Year: 2005

We’ve been catching up on “House” reruns, which started immediately after the season finale a couple of weeks ago. We rashly made the pronouncement that it was “the best show on TV” after seeing just half of one show. We’re willing to stick with that assessment, but it’s interesting how the show really picked up quality with each episode, the actors began to fit their roles, the dialogue–always well written–started fitting their mouths better, everything just began to run more smoothly. By the time the finale aired, the show had the feeling of a series hitting its mid-career peak, two or three years down the line. (We hope that doesn’t mean an accelerated lifespan, but great writing and acting tends to be unsustainable for more than a two or three seasons. Consider, for eample, Sorkin-era “West Wing” and the shows sad decline into mediocrity.)

Of course, “House” would be just another general hospital potboiler if not for the brilliantly sketched character of the show’s namesake. Hugh Laurie has done an admirable job of creating a peevish, repellant anti-hero to enunciate all those clever put-downs, come-ons, and punchlines. We didn’t think it would be possible to see workplace sexism, dubious medical ethics, and persistent, recreational drug use as a relief, but after a harrowing season of “24” (which, in some aspects of its pro-torture, ends-justify-means agitprop, makes Leni Riefensthal look like Hitler’s biggest critic), we are–well, relieved.

“House” is billed as a new twist on generic mystery-TV, and so it is–although it combines some prurient CSI-style interest in its actual medical footage (kinda gross; the wife covers her eyes in disgust and makes little wretching noises), as well as a tendency to point beyond itself to larger social and political issues like euthanasia, health insurance, gun violence, and so on.

But we’ve had the sneaking suspicion for the entire season that “House” was actually an upscaling of an odd, uncelebrated, occasional front-of-book department in the New York Times Magazine, called “Diagnosis.” You can always tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs. This was an innovation of editor Adam Moss which seems to have been scalped by NTYMag’s old new editor, Gerry Marzorarti. Probably for the best. What that department really lacked is what the TV show has in aces: characters who instantly evoke a sympathetic response. Medicine as a whiz-bang diagnostic science has its appeal, of course, but it doesn’t sell beyond the pages of JAMA or New England Journal of Medicine, or even Nature. What doctors count as an asset–the ability to distance oneself emotionally in order to actually get through the waiting room in one piece, makes for lousy general-interest reading, but we can think of several wonderful examples of medical journalism that achieve what “House” achieves.

God bless our man Chuck Haga, who like a friendly health teacher with a high beltline, a stylish combover, and a full quiver of PG-13 puns, has compiled a little refresher list of euphemisms for marijuana. Strib readers who receive their copies of the paper at their guard stations can thus be dutifully outraged today by the “dopers” who are “sucking up” street signs in rural Minnesota. (420th Street–get it? “High Street” has been a target for decades, of course, but the Strib is just getting up to speed here, so bear with ’em.)

A couple quick observations on this. First, where is the Strib article decrying the well armed militia of gun-nuts out there who insist on blasting every rural stop sign out of existence? Is the $80 cost of replacing street name signs somehow more onerous than the $80 cost of replacing all those ventilated stop signs? Or is it just more fun to single out the harmless hippies rather than the trigger-happy rednecks? (Extra credit: the Strib has “no guns allowed on these premises” notices on all of its buildings and entrances. Everyone knows that this is a covert, liberal statement of protest about Minnesota’s soft-headed new conceal and carry law. When the editors hear about this, how long will it take them to remove the signage as a natural consequence of their ongoing Red Shift?)

Second, why must local governments insist on naming every little dirt road through hell’s half acre as if this alone will make the dangerous outback safe for the McMansion developers?

Finally, if this is truly the epidemic it appears to be, how about not naming any rural roads “420”?

Our friend Molly Priesmeyer notes that three key curators at the Walker Art Center have announced that they’re leaving, along with the Walker’s chief operating officer. Both WCCO (who reported the news yesterday) and Preismeyer are worried about what this might mean, and they point out the alarming cost overruns of the new digs on Vineland Place as a possible goad, though we can’t see exactly why that would impact the curatorial staff. It’s not as if Director Kathy Halbreicht wants to lose her best lieutenants, nor that she can shop for better ones at a savings.

Aside from COO Anne Bitter (who somewhat cryptically “resigned” to “resume a private consulting practice”–which could be a harmless statement of fact, or an ominous, thundering euphemism) it looks to us like the time was right for some serious cashing out among the team’s top talent. Everyone agrees that the Walker’s relaunch was the event of the season–and not just locally but nationally. In fact, the Walker’s international reputation and celebrity have never been higher. If you were working in the trenches of the WAC for ten years and hoping eventually to step up a rung in the industry, to the very tippy top where you’re not supposed to stand, now would be the time to do that. We note that curators Flood, Vergne, and Fogle are all taking promotions at other major museums.

When Lance Armstrong wins the Tour de France and wears the maillot jeune down the Champs Elysees, his best captains get poached shortly thereafter by rival teams for more money, more responsibility, and more prestige. Success of the finest thread-count often breeds this sort of accretion; it is a cost of doing business well, and you either build loyalty into your budget or you read a lot of resumes.

My cousin was in the Army, stationed in Germany during the cold war. His duty for a while was commanding an anti-aircraft battery. He described it like this: “I commanded a $58 million missile launching system. I had a lifer sergeant, who really knew his stuff, but the men who actually had to aim and fire this intricate computer guided system were a bunch of high-school drop outs who never really learned how to operate the system. I figured if the Russian air force attacked, we could get the thing calibrated and get off a shot about the time the planes were over Paris. My only consolation was that I knew that there was a Russian commander a few miles to my east who had exactly the same problems.”

So, I wasn’t surprised when I saw this story in Slate. It notes, as many other stories have done lately, that recruiters are having a tough time filling their quotas for the Army and Marines. The Slate piece even reveals that we’re keeping undesirable soldiers in the military, in order to keep up the fiction that we have enough troops, when the commanders who have to deal with these bad soldiers would rather muster them out.

The Slate piece puts forth some really good ideas about how to address the problem of declining recruitment without resorting to keeping bad soldiers. It also points out one of the idiocies of the current “privatization” of military functions…the unintended consequence of bad military policy of the current administration. I became personally aware of this when a retired Marine friend of mine told me he’d been offered four times his Marine salary to lead what amounts to a private Marine rifle squad in Iraq.

“Who would be in this squad?” I asked. His reply, “Guys like me; guys we spent millions to train to be the best fighing men in the world, then pay them like crap and starve their families while they’re on deployment overseas.”

And, it seems, make them serve with guys who’ll get them killed, just so we can say we’ve got enough boots on the ground.

By the way, today is the 61st anniversary of D-day. Thank a veteran, particulary a WW II vet, today.

A crazy day around here, but lookit: We hear Washington City Paper has decided to take their paper to the streets, in an apparent effort to staunch their lightly bleeding circulation numbers. The approach is simple: Put twenty real, live human beings on the streets handing out the paper to passersby (much as D.C.’s two daily commuter freebies do in the morning, although City Paper figures afternoon is a better time to hit their readers). Now the official reason they give is that retailers who normally carry the alt-weekly line of publication–the coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and so on–are cracking down on freebies that contribute not much to their interior ambience besides litter.

For our part, we certainly are familiar with this struggle, and we make it a point of business practice to maintain good relations with the fine people who allow us to distribute the magazine in their lobbies and foyers. We know from painful experience that there are a number of challenges facing the freebie crowd–in the first place that it is a crowd, with dozens and dozens of pamphlets, broadsheets, chapbooks, real estate and automotive and sexual shoppers, and so on, cluttering up entryways and gutters throughout the city.

Most publishers of materials like this do not ask for permission before dumping their reams off wherever and whenever they please. They see legitimate and reputable publications doing it, and they assume it’s OK to do the same. It probably would be OK, if they took the same care that the better operations take, i.e. to clean up after themselves and others, to tidy things up, to show a little respect to both the business owners and the other publications, to ask permission, and so on.

Second, it is true that many of the national chain retailers have no sympathy for local publishers, and have policies and attitudes that frankly don’t win them much favor in our pages. (The irony is that a magazine like ours has found a terrifically passionate readership in the outer suburbs where national chains flourish—but we have to work like dogs to make it available to them.)

But when we look more closely at the sitch in D.C., we have couple of questions. City Paper execs say they are having trouble getting distribution, and yet they have not actually lost any distribution spots during the period that their circulation has declined considerably. Lost spots have been replaced by new ones, they say. Thus many lost retail positions have been replaced with street boxes.

So why is circulation still going down at City Paper? It seems to us that it may have less to do with uncharitable merchants and more to do with a disinterested readership, and the need for an editorial opening of windows. If readers really want a publication, if it’s a true must-read for a significant portion of the city, they’ll find it wherever it is distributed. It’s interesting that some City Paper readers say they can’t find the paper, or that it’s gone by the time they get around to seeking it out, and that strikes us as a problem of staying stocked where you are most wanted. (The two free dailies cannot be helping much, but what we’ve seen of most of these commuter papers is that they make a good seat cover on the bus, and a fine place to deposit used chewing gum.)

Now, as to whether it might be more effective to have a pushy human being in an orange T-shirt pressing the paper into your hands, we can’t say. But it is interesting that City Paper’s readership is an alarming ninety percent single, and undoubtedly starving for human contact.

Now there’s a savvy approach to a serious circulation challenge: merging the desperate, growing singles space with the declining rate base right out there on the streets of Washington D.C.