. 

To Lieberman, this was simply patriotic.  To his critics, Lieberman’s stance was craven; moreover, it implicity downgraded the patriotism of his fellow Democratic Party members.

It is probably this perception, more than his position on the war itself, that cost Lieberman the support of his state’s Democrats, and swung the primary election to Ned Lamont.  After all, Lieberman was just one of many Democratic senators and House members who had voted for the war, and have so far declined to demand an immediate pull-out –which many Democrats agree would be irresponsible. 

To the left, Lieberman became a symbol of Democratic capitulation to Bush/Cheney in the years after 9/11 because he seemed so proud of his pro-war position, and even prouder, specifically, that he was supporting this president.  That was not so wise, politically. Any Democrat who fails to speak ill of George W. Bush in 2006 is suspect in the eyes of most Democratic activists. This colorful post, from Americablog.com’s John Aravosis expresses this feeling:

So, if the media and their GOP handlers are correct that bloggers are to the far-left of the Democratic party, and we all opposed Joe Lieberman because we supposedly hate conservative Democrats who support the war on terror, then why is it that we really like Harry Reid (a pro-life, white guy, who supports the flag burning amendment), but we aren’t shedding a lot of tears over last night’s defeat of Cynthia McKinney (a black woman and flaming liberal who was highly critical of George Bush)?And why is it that other Democrats who were supporters of the war in Iraq, and have significant progressive constituencies, and who are up for re-election this year, aren’t facing serious criticism from us, and aren’t facing serious primary challengers?

If we’re all flaming liberals who hate anyone who supported the war in Iraq, then why is Lieberman the only guy we’re upset with?

Or maybe: the Republicans are lying; the media, as usual, fell for their lies hook, line and sinker; and Joe Lieberman lost because he was George Bush’s love child and the American people have had it with this administration; their incompetence; and anyone who blindly enables it.

It’s not just bloggers, by the way. The “netroots” are just a new name for a species of zealous activist that has been around a long time. I’ve been a Democrat all my voting life, and I don’t recall a time when it was ever “okay” with self-identified Democrats to say they agreed with a Republican president about anything until he was safely out of office and preferably dead.

When Democrats start saying things like “We need to be pro-jobs,” or “We’re too weak on defense,” or “We need to be tougher on crime,” that’s normal Democratic angst.  But Democrats who said out loud that Nixon, Reagan or Bush 41 were better on a core issue generally were getting ready to leave the party (except Democrats trying to hold onto a Democratic seat in a very Republican district.)  It is no different in the era of Bush 43.  Democrats don’t agree on everything, but they are united in their eloquent hatred of Republicans in power.

While observing that, I still saw some of the netroot celebrants going down a disturbing and probably self-defeating path. My DD on the “many benefits of Ned Lamont’s victory” was typical of many and more articulate than most:

With Ned Lamont’s victory, we will now see far fewer Democrats in Washington and elsewhere take the easy path to media stardom that the corporate media had provided for Democrats since the mid-1980′s: talk about liberals and/or Democrats in the same way Republicans talk about liberals and/or Democrats. No one will want to be the next Joe Lieberman, and as such this victory will change Democratic behavior. This will now make it much more difficult for Republicans to close Daou’s triangle on a variety of issues, as they quickly will find a shortage of elected Democrats willing to use anti-Democratic Republican talking points. Thus, the more partisan messaging will make it far more difficult for conservatives and Republicans to dominate the conventional wisdom narratives of our national political discourse. This will also mean fewer “Democrats divided” narratives in the media, and help us slowly begin building toward greater message clarity. Today we already have seen how Lamont’s victory this defeat freed up Senator Dodd on Iraq and Emmanuel on Bush. This is just the beginning.

Daou’s Triangle, by the way, refers to this diagram by Peter Daou, which is supposed to show how bloggers (by which he means activists) and the regular party establishment can work in concert to get the “corporate media” to repeat their messages and influence the public.  According to this meme, the Republican triangle works flawlessly — in part because apostates like Lieberman lend more credibility to their messages – but the Democratic triangle is “broken.” 

But the question is:  In service of a PR objective (“fewer ’Democrats divided’ narratives,” “greater message clarity”), should Democrats who take different positions be run out of the party?  This is what he seems to be saying. It’s a peculiar stance for a Democrat, one that seems out of step with the historical nature of the party. 

There is no specific Democratic position on a large assortment of issues, except for disdain for Bush.  How do you decide which of the many Democratic positions on Iraq and the Islamist threat–not to mention Social Security, health care, education, gay marriage, the environment, gun control, etc. etc.–should be purged for the sake of “message clarity?”  ”I don’t belong to an organized party; I’m a Democrat,” Will Rogers’ famous remark, was uttered just as the party entered its period of greatest dominance.

Is it so different today?  Must the nature of what it means to be a Democrat really become so narrow in order for the party to succeed?

“Message clarity” is not a virtue unto itself.  It is a PR technique, and generally a defensive one. Straying from the “key messages” is usually seen as dangerous for a CEO or corporate spokesperson dealing with a crisis, or anticipating criticism.  It is not a confident stance, nor is it a way to foster the kind of creativity that — in my opinion — the Democratic party really needs more than anything right now. 

Obeying, I guess, the iron law of Daou’s Triangle, the left- and right-wing bloggers are now furiously, frantically spinning to claim not who “won” yesterday’s vote — clearly, that was the left — but which party gains.  Republicans say Republicans, because the election proves that left-wing wackos have taken their party down the McGovernite road. Democrats say Democrats because the election reflects dwindling support for the Iraq war that is the most prominent Republican policy.

My take is that the Lamont victory gives the Democrats an opportunity, but only an opportunity.  They’ve got the public’s attention.  They’ve done something novel, tossing out a respected party veteran — no matter what else you might think about him, Joe Lieberman is no hack — who was their VP candidate six years ago. They have, I think, captured the zeitgeist of a public that is weary of the war and wondering whether Bush has a clue what to do next. 

When you’ve got the microphone, however, you better have something to say.  ”Message clarity” won’t be good enough if the message fails to persuade or enlighten the troubled American public.      

Full Moon Fever

Why do we stare at the full moon? Why are we so captivated by it?  Why, when it rises above the horizon, do we stop what we’re doing or saying to point it out? Why does a landscape bathed in moonlight have such mystique?

It’s the realization that all over the world, wherever it’s dark at that moment, everyone is caught in the same strange light.  The light of a full moon is only the reflection of the sun’s; but the moon–this dark, abandoned mirror–transfigures the light into a magic glow.  You can see it and feel it best out on the ocean or in the desert, away from electric lights; but even in the city, a full moon aimed at an open bedroom window changes whatever and whoever is inside.

If full moons happened less frequently, we’d think they were astronomical miracles.  But, for some reason, this month’s is making a big impression on people. The light seems different — although I don’t think this photo really captures it.

Pelicans and Hummingbirds — Separated at Birth?

The pelican is a bird of disproportionate meaning to me. 

When I was at Cal, I edited The Pelican, which during my years (and probably only during my years) attempted to be a “New Journalism” type of magazine with serious non-fiction, poetry and fiction.  (At its inception, through most of its history, and probably today, it has tried, usually without success, to be the West Coast’s answer to the Harvard Lampoon.) 

The pelican’s revival along the California coast has, along with the dolphin’s, signalled that aggressive environmental protections make a difference.  (I’m an enviro-optimist.  I like to think when you pass laws to limit pollution, the laws’ advocates should stop once in awhile and say: “See? Wasn’t that worth it?”)  

It’s also hard not to relate to a bird that is uglier than the ugly duckling, and yet flies with such stately insouciance and grace. Actually, the relaxed pelican could not be less like the frantic hummingbird — except in silhouette:

Usually pelicans travel in flocks but this one patrolled a cove off Catalina alone and didn’t seem to want any fishing buddies.  

These two banked against the stiff breeze at Hurricane Gulch, at LA Harbor, making it look easy to fly against a wind that knocked the cap off my head repeatedly. 

Fifteen Minute Intermission

I’m going out of town until Tuesday. Back on line Wednesday. Feel free to tour the archives — and comment if so moved — while I take this brief intermission.

No Comment?

I have so many more readers for this blog than I ever thought I would. I have great fun writing it, to the point of distraction from my other responsibilities, including sleep. From day to day, week to week, I don’t know exactly where I’m going to take this thing. What I’m going to write about and what I’m going to say is as much a process of discovery for me as it is a surprise for you. This blog has given me a chance to gain confidence and refine my “chops” as a writer, which (after the past two years of Lewis-Carroll-meets-John Grisham-meets-James-Ellroy has “repositioned” my career) is a direction I intend to pursue seriously.

So, when I open up “From the Desert to the Sea…” each day, I am happy. Except for one thing.

Days, sometimes weeks, go by without any reader comments.

The sites I admire the most, irrespective of subject matter or point of view, get lots of comments. Jon Weisman’s Dodger Thoughts, where I am part of the commenting community under the nickname dzzrtRatt, will get a hundred comments during a rain delay. Ann Althouse‘s posts on the day’s news will spark a fascinating discussion in the comments — often with little further input from Ann herself. Likewise Jeff Jarvis‘ site on the media, BuzzMachine. I don’t always agree with him, but the combined effect of Jarvis and his erudite commenters is always stimulating.

Each of these sites succeed in creating a conversation, which is the ultimate flowering of the web medium. In print or on TV, the writer is king. On the web, in a blog, optimally the writer is merely the instigator.

Now, I know that Jon Weisman, Ann Althouse and Jeff Jarvis have been blogging much longer than me. They do it better. Weisman and Jarvis also stick to their knitting better than I do. When you open their doors, you know what you’re going to get. Althouse, a law professor who likes to stray from writing about the law, has established a persona and seems like a friend. (Some other sites legendary for their high volumes of comments attract a politically homogeneous community, from the right or left. Obviously, that won’t work for a polymorph like me. I don’t want or need a bunch of yes-persons saluting me.)

Some might say, maybe comments aren’t that important. Two of my other favorite sites, LA Observed and Instapundit, don’t even permit them. Kevin Roderick and Glenn Reynolds are such prolific posters, I imagine they don’t think they have time to moderate the dozens of comments they’d undoubtedly get.

But with all due respect to both gentlemen, I believe their sites would be even more interesting if we could read the conversations their posts stimulate. “Naked Conversations” co-author Shel Israel posted about comments the other day, expressing relief that his broken comments capability had been fixed. He asked his readers, “Do Comments Help?” The first comment he got, from Doug Karr, said it all to me:

Without comments, you’re merely a writer.
With comments, we have a conversation.
By not acting on comments, I have no choice but to leave the conversation or yell louder.

The context was a little different than this. Israel is one of many writers trying to talk corporations into blogging — a pursuit that is fraught with at least as much peril as opportunity. But the point applies just as much to a blog people read purely because they like the writer’s style or subject matter. All my life, I’ve read newspapers, magazines and books with a running dialogue going in my head–or to be more precise, a parallel running monologue. Now, technology has created an opportunity to turn that into a dialogue.

So, I ask. If you are a reader of this site, why don’t you comment? Is it me? Do I come off like a writer who’s said it all,  smothered the subject and left no room for anyone else? It is you? Are you afraid of letting other people know what you think, or what you think of me? Are you too busy? Or just too bored. Don’t hold back, I can take it.

To facilitate more comments, I’ve changed how they are processed. I no longer moderate them — although they are still subject to a spam filter. The spam filter is not perfect, so a few spammers (out of hundreds each week, by the way) might get through. I’ll remove spam as soon as I see it. Also, I believe I was asking people for their e-mail address before, and that might’ve been a deterrent. If I’ve gotten the widget working correctly, you won’t need to do that anymore. I will delete comments later if I think they’re abusive, or raise legal concerns, but the bias now will be that comments should appear.

So let me know. Do you want to comment? Do you not want to comment? Are there things just better left unsaid? Whatever to you want to say about it, please, leave a note right here…

The Elder Statesmen

I don’t know when I started paying attention to the news or mass culture; maybe around 1961 or ’62?  Not that many of the folks who populated my consciousness back then are still around today, but two of the survivors have much been in the news lately, for different reasons:  Tony Bennett and Fidel Castro.

“I Left My Heart in San Francisco” must have been coming out of every Edsel’s radio when I was a little kid; for years it was the only song of Bennett’s that I knew existed, and it was one of the first contributors to this Illinois-boy’s impression of California as a magical place.  When he sang ”Those little cable cars/Go halfway to the stars,” I could see them–because they also showed up on Rice-a-Roni commercials.

Yesterday was Tony Bennett’s 80th birthday.  The New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote a nice profile that drew the distinction between Bennett and his career-long musical parallel:

After the death of Frank Sinatra in 1998, Mr. Bennett immediately became the leading caretaker of the literate American song tradition that runs from Kern to Ellington to Rodgers. You couldn’t ask for a more reverent keeper of the flame.

Careers that last as long and have been as distinguished as Mr. Bennett’s have something to tell us about collective cultural experience over decades. It has been said that Sinatra’s journey from skinny, starry-eyed “Frankie,” strewing hearts and flowers, to the imperious, volatile Chairman of the Board roughly parallels an American loss of innocence. As Sinatra entered his noir period in the mid-1950’s, his romantic faith gave way to a soul-searching existentialism that yielded the most psychologically complex popular music ever recorded. Following a similar arc, the country grew from a nation of hungry dreamers fleeing the Depression and fighting “the good war” into an arrogant empire drunk on power and angry at the failure of the American dream to bring utopia.

Mr. Bennett is something else altogether. A native New Yorker and man of the people, he never strayed far from his working-class roots in Astoria, Queens, where he was born Anthony Benedetto. Although he came out of the same tradition of Mediterranean balladry as Sinatra, he retained the innocence and joie de vivre of his youth. Disappointment is not in his vocabulary. We don’t go to him for psychological complexity, but for refreshment and reassurance that life is good.

Believing in the power of art to ennoble ordinary lives, he sings what he feels with a rare mixture of humility and pride: humility in the face of the daunting popular-song tradition he treasures and pride that he is recognized as its custodian. Gratitude and joy, gruffness and beauty balance each other perfectly in singing that has grown more rhythmically acute with each passing year. 

Compare their Saturday Night Live parodies.  Phil Hartman’s Sinatra was belligerent, demanding and opinionated, admonishing a rapper to tone down the “blue” language, and threatening Billy Idol by saying “I got chunks of guys like you in my stool.”  Meanwhile, SNL’s faux Tony Bennett, portrayed by Alec Baldwin, hosts a talk show where he sings “I like everything that’s great!” and tells a grumpy Dick Cheney that his bleak vision of a world at war is “fantastic!”  

I recall seeing Tony Bennett throughout the sixties on TV variety shows, doing Broadway tunes and then, when the rock era began to dominate, doing pretty good versions of songs like Stevie Wonder’s ”For Once in My Life.”  His choices of late sixties “kids’” material were idiosyncratic but perfect for him:  “Come Saturday Morning,” the theme from the obscure Liza Minnelli movie “The Sterile Cuckoo,” or the Beatles’ “Something” and “The Long and Winding Road.”  But the sixties and seventies temporarily eclipsed Bennett — which then led him to team up with the jazz great Bill Evans on two gorgeous records, and to appear on the cult comedy show SCTV. 

Still, Tony Bennett’s best years artistically and commercially were ahead of him.  For the past 20 years since his return to prominence (via MTV of all places), he has been an icon not just for his generation but for every generation. He’s still doing concerts.  It feels like he’ll never be gone, and that’s a blessing of our times.

Meanwhile, 90 miles south of Florida, the other elder of the Cold War generation lies in a hospital bed, or perhaps a morgue, waiting to return to power, or perhaps waiting for his funeral. 

Fidel Castro was the first non-imaginary bogeyman of my youth. From my five-year-old’s point of view, it was Castro who wanted to blow up the United States with a nuclear bomb.  I didn’t understand his client relationship with the Soviet Union.  All I knew was, there’s this man, his country is next to ours, he’s got a big beard and a cigar, and he hates us, and he has a nuclear bomb, and he’s going to shoot it toward us. Duck and cover!

I’m sure JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton all envisioned they would leave office with Fidel out of power. I’m sure that was true, too, of Krushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Tito, Franco, De Gaulle, Trudeau, and every other world leader of the past four decades who Castro has outlasted and, in many cases, outlived.  

In life, Fidel’s Cuba stopped being much of a threat to us, really, years ago — certainly after the fall of the USSR, which threw his country deeper into poverty and curtailed his global revolutionary ambitions.  But he hung on, for 17 more years so far, and maybe longer.  And now, he’s much more threatening to peace in death.  Not that I want him to stay in power — I think his regime is evil, murderous and corrupt and has held his people back.  If I were the son of a Cuban refugee in Florida, I’m sure I’d be joining the festivities around his pending demise. 

But, like Saddam Hussein’s, Fidel Castro’s life and seemingly endless regime put the history of his country on “pause.” His continuation brought a kind of stability.  His death will bring instability as competing forces push for position, with Bush-Cheney presiding over it. I’m uneasy. Will the people of Cuba get freedom, or will they get endless insurgency, or will they get a combination of the two, as in Iraq. Are we competent enough to manage our role effectively? Will the politics of South Florida be the tail wagging the dog?

At my age, you get used to letting go.  You get used to understanding you can’t rely on anything to stay the same.  I’d like to think Tony Bennett will keep putting out great CDs, and that I might see him again in concert. I don’t like to think Castro will run Cuba forever, but I don’t trust the future after Castro to be peaceful or orderly, so I’m not in a hurry to see him go.  Replacing an evil dictatorship with “democracy” once the dictator is toppled doesn’t seem quite as obvious or simple as it used to, in theory, appear.  

As long as these two icons are still around, I still feel like I live in the world of my childhood, with its familiar terrors and familiar pleasures.  New pleasures surely await us, but also new terrors that we’d rather not think about.       

Pinkberry vs. the Parking Trolls

Two Los Angeles obsessions — dieting and parking — have collided with the fury of rutting mule deer in West Hollywood, according to Deborah Netburn of the Los Angeles Times.

Netburn’s story describes what happens when Hyekyung Hwang, a USC business school grad, bought a little storefront on Huntley Drive. She wanted it to be an English tea room with outdoor seating, and ran up against the local property owners’ group. Of course, under the City of West Hollywood’s rules (which are typical for Southern California cities), the neighbors had the right to tell her she couldn’t offer outdoor seating. Then she thought, what about serving something elegant like sherry? Using the liquor license laws, again the neighbors slapped her down.

This was, by the way, a store that previously had been a tattoo parlor and then a medical marijuana outlet. So it’s worth pondering what these homeowners thought would be so destructive of neighborhood values if instead of pot Hwang sold sherry. What’s probably the case is that the medical marijuana dealership and tattoo parlor operated under the regulatory radar, but Hwang needed a permit. In local politics, the need for a permit brings out the trolls under the bridge who demand payment to let you cross.

So what other kind of business could an entreprenuer slide into this slot without incurring the trolls’ wrath? Hwang settled on selling frozen yogurt made with her own recipe. Low-fat, but without artificial flavorings, served with fresh fruit on top. She called it Pinkberry.

By February 2005, one month after it opened, Pinkberry was already turning a profit. The lines started that summer. By that August, it was discovered by Daily Candy. By spring, Los Angeles had fallen hopelessly in love. The little store on Huntley where the tattoo parlor used to be now serves about 1,300 to 1,600 customers a day.

This, of course, was not exactly what the neighbors thought would happen. Hwang said when she first opened the store the neighbors were friendly and welcoming. “They were like, ‘Good luck, Asian lady’ and buy a yogurt,” she said. Now they are plagued with increasing traffic on their once sleepy street of million-dollar bungalows and people double parking “just for a minute” to run in for a quick Pinkberry (though with the long lines, there is no such thing as a quick Pinkberry any more).

For neighbors, there is Pinkberry trash on their lawns, and sometimes Pinkberry customers too. The angriest of the neighbors stand outside at night to remind yogurt lovers that the street is all permit parking, and they will be ticketed if they park illegally. But even that doesn’t always work.

“The bottom line is the customers that go to Pinkberry don’t mind paying $68 for a tub of yogurt,” said Huntley Avenue resident Oliver Wilson, handily adding the price of a parking ticket to the $7.45 cost of a large yogurt. “It’s all Escalades and Mercedes and BMWs. You tell them, ‘Don’t park here,’ and they do. They can afford it.”

I love it!

“Permit parking.” If you’re not a well-off homeowner in certain parts of Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Santa Monica and other desireable locales near attractive commercial neighborhoods, this concept might be alien to you. Beginning about 20 years ago, such homeowners decided it wasn’t enough that they had a house with a driveway and a garage, and they could walk to stores, parks, pubs and other urban play areas. They wanted to own their street, or at least all its parking spaces. However, they didn’t want to have to pay for this additional valuable property. So someone came up with the brilliant idea of getting the city to give it to them, like a present.

So, if you own a house on Huntley Drive, or on one of the hundreds of streets like it, you get to park in front of your house, but no one else can, even though we’re all taxpayers, and we all paid for the street, the curb, the park strip and so on.

Huntley Drive runs right into busy Santa Monica Boulevard, which was a commercial street long ago. The little bit of Huntley that abuts the boulevard was also zoned for commercial. The homeowners weren’t blindfolded when they purchased their homes. In fact, proximity to Santa Monica Boulevard is, for some, an added attraction. Nonetheless, they feel they are entitled — entitled! — to enjoy the amenities of a suburban neighborhood ambience in which outsiders are unwelcome.

I worked in LA City Hall when the permit parking trend first took hold. I couldn’t believe such a thing was legal. I found it even harder to believe that a city political culture supposedly dedicated to equality thought the better-off residents who could afford to buy homes in pricey neighborhoods were deserving of a gift of public property that all taxpayers had paid to build and continue to pay to maintain.

But these homeowner groups were unbelievable. They depicted daily life in their cozy little neighborhoods as if everyone who parked there threw a week’s worth of garbage on their front lawn and then urinated on it. Every time a new permit parking zone was approved, the debate would be the same. The local councilmember would agree with these organized homeowners that it was a “crisis,” an “emergency,” from which only permit parking would save them.

I figured, if these people want to buy the parking rights in front of their home, fine. The city could use the revenue. Charge them market rates — in fact, have an auction, with the proceeds to fund additional police, more teachers, health clinics, the kinds of things government is supposed to do. But — it wasn’t my department. And I’m sure if I’d pushed this idea in City Hall, I would have been instructed, not so patiently, on who really runs the city. The 10-20 percent of those who vote in municipal elections are disproportionately property owners. So you do what they want, or you find yourself unelected.

All bad policies have a way of blowing up in someone’s face eventually. Well, the brilliant Hyekyung Hwang and her “frozen heroin juice” (as one fan calls it) did the deed. She created a yummy, low-fat product that wealthy people from another part of the Los Angeles area were willing to pay the price of a parking ticket to buy. Why can they afford to pay $68 for a yogurt, night after night? Oh, lots of reasons I suppose, but one of them must be that their homes have also risen in value and low-interest home equity loans can help pay their bills–including their parking tickets. Their homes probably are really nice, lots of amenities, big shady trees — and permit parking to keep the riff-raff away.

Meanwhile, Ms. Hwang, on behalf of the South Bay, I want to welcome you here with open arms whenever you’re ready to franchise your concoction. Permit parking is relatively rare, and there are lots of storefronts on PCH with ample parking out front. And we are just as obsessed about our waistlines down here as anyone in West LA.

Embarrassing LA Times Scoop: Marilyn Lives!

The Los Angeles Times’ decline reminds me of what happens when you spill a bag of groceries down a flight of stairs. It keeps going and going, and then when you think it has stopped, another can of tomatoes bounces out.

For many observers, this week’s can of tomatoes is yesterday’s announcement that it will put advertising on its section front pages. For me, it was today’s piece about the rock singer who thinks she was Marilyn Monroe in a past life.

Robert W. Welkos, a long-time reporter for the paper and, among other achievements, co-author of the brave 1990 series exposing Scientology, today sees his byline over a 2,000-word piece about an obscure rock singer in an unknown Canadian rock band called Pandamonia, who has been provided with past-life regression therapy to deal with her belief, beginning at age 11, that she is Marilyn Monroe.

The Times apparently thought this story was pretty important. It gives Welkos a full page in the Calendar section, illustrated with an enormous glamour-shot of Marilyn along with photos of the singer, Sherrie Lea Laird and her daughter (who, get this, believes she’s Marilyn Monroe’s mother) and the therapist, Dr. Adrian Finkelstein. Finkelstein, who Welkos takes pains to point out is “currently accorded privileges to practice at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center,” is peddling a book about the return of Marilyn entitled Marilyn Monroe Returns! The Healing of a Soul, which is currently ranked #268,228 on Amazon. So, you know, this is news, baby!

(Pandamonia has no CDs for sale on Amazon, and from its own website seems to be a band that plays mostly in Toronto pubs and sells its songs via downloads. Welkos says Pandamonia is playing this week in LA, although the tour dates page on the band’s website doesn’t agree.)

The tone of the piece is completely credulous. Oh, Welkos does allow as to how “neither the American Psychiatric Association nor the American Psychological Association have taken an official position on past life regression therapy.” But when Finkelstein and Laird say that Laird “had never done the kind of research that might explain the persistent familiarity she felt for Marilyn,” Welkos does not question this assertion.

Welkos, and the Times’, only test of Laird’s trustworthiness is that she is not being paid by Finkelstein to promote his book — even though she is doing a press conference Friday to promote the book, which presumably will give this would-be rock star more visibility. Oh, and that Laird’s “fellow band members were concerned about her coming forward at this time for fear that it would hurt the group’s credibility.” Gee, if Pandamonia’s members decide to give up music, maybe they could become editors for the LA Times.

Certainly, Times readers would benefit from a past-life regression from Robert W. Welkos — from the reporter he is today to the reporter who, with Joel Sappell, demolished Scientology 16 years ago. That Welkos would have had some good questions for Dr. Finkelstein, such as: How much money did Ms. Laird pay you for this “therapy?” What about your website? How much money do you make selling “memberships?” How much do your DVDs, tapes, CDs and books bring in? The site looks like a giant come-on, doctor; care to comment?

Look, like the American Psychiatric Association, I’m not taking a position on reincarnation, which is a religious belief. Nor am I saying that past-life regression is bunk, because I don’t know enough about it. My questions are simply logical ones. Like, how is it that of the billions of dead souls out there, most of the past-lives stories center around dead celebrities like Marilyn Monroe?

Hundreds of books have been written about the tragic actress. Practically everyone who knew her has written a memoir about her. They’ve multiplied since evidence began to emerge that she had affairs with John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. I’ve run across many TV documentaries about her life, her death, conspiracy theory about whether she was murdered. I don’t consider myself a hugely obsessed Marilyn Monroe fan, but just through pop-culture osmosis, I could probably recite 100 facts about her life. But the LA Times wants us to buy this?

After treating hundreds of patients with regression therapy, Finkelstein, who runs the Malibu Wholistic Health Center, came away convinced that Laird wasn’t lying and wasn’t psychotic.

Indeed, he noted, she was able to answer — under hypnosis — hundreds of carefully researched questions about Monroe’s life. He noted that some of her answers could have been known only by the real Monroe, such as being able to identify the actress’ maternal aunts in a family photograph.

The psychiatrist also pointed out similarities that he said existed between the two women’s facial features, hands, feet, voice patterns and handwriting. Finkelstein stressed that Laird was not a poser who wanted to embody Monroe but was someone struggling to reconcile years of pain and disturbing memories: “She didn’t want to be Marilyn Monroe, period. She wanted to be herself, unlike so many pretenders, beautiful girls who stepped forward and wanted to be her.”

Ah yes. The old “statements against interest” form of evidence. If you say you’re Marilyn Monroe, but you don’t want to be Marilyn Monroe, then you really must be Marilyn Monroe. Welkos also applies empirical proof to her claims:

Connected at birth?

LAIRD was born 11 months after Monroe’s death. But Laird said she doesn’t believe that contradicts her reincarnation theory. Laird said her mother suffered a miscarriage and two months later became pregnant. “The same baby was me,” Laird said. “She lost me, but I came back.”

Finkelstein came to another startling conclusion that may be harder to swallow, for some, than Sherrie Laird being Marilyn Monroe.

He believes her daughter, Kezia, is the reincarnation of Gladys Baker, Monroe’s mother.

He noted that Kezia was conceived within days of Baker’s death in 1984.

“It seems that immediately upon her death, Gladys made a ‘reservation’ to be born to Sherrie,” Finkelstein writes in his book.

“That’s his biggest gift for me,” Laird said in an interview. “[Kezia is] Gladys…. You actually do get a chance to work things out with loved ones.”

Surely Welkos, with his months of research into Scientology’s greedy practices, knows what the effect of this article will be. He is going to drive hundreds of new customers into Finkelstein’s lucrative online bazaar. Not only will the good doctor sell more books, he will sell more of everything he hawks on his site. Next we’ll be hearing about the poor victims who never wanted to be reincarnated as JFK, RFK, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix and Judy Garland. People will pay millions to hear their sad stories of the uncontrollable thoughts about the Bay of Pigs, Viva Las Vegas, and playing guitar with your teeth.

And, perhaps 20 years from now, the reincarnation of Otis Chandler. He already walks among us! He’d just be a baby now, but in a few years he is going to learn how to read, and he’ll be mysteriously drawn to a copy of the LA Times. He’s going to see it and, boy, is he going to need therapy!

(UPDATE: Now I’m embarrassed.  Until today [9/26], I didn’t see that I had misspelled the word “embarrassing” in the title.  Well, I guess that shoots my application to become a copy editor for the Times.)