m e d i a r a r e

Dan Clowes event in Chicago June 13

2010-05-23T20:21:00.001-07:00

Dan Clowes is on the road promoting his latest novel, "Wilson." He'll be in Chicago June 13 at the Printers Row book Fair; I'll be moderating. Some recent Clowes interviews are here.

Far. And Near. two photo shows

2009-09-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

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

You want to travel blind: portraits

2009-07-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-01T16:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

[Chicago Avenue east of California Avenue]

Keyboard cat plays off Roland Burris

2009-05-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

Fallen

2009-05-28T03:45:00.000-07:00

[Chicago Avenue at Leavitt Street]

Frank Bruni amid the "carniwhores"

2009-05-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-26T15:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-01T06:55:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

Politicians are not meant to speak in full sentences

2009-03-25T14:31:00.001-07:00

An English gentleman shows how it's not done.

Media Rare returns in April

2009-03-14T06:09:00.000-07:00

America's Favorite Snack

2009-03-14T04:07:00.000-07:00

A perfect passage in a sweet Sunday profile of Budd Schulberg

2009-02-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-12T15:13:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-09T15:11:00.000-08:00

"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.

2009-02-05T00:27:00.000-08:00

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

AP dashes HOPE

2009-02-04T18:03:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-04T16:30:00.001-08:00

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...

2009-01-30T14:02:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-29T15:26:00.000-08:00

Good for the Serbians?

Exeunt left, pursued by history

2009-01-20T15:29:00.000-08:00

Newcity 411's battle of the tabs

2009-01-13T13:39:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-11T17:23:00.000-08:00

"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

2009-01-11T02:04:00.000-08:00

What great theater should be

2009-01-10T16:00:00.001-08:00

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

I think it would be fun to run a newspaper

2009-01-10T15:49:00.000-08:00

"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

2009-01-09T15:53:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-01-08T17:30:00.000-08:00

You are young pizza by slice

2009-01-07T19:17:00.001-08:00

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

The bright one

2009-01-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

Michael Ventura on "The Talent of the Room"

2009-01-05T16:44:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-02T13:09:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T11:26:00.000-08:00

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.]

Consider: Blago represents only himself.

2008-12-30T16:43:00.000-08:00

New cliches are minted hourly. Journalists strive for superlatives in describing Illinois as corrupt. Television newsreaders suggest that Blago is the face of the Democratic Party in the United States. Bobby Rush doubly invokes language of past, racially-inspired murders: "I would ask you not to hang or lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointor. Separate, if you will, the appointee from the appointor. Roland Burris is worthy." Blagojevich's public play for an insanity plea cannot end too soon. [Graphic: ABC News.]

"Cancer Cells," by Harold Pinter (2002)

2008-12-25T12:42:00.000-08:00

The black cells will dry up and die
Or sing with joy and have their way
They breed so quietly night and day,
You never know, they never say.

Pinter was 78.

The Proof is in the off-putting: The NYT's new booze blog

2008-12-23T11:12:00.000-08:00

The Times calls it Proof, and it's their blog about drinking, or wanting to drink despite behind sober for months and years. It's an odd cocktail. Here's a sentiment, from David Kramer's "Buybacks": "One thing I miss about drinking is hanging out in bars. Mm, okay. Let's sample Jim Atkinson's "It’s the Holidays. How About Just One?": "I had my last drink nearly 16 years ago, so you’d think I would have assimilated pretty much every bit of unpleasantness associated with clean and sober life in a society that remains thoroughly sodden with alcohol. But I still can’t quite handle the holidays. It’s not that I’m driven to drink; just to a certain uncomfortable distraction that doesn’t leave until the holiday season thankfully does. And it’s not just that the holidays seem to have been invented for the express purpose of promoting—no, necessitating—irresponsible alcoholic consumption." Cheer-filled! How about David Kramer's "Self-Inflicted Prophecy "? "Years ago, I had had a run of terrible luck in my life. My career was going nowhere. I thought about going to see a shrink, but I was totally broke and I didn’t want to get myself involved in anything that was going to cost me lots of time and money. So I went to see a psychic. In my mind, it was just like seeing a shrink, only instead of wasting all that time mulling over my past, I could set some totally arbitrary goals and navigate my life through them, moving forward." Got anything stronger? How 'bout Susan Cheever's "Drunkenfreude"? "As dessert ended, the woman in the red dress got up and stumbled toward the bathroom. Her husband, whose head had been sinking toward the bûche de Noël, put a clumsily lecherous arm around the reluctant hostess. As coffee splashed into porcelain demitasse cups, the woman in the red dress returned, sank sloppily into her chair and reached for the Courvoisier. Someone gently moved the bottle away. “Are you shaying I’m drunk?” she demanded. Even in the candlelight I noticed that the lipstick she had reapplied was slightly to the left of her lips. Her husband, suddenly bellicose, sprang from his chair to defend his wife’s honor. But on the way across the room he slipped and went down like a tray of dishes. “Frank! Are you hurt?” she screamed. Somehow she had gotten hold of the brandy. “S’nothing,” he replied, “just lay down for a little nap. Can I bum a smoke?” Bartender! What he's having! And make it a double!

Rockcrit: Matthew Perpetua on Tim Kinsella

2008-12-22T18:22:00.001-08:00

Writing at Fluxblog, Matthew Perpetua considers the case of Joan of Arc's “Ne Mosquitos Pass”: "Tim Kinsella is not the easiest singer to appreciate. In fact, he’s probably the worst singer whose music I actively enjoy. But here’s the thing: Whereas all too many crappy indie vocalists hedge their bets and sing with timidity and a flat affect, Kinsella emotes and pushes his thin, frail voice to occasionally excruciating limits, often with gutting results. Even still, his style would come off horribly in most musical contexts, and so it’s pretty crucial that it’s in contrast with delicate, imaginative arrangements that balance out gorgeous, graceful instrumentation with uglier textures and unorthodox rhythms. “Ne Mosquitos Pass,” a Joan of Arc gem dating back to 2001, never fails to move me with its gently floating arpeggios, somber piano chords, and absolutely unhinged conclusion. The beat is steady, but it seems to stagger all along the way, as if it can barely hold itself erect, especially when the song gets around to its bitter, ironically anthemic chorus." Not only a nice paragraph, but it suits the song.

Terminal velocity: how to end the massive Madoff coverage in NY Times

2008-12-21T14:45:00.000-08:00

NY Times front-pages the deceptions of Bernard Madoff in the December 21 editions. As written by Diane B. Henriques, the closing grafs offer a keen example of accelerating-cadence prose ending a huge, detail-choked article. "In early December he remarked to one of [his sons] that he was struggling to raise $7 billion to cover redemptions. He seemed tired and drawn, but so was just about everyone else during the turbulent weeks of late November and early December. Then, early on Dec. 10, he shocked [them] by suggesting that the firm pay out several million dollars in bonuses two months ahead of schedule. When pressed by his sons for a reason, he grew agitated and insisted that they all leave the office and continue the conversation at his apartment on East 64th Street. It was there, at midmorning, that he told his sons that his business was “a big lie” and, “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme.” There was nothing left, he told them—and he fully expected to go to jail. The questions have piled up since then: Could Mr. Madoff have sustained this worldwide fraud for so long by himself? Why didn’t regulators, in Washington and abroad, catch him sooner? And will anything be recovered for investors, some of whom have lost every penny? But when the news of his arrest began to spread on Dec. 11, the first thought that struck an old friend who had known him as a pioneer on Wall Street, was, “There must be an error. It must be another Bernie Madoff.” Then he added, “But then, there is no other Bernie Madoff.” [Reported by Henriques, Alex Berenson, Alison Leigh Cowan, Alan Feuer, Zachery Kouwe, Eric Konigsberg, Nelson D. Schwartz, Michael J. de la Merced, Stephanie Strom, Julia Werdigier and Dirk Johnson.]

Clay Shirky on "vulgarity" on the internet, from CJR

2008-12-20T14:39:00.000-08:00

Clay Shirky, who teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications program at New York University and is the author of "Here Comes Everybody, says not to worry about information overload. "You know, “Life was better when I was younger” is always an acceptable narrative. Right? And so for anybody who was brought up genuflecting to the literary culture and the virtues of reading Tolstoy—and essentially Tolstoy is a trope in these things, War and Peace is the longest novel in the sort of Euro-centric canon—you could always make the argument that the present is worse than the past by simply pointing to the virtues of the past. And so, what the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what’s available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. So, the only thing surprising about the Web, in a way, is that it’s been a long time since we’ve had a medium that increased the amount of production of written material this dramatically... [P]eople made the same complaint about comic books, they made the same complaint about paperbacks, and they made the same complaint about the vulgarity of the printing press. Whenever you let more people in, things get vulgar by definition. And people who benefited under the old system or who dislike or distrust vulgarity as a process always have room to complain. But, the interesting thing is, when you say so many people believe this, in fact almost no one believes this, right? There’s a tiny, tiny slice of the chattering classes for whom “Life was better when I was younger” is an acceptable complaint to make, and they have these little conferences or whatever and agree with one another about that phenomenon. But when you look at the actual use of the Web, it is through the roof. And it has continued in an unbroken growth from the early ’90s until now. So, in fact, almost everybody thinks it’s a good idea because they’re embracing it and they’re experimenting with it and they don’t really care what we think. And when I say “we,” I mean—I am a member of the Chardonnay-swilling East Coast liberal media elite. But I also recognize that anything I might have to say about the utility of the media actually isn’t going to influence whether or not people are going to adopt this. And so once you get out of the idea that basically the previous avatars of the cultural good, and the world that George W.S. Trow chronicled so beautifully 'Within the Context of No Contex't—once you grasp that those people are powerless to that effect, powerless with regard to the adoption curve—the question really becomes, “How do you point out an effect where something has been damaged?” And that’s where I think a lot of this conversation about reading breaks down, because if you assume that reading Tolstoy is an a priori good, your world crumbled in 1970. And it’s hard to point to the Web as responsible for any of that because that was a done deal for some time. If you want to point to more proximate harms, it would be very hard to argue, for example, that innovation, inventiveness, new intellectual discoveries had slowed as a result of the Internet, and so people are left with these kind of mealy-mouth cultural critiques, because nostalgia becomes the only bulwark against change. The actual effects of making more information available to more people have been enormously beneficial to society, yet not to the intellectual gatekeepers in the generation in which that change happened."

Greek protest posters

2008-12-20T14:17:00.001-08:00

I've collected Greek political posters for a while and was disappointed this fall to find a lack of the usual startling design work. The provocation that led to the creation of these and the resulting violence is a terrible thing, but terrible times focus the mind. [Via Nassos Kappa.]

Manohla Dargis addresses her "dear (and hostile) reader"

2008-12-20T13:01:00.000-08:00

In a sweetly optimistic, even uplifiting year-end countdown, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis is inspired by the lead character of Happy-Go-Lucky: "There is, of course, perverse pleasure in ending the year with an angry rant, as I have proven in the past, if only to myself. But given the clanging of so much bad news, I thought I would try a change of pace. I’m not sure if optimism becomes me, but it sure feels nice. Every year filmmakers from around the world offer us stories filled with grief and tragedy that either feed our souls or rip out another little piece. I tend to fall for movies like these, but I also swoon for those filled with grace and generous sentiments, like Happy-Go-Lucky, that suggest that one way to face hard times (and raging driving instructors) is with an open heart and smile. Quickly now: give it a try!"

Slush pile

2008-12-19T13:28:00.000-08:00

A pleasing screed from a reader of writing on film: Time Out Chicago

2008-12-18T13:04:00.000-08:00

The "Letter of the week" in the 18-31 December issue of Time Out Chicago was a surprise. Writes Brandon Linden: "I'm writing this in response to an article on the New French Cinema series at Facets Multimedia and in terms of your film coverage in general. We are lucky in Chicago to have a rich and distinguished culture of film criticism. Whether you take into account Rosenbaum's polemics at the Reader (sorely missed), Ebert's more mainstream but well-wrought and beautifully written prose, or Ray Pride's personal, almost memoirist, take on film at Newcity, these are all examples that show your own writing to be ill considered and snide when it should be thoughtful and exciting. If you did not like any of the films at the fest, that is certainly your right, but it is your duty to explain the whys and hows, not just as critics, but as writers who want to be read... Your dismissive attitude about the fest as a whole shows an attitude that pervades the rest of the film coverage as well... There are wonderful opportunities here to turn on an audience that might otherwise not see these films. Engage them, contribute to the wonderful film culture we have." The editors do not offer reply.

"Duly noted" blog entry of the day

2008-12-17T14:42:00.000-08:00

From a teacher-photographer in Thessaloniki, Greece who posts under the name Teacher Dude's Grill and BBQ:"Time to make ourselves heard... The batteries are charging, the bag packed, my pencils are sharpened and my notebooks blank. Tomorrow I am heading for the nationwide series of protests over the killing of Alexis Grigoropoluos. Hope to see you there."

Illo: Bob Staake on his New Yorker cover, "Reflection"

2008-12-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

A brief animation describing illustrator Bob Staake's 'Reflection' Cover for the November 17, 2008 Obama victory issue of The New Yorker.

She should have persisted: Summary graf of the day, Threepenny Review

2008-12-15T15:03:00.000-08:00

At the estimable Threepenny Review, essayist Philip Lopate makes "Notes on Sontag". As an essayist writing about an essayist writing about an essayist, Lopate has this to say: "The title essay on Walter Benjamin, "Under the Sign of Saturn," is my favorite in the book, and probably my favorite of all her essays. Her tribute is a rare act of sympathy by which one author assimilates another, and transmits unselfishly that spirit to the reader, rendering his notoriously difficult aspects into something coherent and attractive... The prose is dense but clear, never stuffy or derivative; one would have to quote the entire Sontag essay to convey its method of piling idea upon idea, so that each insight builds on all the previous ones. A few sentences, extracted from the middle, may suffice: Benjamin's recurrent themes are, characteristically, means of spatializing the world: for example, his notion of ideas and experiences as ruins. To understand something is to understand its topography, to know how to chart it. And to know how to get lost. ... Anyone familiar with Benjamin's work will hear echoes and paraphrases... Sontag's prose here is also remarkably rhythmic, as though she were in a semi-trance when composing it, able to channel Benjamin's spirit calmly while looking at him objectively...She begins novelistically, by describing Benjamin as he appears in photographs. Then she takes us through some of his dominant motifs and characteristics: topography, miniaturization, indecisiveness, keeping one's options open, a courtier's courtesy. Benjamin was a passionate collector, and in her analysis of his fidelity to things... we get a first glimpse of the Cavaliere, the collector-protagonist of her novel The Volcano Lover. Benjamin was also another exemplar for her of "the freelance intellectual." Finally, he was a negative model in the difficulty he had finishing books. "His characteristic form remained the essay. The melancholic's intensity and exhaustiveness of attention set natural limits to the length at which Benjamin could develop his ideas. His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct." Her own essay on Benjamin runs a mere twenty-five pages. She later said, by way of explaining why she no longer gave her main energies to essay-writing, that some of the essays in Under the Sign of Saturn had taken her six months to write. From my perspective, this means she should have persisted in essay writing; it was just getting to the proper level of difficulty."

Love, like light: Summary graf of the day, The New Yorker

2008-12-14T15:30:00.000-08:00

From a long piece examining recent books about Boswell, Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, Adam Gopnik sums up: "Life has, as Johnson said, a way of pointing toward morals, but, as he also knew, they are rarely the morals we expect to be pointed toward. Mrs. Thrale did the disgraceful thing, and was rewarded with a serene and happy second life. Boswell took the diaries and journals he had piled up in a wasted lifetime of sensual pleasures and obsessive self-regard and turned them into one of the best and most enduring books ever written. It is a love triangle, certainly, but the shapes that the three points describe seem still to be in motion. Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper."

Lede: CNN's prisoner of war from Men's Journal

2008-12-12T16:53:00.000-08:00

Rolling Stone-style new journo lede hits hard: “I am not the same fucking person,” he tells me. “I am not the same person. I don’t know how to come home.” It’s October, six months after our first meeting, and Michael Ware, 39, is at his girlfriend’s apartment in New York, trying to tell me why after six years he absolutely must start spending less time in Iraq. He’s crying on the other end of the telephone. “Will I get any better?” he continues. “I honestly don’t know. I can’t see the — right now, I know no other way to live.” [By Greg Vels, story at link.]

NY Times' Robin Toner, 54, was a scrupulous factpchecker

2008-12-12T10:33:00.000-08:00

In their obituary of national correspondent Robin Toner, the Times notes, "[I]n a craft in which small errors are commonplace and bigger mistakes a regular occupational hazard, Ms. Toner devised a meticulous personal method for checking and re-checking names, dates, facts and figures in her own raw copy, a step few reporters take. As a result: only half a dozen published corrections over the years, on more than 1,900 articles with her byline." Examples and lessons were not provided.

"Shame": the Sun-Times' good wood on Blago, Day One

2008-12-11T04:55:00.000-08:00

Election day view from Kings Cross

2008-11-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

Election night view in Sheffield, Shude Hill, via SkyTV

2008-11-04T05:00:00.000-08:00

You are invited

2008-10-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

The Bright One

2008-10-06T15:33:00.000-07:00

Trib Tower alley

2008-10-05T15:32:00.000-07:00

Trib in rain

2008-10-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

Trib Tower by night

2008-10-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

Chicago Tribune Freedom Center

2008-10-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

Freedom stripes

2008-10-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

Skidmarks, Chicago Tribune Freedom Center, Chicago Avenue at Halsted Street.