Far. And Near. two photo shows

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Two shows begin October 1 and October 2. Details at Far. And Near. [Click for LARGER images.]

You want to travel blind: portraits

An exhibition of portraits of film figures and friends is running in Chicago through July 26 at the Rainbo Club. The address, more information and other pictures are here. [Takeshi Kitano; Azita Youssefi; Michael Ondaatje]

this is 606: a photo exhibition of "chicagoesque" images

Ten large photographic landscapes of Chicago, or "606," open Friday, July 3 at The Architrouve in Chicago, 6-9-m. [Location and daily hours through August 2 here.] The set is drawn from the ongoing daily photographic project, "this is 606," which is here.

Please, go ahead, craft a better lede

In a day where journalists are regaling the world with Michael Jackson encounters, Lucian K. Truscott IV trumps them all on another topic: "I was perhaps the unlikeliest person in the world to cover the Stonewall riots for The Village Voice. It was June 27, 1969. I had graduated from West Point only three weeks earlier and was spending my summer leave in New York before reporting for duty at Fort Benning, in Georgia. After a late dinner in Chinatown, I was about to enter the Lion’s Head, a writers’ hangout on Christopher Street near the Voice’s offices, when I blundered straight into the first moments of the police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar a couple of doors down the street. Even a newly minted second lieutenant of infantry could see that it was a story." Truscott is also blogging his new novel, which he introduces, in part: "Being under contract is a nasty business in the writing game and should be avoided if at all possible. What used to happen was, you signed this lengthy document of many paragraphs… referred to quaintly as “clauses”—by which you surrendered pretty much everything deriving from the fruit of your labors other than your byline, which the employer reserved the right to fuck up in every way up to and including misspelling it, and then you went into a room and you closed the door, and you were allowed out when you are able to carry, depending on the nature of the contract, 30, or 120, or 800 pages of manuscript, which you would then deliver by hand or dispatch by mail to the employer in question. Today you are instructed to send the same numbers of pages with clicks of a mouse, but otherwise, the task expected and the toil extracted and the rights surrendered by the resident of the writing room–whomever he or she may be—remain the same. Then at the leisure of the employer, some weeks or even months in the future, they send you a check for an amount which will buy you significantly less beans and rice than the same amount would have when you first entered the writing room and began the work which earned the paycheck. And then they send you back into the writing room so that days or weeks or months from now you will come out with even more fucking pages, and they send you another fucking check at their fucking leisure that will buy even less beans and rice than before, and so you go back into the writing room in order to maintain some fractional modicum of hope that you will be able to keep yourself and your family in beans and rice until… well, until when exactly? Until you reach retirement age? What fucking retirement age? In his 80s, Gore Vidal is still lashed to a chair in his writing room and they had to pry Norman Mailer’s fingers from his pencil the day he was found dead at age 84 and when Philip Roth finally goes into the ground his publisher will send out a crew of interns to dig up his corpse and tie 14-gauge wire to his big toes and put a zillion watts into him hoping that he’ll rise from the dead and crank out another masterpiece and get maybe one more chance at the Nobel and thus double or triple or maybe even quadruple profits from his final masterpiece and then there’s the explosion of earnings to be gleaned from reprinting his backlist with the fucking Nobel emblazoned on the cover bigger than his name…"

Free! wants to be information

The blue Bic pen glides along the page, and surprising things always spill out of it

In BOOKFORUM, novelist Richard Ford talks about creating his "everyman", or at least how he writes. "I [wrote] with the certainty that even if I were working straight from life, and was trying to deliver perfect facsimiles of people directly to the page, the truth is that the instant one puts pen to paper, fidelity to fact—or to one’s original intention or even to sensation itself—almost always goes flying out the window. This is because language is an independent agent different from sensation, and tends to find its own loyalties in whimsy, context, the time of day, the author’s mood, sometimes even maybe the old original intention—but many times not. Martin Amis once wrote that literature “is a disinterested use of words. You need to have nothing riding on the outcome.” Another way of saying that is: The blue Bic pen glides along the page, and surprising things always spill out of it."

You are young

[Chicago Avenue east of California Avenue]

Keyboard cat plays off Roland Burris

Fallen

[Chicago Avenue at Leavitt Street]

Frank Bruni amid the "carniwhores"

In a laudatory review of Chicago's months-old Publican restaurant, outgoing restaurant cricket Frank Bruni tries out what at first appears to be a neologism, one that looked like a typo at first glance: "The menu is frustrating, in that just about everything on it reads as if it shouldn’t be missed. I didn’t get to the beef heart or the sweetbreads, just two of the ways the Publican acknowledges the necessity of offal in any restaurant that cares about its carniwhore credentials." As it turns out, Bruni took "carniwhore" for a spin on March 18: "The carniwhore school holds that no beast bests the pig in its multifaceted pleasures, that offal shouldn’t be relegated to just one or two dishes on the margins of the main feast, and that if you think something might taste better fried, go ahead and fry it, arteries be damned." Google searches lead to Bruni, an odd band, and a definition by Urban Dictionary in February 2008: "Derogatory term for a vegan or vegetarian who has sex with meat-eaters. The antithesis of a vegansexual."

A New Yorker cover drawn with an iPhone

Here's one among the dozens and dozens of links blogged about this today after an article in The New York Times... The June 1 issue of the New Yorker was drawn with Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone application, by Jorge Colombo. Details at The New Yorker, which announces Colombo will do one each week for their website.

Roughed up in Thessaloniki

FACE DOWN ON THE TABLE IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM, I hold stock-still as the young doctor with the needle poised to pierce my scalp deadpans, "How are you enjoying our Greek hospitality?" Two female doctors in training, tall, longhaired brunettes, giggle at his banter between instructions in their language: he's fascinated that I'm calm after being attacked by a mob. "So you're a photojournalist?" "Po-po journalist, it seems," I joke, using slang that's an all purpose "oh-oh." The women giggle. "I don't get it," he says, as he pulls thread through my lacerated skin.

It's been a little more than a month since that Sunday night and most aches have subsided. My insurance covered the CAT scan and other tests once I was back in the States, assuring nothing might be permanently awry. Cumulatively, I've spent almost six months of my life in the north of Greece but this is the first time I've been taken for an anarchist infiltrator and roughed up by a gang of nationalists. [Machine translation]

Thessaloniki is a city of just over a million. Street protests are common, prevalent, even. One cloudy afternoon a couple of years ago, I asked a cop in knee-high black boots standing beside his motorcycle as a main artery was filled with red flags of a communist youth party and black flags of some anarchist faction, what's this one about? "Just another regularly scheduled spontaneous demonstration," he answered.

That Sunday was the last of ten days of the eleventh Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. I had been watching films and talking to directors and photographers and programmers for a print piece for Filmmaker magazine. The usual suspects: homelessness, globalization, genocide. Earlier, I'd had conversations with a young Rwandan director who made one of several films about that last topic as part of a section of films made specifically by African directors. I had a drink with a few filmmakers and colleagues and chose to stop by a friends' apartment rather than ending the event on the bloody note of his film: he is a good storyteller and I'd gotten more than the gist of the horror, physical and moral, of that tragedy.

Along the eight blocks to the apartment, a square bristles with a crowd of middle-aged men listening to an energetic older man. A rank of blinding bright white lights stands between the speaker and the Byzantine edifice behind him. This is the square of Agia Sofia, the "Church of the Holy Wisdom." It's a neighborhood I know well; I feel safe. The words of his urgent peroration that I understand are mostly along the lines of "homeland" and "patriotism." Riot police stand at the perimeter of the gathering. I have my DSLR camera with me, walk past without even framing a picture. I move along. "Homeland." "Patriotism."



Journalists watch, movie reviewers watch, photographers watch, used to seeing. Seeing without being seen, as well. I was about to get a simple lesson in observation. The speaker's voice resounds through the shutters of the flat several blocks away. "Homeland. "Patriotism." I take the same route half-an-hour later, 9:15, after dark. Observing, I reach toward my unzipped camera bag, more to protect its contents than to take out any equipment. Three, then four middle-aged men are abruptly in my face shouting in Greek, "Who are you?" "Who sent you?" "What are you doing?" I'm surrounded. I move to protect my bag as punches fly and fall.

Sloppy punches and kicks from a dozen men in a mob scrum are always to be preferred over two guys in an alley. If you get dragged free soon enough, it's more roughing up than being beaten stupid. Still, there's blood. The velocity of the event? Under two minutes, I would guess.



I was told later the men who kicked, swung, slapped, as I crouched on the ground to protect my face, might have taken me for "an anarchist infiltrator." Fast, furious. Less than two minutes and about a pint of blood later, soaking my hair and cascading down the back of my jacket, police pull me away, to insure "bodily integrity," as the term of art of Greek law has it. Adrenaline brings clarity. My upturned palms are covered with blood from the gash on the back of my head. I hold them up. "American… Journalist… NOT political. What do you need?" My fingerprints blood my press pass as I hand it across.

A rare incident, I'm assured later by Greek friends, the police, the U. S. Consulate. And a modest one compared to the blood that had run through the aisles during so many of the thirty or so documentaries I'd seen in the ten days prior. Greek friends expressed concern about the temperature in their streets: these were the middle-aged fed up with riots in the streets of cities since the December shooting of a 15-year-old boy in the Exarchia district of Athens. What had I done? What a reviewer, a journalist, a photographer does. Just looking. My "crime." Just being seen looking. And remembering the image of my two bloody hands, red, La chinoise-red, which I could not take a picture of.

CODA: Last week I saw Z for the first time in memory. Costa-Gavras' restored thriller is the most authentic representation of getting your head lacerated in Greek street violence that I know. My injuries were in almost the same place on the back of the skull as those that kill Yves Montand's political figure. I sat stock-still, rapt with fascination.

Inside Rod's Head: There's a Monster in this Box

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Politicians are not meant to speak in full sentences

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An English gentleman shows how it's not done.

Media Rare returns in April

America's Favorite Snack

A perfect passage in a sweet Sunday profile of Budd Schulberg

Robert Chalmers in the independent goes a round with Budd Schulberg. This is by far not the best paragraph but it is great: "A well-preserved and alert 94, Schulberg sits by a log fire while his fourth wife Betsy Langman, a former actor and magazine journalist who protects his interests with formidable devotion, is discussing percentages on the phone. Budd seems more interested in looking out for the swans that visit Aspatuck Creek, the stretch of water just beyond his window. Some of them will take corn from his hand. If you didn't know, you would never guess that this gentlest of ornithologists, who speaks with a slight stammer, would be a legend even if all he'd ever produced was his boxing journalism.

'Did you ever fight, yourself?'

'I tried to box,' he says. 'But I had two major flaws: I never liked being hit on the nose. And I never developed a strategy to avoid being hit on the nose.'"

Photographers to become terrorists in UK

Reports the Guardian, UK photographers fear they are target of new terror law. "Taking photographs of police officers could be deemed a criminal offence under anti-terrorism legislation that comes into force next week. Campaigners against section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which becomes law on Monday, said it would leave professional photographers open to fines and arrest... The National Union of Journalists and the British Press Photographers' Association said the law would extend powers that are already being used to harass photographers and would threaten press freedom... Under section 76, eliciting, publishing or communicating information on members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers which is "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" will be an offence carrying a maximum jail term of 10 years... The new powers would be too vague to prevent abuse... "They will now be able to arrest you if a photograph could potentially incite or provoke disorder. But isn't that any protest?" ... Val Swain, a member of Fitwatch, a collective which photographs police intelligence teams taking pictures of protesters, said: "I took a picture of an officer on my camera phone and he walked over and said, 'you are going to delete that'. We're in a public place, he's in a public role and he knew that. They've been gearing up for it but so far they've stopped short of arresting people. Now they will have the power to do it." Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, said: "Police officers ... believe they have the power to delete images or to take editorial decisions about what can and can't be photographed. The right to take photos in a public place is a precious freedom. It is what enables the press to show the wider world what is going on."

CNBC anchor does not speak same English as Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Talleb

"Dr. Doom," aka economist Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan" seem to have been invited onto CNBC for comic relief as the anchor doesn't seem to understand, or care to understand, a single thing the lucid pair have to say. It's a fairly stunning ten minutes that suggest mass media may have been dead for far longer than we care to realize.

The writer is president of the United States.

A nice bit of journalistic notation at the end of an op-ed in today's Washington Post.

AP dashes HOPE

AP's Hillel Italie reports on AP alleging copyright infringement in Shepard Fairey's iconic HOPE image. Observers of journalism have noted the newsgathering service's often alarming slant on news toward Republicans and against Democrats. (Washington editor Ron Fournier almost became part of the failed John McCain presidential campaign.) AP also disapproves of quotation and linkage from their articles: this much falls under 250-word fair use. "The image, Fairey... acknowledged, is based on an [AP] photograph, taken in April 2006 by Manny Garcia on assignment for the AP...The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees." [More bunkum at the link.]

Joe Klein on former VP Cheney's outburst

At Swampland, Joe Klein makes a few notes on the unspecified location of Mr. Cheney's mind in "Please Go Away": "Let's leave aside the fact that if Dick Cheney and his alleged boss had been more vigilant—if they had listened to the Clinton appointees like Sandy Berger who warned about Al Qaeda, if they had paid attention to their own intelligence reports (notably the one on August 6, 2001)—the September 11 attacks might never have happened. Actually, I can't leave that aside... but in any case, it is sleazy in the extreme for Cheney to predict another terrorist attack. For several reasons:
1. Some sort of terrorist attack is likely, eventually, no matter who is President.
2. Cheney has done here what the Bush Administration did throughout: he has politicized terror. If another attack happens, it's Obama's fault. Disgraceful... and ungrateful, since it's only Obama's mercy that stands between Cheney and a really serious war crimes investigation. Which leads to...
3. The means that Cheney has supported to combat terror in the past, especially "enhanced" interogation techniques, are quite probably illegal. He is criticizing the Obama administration for not being willing to defy international law.
4. Cheney's track record of mismanagement in Iraq and Afghanistan--his sponsorship of Donald Rumsfeld, the worst Secretary of Defense in US history-- disqualifies him from having any credible say on the security policies of his successor.
This is a man who should either be (a) scorned or (b) ignored.

He doesn't seem...

The last two grafs in Friday's coverage of ex-governor Blagojevich in The Bright One: "One teen posed for a photo with Blagojevich to capture the history. 'He doesn't seem like a total douche,' the teen remarked after the former governor passed."

Extra

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Good for the Serbians?

Exeunt left, pursued by history

Newcity 411's battle of the tabs

It gets curiouser and curioser in that publishing town. "Sources who attended Monday night's meeting of the Sun-Times' chapter of the newspaper guild say that, unsurprisingly, the union seems to have little information and even less power in the face of an impending cut of another seven percent in wages and benefits and rumors of outsourcing copy-editing to India," an unbylined piece in Newcity reports. ".A strike against the on-life-support newspaper would likely kill the publication, leaving the union only with grievance-filing in its toolbox, and even that means little if the publication doesn't survive. The Tribune, smelling blood, announced Tuesday that it was converting its newsstand product to a tabloid, in a move that seems to be a clear attempt at placing the dagger directly in the Sun-Times heart. Sun-Times staffers related details about Monday night's convocation of union members of the editorial department, including writers, columnists, copyeditors, photographers, designers and some web workers. Union reps told members the proposed pay cuts would not save jobs and working fewer hours did not appear to be an option. The issue of severance arose, and a lawyer explained that fired copy editors would likely get severance, but if the company folds it's not clear if employees would still receive that benefit. Members militated about alerting the general public about the threat of outsourcing, and picketing was discussed." The tab starts Monday: a side benefit to presses already churning out Red Eye, TribCo's tabloid free-fluffer. Wonder if the layout will be the same?

NY Times' Holland Cotter on his critical path at CJR

"So conveying your experience is almost as important as giving an opinion?" "I think that’s true. My favorite critics are not art critics, but dance critics. Especially Edwin Denby. I like to read them best—not for stylistic reasons, but because the subject they are writing about is a very ephemeral thing. It basically doesn’t exist beyond the performance. The only record is what you write about it, with the kind of language that captures it on the fly. I think of art the same way. There is no objective perspective on it that makes sense to me, really. We’re here for a very short time. We’re here together. We won’t be here very long. The experience is so personal, so fleeting, that I just want to capture it."

The future of journamalism

What great theater should be

Rally for Gaza, Dearborn Street, around 430pm Friday.

I think it would be fun to run a newspaper

"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years."

"Slumdog copyeditors": Michael Miner on the Sun-Times outsource scheme

There's more to the story, but here's Michael Miner on the Chicago Reader website about an unlikely scheme to slow the death of the Chicago Sun-Times: "On Wednesday, the Sun-Times Media Group, at a meeting in the Sun-Times led by CEO Cyrus Freidheim Jr., told their unions they needed to cut their overall wage and benefit packages by 7 percent; they asked the unions to come up with ways to do it. The Sun-Times unit of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, which represents editorial employees at several of the papers, will meet Monday evening to discuss the issue. Sure to be on the agenda too is an idea the company floated Friday afternoon at the Sun-Times. It's to eliminate 25 to 30 jobs -- about a fifth of the editorial jobs remaining at that paper -- by outsourcing the copy editing and layout functions, possibly to India." [More at the link.]

Is there really a monster in this box?

You are young pizza by slice

Metal boxes ready for recycling when the presses are no longer oiled and inked.

The bright one

Michael Ventura on "The Talent of the Room"

People who are young at writing — and this does not necessarily mean they’re young in years — ask me, now and again, if I can tell them something useful about the task. Task is my word, not theirs, and it may seem a harsh and formal word, but before writing is anything else it’s a task. Only gradually do you learn enough for it to become a craft. (As for whether writing becomes your art — that isn’t really up to you. The art can be there in the beginning, before you know a thing, or it may never be there no matter what you learn.) “The only thing you really need,” I tell these people, “is the talent of the room. Unless you have that, your other talents are worthless.” Writing is something you do alone in a room. Copy that sentence and put it on your wall because there’s no way to exaggerate or overemphasize this fact. It’s the most important thing to remember if you want to be a writer. Writing is something you do alone in a room.

"The Talent of the Room," Michael Ventura

Thumbsuckering: Louis Menand on the VOICE in The New Yorker

In a diverting but hasty survey of the history of the Village Voice over its decades on the streets (and sometimes on the ropes), Louis Menand hastily sums up: "The Murdoch purchase did not end the Voice's distinctiveness. It was a durable brand. Of course, the paper will share the fate of every other print medium in the digital age, whatever fate that is. Still, more than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the internet does now long before there was an internet. The Voice was the blogosphere... and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium. It opened up an insecure and defensively self-important profession. Until its own success made it irresistable to buyers who imagined that they could do better with a busisnes paln than its founders had done from desperation and instinct, it had the courage to live by its wits." While the article does not mention the present straits of its current owner, nor its New Years Eve firing of 50-year-veteran Nat Hentoff, the fairly banal summation graf has the backhanded felicity of only implying the sad situation of many journalistic institutions today, bled or wracked by buccaneers enabled by bankers who haven't an ounce of ink in their veins.

Brian Eno on "the feeling that things are inevitably going to get worse," from EDGE

As one of the luminary respondents at the Edge Foundation's question of the year "What will change everything?", Brian Eno considers"the feeling that things are inevitably going to get worse." "What would change everything is not even a thought. It's more of a feeling. Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better. The world was rich compared to its human population; there were new lands to conquer, new thoughts to nurture, and new resources to fuel it all. The great migrations of human history grew from the feeling that there was a better place, and the institutions of civilisation grew out of the feeling that checks on pure individual selfishness would produce a better world for everyone involved in the long term. What if this feeling changes? What if it comes to feel like there isn't a long term—or not one to look forward to? What if, instead of feeling that we are standing at the edge of a wild new continent full of promise and hazard, we start to feel that we're on an overcrowded lifeboat in hostile waters, fighting to stay on board, prepared to kill for the last scraps of food and water? Many of us grew up among the reverberations of the 1960's. At that time there was a feeling that the world could be a better place, and that our responsibility was to make it real by living it. Why did this take root? Probably because there was new wealth around, a new unifying mass culture, and a newly empowered generation whose life experience was that the graph could only point 'up'. In many ways their idealism paid off: the better results remain with us today, surfacing, for example, in the wiki-ised world of ideas-sharing of which this conversation is a part. But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the future world not in that way but instead as something more closely resembling the nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion described in Cormac McCarthy's post-cataclysm novel 'The Road.' What happens then?

The following: Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on longer time-scales and require structures of social trust, don't cohere. There isn't time for them. Long term projects are abandoned—their payoffs are too remote. Global projects are abandoned—not enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits. Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. Survivalism rules. Might will be right. This is a dark thought, but one to keep an eye on. Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place. They can take hold quickly and run out of control ('FIRE!') and by their nature tend to be self-fueling. If our world becomes gripped by this particular feeling, everything it presupposes could soon become true." [Other respondents include Stewart Brand, Verena Huber-Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Terence Koh, Kai Krause, Ian McEwan, P.Z. Myers, Monica Narula, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Howard Rheingold, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.]