John’s Busier Blog Has a New Name

Before the election, I called it “Politics and Profits:  Business and the 2008 Election.”  Now it’s called “Politics and Profits: The Meltdown.“  In a “rebranding post,” I explain the new direction.

I’m Still Here…

…even though I’ve gone nearly a month since my last post.

Do I still want to be a blogger?  I enjoy writing, in fact I need to write.  I’m writing all the time, commenting quite frequently on a couple of blogs (Dodger Thoughts and Althouse) and sporadically on others, sometimes using my real name, sometimes one of a couple aliases.   I have a screenplay I’ve been working on since 2005, which I’m still editing (and of which a few friends are waiting to see drafts — coming!)  I’ve been arguing with or trying to entertain (sometimes hard to tell the difference) a few friends and family members concerning the election.  And, most importantly, I’ve been working.

As some might recall, this blog began during a long period of unemployment caused by my shocking encounter at the crossroads of politics and the criminal justice system.  The blog was my lifeline during that period.  It was how I maintained my voice in the communities of which i had long been a part.  It was also a kind of journal of that period, although a journal in only the most oblique sense, since I could not discuss my case except superficially (and still can’t, since the case is still on appeal.)  It was also my personal exploration of the blogging medium.  And it was my refrigerator, serving the same function of providing a white space where I could tape an article where my housemates could see it, except now my house is the virtual world.

For the first year or so, I wrote in this blog almost compulsively, posting every day, sometimes two or three times a day, writing about things I understood–like Los Angeles, politics, PR and marketing, the environment and related public policy issues, sports and music–and things I didn’t.  No one could tell me not to write whatever I wanted.  That freedom is the essence of blogging.

Part of that freedom is also…not to write.  Or to write something or somewhere else.  And then come back to this.

If you like reading my stuff or want to keep up with me, here’s what I think I’ll do.  I’ll put an RSS feed of this blog on my page on Facebook.  I’m on Facebook. You’re probably also on Facebook, whoever is reading this. The feed will show you when I’ve updated this blog.  I will also leave a note if there is a particularly noteworthy (notes for the noteworthy? What a concept) post.  The rhythm will be arhythmic, but you’ll never feel like you’re reading filler.  That’s my only guarantee.

The Obama and McCain Buddy-Cop Show

A month ago, I tossed off a comment on Althouse that included the following lines:

So that leaves Obama and McCain. I wish they could run together. They’d be like one of those old 1970s cop shows. The crusty old seen-it-all guy who goes by his gut, partnered with the brilliant rookie whose got courage to match his brains.

They both seem like leaders to me. Contrary to extremely popular belief, the presidency is not an ideological office. The needed skills are inertia-busting on the domestic front, and strategic courage on the international front. Plus the right kind of ego, an ego strong enough to surround themselves with very smart advisors and encourage candor from them.

Both seem to have these skills. If they end up running against each other, I don’t yet know which way I’d go. But if only one of them is in the race, that’s the one I’m voting for.

I was sort of kidding.  In the same comment, I discussed briefly my distaste for Hillary Clinton and at greater length my dislike of Mitt Romney. 

Recently, Salon’s Edward McClelland wrote a column suggesting that guys are supporting Obama and/or McCain — just to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.  His take-off point was my post:

John Stodder, a 52-year-old blogger from Palos Verdes Peninsula, Calif., looks at the presidential field and sees another buddy-cop pairing: John McCain and Barack Obama, supposed mavericks who break their parties’ rules, bound together by a common mission — keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

“I wish they could run together,” Stodder swoons. “They’d be like one of those old 1970s cop shows. The crusty old seen-it-all guy who goes by his gut, partnered with the brilliant rookie who’s got courage to match his brains.

I give McClelland huge props for crediting me with the line.  I think it’s funny.  I don’t actually think the White House is like a grungy detective precinct in a gritty urban core.  The fact that I like both candidates (Obama more than McCain) is incidental. 

The fact that they’re both men has nothing to do with why I like them.  I was prepared to vote for Sen. Clinton until this year despite some misgivings, until her campaign’s empty-headed and scurrilous nature became apparent. 

You hear a lot about the failure of the Clinton “inevitability” strategy.  In America, what else could such a strategy do but fail?  “Vote for me because you have no choice” might work in Cuba or Iran, but not here. 

Anyway, my little brainstorm got another push into potential meme-dom today on NPR’s “Wait…Wait…Don’t Tell Me.”  Listen to the first couple of minutes.  (And thank you to my wife’s aunt for happening across the show.)

It makes me want to blog some more!

Okay, I’m Back

I’ve been thinking about how to get this blog back up and running, even though I’m supposed to be focusing mostly on my new blog, From 50,000 Feet.  That’s a blog about business, which means it’s about almost anything I want it to be, since everything is business and business is everything. But it’s not about me.

The problem is simply this:  When I was committed to this blog on a daily basis, I wrote what were essentially articles.  They were bloggy, but because I’ve written journalism and PR most of my life, I couldn’t let anything go if I hadn’t at least done some research on it and thought about how I wanted to present it.  Even if the search was purely personal, I still wanted people to take information from it, information you could use.  

Now, that article-writing mentality is switched to my new blog.  I just don’t have the time or energy for two such projects.  And, well, the other one…I’m getting paid to do it.

But in the two years of steady work on this blog, as I labored over my posts, oh how I envied those great models of blogging, LA Observed, Instapundit and DodgerThoughts for their concision, for their gift of open-endedness, their willingness to just let a thought or an idea live on its own, without all the struts and supports that I felt mine needed.  For Kevin Roderick and Glenn Reynolds, that meant they could do 4, 5, 10, 20 posts a day sometimes, while I struggled to do one.

It’s been my problem as a writer for as long as I’ve been a writer. Not writing fast — I’m a whiz, actually — but writing too much.  Probably, I should blame my math teachers who drilled into my head that I must “show my work.”  But it’s not a #2 pencil world anymore.  You’ve all got calculators, and the great thing about calculators is once you’ve got the answer, how you got there doesn’t matter anymore.

So that’s how it’s going to be.  I’m not just going to get to the point on this blog. It’ll be all ”point” and no “getting to” it.

So what am I thinking right now? 

That I need to go for a swim.

That I need to take some paper to be shredded.  Three bags full, accumulated over a year or more. 

That my feet are cold.

That I can’t believe I’m agreeing with the Dodger management about their hiring of Joe Torre.

That Maureen Dowd’s column on Hillary Clinton is a major return to form for a seemingly burned out writer.  A lot of pundits are getting blood transfusions with the approaching end of the Bush era, where the intellectual air had gotten pretty stale. 

Keep in mind, if I had to guess right now, I would guess I’m going to be casting my presidential ballot for Mrs. C.  But, still, this was good:

When pundettes tut-tut that playing the victim is not what a feminist should do, they forget that Hillary is not a feminist. If she were merely some clichéd version of a women’s rights advocate, she never could have so effortlessly blown off Marian Wright Edelman and Lani Guinier when Bill first got in, or played the Fury with Bill’s cupcakes during the campaign.

She was always kind enough to let Bill hide behind her skirts when he got in trouble with women. Now she deserves to hide behind her own pantsuits when men cause her trouble.

We underestimate Hillary if we cast her as Eleanor Roosevelt. She’s really Alfonse D’Amato. Not just the Senator Pothole role, but the talent for playing the aggrieved victim.

D’Amato pulled off a dramatic upset in ’92 against Robert Abrams, the New York attorney general, by pouncing when Abrams slipped one night and called D’Amato a “fascist.” Though never a sensitive soul about insulting other ethnic groups, D’Amato quickly cast “fascist” as an insult to Italian-Americans, producing an ad with scenes of Mussolini.

“It was sheer gall,” Anthony Marsh, D’Amato’s media consultant, proudly told The Times’s Alessandra Stanley.

Like Alfonse, Hillary has the gift of gall. She can be righteous while playing brass-knuckle politics. She will cozy up to former enemies she can use, like Matt Drudge and David Brock, and back W.’s bellicosity if it helps banish her old image as antimilitary.

There is nowhere she won’t go, so long as it gets her where she wants to be.

That’s the beauty of Hillary.

Well…gotta go to the gym! 

Thank You

Sometime in the past 24 hours, From the Desert to the Sea’s total “hits” passed 200,000.

It means so much to me that so many visitors come read what I have to say every day. So thank you.

This blog will keep going. However, the frequency of posts will slow, and the focus of them will be more personal. This is because I’ve started a new blog for the company for which I work, Dolan Media, and I need to prioritize writing there.

Dolan is a publisher of business and legal information and so the new blog — called From 50,000 Feet — is completely focused on those topics. My role will be more like a reporter and editor, sharing things I think will be of interest to people in the business and legal realms. I will also share with you some of the best of our company’s reporting and blogging.

I can’t help being me, so the new blog will probably have a disproportionate focus on the business and legal subjects with which I am most familiar — environmental issues, the practice of PR, business and public policy — but I can stretch. That’s one great thing about the blogging medium. It’s not my job always to have the best information or ideas; just to point you there.

Dolan has newspapers and related websites in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan, Oregon, Idaho and Minnesota. There are links to all of them here, and on my new blog. The new blog also links to all of our affiliated blogs, where you’ll find a wealth of good writing.

I’m working with a fearless group of editors and web designers. We’re in the process of bringing the tools of social media to our readers in what we believe will be new and useful ways. I’m grateful for the opportunity the company has given me to explore and help create the future of news and information.

But I’m also so grateful for being able to talk to the readers of this blog for the past two years–and for all your support. I’m proud of a lot of the work I’ve done here, and I’m not done with it yet. But please visit my new thing, make a comment if you’re so moved, and tell your friends.

Thanks again.

Yankee Class

Last night, the New York Yankees were defeated by the Cleveland Indians, 6-4 and thereby ousted from the playoffs. Normally this is something in which I would take devilish delight. But not today. Because that loss is almost surely the end of the remarkable tenure of their manager for the past 12 years, Joe Torre.

Just for fun, I followed the game via an open thread on Bronx Banter, a Yankee fan blog affiliated with Jon Weisman’s great Dodger Thoughts via the Baseball Toaster. I’ve checked out that blog before, but generally didn’t hang around because it struck me as a place where someone might throw a piece of loose concrete at your head and everyone else would say it fell off a building.

I made up my mind early not to be a “troll.” Even though I’m a confirmed Yankee-hater going back to 1964, I didn’t want to be rude to fans who might be grieving. When Yankee pitcher Chien-Ming Wang gave up four runs in the first two innings and was gone in the second without having gotten anyone out, grief loomed closer. You can’t count a lineup like the Yankees’ out, ever, but the tone of the fan comments got gloomy right away. I tried to keep my comments positive, though. These guys seemed to appreciate a boost now and then; plus I didn’t want any chunks of concrete flying my way (some did anyway, but I think it was a case of mistaken identity).

As we now know, the Yankees home run prowess went for naught as each dinger flew over the fence with no one else on base. Bronx Banter is a far more profane world than Dodger Thoughts, but I found myself increasingly protective of these guys. The community around that blog were tough-but-tender types. And far more than I, they recognized they were watching the end of something — the end of Joe Torre’s astounding 12-year reign as manager during which he brought the Yankees into the post-season every year.

For these fans, Joe Torre is a complex kind of father figure. He’s a gentle man, wise and kind, with a record of success you can’t argue with. But fans being fans, they always wanted something more from him. In his case, I think they wanted him to be more brutal. He was the too-nice father who let Roger Clemens pitch Game 3 even though he was in no shape to do so. He was the befuddled father who let Wang pitch Game 4 even though he’d massively failed in Game 1. Since the last Yankee world championship, the perception is Torre “let” inferior teams like the Diamondbacks, Angels, Marlins and finally the hated Red Sox overcome the Yankees because Torre made bad decisions. There’s nothing more painful and infuriating than watching your father fail in front of everyone else.

After years of raging against him, it started to sink in that he was really going to leave. George Steinbrenner had promised to fire him if they didn’t win the playoff series with the Indians, and they didn’t win it. Some Bronx Banter posters were already discussing whether Joe Girardi or Don Mattingly should replace him, but most of them refused to play. The unimaginable was happening. It was Joe’s last game.

Trying to Beat Somebody with Nobody

Matt Bai’s excellent reporting on the netroots — a term he scrupulously avoids in a story that is meant to show the growing influence of the West Coast on the Democratic Party — contains the kernel of what I predict will be the movement’s ultimate frustration:

That these new progressives don’t have a West Coast politician to represent them in the Iowa caucuses is in keeping with the point of their entire movement. The progressive uprising inside the Democratic Party isn’t about trading in one group of politicians for another; it is about building a party in which politicians in general matter less. In their view, the 20th century may have been all about candidates dispersing their messages to the populace through the bullhorn of paid media ads, but the 21st century is about the populace sending its message to the politicians, thanks to the democratization of the online world. Who leads the charge at the top of the ticket hardly matters, as long as he (or she) says what the progressives want to hear.

“A party in which politicians in general matter less” is not the kind of party that can succeed in America.  We do not have a parliamentary system.  As of now, we pick our candidates, Democrat and Republican, through primaries.  There is no effective mechanism of party discipline, particularly on presidential candidates. 

If the movement Bai describes is so powerful, how is it that the Internet-based progressives’ favored candidate, John Edwards, is running a distant third to the candidate the progressives dislike most, Hillary Clinton?  (The Republicans are facing a similar quandary:  Their most popular candidate, Rudy Guiliani, only agrees with some of the GOP’s bedrock principles.  Liberal northeastern Republicanism was supposedly dying, but Guiliani might wind up as the most liberal Republican presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt.) 

Bai tries to demonstrate the progressive movement’s power this way:

Pre-Mortem Autopsy for The New Republic

From reading Richard Miniter’s lengthy analysis of how The New Republic allowed falsified dispatches from a soldier in Iraq to be published, and why it continues to defend them, you get a picture of an insular organization with varying standards based on insider relationships, and with an alarmingly low threshold for fact-checking.

The scandal does not seem driven by ideology so much as maniacal ambition on the part of the writer, and a cozy credulity on the part of the magazine’s editorial leadership.

The writer/soldier, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, still has his defenders, but as this piece from the Huffington Post demonstrates, they are becoming increasingly desperate.

I’m probably the last blogger to address this story — I tend not to avoid well-trodden paths — but the Miniter piece has great human interest, elevating the story to some kind of tragicomedy.  Here’s a sample:

Sorry, Theresa

The story of Theresa Duncan has begun to take shape.

It’s the story of what happens to you after you die. What happens to your reputation when reporters think your corpse is sexy.

Theresa Duncan wrote a blog almost every day of the last two years of her life, a blog in which she left almost no clues to her pending suicide. But it’s being picked over anyway. The big assumption is that her death had something to do with her alleged delusions about being stalked. Apparently, she and her boyfriend, the notable artist Jeremy Blake, shunned some ex-friends who didn’t buy into their fears. According to a follow-up story by the LA Times’ Chris Lee:

Bradford Schlei, head of production for Muse Productions, optioned the rights to George Pelicanos’ “Nick’s Trip” that was to have been Blake’s feature film directing debut. The project stalled just before a deal with Paramount Vantage was being negotiated, however, when Blake accused Schlei’s then girlfriend and the project’s screenwriter of being Scientologists. (Schlei says neither he nor the other two are affiliated with the church.)

“It was complete and utter craziness,” Schlei said. “Theresa sent around e-mails, delusional things. They’d say, ‘You’re a Scientologist, your girlfriend’s a Scientologist, we don’t want to be involved with you.’

“The thing that ended our relationship was when Jeremy said [my girlfriend] was trying to ruin Theresa’s reputation. None of this ever had to do with Jeremy. It was always about Theresa and her film career.” Several other sources confirmed Schlei’s account, recalling that Duncan’s e-mails grew wilder toward the end of her life.

“There was a paranoia thing going on there,” he continued. “If you sat with them for a while, drinking the massive Manhattans they were always drinking, and smoking Shermans, it always got came back to Anna Gaskell.”

(Ms. Gaskell is a former girlfriend of Blake’s who Duncan, and perhaps Blake, saw as a participant in their persecution.)

Kate Coe, in LA Weekly, goes much deeper in her search of Duncan’s seemingly endless foibles. I’ve left all her links in this excerpt:

According to Nichols and other friends who spoke to the Weekly only off record, Duncan began blaming her lack of success on the Church of Scientology, saying that the church was influencing “the studios.” Duncan accused her skeptical friends of stealing hair from her hairbrush to send to the Scientology Center, Nichols says, and confided to Nichols, “I really don’t have any friends.”

Duncan’s paranoia began to hurt her professionally. Renee Tab, her agent, tells the Weekly that Duncan was advised to tone down the paranoid talk but called back later to say she had not given that advice to Duncan, but hoped or wished someone had. And two of Duncan’s acquaintances, who refused to be named, say they were so unsettled by Duncan’s campaigns by e-mail, where she accused them of trying to hurt her or Blake’s careers, that they contacted lawyers. Nichols says of Duncan and Blake, “They didn’t just burn their bridges, they exploded them.”

THE ILL-FATED COUPLE LEFT — some might argue fled — Los Angeles last fall. In New York, Blake took a full-time job at Rockstar Games and prepared for a big fall show at the Corcoran Gallery, where he was to be artist in residence. The stylish couple found the perfect apartment in a converted rectory at St. Mark’s in the Bowery.

By uncanny coincidence, activist Father Frank Morales, a controversial figure who probes conspiracy theories, was the pastor. Morales told the Weekly that “Theresa . . . manifested a penchant for looking at things in a dark way,” adding, “She came to [New York] with some hard feelings, some hurt, but she was a bright light.”

She and Jeremy Blake were photographed at New York social events, and she eagerly joined the St. Mark’s fund-raising community. In March, her short story “Topographers” was published in Bald Ego, the au courant magazine edited by Glenn O’Brien. But Duncan never shook off her fear and suspicion. On her blog on May 20, she wrote that author and USC research scholar Reza Aslan was a “Muslim American seeming Homeland Security agent,” and blamed Scientologists for graffiti and a dead cat in her old Venice neighborhood.

Aslan told the Weekly that whenever he appeared on TV, she contacted him with strange rants. He gave Duncan’s threatening messages to his lawyer because “I wanted someone else to know about this.” Aslan knew her for years, and “she had always said kind of crazy, paranoid things,” but “it just got worse and worse. She accused me of being an undercover CIA officer, of eavesdropping on her, of having her FBI file. The conversation she blogged about — about her FBI file — never came up; the whole conversation was completely fictional.

“She was losing her grip on reality, and Jeremy was so devoted to her that he would go along with it . . . It became impossible to ignore, and so my [girlfriend] and I began to extricate ourselves.”

This last paragraph is the developing conventional wisdom: Theresa went crazy and dragged Jeremy down with her. Jeremy had the “real” art career, but was hobbled by his strange symbiotic relationship with a crazy person. His suicide was, in effect, crazy Theresa’s final grasp at him from the grave.

David Segal of the Washington Post — he’s their music critic and in that role he’s good — takes a step back from this horror-movie cliche, and tries a more psychological approach:

Duncan and Blake didn’t just fall for each other; they grew so close they all but intertwined. “When you called, they were always both on the phone,” said Jason Meadows, an artist and friend. “When you e-mailed, they’d take turns writing back. At some point, I realized it doesn’t matter which of them I’m communicating with. They were that tight.”

One of their shared passions, friends said, was a distressingly paranoid view of the world. The two would describe plots by the government, plots by Scientologists, people tailing them, breaking into their home. All of it sounded so far-fetched that it was easy to think occasionally that they were kidding. They weren’t.

“It was like a Tom Clancy novel,” said Meadows, “except that was very real to them. And if you said, ‘This can’t be true,’ there’d be a lot of anger and you’d be exiled. That happened to me several times and I had to work to regain their friendship.”

Gradually they seemed to slip into some sort of shared psychosis, and they had each other to reinforce delusions that friends were powerless to talk them out of. Many of those friends bailed out, frustrated and bewildered. But for all the tumult, the pair remained focused and Blake, at least, was applying himself to work, said Binstock. Duncan could be prickly and acerbic and sometimes one would say something loopy, friends said, but the couple generally kept it together.

“Obviously there was much more going on than any of us realized, but he never said anything that suggested there was a problem,” said Anne Schwartz Delibert, Blake’s mother, who lives in Takoma Park. “He was devoted to her. He was a loyal caretaker.”

The last comment from Blake’s mother refutes everything that came before it, though, doesn’t it?  His own mother never detected a problem?  How does that fit into a diagnosis of “shared psychosis…a distressingly paranoid view of the world…?”

See, that’s my problem with virtually all of the journalism published since the pair’s death.  There was too much going on in both of their lives for anyone to say, or even suggest, what caused these deaths.  The reporters know this.  So they dig up stuff about both of them — Duncan especially — and put it out there.  It’s salacious. It’s embarrassing.  It’s suggestive, but suggestive of what they won’t say, because they don’t know.   But because it’s a mystery, there is no end to the investigation and revelation of every stupid, unkind, ill-considered or even “paranoid” thing they might have done or said in their combined 75 years on Earth.

Is there anyone whom you couldn’t portray in a extremely negative light by choosing, say, five anecdotes from two lifetimes — three of them reported anonymously?

And neither of them can respond. “There are two sides to every story,” is a truism from kindergarten, but the way events have unfolded, we’re only getting one side of each tale, and the tales are accumulating and solidifying into a reputation, a kind of pseudo-truth that will mestatisize in the vacuum of the real truth.   Which is none of our business anyway.

You can think about this:

At some point, you will die.  Maybe you’ll die before your time, in a sensational fashion.  At whatever point, your life will become a story, but it won’t be your story, it’ll be the story that your survivors will try to piece together.  If you happen to be prominent, or if your death is determined to be sexy, the media will assist with this process, whether they have a right to or not.

Everything you ever said or did that anyone remembers or can document will float to the surface, like old bobbins released from under a rock.  They will all appear to have the same weight — the good, the bad, the funny, the weird, the selfish, the selfless; something you did for ten minutes, something you did for ten years.  All of it floating on the surface, waiting for others to find patterns in it, patterns more revelatory of their own minds than of yours.

Ron Rosenbaum, a good writer with an interesting blog is obviously fascinated by Duncan/Blake, and has begun some kind of investigative study.  Compared with Lee, Coe and Segal, however, Rosenbaum is relatively modest in his claims to understand anything based on these fragments — yet.

Unlike Coe and Lee, Rosenbaum lets his readers comment.  I think this commenter, Mike Payne, is reacting to all the news coverage of his friends, but takes it out on Rosenbaum because he provides an outlet:

Theresa’s blog was read around the world,in her wake she is praised for her dynamic personality and intelligence-one webblog event submits that this is all ARG, a game-Theresa would be flattered,certainly capable of masterminding such a concept.The fact is her real life is as hyperdynamic as it reads.
The people who discount Theresa and Jeremy’s claims-who needs the CIA and CoS (Church of Scientology) with friends like them.You tell people the real shit going down in your life and they degrade you,how many times do I get to read GLenn O’Brien’s disregard of Theresa’s concerns as improbable-he never said this to her face-otherwise his word would for sure not be the last post on Staircase.I bet the emails you ‘ve read would confirm this in terms of how T & J react to feeling betrayed.
I don’t believe she killed herself-I’m sure I’ve lost you all now-I fucking knew her-I was even able to give her the benefit of the doubt,from her note reading she was at peace-it’s not gloom and doom it’s just exactly what she writes-she is at peace so let her rest,her personal reasons are her own damn business to quote her film THE HISTORY OF GLAMOUR-the people who made this most excellent bit of film,were not done living,even if they did make it years ago.

I  add this not to validate the alleged “conspiracy” — I’m in no position to do that — but to illustrate that some people apparently believed them, some people didn’t find them irrational, or if they did, never said anything until their deaths gave them the opportunity.

I’ll close with two comments from another Washington Post writer, an in-house blogger named Joel Achenbach:

Forensic psychoanalysis on the dead is never wise.

An entirely praiseworthy position, which he undercuts with his next word: “But…”

I forgive him, however, because he closes with this even more praiseworthy comment:

I hope no movie studio decides it’s a great romantic story, Shakespearean and ripe for the screen.

It’s just sad.

Amen.

Breezin’ Along with the Breeze

I have been trying to keep in mind Tony Soprano’s sixth-season admonition, “‘Remember When’ is the lowest form of conversation.”

I’m in my fifties now, I’ve seen a lot of things here in my little world, and I find history both pleasurable and important. But I also think change is good, new things excite me and as a father of an incoming high-school senior, the future is far more important to me now than the past. For me, too. It has to be. What I once thought of as my life has ended abruptly, twice, with no turning back. This is a condition of everyone’s existence. Sometimes this truth is hidden, but it’s there.

I remember floating on a water taxi in Venice early one foggy morning, seeing these ornate palaces emerge from the opaque dampness, one-by-one like a procession of ghosts. Whoever built these gilded homes never imagined that mighty Venice would ever lose its grip on the world of commerce. But it did. When the end came — in the form of Napoleon’s armies — Venice didn’t even put up a fight. They wanted to save the palaces to remind them and future generations of how rich and powerful and glorious they were, once. So, in exchange for no bombardment, Venetians handed over the keys to the invader. And now the whole place is sinking.

Someday they’ll say of Venice: “Remember when?”

Curiously, I thought of all that when I came across LA Observed’s link to a post on Life on the Edge, a San Pedro blog. The post is about the Daily Breeze, the supposed newspaper of record for my part of Los Angeles, the South Bay and Harbor areas. When longtime owner Copley News sold it to Dean Singleton’s Los Angeles Newspaper Group a year or two ago, it was inevitable that we would read about the Breeze’s descent into the lower depths of journalism. LANG’s a cheapo-cheopo organization, proudly so. They buy up newspapers in a region, they consolidate as much of the operation as they can, and then they cut cut cut.

“…the Apparent Double Suicide…” *UPDATED

A rank odor rises from the LA Times’ belated coverage of blogger/filmmaker Theresa Duncan’s death and the subsequent disappearance of her boyfriend, the artist Jeremy Blake. After rehashing what everyone else said days ago — the deaths were “confounding,” the art world is in shock — writer Chris Lee gropes in the dark for explanations that are clearly beyond the facts in his notebook, and in doing so, inflicts needless damage to their reputations.

If someone knows why two talented, popular people with the world on a string would kill themselves, they can choose to tell that story. When it comes to prominent people — and there’s no question Duncan and Blake courted attention — the trade-off between violating the privacy of the deceased and offering a coherent narrative to explain a senseless act tends to favor telling the story. But only if you have a story to tell. Lee doesn’t. He has a hodge-podge of disquieting details that add up to a big, contradictory blob of nothing that perhaps tells us more about Lee than his subjects.

I Never Knew Theresa Duncan

I never knew Theresa Duncan, author of the blog The Wit of the Staircase among many other creative accomplishments. But I happened to get a note from an admirer of hers last week, asking if I could confirm her death.

Our connection was LA Observed. Kevin Roderick loved Duncan’s blog, and he says nice things about this one, too. Somehow, the e-mailer thought we might know each other, and hoped I might be able to dispel what was then just a rumor.

This thread led me on a search through the Internet to find out what had happened. The facts are unbelievably sad and frankly bewildering. Not only is Duncan gone, but so is her boyfriend of 12 years, the well-known artist Jeremy Blake, who apparently drowned himself a few days after finding Duncan’s body in their New York apartment.

The New York papers have all now weighed in. The most straightforward account appeared in Saturday’s New York Daily News:

If Sheriff Baca is a Scientologist, Wouldn’t That Be News?

I drafted a long post over the weekend about the crazy Paris Hilton story, which I happen to think is real news. Maybe my (possibly) imminent incarceration is a factor in how I see this story — just like a pregnant woman suddenly notices babies everywhere, I notice people in handcuffs — but I don’t think so. To me, it’s a political story, about Sheriff Lee Baca.

To put things in perspective: Los Angeles County is the nation’s largest county, by a lot. It has more than 10 million people, which is at least 4 million more people than the second-largest county (Cook County, Illinois). Los Angeles County would be the ninth-biggest state in the U.S., coming in between #8 Michigan and #9 Georgia. More than three percent of all Americans live in Los Angeles County.

There are three county-wide elected positions: District Attorney, Assessor and Sheriff. The Assessor exerts little authority — Proposition 13 took care of that. But the DA and the Sheriff have to be counted as two of the most powerful elected officials in the United States. Sheriff Baca has more constituents than Rudy Guiliani had when he was mayor of New York City, more than Mitt Romney had when he was governor of Massachusetts, more than John McCain has as senator from Arizona, more than John Edwards had when he was senator from North Carolina. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico is running for president, and his state less than one-fifth the size of LA County. Bill Clinton’s only relevant experience for being president was being governor of Arkansas, which is less than a third the size of Los Angeles County.

Am I making my point? Over-making it? Lee Baca is a big deal.

And yet, during the reporting of his decision to release Paris Hilton from jail, none of the mainstream media saw fit to report that he received a campaign contribution from Hilton’s grandfather until about two days after a “Pop Politics Scandal Style” site called Radar mentioned it. The LA Times’ coverage was very “oh by the way,” paragraph 13 of an update on Sunday focused mostly on Hilton’s decision not to appeal her sentence.

Not mentioned in any mainstream media as of Sunday was the suggestion that Sheriff Lee Baca is somehow affiliated with the Church of Scientology. I first saw this on a Scottish site called Monsters and Critics, which linked to the documentary evidence to support the claim, a photo of Baca riding the Scientology float (supposedly) in the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which ran on this site. Kevin Roderick put the photo up on LA Observed this afternoon. Here it is:

Has anyone asked Baca or his staff about this? I don’t know of any connection to the Hilton story — which is why I hesitated in publishing my post — but now that Kevin has put it out there, I wonder how long it will take before the LA Times gets around to asking him about his ties to Scientology, or investigating those ties.

Here’s the Google link to a news search under the terms “Baca” and “Scientology.” As of now, there are only three stories that match, the same three I saw on Saturday night. Two of them I’ve linked to above. The third is a British news story focused mainly on the theory that Paris Hilton is a claustrophobic. Here’s what Google shows using the same search terms to look through blogs. And here is what you find if you Google “Baca” and “Narconon,” which is the Scientology-sponsored drug treatment center.

From that last search, I came across this item from a blog by cult “expert” Rick Ross. It’s a year old.

This month Baca was featured within the magazine International Scientology News (Issue number 33) gushing about how wonderful the founder of Scientology was and his supposed precepts remain.

The following statement is seemingly attributed to Sheriff Baca complete with photo within the Scientology publication. A copy of the quote as it appears is posted a Web site administered by David Touretzsky, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and critic of Scientology.

“The story of L. Ron Hubbard can be found in the time to understand the information that he provides, the wisdom that it brings to dealing with life’s needs and therein the real story can be told. And the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people, who have been exposed to what his ideas are — it’s all about goodness, it’s all about improving yourself, it’s all about finding a way to empower other human beings. It’s reverence for life. Those are important things.”

Can Baca be so ignorant and poorly read that he doesn’t know about the actual teachings of L. Ron Hubbard and only understands what Scientology’s public relations department churns out?

Does he think that Tom Cruise going “crazy” is proof of “improving yourself” through Scientology?

Or is it that the sheriff has somehow benefited through his association with the controversial church many call a “cult”?

Perhaps Scientology’s rich patrons have contributed to his political campaign fund?

Maybe the sheriff should do a little more reading about Scientology before he agrees again to stand up for its programs and lend his name and the weight of his elected office to its schemes.

Okay, so Rick Ross is himself controversial — to Scientologists especially.

Nonetheless, to me, this is more than enough smoke for the LA Times or one of the other major news outlets in Los Angeles to start trying to figure out what the Sheriff’s connection to this group and its affiliates amounts to.

More to the original point, the Hilton campaign contribution should have been mentioned on day one of the Hilton coverage, not day three, and it should have gotten our media curious about any other connections between Hilton’s legal and business advisers and the Sheriff’s campaigns and other endeavors.

Here’s one question I’ve yet to see addressed in any of the coverage of Hilton’s ill-fated release: Who asked for it? Did the Sheriff’s office just do this on their own after observing her breakdown, or did someone from Hilton’s camp request it? If so, who? Through whom?  They’ve implied it was the Sheriff’s decision without ever really saying so, exactly. Which makes me think what they’re implying is the opposite of what happened. It usually works that way.

All weekend long I got to hear the media bemoaning the state of…uh, itself…for covering Paris Hilton rather than Iraq or other weighty matters. Paris herself played into the media’s shame with her statement Saturday.

“I must also say that I was shocked to see all of the attention devoted to the amount of time I would spend in jail for what I had done by the media, public and city officials. I would hope going forward that the public and the media will focus on more important things, like the men and women serving our country in Iraq and other places around the world.”

How she plays the mainstream press like a fiddle — she or her well-manicured flack.  But there is a potentially huge political story hiding in plain sight in the middle of this celebrity gossip fiesta, and I don’t know why it’s being ignored.

I pray I’m wrong, and that the remnants of the LA Times‘ investigative team are on this story right now. If so, don’t make us wait six months for you to write a giant Pulitzer turd. Just give us the answers when you find them: Is the Sheriff of the biggest county in the United States a Scientologist? And what was his involvement in getting Paris Hilton released from jail?

P.S. There is a history of entertainment figures exerting sway over the business of Los Angeles County government. Anyone remember Dr. Thomas Noguchi? “Coroner to the Stars?” Actually, the stars feared him. After he told the public about how alcohol contributed to the deaths of actors William Holden and Natalie Wood, Hollywood’s establishment put pressure on the Board of Supervisors in 1982 to dump him. Because he retained civil service status, the Board couldn’t fire him, so they demoted him. He fought for his job in what must be the most widely covered civil service hearing in history. He eventually lost. As a reporter, I covered the appeal, which was run like a trial.

“I’m Not Too Happy With Your Inability to Provide Me With Some Cookies. If We Could Fix This Situation, That Would Be Great.”

Ever had a roomate?  Ever worked in an office with a shared kitchen?  Then this is the site for you.

If you’ve ever written one of these “passive-aggressive notes,” now you’re on notice. It might show up on a website, like this:

or this:

Waiting Waiting Waiting

Two of my brothers and I took our mother to Mother’s Day brunch yesterday.  (She actually found the place and made the reservation, which is kind of embarrassing. What’s wrong with us?)

The restaurant offered, among other things, a creme brulee French toast as part of a buffet that also included omelets, lox and bagels, a salmon covered with thin cucumber slices arranged to look like scales, various fruit and vegetable salads and a flowing chocolate fountain into which you could dip ripe, sweet strawberries, banana slices, marshmallows and profiteroles — little bubbles of pastry filled with whipped cream. 

There was a barista, and thanks to her I got my mom her first mocha latte, ever. This barista told me she usually works catering jobs, and for a certain generation of coffee drinkers, she provides their first exposure to espresso beverages.  Apparently, not everyone has been inside a Starbucks.  

Along with my two brothers, my son was there, my father, and one of my brothers brought his girlfriend.  We talked about movies, books, TV, news, the difference between MySpace and Facebook, what my parents’ doctors say, what we each had the omelet chef mix into our omelets.  My son is disgusted that I like feta cheese.   My brother’s girlfriend is very thin, but prefers egg-whites only omelets anyway. We gave my mother gifts and discussed each one as she unwrapped them. 

We talked about everything we usually talk about when we get together as a family.  The only topic we avoided was the fact that I might be going to prison in a few weeks.

I say “might be.”  This is because my surrender date has been postponed until the 9th Circuit Appeals Court rules on my request to be free on bail until the appeal is resolved.  Various procedural issues have stretched out this process.  It would seem automatic that bail would be granted pending an appeal, in the event that the appellant wins.  It would seem to me you would need a very good reason to incarcerate someone whose conviction might later be overturned; a history of violence, or a motive to flee the jurisdiction of the United States.  But the system doesn’t always work that way.

Indictment was bizarre.  To see the awesome might of the most powerful government that ever existed aimed at you is like being chased by a grizzly bear. The trial was a battle, albeit on a tilted battleground.  The period after the trial, as I waited for rulings on the motions to overturn the verdict, was one of anger and the kind of helplessness you feel when you’re yelling and no one can hear you. 

But as bad as all of that was, this period — the waiting — is the worst.  Maybe it’s because of the accumulated weight of all that has come before.  I can’t honestly say I’d prefer for it to be resolved, if the resolution entails my surrender.  I look at my wife and son, my job, my parents and my home, and freak out about leaving them all behind; freak out about the chaos my departure will inflict.  But then I stop myself and think: “I’m not going anywhere.  Not now. Not ever. What’s supposed to happen is what will happen — and I don’t belong in prison.”

Over brunch, one of my brothers whipped out his Blackberry to show me a story in LA Weekly about the premier LA blogger, Kevin Roderick.  Kevin was kind enough to mention me to the writer, and the writer, Ella Taylor (whose film reviews I remember enjoying on KPCC) was kind enough to include the mention.  And I immediately felt a little sheepish.  Despite what Kevin says, I know this blog hasn’t been as interesting lately. 

The waiting is taking a toll on my psychic energy.  To be a great blogger, you have to be passionately interested in what you’re writing about.  You have to constantly be saying ”Hey!” to yourself about something you stumbled across, or a thought that came to you. You have to be zealous about sharing it.  This waiting has made me more apathetic than I’ve been in a long time about things in the news, politics, issues, whatever. 

The presidential debates sound to me like the same yada-yada that all politicians use to rationalize the careless destruction of lives.  I got momentarily stimulated by Elliot Mintz’ yo-yo act with Paris Hilton, but I had to fight a kind of vertigo in order to write those posts.   I had to admit, I join Paris and her entourage in their outrage about the judge’s vindictive showboating.    At the same time, if you spend an hour or two on Prison Talk, and you read post after post of heartbreak, tragedy–and quite often, intractable injustice–you hate yourself for sympathizing with Paris. Or with me.  The worst that can happen to either one of us would equate to a miraculous turnaround for the hundreds of thousands of Americans trapped in the system. Nearly two million people woke up this morning incarcerated somewhere in America.  If only five percent are there wrongly – and do you doubt it’s at least five percent? — that’s 100,000 people.

Politics in this country has gone absolutely jail-happy, and the results of all these wildly popular “throw ‘em in jail” policies get virtually no attention.  Where are you, reporters?  Why aren’t you reading Prison Talk, and running down stories about lives ruined to satisfy the ambitions of politicians, cops, prosecutors and judges?  Why aren’t you looking harder at what happens inside those prisons?   

Just now, it’s hard to write about the kinds of things that initially attracted Kevin and probably others to this blog.  All I can get excited about are the small, good things we are given in the course of our daily lives, if we’re lucky.  A barbecue with friends.  A surprise invitation to see “Porgy and Bess.”  My wife making us scallops.  My son singing a solo in his school musical. Our dog dancing on his hind legs. A blue sky, or a gray one.  A re-release of a long-lost Warren Zevon album.  A Dodger rally.  The way your lungs seem to expand after working out.  Just being with people I love, like I was all day Sunday.

Somehow, through the grace of some evolutionary survival tactic, when we see the walls closing in on us, we’re able to enjoy those small, good things in the most uncomplicated, clear-headed way, without even trying to multi-task. Knowing it could be taken away makes you just want to take a bath in these moments.  If I do end up in prison, I’ll pass some of the time replaying these moments in my mind in detail, and I don’t want to miss any of them.

So if my next few blog entries seem a bit more personal and a bit more trivial, that’s where my head is now.  The news about my bail situation will come when it comes.  Waiting can throw you off the rhythm of your life, and that’s uncomfortable, but at least I’m still at the dance.

“If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

No, that quote isn’t from President Bush’s press statement today.  And it’s certainly not from Harry Reid.

It’s Digg.com’s founder Kevin Rose, forecasting possible doom for his high-profile Web 2.0 site over its decision to rescind an earlier decision to pull all posts that featured an HD-DVD hack:

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

The “bigger company” to which he refers is a video licensing authority that enforces copyrights on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs — the Advanced Access Content System consortium, which was working with the Motion Picture Association of America.  They sent cease and desist notes to other websites where the code was posted, including Google.  For a time yesterday, some of the sites complied.

Imagine a flood.  Imagine you want to stop the flood.  Imagine throwing seven pebbles into the flood and waiting for it to stop.

This from TG Daily:

Copies of the cease and desist letters started appearing on the web yesterday and as we’ve seen in so many previous cases it was “Game On!” for the hackers.  The processing key in its full hexadecimal glory  sprouted like a weed all over the Internet.  Users of popular websites like Digg and Slashdot thumbed their virtual noses at the MPAA by posting the key into the comments sections, often using decimal, binary and other permutations.  Some users have also been creative enough to make up a shopping list using the numbers, 9 oranges, 9 fruits, etc.

The leaking of the HD DVD processing key isn’t a complete doomsday for the high-definition movie industry because the key only affects some players and presumably the movie companies could push updates that would prevent copied movies from playing.

This might sound very familiar.  Some years back, when I was in PR, MPAA was a client, and our assignment was to support its litigation to stop spread of a DVD copy-protection code hack — the famous DeCSS.  Only a three or four sites existed then that would post the hack, but I was told there were kids walking around New York City with the hack code printed on their t-shirts.  Now…fuhgeddaboutit.

Imagine if you really wanted to stop this flood.  What would you use?  That’s what should  really worry us.  What kind of bill are the copyright owners’ lobbyists writing now to reflect this new world?

The Best Posts About the Sopranos

Since so many of my readers have been coming here lately in search of Sopranos spoilers, and presumably clicking away disappointed in the lack of dish, I’ll do the next best thing:  Here are some of my favorite places to read about the Sopranos, especially the most recent episodes:

• Slate’s TV Club dialogues on the Sopranos.  In the past, they’ve had organized crime experts and psychologists.  This half-season, they’re just using a couple of good writers, Timothy Noah and Jeffrey Goldberg.
• The Television Without Pity forum on the latest episode.
• A brief post by Ann Althouse, plus some good comments.
• MSNBC’s “Sopranos Body Count.”
• TV Squad has a contemplative take.

What everyone seems to be picking up is:  The overt references to The Godfather (Tony with his tomato plants, the christening scene in the previous episode, the brief reign of the New York boss ending with a bullet in the eye like Moe Green got),  the eerie resemblance of the young Asian man incarcerated with Uncle Junior to the Virginia Tech madman, and the prevailing sense that things might end “not with a bang, but a whimper.”

That line is originally from T.S. Eliot, by the way, and that’s what “The Sopranos” reminds me of:  Being an English major.   For all its violence, comedy and great characterizations, what’s most notable “The Sopranos” is the richness of its symbolism, the subconscious parallels between two things that seem unrelated, but connect in our minds and in the characters’ minds, especially Tony, Carmela and Christopher. 

We see the three of them try to make sense out of their world on this deeper level in a way that compares with how we follow another trio’s subconscious thoughts: Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the main characters in Ulysses.  Part of the joke, though, is that the poet in Tony is the same psychic realm from where his murderous thoughts seem to arise.  Tony vents his rage verbally, but he is most dangerous when he is listening and watching.  Tony is a great listener and watcher

Like last night: For some reason Tony wanted to know if it was Paulie who, years earlier, told Johnny Sack about an offensive joke made at the expense of Sack’s wife, leading to all kinds of headaches for Tony.  What made him think of it?  Listening to Paulie prattle on about his mob life with some prostitutes.  Then listening to one of the prostitutes repeat some of the information back to him in bed.   Somehow, these and other observations come together in his mind; and as a result, he almost murders Paulie on the boat, because sharing the joke with Johnny Sac was a sign of Paulie’s disloyalty.  With war looming with the New York family that Johnny Sac once headed, this is a detail that suddenly alarms Tony.

Water is everywhere in “The Sopranos,” always has been, but especially in these past three episodes.  Tony and Bobby and their wives on the lake.  The FBI interested in what Tony might be learning about Muslim terrorism at the Port of Newark.  Tony and Paulie on a fishing boat.  Tony and Beansie chatting by a swimming pool. Even Junior pissing his pants.  He has to take medicine to control his bladder, but the medicine leaves him too sleepy.

Tony can only control the flow of words from Paulie’s mouth by killing him, but he doesn’t do it.  Water is where bodies are dumped, where bad memories are forgotten, only to float back up again.  Keep an eye on the way water is used in the remaining episodes if you want clues (er, I mean ”spoilers”) to how it’s all going to end.    

Watching the Odometer

If present trends hold — unless all of a sudden people stop reading my blog — my total page views should hit 100,000 in the next 24 hours.

A hundred thousand hits in 16 months only makes me a multicellular microorganism in the blogosphere — up from an insignificant microbe! — but if you’d told me I’d ever hit 100,000 views when I started this thing, I wouldn’t have believed it.

To be perfectly honest, I’m sure many of my views have been the result of my humiliating encounter with the federal legal system over the past two years.  I wish I could’ve talked about it more.  The experience is one that begs to be shared in real time. Someday, I’ll be able to say more. I feel obliged to share what I’ve learned.

I also know I have Elliot Mintz and his client Paris Hilton, Tony Soprano, Al Gore, Saul Levine, “Walk Away Renee” Fladen-Kamm, Wendy McCaw, a baby giant squid, the people who park their cars illegally near Pinkberry in West Hollywood, George Allen and his can of black spray paint, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe to credit for a lot of my hits.  If you write about things readers are interested in, they find you.

I should also give a huge hat tip to the blogs that have linked to me, especially LA Observed, the Aesthetic, Here in Van Nuys and Todd And(rlik) on whose list I’ve fallen a bit because I haven’t written enough about PR.   (But see my next post!)

For those of you who came here initially to find out about my trial or one of above celebrities, and then kept coming back because they liked what I do — much thanks.  The encouragement you’ve given me to keep writing will stay with me forever. 

My productivity here is down, I realize.  I have to fit this into a full-time job, a lot more travel, and the slow, steady milling process called the law.  But there are 434 posts here, most of them still somewhat timely, so if I’m having a slow week, please continue to explore and react.

Now, onward and upward to 1 million!    

Beneath Contempt*

According to Fishbowl LA, as blogger and media critic Cathy Seipp lies in a hospital ICU bed, approaching the end of her noble battle against cancer, a grotesque subhuman being named Eliot Stein has posted an inane, score-settling fake letter on a site he registered in her name.   

I glanced at it, then clicked away, sick to my stomach.  Obviously, this thin-skinned ideological coward lacked the cojones to take her on when she was conscious, and so now takes the opportunity to have a morbid “last word.”

It is completely nauseating.  I guess there’s some right vs. left angle to this, (There isn’t:  See the first comment below.) but if so, Eliot Stein shames his side of the argument no less than Ann Coulter shames hers.  The only difference I can see is Ann Coulter makes a lot of money selling books, while I can’t imagine Stein enjoys success in doing much of anything.

I assume Eliot Stein has friends and family.  I feel sorry for them.  They must be looking for the exits about now — unlisted phone numbers, new e-mail addresses and so on to keep this lamebrain at a safe distance.  One thing is for sure.  Nobody will take note when this little tiny man passes away.  Cockroaches don’t get funerals.

*UPDATE 3/30/07.  Karma.  

No, Really, I Don’t Know Anything about the Sopranos!

Should I feel guilty?  I’ve been getting a lot of traffic lately to a post I put up about a year ago about The Sopranos.  The point of the post was that there were a lot of spoilers on the Internet the weekend before the first episode of the new season, and avoiding them would take some willpower. 

The post has not a single spoiler in it.  And even if it did, it would be a year out of date.

Well, if you type Sopranos Spoilers into Google, guess whose entry shows up on the first search page?  The search page entire marketing departments and spin-off PR agencies are built around.  I am so optimized.  And I wasn’t even trying. Nobody paid me $50,000 to consult for them on how to do this.  It just happened.

This isn’t the first time.  My Elliot Mintz post from last year still gets lots of hits, and until someone basically copied my stuff into Wikipedia, I was the #1 result of any search for the Paris Hilton/John Lennon publicist.  (I’m still a healthy #3.)  But at least that post had information in it.  You go to my Mintz post, you learn something.  You can impress girls with it.  You can win bar bets.  You can feel in the know.

Not so with my Sopranos post.  It’s just a bunch of pointless drivel.  It was meant for my smaller core of regular readers who check in here occasionally for a glimpse into my mind.  A glimpse taken on a particularly sad and mediocre day, catching me obsessing about a damn TV show.  

A few days ago, I updated the post to underscore its total uselessness.  But they keep coming! So this is my last shot, my last chance to get my integrity back. 

Attention: If you’ve come to my blog for a clue as to how the Sopranos are going to end, you won’t find it here.  I don’t know.  Go here instead.  It has a bunch of credible sounding spoilers in it.  I wish I hadn’t gone there.  I really didn’t want to know what it purports to tell you. It’s probably not true anyway.  But since you’re obviously so determined…have at it.

Old Media Gets the Vapors (CORRECTED)*

(via howardowens.com)

In addition to the LA Observed suite, another great Web 2.0-from-the-ground-up site is Pegasus News, which delivers content mostly of interest to Dallas-Ft. Worth area users. On Monday, Pegasus’ Mike Owens Orren posted a story on his ill-fated partnership with the local Fox 4 News outlet — a relationship that started very promisingly, but was killed by someone he doesn’t name in Fox’s corporate headquarters for what can only be described as whimsical reasons.  

At first, Owens Orren writes, it seemed like a great match:

They had the reach; we had the depth. We had the search engine rankings; they had video people wanted to find. We had the indie cred; they had the network cred. They could promote us to a million people at a pop; we could promote them a million times a month in little increments.

The downfall began when Pegasus got Fox to agree the partnership was newsworthy and should be announced in a press release.   At first, an enthusiastic “yes.” But then, “no,” with a request for what seemed to be a slight change in the copy that would introduce the Fox 4 content. (The copy was boilerplate stuff; Fox’s requested edit was the kind of thing only PR people would notice.)  

Pegasus’ web developers needed a few days to make the change (not an unusual frustration in this world), which Owens Orren hadn’t understood to be an urgent matter anyway. However, two days after the request, in a scene that reads like a bad break-up:

Late Wednesday afternoon, my phone rang with Saunders and Mahaney (from Fox 4) on the other end. A vigorously unnamed FOX exec, who it was now admitted had been against the deal happening at all on the conference call about the press release had visited our site and seen that the requested text change had not yet gone into effect and unilaterally called off the whole deal. Yes, no one told us that the request was critical. No, there was no explaining that. No, there was no chance of reasoning, discussing or even learning who had cut the deal off at the nub. No, no part of the partnership could be salvaged. Everything Fox needed to come off our site and we wouldn’t be working together on hyperlocal news.

The best that could be offered was “maybe give it a time interval and try again.” How long? “I have no idea … a long time.”

Given the amount of precious time Pegasus invested in the tech side of this marriage, Owens Orren is understandably a little bitter.  His meta-conclusion rings true, however:

You can wait for corporate media to “get it.” You can think they have. But, in the end, corporations aren’t inherently smart, even if people inside of them are. And corporations aren’t inherently honorable, even if people inside them are. And those who can’t see past their nose and who don’t have regard for their partners will pull stunts like we just saw from Fox.

(snip)

This Little Company is at its best when it is flying the jolly roger. We work and play well with others, but apparently mainly those others that, like us, are on the outside. This episode thoroughly re-taught me that lesson, one that I won’t soon forget. That’s not to say that we can’t work with big corporations — we just can’t until we look the people who pull the pursestrings in the eye and they tell us that they, too, believe. And probably even then, we wouldn’t be safe unless they had a financial stake in our success.

One other thing is clear to me: We will, sooner rather than later, eat these larger media corporations for lunch, unless they learn how to behave in a world of distributed media. Granted, that’s the larger “we.” I can’t guarantee that Pegasus News will be The One, or one of the ones to pull it off. We’ve grown more quickly than you could have ever imagined with fewer resources than you waste in an afternoon. The “people formerly known as the audience” are mobile and transient and will abandon their old media habits without prejudice — perhaps worse, without even realizing they have done so. Blogs, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, RSS, Flickr: how many had you heard of a few years ago? These and others have disrupted the hell out of media in general, but have had less of an impact on local media. That’s changing, and fast.

The unnamed Fox executive who got the vapors about protecting the corporate image, brand, name or whatever from contamination by upstarts will probably have some explaining to do down the road.   

*(Note: In an earlier version of this post, I misidentified Mike Orren as Mike Owens, leaving the impression that I was quoting Howard Owens.  My apologies to both Owens and Orren)

John Edwards’ Blog Lesson*

If you know this blog, you know I tend to stay away from the stuff that other bloggers go on and on about.  The bigger the meme, the more room I give it to roll on through. But the story of John Edwards and the two bloggers he hired and then had to let resign (or whatever), is so mysterious, it’s been nagging at me, so I have to discuss it.

I don’t think Amanda Marcotte is a bigot.  On her site, Pandagon, she says she is “pro-sex, pro-feminist, pro-freedom,” which is like motherhood and apple pie, baseball, hot dogs and Chevrolet as far as I’m concerned.  She’s got a mean streak, no question, and she lets fly with harsh and graphic sarcasm particularly in response to organizations like the Catholic church that, in her view, repress women. 

She’s not the first feminist to feel rage like this against the Catholic church.  Remember Madonna, dancing in front of a burning cross?  Or Sinead O’Connor, ripping up a picture of the Pope?  I’m a guy, so I don’t feel this rage, but I’m hardly in a position to begrudge her the feelings she has. But anyway, it’s not like she’s obsessed with the topic.  She can be a charming and perceptive writer, and she’s energetic in her approach to blogging.

Melissa McEwan also seems like a bright young writer with a progressive bent, for whom the “anti-Catholic” charge was a bad rap.  However, she is also a fierce feminist who refers to herself as “Queen Cunt of Fuck Mountain,” and to the religious right as “Christofascists.” 

If you read a lot of blogs, especially on the progressive side, this kind of language is fairly typical.  It is not aimed solely at religious people; it’s aimed at conservatives, Republicans, DLC Democrats, Joe Lieberman Democrats, the media especially Fox News… It’s how they express themselves. 

If asked, I would tell all these progressive bloggers that words like “fucktard” and “Bushitler” are getting tired.  They aren’t persuasive, they’re alienating.  But it’s the language they seem to enjoy, and the Internet was made for this kind of thing.

Amanda was supposed to be the blogmaster for candidate Edwards, and Melissa was supposed to serve as a liaison to the extensive blogger network of progressives.  They had both settled in North Carolina to assume their new jobs.  But then Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League released a statement demanding they both be fired.  Edwards didn’t fire them, but he publicly disassociated himself from the things they’d said in their blogs, and, inevitably, both resigned within days.  

Marcotte and McEwan had done nothing new to warrant Edwards’ scolding statement, nor the termination of their political careers, between the time of their hiring and the time the controversy surfaced.  If the campaign had done minimal due diligence, they would have known the kind of electronic paper trail these bloggers had left behind.  They must have done this. So why did Edwards hire them? 

Presumably, the campaign knew that anytime a journalist or commentator is hired by a politician — never mind if they use a blog as their medium — their past words will be thrown in their face.  Pat Buchanan is the most famous columnist to serve stints on the White House communications staff, and there was no shortage of adversaries who tried to hang intemperate words he wrote as a journalist around the presidents he served.  Sidney Blumenthal had the same experience when he worked for Clinton.  (His response was to become even more outrageous as a political aide than he’d ever been as a writer.)

The most recent example before Marcotte and McEwan is White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. ThinkProgress, a progressive site, had a ton of fun finding critical things Snow had said about his new boss, President Bush — calling Bush “an embarassment” and “impotent.”  For some reason, Bush looked past this record and hired Snow anyway, and any controversy about it died quickly.  But Bush is a lame-duck president.  Edwards is a candidate, a dark horse, running for the nomination of a party where big-city Catholics are important.

Lots of Catholics will vote for a pro-choice candidate.  They’ll vote for Democrats, knowing that among their elites are many who disdain their faith.  But they’ll have a hard time swallowing a candidate who embraces people who seem to have no reverance for their beliefs whatsoever.  To quote Donohue:

“Writing on the Pandagon blogsite, December 26, 2006, Amanda Marcotte wrote that ‘the Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics.’ On October 9, 2006, she said that ‘the Pope’s gotta tell women who give birth to stillborns that their babies are cast into Satan’s maw.’ On the same day she wrote that ‘it’s going to be bad PR for the church, so you can sort of see why the Pope is dragging ass.’ And on June 14, 2006, she offered the following Q&A: ‘What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit,’ to which she replied, ‘You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.’ 

This kind of colorful talk — which goes way beyond commenting on the church’s anti-choice stance – is something no mainstream campaign could tolerate.  Edwards’ people should have found it, and it should have stopped them in their tracks.  Forget the Catholic League.  Edwards’ political rivals would have hauled this stuff out.  It’s often forgotten that the first candidate to attack Michael Dukakis for releasing rapist-murderer Willie Horton on a weekend prison furlough was not George H.W. Bush, but Al Gore.  Gore didn’t put the racial twist on the story that Bush did; but he looked for the weak spot, found it, used it, and then left it for the Republicans to pick up in due course.

You think Hilary Clinton would do any different?  But say she didn’t.  Say the Marcotte/McEwan writings had gone unexposed until the November campaign — perhaps against GOP nominee and (pro-choice) Catholic Rudy Guiliani.  You think Guiliani’s campaign would have been able to resist grandstanding to the faithful about these ‘blasphemous’ campaign aides?

The rules of politics haven’t changed just because of the Internet.  If anything, they’ve been reinforced and accelerated.  Hard-core, wild-west, shit-stirring bloggers have no more place on a political campaign than slash-and-burn op-ed columnists did; and it was unprofessional of the Edwards campaign to think otherwise. 

I don’t feel bad for Marcotte and McEwan.  In the short run, their lives are disrupted, but this controversy could end up making their careers in the field where they are best qualified — as writers. 

But I keep thinking about Edwards, who made his zillions as a plaintiff’s lawyer suing doctors and hospitals.  Litigators like him know the “gotcha” game better than anyone on the planet.  One stray word that strengthens their case, and they will hammer the defendent with it until they’ve reduced them to bloody pulp.  How could people working in his name not have seen what was inevitably coming?

*UPDATE:  Happened to run across a post by Dan Gerstein in The Politico.  Gerstein, was communications director for Sen. Lieberman’s general election campaign win over netroots’ crush Ned Lamont.  He assails the liberal blogosphere for its unquestioning defense of Marcotte and McEwan:

But the reality is, as I experienced over and over again in the Lamont-Lieberman race, this is the liberal blogosphere’s standard-less operating procedure. They have decided that the best way to fight the “right-wing smear machine” that they so despise is to create an even more venomous, boundary-less, and destructive counterpart and fight ire with more ire.

It also goes to show just how deeply most liberal bloggers believe that Republicans and conservative are morally illegitimate, and as such, any criticism or argument made by the other side is on its face corrupt and dismissible. If it is said by Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who has a history of controversial statements himself, it automatically becomes invalid, no matter the inherent integrity of the underlying proposition.

What these liberal bloggers fail to appreciate is that this petty, polarizing approach is not how you ultimately win in politics – especially in an era when most average voters outside the ideological extremes are fed up with the shrill, reflexive partisanship that dominates Washington, and when the fastest growing party in America is no party.

The blogger bomb-throwing may be good for inflaming the activist base, and, as they demonstrated in the 2006 Lieberman-Lamont Senate primary race in Connecticut, for occasionally blowing up the opposition. It’s not bad for bullying your friends, either, as the liberal blogosphere did last week in pressuring Edwards to not fire the two bloggers who penned the offensive anti-religious posts.

But the typical blog mix of insults and incitements is just not an effective strategy for persuading people outside of your circle of belief – be they moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans, or the swelling number of independents – to join your cause. In fact, it’s far more likely to alienate than propagate them. 

*ANOTHER UPDATE:  Thinking about this issue, I remembered another unlikely combination between a politician and an out-of-control writer:  Jimmy Carter and Hunter S. Thompson.  But Thompson was never more than an “unofficial advisor” to the future president.  This post is a Thompson bio that includes the story of his visits to Plains, Ga.

Put Down that Sock-Puppet or I’ll Shoot!

If you’re an author with a book being sold on Amazon, and you post a fake rave review, or if you’re a company that creates a fake blog where consumers are represented as raving about your product, you could be prosecuted in Europe as a criminal!  From Britain’s TimesOnline:

Online consumer reviews are playing an ever greater role in shaping shopping habits, with websites such as TripAdvisor for the travel industry being seen as increasingly influential.

However, a string of businessman in the UK and the US have been caught posing as supposedly independent customers in an attempt to boost sales.

A recent investigation found that poorly rated travel establishments could lift their reputations from one to four stars in hours by posting fictional positive reviews.

Shortly before Christmas, the owner of the Drumnadrochit Hotel near Loch Ness admitted to posting a fake review of his own venue on the TripAdvisor site, calling it “outstanding” and “charming”. David Bremner said: “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it. But I don’t think it’s that big a deal.”

Well, it is certainly true that before I buy anything, I try to find customer reviews to verify the manufacturer’s claims.  Don’t you?  But I take anything I read with a grain of salt.  I’m not sure I’m ready to see some poor hotel owner locked up in a Brussels prison for trying to lure me in.  What about “buyer beware?” 

I think the Word of Mouth marketing trend, all the research suggesting “people like me” can make me want to buy something, runs aground right here.  I’ve watched fake “people like me” try to sell me stuff on TV my whole life.  You’d have to be pretty naive to think the Internet is magically different from all other media in this respect.

Stuck on 400

Hello, friends…

When I started this blog, I had no idea what I’d do with it. At various times, it has been like a friend, my own media channel, a shingle, a distraction, a guilty pleasure and, above all, a place to give my writing and photography skills a chance to develop.

The post before this one is the 400th I’ve completed since I started up on December 14, 2005. If anyone had told me I would write 400 posts on this thing in a little over a year, I would have said:

a) that was a madly ambitious goal;

b) gee, how many books and screenplays could I have written if I’d put all that writing energy into those things?

Four-hundred posts! And I tend to write long for a blogger. No terse Instapundit-style allusions for me. I quote at length, and then write at more length. Figure my average post is about 500 words, excluding what I copy-paste from others; I’ve scribbled some 200,000 words here in the past 13 1/2 months! That’s a long novel.

I always wanted to write a novel. Hmm.

Part of my new job is to coach other bloggers. My first rule is: Don’t look at mine as a good example! This is where I get to make mistakes so you won’t make them.

Anyway, since writing my 400th post a week ago, I have felt a little writers’ block. Some of the reasons are obvious if you’re following my legal travails. But that’s not all of it. In April and May 2006, I managed to write 36 posts during an immediately after my trial. This post will only be my 11th of January ‘07.

It’s not like I don’t enjoy this anymore: I do! I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done this month. Especially this, this, this and this. So maybe I’m settling into a different rhythm now. I don’t have to write a post every time something pops into my head. I’ll let them cook for a few days, even a week.

Just so you know I haven’t been utterly neglecting this blog, here are some of the things I’ve considered posting about in the past week:

• The music and legacy of Phil Spector
• The State of the Union address, James Webb’s response, and the politics of the “surge”
• “Hurray, We’re Capitulating!” — an excerpt from a book about European appeasement of Muslim extremism
• Hillary, Obama, Vilsack and Brownbeck — heirs to CSNY?
• Ahmet Ertegun, R.I.P.
• More pictures from my trip to New Orleans
• The fact that every team I was rooting for in the NFL playoffs lost, but I’m still happy because the New England Patriots didn’t make the Super Bowl
• Why I liked “Dreamgirls” even though most of the song are bad
• The woman who died after drinking too much water on a morning whacko radio show
• The woman who died when her jealous friend sabotaged her parachute

…and that’s just for starters. I might do some, none or all of these, eventually. I’m also reading four books now. If I ever finish one of them, I’ll probably post about it. The top candidate? Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky — the first two parts of a five-novel cycle the writer planned to write about the German occupation of Paris, until her plans were interrupted by her arrest by the Nazis and death in a concentration camp. That’s a poignant story in itself, but the book itself is also breathtakingly great, a novel for all time.

For now, all I want to do is thank everyone who reads this blog for reading it, apologize if my productivity has flagged this month, and promise more exciting reading ahead!

(There…with post #401 behind me, maybe I can relax…)

Baseball Diaries

The major league baseball playoffs began yesterday, but here in Los Angeles, today is the big day, as the Dodgers bring their streaky, drama-queen team to New York for their first game this afternoon at 1 p.m. LA time.

Major League Baseball has invited several playoff participants to keep blogs. The Dodgers’ Game 1 pitcher Derek Lowe is one of them. Here he describes how he spent part of his day off yesterday in NY:

Today started about as far from baseball as possible. A few of us left the hotel and went to Ground Zero. I hadn’t been there in three years. We walked around and thought a lot about what it means. I went over to Station 10, the fire station that’s located right across the street from where the towers fell.

A couple of the firemen recognized me and yelled my name. They called us over, and we spent maybe an hour with them. They showed us around the station and we talked. I didn’t want to get into too much detail, but I was curious and they told us about what it was like on Sept. 11. They were the first responders, being right there across the street. It kind of puts our job in perspective. A bad day for us really isn’t like a bad day, compared to what those guys go through.

I put Lowe first, because he’s our guy, but the best playoff blog by far is the Oakland A’s Barry Zito, who beat the Twins in their game 1 yesterday. Zito is going to be a free agent after this postseason. Based on his talent alone, I hope the Dodgers sign him. But his writing ability is a plus for a city that likes a good story:

You know that Kevin Costner movie, “Love of the Game”? You know when he talked about, ‘Quieting the mechanism?’ I don’t know how I did it, but I quieted this crowd in my head today. Last time I pitched in the playoffs here, I’d look in for the signs, and Ramon Hernandez’s fingers looked like they were shaking from sound waves bouncing around. But today my focus was so sharp, and it was like I just turned the volume down in my head. It was just me and Jason, pitch and catch. That, more than anything, was the key for me today. It’s not easy to block out 55,000 people, but I — we — did it somehow. Just an awesome day.

I might not be blogging so much this month. I could tell you it’s because I’ve got some new work, and that would be true. I could tell you it’s because of developments in my legal case, and that would be true also. But the fact is, I’m always kind of distracted in October. I would give up all the holidays and my birthday if I had to, but I always want to be watching postseason baseball in October. It’s especially exciting if you’ve got your team in the mix, but even if you don’t — do-or-die baseball elevates this great game into truly compelling entertainment. Myths and legends are created during these weeks. It’s important to pay attention — it just is.

Going to Extremes (*updated)

I hope Brendan Nyhan is wrong when he says this:

Today, online politics has come to be dominated by two warring camps, just like offline politics. And while many critics complain about the polarization of the blogosphere and its effect on elections, how blogs will affect the economics of opinion journalism is less well understood. In particular, partisan blogs have become so popular that they are threatening the business model — and the independence — of center-left opinion magazines, which may be forced to toe the party line to ensure their survival.

He illustrates this point with his own experience. A founder of the now-defunct Spinsanity, Nyhan was invited to blog on The American Prospect’s TAPPED site. The American Prospect is a liberal publication, but like The New Republic, it was not monolithic and could be contrarian from time to time, in keeping with the open-mindedness long associated with liberals. But after Nyhan posted a couple of items criticizing other liberal bloggers, TAP’s editor asked him to limit his attacks to conservatives. This diktat caused Nyhan to quit.

Is TAPPED afraid of dissenting viewpoints? Not editorially. But according to Nyhan, it is afraid of popular left-wing bloggers’ Moses-like effect on the flow of liberal click-throughs:

One important factor shaping TAP’s decision may have been the popularity of Democratic bloggers like Atrios, who pump out a stream of pre-filtered news and commentary. Before the rise of online competition, opinion magazines had some freedom to be idiosyncratic and less partisan than their readers. The initial incarnation of the Prospect, for example, had a thoughtful, academic tone. But the availability of more points of view online (while laudable in many ways) has paradoxically increased the pressure on ideological publications to pander to readers, who have the option of seeking out exclusively partisan blogs instead.

In addition, the huge audiences of the partisan bloggers make them a key source of online traffic for opinion magazines if they supply ideologically favorable content. (At Spinsanity, we quickly learned that it was virtually impossible to get links from liberals when we criticized a liberal, and vice versa for conservatives.) Similarly, the risk of not getting links means that few commentators are willing to criticize the gatekeepers.

In some cases, the threat may be existential. Opinion magazines lose money — a lot of money — and are vulnerable to further financial losses. Atrios, Kos, and other liberal bloggers have attacked The New Republic for years, helping to undermine the center-left magazine’s lagging popularity among liberals. If TNR’s subscriber base were to shrink as a result of these attacks, the viability of the magazine could be threatened.

Nyhan points out that conservative journals of opinion were always less prone to ideological divergence, but the same syndrome exists on the right as the left. Although it does seem to me there are a number of bloggers that get called conservative but are really more libertarian, like Instapundit, Ann Althouse and The Volokh Conspiracy, who provide lots of links, but rarely to right-wing mags.

I like a battle of ideas, not a march of talking points. My advice to TAPPED and The New Republic is to take more risks, not fewer. I can’t help but think that when Bush is truly a lame duck and there is fresh soil being plowed in both political parties, the lock-steppers on both the right and the left will seem a bit marginal–dull and shrill.

For over a century, the opinion magazines have played a role as idea labs for the candidates. If all they’re doing is saluting Kos and Hugh Hewitt all day with predictable rants, that will just drive the stuff of politics, the intra-party policy debates, out of the public eye and into realms accessible only to insiders. That’s not what the Internet promised.

*UPDATE:  Here is Nyhan’s blog post about the reaction to his column.  Extremely interesting comments. although it seems as if no one got his point.  The question isn’t whether the right and left blogs enforce conformity.   Some do, some don’t.  The question is whether the right and left blogs are causing the traditional opinion journals to mute contrarian points of view or self-criticism for economic reasons — to keep the referral clicks coming from the more popular blogs.

This is really an economic issue.  A political blog starts out as a labor of love, done for free.  If it catches on, it can sell ads, but the ad revenue need only “pay for” the time the bloggers spend working on it, and the small amount of overhead needed for web hosting.

However, the New Republic and The American Prospect (and National Review, and Weekly Standard) have the enormous additional cost of maintaining a paid staff of writers, editors, graphic artists, circulation managers, ad managers, etc., plus paper, ink, postage and rent. They are hoping their web site advertising will offset some of those costs.

And, if Nyhan is correct, the editors of those sites have noticed that traffic goes up or down based on whether these sites give reliable reinforcement to their ideological fellow-travelers.  This tendency exerts pressure on editors of these magazine-based websites to enforce comformity, he believes.

So the real question on the floor is: Do we lose anything if these magazines are forced by the marketplace into becoming more orthodox?

A Lesson for Bloggers: Don’t Go All Ga-Ga

It surely seemed like a great idea at the time:  Former President Bill Clinton inviting a group of progressive bloggers to lunch in Manhattan to talk politics and get their pictures taken with him.  The attendees who blogged about it frankly gushed.  Talk Left said it was “awesome,” and added this:

Criminal defense lawyers take note: He’s far better on our issues than we thought while he was President, from mandatory minimums, to drug courts to restoring the right to vote to former offenders. I’m totally impressed.

Americablog, meanwhile, was ecstatic:

And while the policy discussion was fascinating, for me these kind of get togethers are far more interesting on a personal than substantive level. Meaning, it’s fascinating to see someone like Clinton in person. How his brain works, what he’s like personally, and just as importantly, to meet and get to know his staff so we can all help each other in the future (we are, after all, Democratic bloggers).

My impressions? He looks a little older than I expected, though befitting someone who was president for eight years (and he was first elected 14 years ago). He’s got beautiful blue eyes (this isn’t something I normally notice, but in his case I did, and he does, and I suspect he uses it to good effect). The man is smart as hell. He knows a lot about everything, and he gets it, he gets politics, he gets people, he understands what’s going on and knows how to get things done. His political advice is no-nonsense and straight forward – he’d rather take an issue on than run from it (oh for the days of that in a Democratic politician).

Bu-u-ut… the blog commenters weren’t all as kind, as you can read below.  This is a big lesson for everyone who wants to blog with a purpose, whether it’s political or business.  It’s really not about you at all; it’s about the community you create.  And they don’t like it if it seems like you can be bought off with a cheap lunch. Even the dreaded MSM tries to maintain objectivity.

Although Americablog’s commenters were mostly happy for ”John in DC,” and complimentary of Clinton, most of Talk Left’s commenters weren’t happy.  Here are some excerpts of the negative comments.  

So why the f–k wasn’t he a more progressive, less reactionary, less corpoRatty prez?

his triangulation killed the liberal wing of his Party…

just askin…

And:

saying it don’t make it so… and he’s talked a good line for a long time.

i’m going to stick to judging him by his actions.

And:

I doubt I’ll ever stop thinking that Bill Clinton was the greatest,most talented president I will ever see in my lifetime, but the commenter above is right… it is awefully strange to compliment him on the opinions he *actually* holds but did not put on paper.

And:

Bill Clinton fought for Nafta and got it passed. He signed legislation that allowed media to consolidate into a handful of companies. He failed to restore the Fairness Doctrine. He left it up to the Bush Administration decide whether to pursue Osama Bin Laden, rather than launch the attacks once the evidence was in on the Cole Bombing. He has refrained from criticizing Bush even though the Bush Administration has broken all precedent by criticizing him relentlessly. He continues to support dynasticism in American politics by supporting his wife’s presidential ambitions.

Most unforgivably, he labors under the naive impression that his political opponents just differ about what’s best for the country when it has been quite clear from the beginning that they wanted to liquidate it, take possession of its assets and trample on its founding document. And I don’t believe he’s taken much of a stand on the war, but I might be wrong about that.

These are all pretty important issues to me, so I’d be just fascinated to know on what issues he’s supposed to be “better than we thought while he was president,” when, as an ealier commenter pointed out, it would have made more of a difference.

And, cruelly:

Politicians find it notoriously easy to impress intellectuals and writers in face-to-face meetings. It’s the oldest trick in the book. I hope the others in this meeting were more on their guard than the host of this blog.

Personally, if I had been invited to that lunch (ha!), I’m not sure I would have been any less thrilled.  To me, Clinton has grown in stature since 2000, and I would have been fascinated to hear his perspective on just about anything political and foreign policy especially.  But the caution remains.  There are blogs that exist primarily to generate conversation among like-minded people.  You fly in the face of their expectations at your peril. 

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.

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…

“End Times”: Imagine a World With No Lollipops

It’s hot, I’m slow, I only got to this story this morning, but I was not exactly charmed by it:

STEAL a toddler’s lollipop and he’s bound to start bawling, was photographer Jill Greenberg’s thinking. So that’s just what Greenberg did to elicit tears from the 27 or so 2- and 3-year-olds featured in her latest exhibition, “End Times,” recently at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles. The children’s cherubic faces, illuminated against a blue-white studio backdrop, suggest abject betrayal far beyond the loss of a Tootsie Pop; sometimes tears spill onto naked shoulders and bellies.

The work depicts how children would feel if they knew the state of the world they’re set to inherit, explained Greenberg, whose own daughter is featured in the show. “Our government is so corrupt, with all the cronyism and corporate lobbyists,” she said. “I just feel that our world is being ruined. And the environment — when I was pregnant, I kept thinking that I’d love to have a tuna fish sandwich, but I couldn’t because we’ve ruined our oceans.”

What nonsense! Jill Greenberg is living in the lap of the lap of luxury, and she thinks it’s “end times.” What a gassy title for her exhibit — claiming for herself the final word before the curtain comes down.

Oh, how I wish there was a time machine, so I could take Greenberg back to, say, New York in the so-called Gilded Age, or London in the 1830s, or really almost anytime in history prior to her own cozy lifespan. Mozart had six siblings; he was one of two to survive infancy, and that was a common ratio, even among relatively comfortable families like his, until only about 100 years ago. If a stolen lollipop is Greenberg’s metaphor for the cruelties that our society will visit upon the next generation of children, she is completely ignorant of history.

The future’s so bright for our society’s kids, on the whole, they won’t even notice the lollipop is missing. There is plenty to worry about, of course, and any parent worries for their child’s fate. 9/11 will happen again. Wars won’t stop, and the weapons of mass destruction loom as a threat. And then, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, there’s “plain old death,” dogging all our steps. But as a society, we are heading into a period of unimaginable prosperity, when many festering problems will find sustainable solutions.

Before you get the vapors, be assured: I’m no denier of global warming. We have a lot of environmental problems, serious ones. And fortunately, we have serious people investing their lives in addressing them. On this blog, I honor the scientists who are working to understand, characterize and hopefully reverse global warming. But I have less respect for people like Jill Greenberg, who prefer to wallow in the apocalypse.

In terms of human impact, the environmental conditions that Jill Greenberg or her toddler are likely to encounter anytime in their lives will be enviable compared with what most people in the history of the world have faced. The bleakest environments are in the poorest countries, there is no scenario in which her child will face those conditions unless she volunteers to do so. There is such hubris in her saying “we’ve ruined our oceans.” Sure, the oceans are polluted. But be grateful that your child is growing up at a time when scientists are able to monitor environmental conditions, and people can organize globally for change. Greenberg acts like she’s just discovered this problem — epiphanies of a tunafish sandwich — and nothing’s being done. Which is partly true. She, herself, is doing nothing. She’s taking pictures and trying to depress people. What good does that do?

Likewise the incantations of “corrupt…cronyism…corporate lobbyists..,” like that’s something new and unique to our era. Is she serious? Is she saying this in a national publication like the LA Times? Let me throw a few names at her: Boss Tweed. Mark Hanna. J.P. Morgan. Albert Fall. Billy Sol Estes. Bobby Baker. Richard Nixon. Spiro Agnew. Thomas Keating. All of these names and many more are in Wikipedia if she wants to look them up.

Just to pick a juicy one: Is she familiar with Sam Giancana? One president, Eisenhower, used the murderous Mafia chieftain in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. Another future president’s father, Joseph Kennedy, got Giancana to help him wrangle labor votes for John Kennedy’s successful 1960 election. When Giancana was found years later with a bullet in his head, the CIA chief actually had to deny having anything to do with it. If there is a political scandal today that rivals two presidents trucking with a Mafia capo, I want to know about it.

Anywhere in the vicinity of money or power, Ms. Greenberg, you will find corruption, and that’s been true for 3,000 years. And yet, somehow, we keep making babies, and most of them grow up to enjoy the blessings of this rare and unusual planet.

Okay, but the story’s absurdity doesn’t stop there. It seems like the Internet has gotten ahold of Greenberg long before I did. The complaint? That she’s hopelessly naive? That she’s spoiled by prosperity? That’s she a doom-porn addict? No. They’re mad at her because she took the lollipops away from the kids before she photographed them in order to make them cry.

Bloggers such as Andrew Peterson called Greenberg’s lollipop technique abusive and exploitative, while Greenberg, her husband, Robert Green, and gallery owner Paul Kopeikin defended the work, the process and one another. The conversation, cycling between rational and hyperbolic, says as much about Net communication as about the art in question.

“Jill Greenberg is a Sick Woman Who Should Be Arrested and Charged With Child Abuse,” Peterson wrote under his pseudonym Thomas Hawk at ThomasHawk.com, a blog that focuses on new media and technology. For Peterson, Greenberg’s technique was “evil.”

At this point, I change sides, and become Jill Greenberg’s defender. Child abuse? Is this man insane? When you pollute the English language by relating something as benign as a photographer’s trick to the hideous violence and cruelty visited upon children all over the world by abusive parents and other authority figures, you dishonor the real victims.

But the vortex of stupidity didn’t stop there. Greenberg’s husband, Robert Green was so offended by the comments on ThomasHawk.com that he searched until he found the real identity of the previously anonymous blogger, and outed him. As if the idiocy of his comments wasn’t enough to hang him! He had to be cyber-stalked?

We’re in a bad stretch in the politicized culture of America. It might not be the “end times,” but I still wish I had my lollipop.