I Was Nine Years Old. I Laughed and Laughed.

A Classic Blog Post from Almost Five Years Ago: 'My Wife Cheats on Me'

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

My Wife Cheats on Me

I can't trust her. Our agreement was, since we spent so much money taking her 93-year-old mother around Scandinavia in September, that there would be no gifts this anniversary and no gifts this Christmas -- indeed, a general cutting back on gifts as far as the eye can see -- until we pay off the debts suffered (and in my case all debts are a matter of suffering) on our trip.

Last Saturday was our wedding anniversary. How commemorated? No nothing, not even a meal out. We would have had a meal out, but piling a meal on top of a huge Thanksgiving -- a meal which is still trailing leftovers like a particularly gorgeous comet -- seemed more sentimental than sensible. Now, we did go to the symphony, but that was an accident, a coincidence from our buying a season subscription: "Here's some money. Send us some tickets for whenever."

That is how I buy my symphony music, which on one hand must cause composers of music now alive to tear at their hair, since see the philistines for whom they must compose! "Yeah, whatever you got. I'll listen." But on the other hand if too many composers of music now alive persist in composing music no one particularly wants to listen to, then I am not their bane, I am their godsend. "He don't care," says the girl chewing gum in the box office. "Send him some tickets for that thing where they don't even play, they just sit there and mope, shifting in their chairs, which creak to contrapuntal effect."

Off point. I do tend to go off point, always taking the rant less traveled by (and that has made all the difference).

We went to the symphony but not in a spirit of celebration. If the symphony had not followed so close to Thanksgiving, we would have had a delicious post-symphony supper at the Top 100 Bay Area Restaurant! half a block from the symphony's doors. We have done that before, and it is a wonderful -- if dyspeptic -- experience, since how delicious, how almost naughty, is the idea of a late supper after expensive live music, what I call peacock music since it is performed by men in handsome tuxes and women in various kinds of drab and inappropriate dark clothing. It is cruel and wrong that female players of classical music do not have a default wardrobe choice that displays them to advantage!!!

I'm ranting again.

Since it was: a) so near Thanksgiving; b) so comparatively near to that great hemorrhage of coin called Mama Visits the Herring People, we did not tarry at the Top 100 Restaurant for a late supper. What a glum evening of subdued pleasure.

So on Sunday my wife gave me an anniversary card. So sweet: "All my love from your tango girl." And on Monday she gave me a fine Italian sweater. "I was just walking by the store," she said, "and you looked so nice on Saturday night in that other fine Italian sweater I gave you last Christmas."

She cheats. I'm a bastard.

No no, says the wise reader: You're a stupid bastard and more than that you're a lucky bastard.

Posted by ....J.Michael Robertson at 10:08 AM 2 comments Links to this post

On Saturday at Peter's We Hold the Fantasy Baseball Draft in Memory of Patrick Finley, Whose Life Was a Fantasy

But that, as they say, is another story, and not one I have the energy to write. When you are young, you think you will see everything twice, but Patrick is the only person (not including relatives; that goes without saying; that circus never leaves town) whose self-destruction I witnessed close enough to see the pain, the fine grain of it, and not merely hear the reports and appreciate the distance.

Patrick founded the league in 1984 because he figured -- rightly -- that he was clever enough to win the small cash prizes often enough to turn a profit. And he was. Everything was always a bit of a scam with him, but he made it fun.

He was a poet, you know, and I do like to put up bits of poetry on this blog, and I have hundreds of pages of his poetry upon which to draw.

But I don't put any of his poetry up. His magic was in the presentation of his work -- his salons made money, of course -- and you were never able afterwards to read the poem and think it as good as it seemed when you heard it. He had raised the words up too high. They hit the page and lay flat.

And that's confusing to a susceptible reader. (It does, however, explain how the fact most poets read their work so badly may, in fact, serve well the later appreciation of their work.)

Patrick. He was an actor, a performer, a manipulator, a bit of a cad, polyamorous, polymorphous, not that stringent in keeping his accounts -- but he paid us back the money he owed us the week before he died.

I'm sure he was setting us up for something later, a real score, so he died at the right moment, at least for the sentimentalization of his memory.

I actually meant to write about the league, but I have wandered off. I was talking with E. the other day about that 'seeing everything twice' thing, about how when we were younger part of the pleasure of any new experience was the notion -- spontaneous; not cultivated; just there -- that this was just the first of many, at least of several, visits to place and moment, that if Venice was wonderful or Crater Lake deep or the flood of lightning bugs filling the valley gorgeous to the point of confusion as we came down the mountain that night in North Carolina, all of this was the thing itself and also a reference point for future experiences that would both extend and retrace the past. We always had one foot in the future, it seemed.

Oh well. I know you are supposed to live in the moment, I just don't know how to do it, not entirely. We thought there would sooner or later be more of everything that was good -- if not exactly identical, similar enough to resonate.

Patrick was a good thing. He was a rascal and possibly a genius -- certainly at something, at the conning, anyway, and making you love it -- and we were pretty sure we would hang a dozen like him on the walls of our life. But we haven't, no sir, we haven't.

No point feeling bad. It's like the Heisenberg uncertainly principle, maybe. If we had stared too hard, concentrated too much, not let it play out in our peripheral vision, it would have been work, and we would have been court reporting our own lives, attentive but apart.

He was just there until he was gone. What? What happened? I don't quite ....?

So perhaps we lived in the moment after all.
Damn, he looked like a poet.

This Picture is Worth About Six Words, Seven Tops

Until you hear the story behind it. On the left there you have Richard and next to him his wife Gayle and next to her their friend Jen, who was visiting from Abu Dhabi.

The three met in Jakarta, where Richard was working.

Jen met Gayle. One is polite, you know, so Jen asked what brought Gayle to Indonesia. Gayle replied ... well, I'll let Richard tell it.

(You have to understand, as Jen didn't, that there's a company called -- wait for it -- Sampoerna.)

Okay, ready?

Sampoerna, Gayle said. This was in answer to Jennifer's question, "Who does your husband work for?"

Gayle said "Sam -- poor -- na", but Jennifer heard "some porno".

Thus, Jen was naturally eager to meet this Clint Eastwood of dirty movies, this American who had come to the East to do the Indonesian Adult version of a Spaghetti Western. And so Jen met Richard -- and this is where the story grows just a little sad -- did not think he looked like a porn star and began to think (perhaps) of stunt doubles and mood lighting. But, of course, at some point the misunderstanding was cleared up, and life was a little less interesting for all concerned. (And if you recognize those two folk on the far right of this photo: You should be ashamed.) And here's a postscript, direct from the United Arab Emirates! CORRECT....her reply came across as..... Sam Poor na Company...and hearing impaired me thought Some Porn Company..... wow, cool, her hubby works for a porn company and she's really cool with it... then we finally met Richard and thought, no way, he's too distinguished looking...oh, maybe he's the director??? Heee,heee.....great moments and I was sober!!! PPS: E. says that's Meg in the middle there. She was part of the Jakarta crew that stared at Richard and whispered. PPPS Correction: Ah,no, my friend prof Michael.... you must have Meg confused with somebody else. The Meg featured in this pic is CIA Meg Until recently,she headed the ' unusual developments in UAE carparks"...anything from driving down a one way lane to murders and stabbings..." All in a day's work for her. In her spare time, she's an avid gardener and a collector of Ethnic jewellery and carpets...!!

Gay Marriage Cool, Not Creepy

Image via Wikipedia

I do tend to get all mushy when people who look like me and act like me and have been around the block as many times as me do the right thing. I found this in Daily Kos. I steal it and hide it here.

Update: This is remarkable, from the Democratic Majority Leader of the Iowa Senate:

As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know Ive been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other.

And here's a bullet point from Kos himself.

• You know what would help with marriage equality? For gay couples who have committed themselves to each other to call each other "husband" and "wife". I still hear "my partner" way too much. The more people get used to men talking about their husbands, and women talking about their wives, the easier it'll be to change the culture and, ultimately, the law.

Innovations in Journalism Conference at USF

Journalism & Media

posted Mar 12, 2009 · Comment (0)

Journalism Innovations II: New Work & Ideas for Making the News

(updated 4.01) Speakers | Exhibitors | Workshops | Register
May 1, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. * April 30 (evening reception & panels)
McLaren Hall, University of San Francisco * Directions
Sliding-Scale Donation * No One Turned Away. * Contact: (415) 677-9877, or via e-mail
Presented by the Society of Professional Journalists-Northern California, University of San Francisco and Independent Arts & Media

Join the conversation about journalism and democracy with investor Warren Hellman, Gilbert Bailón of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Kachingle.com founder Cynthia Typaldos, David Cohn of Spot.Us, the California Endowment's Michelle Levander, SF Appeal founder Eve Batey, Michael Stoll of The Public Press and many other innovators, entrepreneurs and community leaders.

Meet a wide variety of exhibitors looking to make connections, build community and share resources, including the Public Media Collaborative, the SF Neighorhood Newspaper Association, ReelChanges.org, The Public Press, SF Engage, San Francisco School Volunteers and the Center for the Integration & Improvement of Journalism.

Access a full day of workshops and panels on jobs and careers, entrepreneurship, philanthropy, nonprofit and commercial business models, health and labor reporting, ethnic and local media, Bay Area journalism startups, student and multi-generational journalism, social media and civic participation, and more.

Get Involved!

• Sign up for Journalism Career-Counselor Speed Coaching and the Public Media Collaborative's Social Media Field Camp.

• Ensure your entry by registering in advance. All are welcome, but we cannot guarantee walk-up admissions.

• Request a free exhibitor table (limited availability)

• Be a Journalism Innovations Sponsor

Journalism Innovations II is co-produced by The Society of Professional Journalists-Northern California; Independent Arts & Media; and the University of San Francisco Davies Forum, and the USF Department of Media Studies and Journalism Program.

Panelists (Updated March 31)

• Gilbert Bailón, Editorial Page Editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, started his journalism career as a reporter at The Dallas Morning News in 1986, eventually becoming the newspaper's executive editor. In 2004 he became publisher and editor of Al Dí'a, a Spanish-language daily serving North Texas. He is the 2007-2008 president of American Society of Newspaper Editors, and past-president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.


• Tom Ballantyne, a "career doctor" for journalists and others, focuses on career changes and transitions for the many journalists reeling from the recent layoffs at media publications and properties around the greater Bay Area.


• Eve Batey, founder of SFAppeal.com, is formerly the San Francisco Chronicle's Deputy Managing Editor for Online, and was a co-founding writer and the lead editor of SFist.com.


• David Cohn, the founder of the journalism-crowdfunding service Spot.Us, is also a contributing editor at NewsTrust.org, an editor at NewAssignment.Net and a freelance writer for Wired News. He won the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge to start Spot.Us.


• Franc Contreras, Al Jazeera TV. For more than 12 years,Franc Contreras has been covering Mexico for major international news media organizations, including NPR, Marketplace and the BBC. He's traveled to every state in Mexico, covering virtually every major political and economic story that has taken place -- including presidential elections, guerilla uprisings, indigenous rights and immigration. He's also reported from most of Central America, Argentina, Colombia, Haiti and Venezula.


• Bill Densmore, a University of Missouri Reynolds Fellow for the Information Valet Project, is a veteran journalist with The Associated Press, and the director of The Media Giraffe Project, a grant-funded effort of the journalism program at the University of Massachusetts "to find and spotlight people making innovative use of media to foster participatory democracy and community." He is also a collaborator on the Journalism That Matters convenings.


• Alex Gronke, co-founder of Oakbook ("Daily Oakland Dispatches"), was a teacher in the Oakland public schools before turning to journalism in 2000. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, the Stockton Record, the San Francisco Chronicle, Red Herring, and the Oakland Tribune.


• Leslie Guevarra is an associate editor at GreenBiz.com and its sister sites at Greener World Media Inc. She has been a news reporter, editor and senior newsroom manager as well as the host and associate producer of a public affairs program on television. Her leadership roles have included tenure as a deputy managing editor, director of newsroom hiring and staff development and interim head of human resources for a newsroom of more than 500 people. A founding member of the Asian American Journalists Association's San Francisco Chapter, Leslie has worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, KTSF-TV, the Examiner and three other Bay Area newspapers.


• Warren Hellman co-founded Hellman & Friedman LLC in 1984, is the Firm's Chairman, and a member of the Firm's Investment and Compensation Committees. He was formerly a Director of numerous portfolio companies, including Eller Media Company, Inc., Nasdaq Stock Market LLC, and Young & Rubicam Inc. Mr. Hellman is a member of the University of California Walter A. Haas School of Business Advisory Board and, in 2005, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


• Richard Kochi Hernandez is a national Emmy Award-winning and Pulitzer Prize-nominated video and multimedia producer. He has worked as a photographer at the San Jose Mercury News for 15 years, and also has contributed to Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and international magazines. Richard was named deputy director of photography and multimedia after spearheading the creation of MercuryNewsPhoto.com. Koci Hernandez is currently a visiting Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism supported by a Ford Foundation grant to produce digital news sites for San Francisco Bay Area communities.


• Holly Kernan, News Director, KALW 91.7 FM Public Radio/CrossCurrents Radio


• Sally Lehrman, Knight-Ridder Chair for Journalism in the Public Interest, Santa Clara University


• The Digital Journalism Review students of Santa Clara University


• Michelle Levander, Director, California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships and Editor-in-Chief of ReportingonHealth.org


• Susan Mernit, a former VP at Netscape and AOL, is a co-founder of Pink Garage, a new online community and resource for women entrepreneurs. She also ran the 2008-09 Knight News Challenge, awarding $5MM to support innovative local projects that expand online news and community discourse. She is a BlogHer contributor, and is currently involved in the Public Media Collaborative, a new group organizing to train and mentor nonprofits and local commmunity groups in using social media tools to deepen member engagement, reach new audiences, market campaigns, and use micro-donation.


• Tom Murphy is a social entrepreneur who is founder of RedwoodAge.com, the first major news site for readers over 40, and Newswire21.org, a news service deisgned for new media. In the past, he was the founding Managing Editor of MarketWatch.com, Editor in Chief of RedHerring.com and AP news supervisor in San Francisco.


• Chris O'Brien is a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News where he writes about business and technology issues in Silicon Valley. He has been a reporter at the Mercury News since 1999, covering everything from the dot-com boom to the California energy crisis to the region's high-tech economy. O'Brien was also a recipient of a Knight Foundation News Challenge Award for The Next Newsroom Project. The project's goal was to research and design the ideal newsroom of the future.


• Barry Parr is the publisher and founder of Coastsider.com, a community news site for coastal San Mateo County, and MediaSavvy.com, a blog about networked media. He's a co-creator of the first full Web newspaper at the San Jose Mercury News and CNET's News.com.


• Chris Peck is the editor of the The Memphis Commercial Appeal, overseeing all news operations for print and online. A past president of the Associated Press Managing Editors and current board member for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he has spent a career working on national newspaper issues. He is also the co-founder of Journalism That Matters, a coalition of legacy media leaders and New Media entrepreneurs who are focused on keeping journalism vibrant and alive in a digital age. He grew up in a newspaper family in Wyoming where he and his brother still own The Riverton Ranger, a newspaper started by his father. He is married to Kate Duignan, who he met at Stanford University.


• Hal Plotkin, founder of ReelChanges.org and the Center for Media Change, is a founding editor of Marketplace, a former senior fellow for the World Economic Development Congress, and a member of the Board of Trustees of Foothill and De Anza Community College. His writing has been published by Inc. International, International Business magazine, Forbes ASAP, Barron's Online, California Business magazine, Family Business magazine, The Harvard Management Update, Securities Industry Daily and many others.


• Rick Rodriguez, Director, Southwest Borderlands Journalism Institute at Arizona State University; former Executive Editor, Sacramento Bee; former president, American Society of Newspaper Editors.


• Steve Rhodes, Tiger Beat Bay Area Media Blog


• Michael Stoll, founder, The Public Press, former assistant director at GradeTheNews.org, and an associate professor of journalism at San Jose State University.


• Yesenia Sanchez is a management consultant and coach for artists, activists and nonprofits, and also works nationally with the National Network of Fiscal Sponsors to network, educate and advocate for fiscal sponsorship as an alternative and innovative nonprofit business model. Previously, she ran one of the largest arts fiscal sponsorship programs in the country at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, and currently serves as an advisor to Independent Arts & Media's fiscal sponsorship program. She has spoken and led classes on fiscal sponsorship and development for The Foundation Center, California College for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Foundation and Grants for the Arts.


• Spencer A. Sherman was named the director of publishing and communications at California Health Care Foundation in November 2007 after having served as executive editor for print and online publishing activities since 2002. Sherman leads CHCF's overall communications strategy including publishing, public and media relations, and development of online publishing and communications efforts. Prior to joining CHCF, Sherman was a legal editor and managing editor of Internet products for Nolo Press, a publisher of self-help legal books and software. He was the editor of Nolo's Guide to Social Security Disability: Getting and Keeping Your Benefits; Beat the Nursing Home Trap; Child Custody: Building Parenting Agreements That Work; and Social Security, Medicare and Pensions, among others. As a filmmaker and journalist, he covered the U.S. Supreme Court, served as a foreign correspondent in Asia, and was a television executive in Japan. Sherman earned his bachelor's degree in American studies and political science from the University of California, Santa Cruz.


• Erik Sundelof, Co-Founder, Vice President of Social Media, AllVoices


• Cynthia Typaldos is the founder and CEO of Kachingle.com, a crowdfunding financial tool for content websites with a planned launch in summer 2009. She was previously co-founder and COO of GolfWeb (acquired by CBS Sportsline in 1999), and founder and CEO of RealCommunities (acquired in 2001).

Exhibitors

• The Center for the Integration & Improvement of Journalism
• Daemonized Networking Services/Free Web Servers on CD-Roms for content producers
• The Golden Gate Gazette: News, information, local history, weather, events, humor and comics
• Media Alliance
• MyTwoCensus.com/watchdog reporting on the 2010 U.S. Census
• National Radio Project/Making Contact
• Newsdesk.org
• SF Engage
• The San Francisco Neighborhood Newspaper Association
• The San Francisco Public Press
• San Francisco School Volunteers
• The San Jose Independent

Workshops

• Career Speed Counseling: Professional career coaches will be on hand Saturday afternoon to provide free speed-consulting sessions about career transitioning, quick resume critiques and tips on interviewing, networking and the right next steps for you. Advance registration required.

• Social Media Field Camp, produced by the Public Media Collaborative, offers up to five group sessions throughout the day on social media innovations and practice. Advance registration required.

Panels

This is a working list -- check back for updates as booking proceeds.

• Journalism Careers: Making Our Own Future (Producer: Leslie Guevarra). Panelists with experience hiring, recruiting and the unemployment line share their strategies for career survival in these tough times. Yes, there is a light at the end of the tunnel -- and no, it's not another damn train.


• Philanthropy & Public Health Journalism: New Directions (Moderator: Michelle Levander, California Endowment; producer: Laurie Udesky)


• "New Labor Reporting"


• "Student journalists: Defining the future"


• "Journalism Generations: A multi-generational discussion/dialogue of careers & journalism perspectives/practices"


• "Funding & Philanthropy 2009: Grantmakers, major donors, individuals and smart crowds"


• "The Business Model 2009: Micropayments, print strategies, longtails, niches and ads"


• "Investigative Reporting Training & Roundtable"


• "SPJ Citizen Journalism Boot Camp"


• "New Labor Reporting: An Open Discussion, a Work in Progress"


• "Media Training for Nonprofits"


• "Bay Area Media Shutdown! The Fate of the SF Chronicle, the Battle for Local Radio, and Other Bay Area Media Adventures"


• "The 3,000 Watt Solution: Local Radio & LPFM Open the Airwaves"

Directions to the University of San Francisco
Directions * Campus Map * MUNI (5 Fulton, 21 Hayes, 31 Balboa, 43 Masonic)

What?
Booking has commenced for the Second Annual Journalism Innovations Expo, a unique showcase, colloquium and jam session for the people, ideas and projects that are defining the future of journalism around the Bay Area and beyond.

Where?
This year, Journalism Innovations II comes to the University of San Francisco, a green and inviting campus just minutes from Golden Gate Park and the historic Haight-Ashbury district, easily accessed by car and public transport, with plenty of on- and off-campus dining options, and home to academic leaders in a wide variety of disciplines.

Our Second Anniversary
This event follows the first Innovations in Journalism Expo, staged in Palo Alto in last May, and featuring hundreds of attendees, career counseling, numerous panels and more than two-dozen panelists. Some notable speakers included Geneva Overholser ("On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change"), Jon Funabiki (SFSU, former Ford Foundation officer), David Talbot (Salon.com founder), Reese Erlich (international print and radio freelancer), Rose Aguilar (Your Call Radio) and many more.

More Info

Expo tables are free to nonprofits, schools, service and advocacy groups, social ventures and startups, but are limited in availability. If you'd like to exhibit your good works to hundreds of journalism advocates, practitioners, students and aspirants, managers and executives, fill out the Expo table request form.

SPONSOR JOURNALISM INNOVATIONS II ... get high-visibility placement for your message, service, idea and organization before a diverse, multi-generational audience of new and emerging journalism practitioners and leaders.

Media Studies Celebrates My Continuance as Chair

Wonderful News for the Media Studies Department

Image via Wikipedia

After frank and candid discussions with a gaggle of deans, I have decided to continue as chair.

Let is be stipulated that I am no longer pissed with anybody, a state of mind that ill befits a first among equals.

The Mystery of the Four Frenchmen (Not to Mention the Belgian)

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday was E.'s birthday, what was once a sad time now become a glad time. For several years there, when my wife was around 40, she bemoaned and bemoaned the imminence of her birthday, an emotional state to which I responded by trying to ratchet down her angst.

That is, I ignored her birthday.

Hearing this, you might say, "Even an idiot should have known he was being an idiot, you idiot." So you are smarter than me. Big deal. Where were you when I needed you?

(Between marriages? I see.)

Anyway, at a certain point my wife staged a one-woman intervention and explained that though I may have correctly diagnosed the condition -- that there was a condition -- my therapy left much to be desired when it came to addressing the underlying cause. I was supposed to make her feel better, not ignore the fact she felt bad. And so the regimen of the nice meal out, the flowers, the piece of tasteless jewelry was born, and now peace reigns.

But what about those Frenchmen? Yesterday we went to the magnificent Lakeshore/Grand Avenue Farmers Market and stumbled on a Frenchman selling his very own goat cheese, which was derived (his sign said) from his very own herd of 37 goats.

Sampled the cheese and didn't much like it. Too strong.

Then we wandered over to the market's food row and found a Frenchman selling high-end sausage. We bought a Fabrique Delices duck salami for $11. (Birthday! Whatever you want, dear.)

Two stalls over was a Frenchman from Lyon -- by this time the sheer unlikely onslaught of Frenchmen, rather like a sudden influx of penguins at nearby Lake Merritt, had piqued my interest and so I asked -- who was selling pricey meat and cheese pastries.

He said he put cream cheese *in* his pastry dough, which made them so very filling and fulfilling. They were about the size of a golf ball, but we bought one anyway, for $7.50, and it was quite lush.

I mentioned to this good monsieur that, damn, his ilk was out in force. He said, well, did you bump into that other guy over there in the market section, the one near the goat cheese maker, and I don't mean the sausage maker?

I said no, which disappointed him somewhat because he was going to say: Aha! He's not French. He's Belgian! Which he said anyway, to less effect.

Okay then, last night we went to one of our "treat" restaurants, Soizic, down at Jack London Square. And who should take our drink orders but ... ?

A Frenchman!

(Unless he was a Belgian or even a French-Canadian, and I could have asked but wouldn't that be an insult. And this guy seemed ready to be insulted, which is why we love the French, isn't it, their being just as high-strung as chihuahuas?)

You may ask okay what does all this add up to?

It is beyond dispute that my wife's birthday is a special day, but "special" manifests itself in many ways -- Old Mother Universe abhors monotony.

And this year that specialness expressed itself in: Frenchmen.

An inch of rain would have been nicer, but it's the thought that counts.

The Never-ending Conversation: Oh What Will Come of the Newspapers?

Image by sillygwailo via Flickr

I pulled this out of Romanesko and sent it to Ricardo and Big Pat:


"There are only two ways to stop the newspaper death spiral"

Calbuzz
Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts write:
* Newspapers have to concentrate all of their force and fire power on their own communities, making themselves indispensable to local residents.
* Or, a business like Google or Yahoo can begin to pay reporters in communities to produce content -- to cover city councils and school boards, write about local development and utilities, local sports and arts, etc.
Posted at 10:15 AM Apr. 2, 2009


Ricardo responded:

Thanks for the link. I agree with the general drift of local focus and internet deals as promising tunnel end of light.

Somehow, against the odds, the swell of letters to the Chron editor on this topic, silly often though not always, and particularly those commenting on facets of a non-profit reorg approach (with well-compensated newspaper pros) gives me an odd hope.

I'd ignore those letters if they didn't fit so closely with reporting on Gavin Newsome and rich guys talking out loud about this same thing. So, put me down in the unlikely optimist column, regarding the Chron only, with little hope for big city papers elsewhere.

And then Big Pat said:

The problem I see with this is that “all force and power on their own communities” will likely shake out to, “all force and power to wealthy communities”. Who will cover the local ghetto, West Fuck, Shasta county, or Weed, California? Not that they do a good job today, but I don’t see a new model reaching the same high level of ignorance as what we have now. Small town papers, with exceptions, are in the pocket of their advertisers. They loathe to run local investigative pieces. They don’t have the expertise and they don’t want to pay for the expertise, they want to talk about the county fair.


And so then *I* said.

Yah, Pat is right – newspapers are owned by the pillars of the community and all flows from that. Indeed, the heretical question is what fraction of what is in a newspaper appeals to what fraction of those voters and activists who move events one way or another achieving some substantive change of how things change, politically or otherwise. We say newspapers matter, as I naturally would since my self-image and my reason for being is intimately connected with the notion that they do/did matter. (And I was a feature writer for god’s sake.)

Maybe what comes after will accomplish whatever good things newspapers have accomplished – but with less preening, less self-important huffing and puffing? It’s not a rhetorical question mark.

An Old Man Teaches in Jazz

Image via Wikipedia

By which I mean only that I have accumulated too much in my head over the years and lost enough faith that I know what is wise and what isn't, what has use and what doesn't, that my teaching is (oh in more ways than one) kind of like whale song, done in the moment for the joy of it, trusting to the sense of it and not always as embarrassed as I might be at leaving the kids to find the sense of it.

Yesterday in my review class, as we talked of the How, the If, the Must of meaning in the visual arts, it came to me to talk of the Piss Christ, which I really hadn't thought of in years and never knew quite what to think about it.

So today -- chasing my own lecture, as it were -- I'm emailing a PC picture to the kids and and some critiques. And then I stumble on this poem, from Slate.

And I like this poem very much.

If we did not know it was cow's blood and urine,
if we did not know that Serrano had for weeks
hoarded his urine in a plastic vat,
if we did not know the cross was gimcrack plastic,
we would assume it was too beautiful.
We would assume it was the resurrection,
glory, Christ transformed to light by light
because the blood and urine burn like a halo,
and light, as always, light makes it beautiful.

We are born between the urine and the feces,
Augustine says, and so was Christ, if there was a Christ,
skidding into this world as we do
on a tide of blood and urine. Blood, feces, urine—
what the fallen world is made of, and what we make.
He peed, ejaculated, shat, wept, bled—
bled under Pontius Pilate, and I assume
the mutilated god, the criminal,
humiliated god, voided himself
on the cross and the blood and urine smeared his legs
and he ascended bodily unto heaven,
and on the third day he rose into glory, which
is what we see here, the Piss Christ in glowing blood:
the whole irreducible point of the faith,
God thrown in human waste, submerged and shining.

We have grown used to beauty without horror.

We have grown used to useless beauty.

Looked in the Mirror Just a Moment Ago

Image by existentist via Flickr

The good news is that I may be too big to fail.

Dateline Oakland Homicide Squad: His Name was W.H. Auden and He Said He was a Poet

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Great fun in arts reviewing today. The kids shone, supplying multiple definitions of art and appropriate questions about the fact art so easily, so irresistibly, contorts to fit those definitions.

I showed my Chihuly pix and followed that up with Ken Baker's furious denunciation of the Chihuly show at the DeYoung, which probably sold more tickets than a rave. Then, I talked about how much 'story' -- explicit or implicit -- is present in "pre-modern" art, which I illustrated thus:

Musee des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
1940

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus Pieter Breughel c. 1558; Oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 73.5 x 112 cm; Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

This is moral work, is it not, or at least philosophical?

In Oakland California with the Homicide Philistine

Cover of Painted Word, The

Just read that's the kind of head to boost traffic, though I assume you'd get a lot of U-turns and not regular readers.

Today was a day well got through: During the morning, I put the final tearful touches on our tax forms and took them to our accountant, who explained we owe an additional $2,500.

Came home and wrestled with a busted computer and a useless router. That entailed phone calls to USF's own ITS (with two different problems), one call to D-Link (the router maker) and one to Comcast after all my other phone calls had resulted not in restoring wireless commune between my laptop and the Internet but in severing commune between the Internet and our old steam-driven desktop computer (which crashes every five minutes anyway).

Good news is Comcast told me how to hook up the Comcast line directly to the laptop, which is how I speak with you now. You can't 'hot sync.' You have to plug the ether net cable from the modem into the laptop and only then turn the modem off.

Turn it back on, and you've got the world on your string. Oh that's simple, and so am I.

Now, the Philistine part. Having finally gotten the computer running, I stepped away to spend time prepping for Arts Reporting and Reviewing tomorrow. At long last we start on "visual arts," the pure stuff without story to draw us in or direct pressure on our pleasure centers, as in the case of food or music. It is, perhaps, our greatest challenge in that it's so easy to retreat into definitions and art history, which make a Liberal Education so charming. Yes, when it comes to painting and sculpture, we insist you sample our bowl of crumbs.

I am a Philistine in that I still find Wolfe's "The Painted Word" a pretty good debunking of art that follows theory, the essence of those theories being their use in gilding the elites with delicate layer after delicate layer of refinement and superiority, each layer carefully moistened with contempt for those of lesser refinement and discrimination.

Ah, the glib, the glib, the glib. I swim in the glib like some lugubrious fish from down in the darkness with its glowing nose. The glib must not be a substitute for the obscure. I must try not to infect the student's with such inverse arrogance.

Sitting in the Plane at the Gate Not Moving Stuck in Atlanta

Image via Wikipedia

Something wasn't working, or the display said it wasn't working, so we sat for two hours before someone solved the problem or kicked the console or crossed fingers and said, "We all owe God a death, including those 264 people sitting in back. Let's fire this Mother up."

But the point is we sat there for two hours. Luck comes multiform. As it happened, my last task from Spring Break was grading a set of meeting stories from basic reporting, and what with one thing or another they were still not graded earlier today; they were to be my in flight recreation. The moment it became clear that the delay might be prolonged, I pulled out my stories and went to work.

These were 350-400 word stories, just an elementary meeting cover with the main points (I insisted) in the first 100 words, to be written as if there were no other words on the subject, not in the whole wide world. Such stories consume 20 minutes apiece to grade because I line edit each of them. It's the only way I know how to grade.

"Write tighter" -- what does that mean? "More detail" and "clearer" and "paraphrase"? Yah, why not just recommend Truth and Beauty, So I tend to scribble in what I mean, and for a page-and-a-half story: 20 minutes.

And thus it was. Six stories in, the captain said it (whatever it was) was fixed. I quit grading and watched some girls NCAA basketball on the seat-back TV, then graded six more stories, then watched Stewart and Colbert and then graded the final story, the one I'd saved because (sigh) it really is heavy lifting. This is the one where I rewrite half, and I leave the rest alone.

Well, back to the point. When I grade this sort of story, I go into my own little world. It's not a pretty world, and I don't much like being there -- I tell my reporting students that I spent 15 years in journalism avoiding writing stories the way I am teaching them to write.

But it closes the door. And sometimes you want the door closed.

More (or Less) About Visiting My Mother

Who was in bed at mid afternoon covers up to her chin, scant hair plastered to her skull with her teeth out. Though I am told she doesn't like wearing her teeth anymore so let's not make it seem worse that it is.

Not knowing me, she hit on me, or so I think, saying I was a nice looking man and perhaps she could go home with me? Not being in a particularly playful, or incestuous, mood, I said I was her son and married besides at which point she began what my sister says is her litany:

I'm bad, no one loves me and no one has ever loved me although there was someone I loved and I prayed that God would either let me have him or let me die although I was granted neither thing so I lay in bed and cried in the dark.

This went on for a while. I mentioned my late father, her late mother, etc., pointing out that they loved her, we loved her, my god all that love. But this had no visible effect. There she lay, woe on  her face, torment on her face, reliving something she either experienced or feared experiencing. As I said: She loops. 

I kissed that little toothless mouth twice and we came away.

Off to the Happy Baptist Nursing Home to Visit My Moms

When she says, "Who are you?" I'll say, "No. Who are YOU?"

We'll see how she likes that. Two can play at that game.

If only it were.

An Insight into the Robertson Gene Pool, or the Nuts Did Not Fall Far From the Tree. As You Can Tell by Looking at the Nut(s).

Californocentric

Came crawling out of the bedroom at my sissy's a little after 10:30 am apologizing for arising so late. Told my brother-in-law it felt like it was 7:30 to which he replied:

"In California it is."

It's true, isn't it? Time zones are the debt we owe to God. (No, I don't know what that means. In California, it's still 1983.)

I Have Deceived My Sister

That is, the previous post was bogus in that it implied a disingenuous when and where. We are now in Tennessee celebrating my sister's birthday, her 70th.

She is right spry. There is hope for me. Of course, there will be pictures. Posit the number of words they will be worth, given the traditional multiplier. Then think exponential.