Author: Hans Eisenbeis

Maybe it’s in the air, I dunno. But I’m hoping yesterday’s storms–seen to be literally a wall of brown out the windows of Bunker’s–cleared about ten days’ worth of bad karma. You know, an accumulation of weird breakdowns, bad communication, minor automotive hiccups, moving violations, unspeakable regression, birds gathering in strange symmetric formations on top of billboards, potentially song-ending skips of the needle across the twelve-inch dance-mix of life. (Karl dying, for example.) Sometimes we try too hard, fight too much, get too wrapped up in ourselves. I do, anyway.

So I’m riding my bike, which I do instead of lunch on Tuesdays, on the bike path past Mill City Musuem just beyond the new Guthrie skyway-to-nowhere. Hot as a two-peckered billygoat. I can see four figures ahead on the bike path: One, a city worker with a weed-whacker, not far from her little John Deere lawn tractor. What appears to be a very large woman in a green tank-top, a lunch-time walker, standing nearby making conversation. And beyond, a doughy couple, recently retired yuppies on nice mountain bikes.

It goes down like this: I pass the weed-whacker and the woman in the green tank top, who turns out to be a deep-voiced man with huge breasts. She or he is holding out her hand to the weed-whacker, as if to shake hands. The weed-whacker does not take the hand, but keeps holding the whacker, not unfriendly, really, just busy–which suddenly makes me think the man-woman is pointing at something with an open hand. S/he says, “Well, don’t work too hard, it’s awfully hot out here.” His/her hair is really frizzy straw blonde, could be a wig I suppose. My thought was not cynical or sarcastic. I said to myself, That’s a transgendered person. My city. My bike path. My people. Cool!

As I peddled a little farther, I reached the yuppie couple, who were struggling against a light wind and the powerful heat, same direction only much slower. They were in shorts and tee-shirts, big bubble helments. He was ahead of her. And she called up to him, plainly referring to the person we’d just passed. “What was that?” she said, with plain disgust.

It made me sad. And a little mad. Like I said, maybe it’s in the air. It can never rain hard enough, I guess.

Sid Hartman’s in a bit of hot water over at the Strib, and we’re not talking jaccuzzi time. Sid is evidently of the opinion that certain silly ethics rules don’t apply to him–and it will be interesting to see how (or even whether) his editors manage to slap the old duffer’s wrists. Kate Parry is certainly taking her whacks, and you can bet Sid’s not going to take any lip from the upstart publisher’s reader’s company spoksperson flack representative, or whatever her title is and whoever it is she actually serves. (The Strib’s twelve summer interns, we guess.)

There is some truth to Sid’s contention that he’s been the anchor man on the team tug-o-war rope for longer than anyone can even remember, and that different rules should apply to him. It’s just that Sid is not Sid’s best apologist. Allowances have been made. This has long been the spirit if not the letter of the law, which is why Sid can continue to be such a loveable jerk in the press box of every major sporting event that ever takes place in our fair city, and why he has for five decades drawn a paycheck from both the city’s newspaper and its “hometown” AM radio station. Half the edit staff at the Strib weren’t even born before most of Sid’s grand-kids were bouncing on his knee, and Anders Gyllenhaal wasn’t even in knee-pants when Sid was general manager of the Minneapolis Lakers. (While a reporter for the paper. How’s THAT for a conflict of interest, you snotty kids?!)

See the problem here is that Sid has never been the most diplomatic fella, and this may be a case where, no matter how many stripes he figures he’s earned over the years, that ain’t going to carry a lot of water with the troops. (If Sid can juggle three or four careers, we figure we can mix our metaphors.)

Does age demand respect and deference? Sure, to a point. But when you grow cavalier and thankless in your grizzled old age, it pays to remember the little folks who will bury you. Sid, it’s never been your strong point, but a little modesty would help your cause. And lose the martyr complex, it’s not very becoming; we know and appreciate your many fine contributions to the Newspaper of the Twin Cities, but have you bought the Strib’s fact-checking department a beer recently? (They may see things a little differently.) Other than that, knock yourself out lending your celebrity to noble causes hither and tither. Just don’t forget the little people–that is, your editors.

There’s an interesting article on product placement in this week’s Business Week (via Romenesko, naturally). But not product placement like you know and love it–we’re talking product placement in the edit space of magazines. Toyota Corporation apparently approached Hearst, Conde Nast, and Meredith and asked executives to consider “product integration” in their pages.

The thing is, it’s not the most terrible idea. Well, maybe it is, but there are more interesting things to say about this than merely “never!” The written language has evolved to the point where certain brands are so well marketed and branded that they often communicate an entire lifestyle, attitude, world-view in a single word. Writers, without any extra compensation at all, are beginning to rely on brand names as useful tools of brevity and concision. Rather than using words like “She drives a dependable, mechanically sound, well designed car, kinda cheap sheet metal, corners cut for unecesssary cost, but integrated amenities and options as standard, so-so gas mileage, depending on the model, great 4X4 legacy, a yuppie mobile that appeals across age and gender demographics, a smart little crossover utility vehicle that circumvents the bad reputation of behomoth SUVs, lots of useless but somehow strangely comforting headspace” you can simply say “She drives a Toyota RAV-4.”

Now of course writers should never be paid, by anyone, for using the WRONG word, if in fact “She drives a Buick Le Baron,” which would surely be a completely different person.

Aside from using brands as short-cuts in description, which seems like a venal sin at worst, there are several problems with a business model that tries to incorporate product placement into print. FIrst, the comparison to placement in other media is misleading and wrong. Product placement has never been attempted, that we know of, in a non-fiction context. It’s easy enough to insert a can of coke into the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, quite another to insert it into the latest Vanity Fair interview of TOm Cruise–if it wasn’t in fact there. We suppose Toyota could suggest that Vanity Fair interview Tom Cruise in the cabin of his brand-new Toyota Tacoma, but you know, there’s probably a limit to everyone’s patience on this sort of scene manipulation. Lord knows it’s hard enough to get to Tom Cruise anywhere or anytime, and trying to bring in a partner, no matter how much money they’re willing to throw at the problem, seems a lost cause on the face of it.

All that said, there is this: Google smart ads. We’ve commented on this before, and it’s interesting. It works like this. Google crawls the editorial content of an online magazine, and places ads on the page that correspond to keywords in the edit. This is widely seen as acceptable because editors and writers have no control over the ads that get placed adjacent to the copy. In fact, neither do the advertisers. Thus, on any editorial page that, say, excoriates George Bush for lying, warmongering, and fomenting class hatred, there might be a dozen ads for the GOP or Powerline or whoever has paid google to place their ads next to any “Bush” high-hit edit content. So they run the risk of advertising next to the opposite kind of copy they would choose to advertise next to.

We thought briefly about how this might actually crossover to print–that is, during the production process, allow some kind of keyword search on magazine edit that also placed keyed ads on the printed page, and we realized that would and could never work. Why? A couple of reasons. Readers, editors, publishers, and even writers are trained to smell this is a big, fat, stinking rat in print. There is the assumption made in print that the people who put the magazine together have full control of the content, and that this sort of bait-and-switch is being done on purporse in order to extract money from the reader and deliver it to the advertisier and to the publisher. Why is that assumption not made with Google smart ads? Because of the technological interface–you’re reading on your computer, dude–you are automatically reassured that it is merely some logorythm (to coin a cool new homonym) at work. Even though humans wrote that code, they were apparently motivated by a more general, universal desire for you to spend your money in a way that would benefit advertisers and publishers

As the Businessweek story points out, there has been a great hue and cry even online, when this sort of thing happens with any human involvement or agency, or the appearance of it. When people got in a lather earlier this year about the New York Post’s version of keyword ads, courtesy of a Vibrant Media search spider, it was the fact that the technology actually highlighted the keywords in the editorial text itself. That was crossing the line.

What does all of this have to do with Lucky, Cargo, and their hundreds of city-mag copycats? Uh… we think product placement in editorial is alive and well, and pretty damn lucrative. It’s just that the placement isn’t really happening in a magazine, in that case. It’s happening in a catalog, the print equivalent of QVC.

We are tearing through the cabbage patch today, putting together the next issue,but we thought you might be interested in this over at MnSpeak, where we appreciate the frank talk about our humble little magazine, and we’d join in the fun, but too much too much too much.

Let me just say that the thread on columnists is one that’s been going on inner-office since we launched this thing three years ago, and probably goes on at every publication under the sun–at least the ones with regular columnists.

Twas ever thus. Suffice to say that people love them or hate them, and they certainly don’t mind speaking up about it. People feel the same way about Jim Walsh, Nick Coleman, Katherine Kersten, David Brooks, whomever. It’s the upside AND the downside of publishing columns. (You might have heard that the Times will soon require subscriptions to gain access to their columnists, which tells you something about how people congregate around columns.) It is also worth noting that a columnist that makes readers mad is frequently just as valuable as a columnist that makes readers glad; that means lots of people are reading and responding. Now the trick, from an editor’s point of view, is gauging whether MOST readers, whose feelings are not strong enough to disturb The Force one way or another, give a shit.

The worst thing is to have any space dedicated on a regular basis to something no one cares about, a place-holder, a contract being executed, whether that’s a column, a news department, a photo, or a standing head. If I had to defend The Rake in sixteen words or less, I would say every word in it is there for a reason, and that reason is to entertain readers. It’s not any more complicated than that. We do not always succeed, hell, we may never succeed, but we certainly don’t plan to stop trying. I frequently am asked by interested readers (and publishers and ad-sales folk) why any particular thing is in the magazine, and my capacity to astonish people with real, reasonable-sounding answers is endless. Want to know why it’s in the magazine? I have the answer!

We didn’t want to like Michael Kinsley’s little dismissal of the Downing Street Memo, but in the end you just can’t argue with reason, even if it’s coming from Wax Museum Mike. (We like Kinsley fine, we just think he should stay off TV if he can help it. With Crossfire officially gone, there is little reason to worry.)

When we read the memo and the initial coverage, we had the sinking feeling ourselves that it was never a secret how much the neo-con hawks wanted to march into Iraq, and how little it mattered what the revolving carousel of reasons would be. Americans have proven time and again that we (that is, a slim majority of us) can’t be bothered with all the niggling little details that may or may not politically justify Iraq. In this respect, it really is a lot like Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin, for example, was merely the expedient that made it possible for many Americans to endorse Vietnam on the larger spiritual quest to stand up to communism–just as we wish today to stand up to terrorism, whatever that’s supposed to mean. It may also be instructive to consider that communism, from Marx to Mao, eventually burnt itself out independent of our failure in Southeast Asia. If we’re really, really lucky, our failures in Iraq will be complemented by a similar, historic petering-out of terrorism independent of our efforts. In other words, Islamic terrorism may fail due to its own inherent contradictions and inward rotteness, rather than from any sabre-rattling on our part.

But what we really wanted to say was that Kinsley certainly made a monkey out of Time magazine–normally a source of deep inner conflict for us, seeing as how that magazine manages to be so smart and so stupid at the same time.

There has developed a little cottage industry in poo-poohing the Watergate scandal–and as a corollary, actually discussing whether Deep Throat was a hero or a villain in the annals of modern American history. (We won’t link to them, but they know who they are.) This is of a piece, we suppose, with various evil revisionists wondering out loud again whether Vietnam wasn’t such a bad idea after all. (Hey, maybe we won that war if we just say we won it–why didn’t we think of that before? Then we can go back to calling all those anti-war hippies traitors again! It was dissent that subverted our efforts in Vietnam, duh!)

For anyone who hasn’t taken the time to reread “All the President’s Men” in the past year–or for those who have forgotten what all the fuss was about–we would have suggested last week’s rebroadcast of Frontline’s excellent “Watergate Plus Thirty: Shadow of History.” (We just got around to it on TiVo last night.)

One word: Chilling. And we’re not talking just about Terry Lenzner’s glasses.

The intentional recasting in the title–Watergate as history that seems to continue to haunt the nation, if not repeat itself–becomes especially concrete in the last five minutes of the show, where convictor and convict alike agree that between the Nixon Presidency and the present one there are striking similarities in spirit and deed.

For anyone still not clear on precisely what all the fuss was about, let’s summarize: The President of the United States thought he was above the law. In fact, he believed he was the personification of the law, and that the same expectations of morality that applied to all other Americans did not apply to him or his inner circle.

But that’s just the half of it. This arrogance coupled with deep suspicion and even enmity toward anyone who dissented with our sovereign leader is what, for a few dark moments in 1973, brought the US dangerously close to martial law at the hands of a President who may, for a few moments, have actually toyed with the idea of defying the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is a false sense of optimism that suggests that Watergate “proved the system works” to people of good will. On the contrary, Watergate’s main valent may have been teaching bad folks a useful trick or two. (Note to self: No secret tapes! No press access! No internal dissent! A vice president with that special John Ehrlichman sneer!)

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.

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.