Author: Hans Eisenbeis

Joe brought to my attention this morning that the term “mud duck” has emerged as a derisive name for Minnesotans. It’s trend enough to have made the pages of the Star Tribune, although to be fair, the Strib appears to have perched its considerable reporting credibility in this very important matter on the back of a newspaper produced by high school students in Maple, Wisconsin. Apparently, the word is used by Wisconsinites who live near the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, and who are in a position to interact involuntarily with a lot of Minnesotans.

It’s probably about time we had an aspersing nickname. We all know that modesty and graciousness are well-dressed stand-ins for misanthropy and insecurity; and if you want to see Minnesotans at their worst, truly losing their cool, spend a weekend trying to find a quiet campsite on the south shore, an organic sandwich in Bayfield, at the gas pump in Bismarck, or saying good-bye to their valedictorian down in Iowa City. If the truth be known, probably the worst “mud ducks” belong to the City and Regional Magazines Association. These kinds of magazines are forever urging their readerships to trample the greenswards of bucolic little villages in search of morel mushrooms, fall color, and antique trivets. They are designed to reach a certain local subspecies of the Ugly American.

“Mud duck,” of course, is a term that is potentially cute and nonthreatening, even if it’s a little dismissive. Thus, it’s a lot like “cheese head,” but a little less obvious. Which raises the disturbing possibility that the Wisconsin coiners of “mud duck” are more subtle than the Minnesota coiners of “cheese head.” But whoever was the first to create the mold for those cheddar-wedge styrofoam hats, he was most definitely not a native Minnesotan.

But let’s not forget the original mud duck, otherwise known as the spoonbill or the shoveller duck. James Audobon himself was very fond of the bird. He wrote:

“We have no Ducks in the United States whose plumage is more changeable than that of the male of this beautiful species…. The Shoveller walks prettily, and I have often admired its movements in the puddles formed by heavy dashes of rain in our southern corn-fields, where I have found it in company with the Wood Duck, the Mallard, and the Pin-tail. Its flight resembles that of the Blue-winged Teal; and in tenderness as well as in flavour, it rivals, as an article of food, that beautiful bird. No sportsman who is a judge will ever pass a Shoveller to shoot a Canvass-back. It is rarely however found on salt water, and that only when compelled to resort thither.”

That, I think, is a namesake we can all live with.

A moment away from a very busy week of production:

It’s too early to see whether the roll-out of Times Select is going to bung up the daily “most e-mailed” list–and whether articles behind the firewall, that is, primarily the celebrities of the Op-Ed pages, will even be emailable and thus eligible for the honors they have previously monopolized. Whatever. I’ve been meaning to go back to reading the daily paper edition anyway– the Times is one of the few newspapers that has actually done a good job of reproducing the paper on the web, by which I mean that when I look at the paper edition after having looked at the website, it feels very familiar–the web didn’t miss the high points, the way it often does at lesser operations.

I did want to comment on an article in the Times magazine from last week, and I went looking for it, and of course it is now archived and thus inacccessible without a financial transaction. From the Times, anyway. As I’ve said a few times before, a savvy googler will always find premium content squirrelled away somewhere, and so it is.

I have to admit, too, that I haven’t really finished reading this nice story for a couple of reasons. First, I guess, is the usual: I like Dave Eggers about as much as I like any really talented young popular writer I’ve never met. (Actually, I have met him, and he’s pretty cool.) I like him. I like what he writes. I like nearly everything he sets to paper, which is great, because there are a lot of popular professional writers who don’t fit into my general mathematical tables plotting quality against popularity.

Still, I am probably more weary of the hagiographies of Dave Eggers than even Dave Eggers is, and it strains my patience when the New York Times finds yet another reason to cobble together another exalting story badly concealed as a summary-trend piece. (It’s not JUST about Eggers! Lookit, he wasn’t even in the lead–it was about Benjamin Kunkel!

I imagine the pitch went a little something like this:

Writer: “It’s Dave Eggers, everybody loves Dave Eggers!”

Editor: “Yes, but everyone knows about Dave Eggers already.”

Writer: “But he’s just the peg! There is a whole new generation of literary critics.”

Editor: “Such as?”

Writer: “Uhm. The Believer women.”

Editor: “Great! Who started that magazine, love it!”

Writer: “Well, it’s edited by Vendela Vida”

Editor: “Great name! Who she?”

Writer: “Uhm. Dave Eggers’ wife.”

Editor: “Is there an echo in here?”

Writer: “I’ll find some other Gen-X literary types, promise.”

Time passes.

Editor: “Find anybody else? Two’s an accident, three’s a trend.”

Writer: “Yes, I think so. There are these kids at something called n+1. They’re in Brooklyn!”

Editor: “Yeah but Eggers is in Brooklyn.”

Writer: “No! He moved back to Frisco years ago!”

Editor: “Okay, good. But Eggers is in the lead, right?”

Writer: “Well, let’s say the first 500 words.”

Editor: “Awesome. Due yesterday.”)

Anyway, what I really wanted to say, before I indulged in that long patch of badly concealed schadenfreude–or was it weltschmerz? Whatever, I’m German, I’ve got it all in spades–was that a single pull-quote really caught my eye. It was from the lovely and brilliant Heidi Julavits, Egger’s executor at The Believer. Now, our little magazine has been compared favorably with The Believer, for the right reasons, I think. You can call it “post-ironic” or a vehicle of the “new earnestness,” but basically it comes down to trying to stand out in the publishing marketplace by actually being enthusiastic without being cynical–celebrate the written word, be funny, take care, try not to hurt anyone that doesn’t REALLY deserve it, and so on. According to the author of the article,

For The Believer, the way to take things seriously is to care about them – “to endow something with importance,” in Julavits’s words, “by treating it as an emotional experience.”

I thought, Geeze what an unfortunate pullquote. The way I normally operate, I don’t “endow” things with importance through a willful act of emotional positing. I do that simply by caring. I had no idea my generation was so far gone that it is almost an unnatural, philosophical act to openly sympathize.

The Minnesota State High School League has banned “mid-riff baring” cheerleading uniforms, and I feel conflicted–and not because I’m a pervert. This is one of those touchy issues where I see both sides of the arguent. Despite the “we’re all in this together” vibe of the announcement, I am pretty confident that any official, affirmative word from the cheerleaders themselves was strictly of the brown-nosing, secretly-rolling-the-eyes, “aren’t-adults-clueless” variety. Kids, especially teenagers, want nothing as painfully as they want to be grown up.

Yesterday, I drove my 10-year-old daughter to her first day of school. At 10, children go through a sort of rebellious, proto-teenage patch which is itself interesting and a clear harbinger of things to come. Anyway, Sylvia was pointing out some of the high school kids as we pulled into the parking lot, and taking note of their crazy costumes–mostly of the leather and dye and spikes variety. A couple of them were smoking cigarettes. “Why do you think they like to do that–dress funny and smoke?” I asked Sylvie–who is firmly against cigarettes. “Because they want someone to notice them,” she said. And I thought that may be one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard anyone say.

Anyway, there is a large contingent of parents these days who dismissively say “Let kids be kids” as a way to excuse their indifference to what their children might choose to wear or do. (Having been exposed to enough present-day high school students, especially by way of a friend who teaches Spanish, I can tell you how effective dress codes actually are in the halls of your average public high school. Not.) But this is precisely the point–they are not being children, they are mimicking adults. If their parents were more engaged in sheltering them from the adult world, in limiting their exposure to hyper-sexualized, ultra-violent, instant-gratification pop culture they might find that kids uncorrupted by these enticements actually do want to be kids. As I frequently tell my own children, you’ll spend the vast majority of your life as an adult. Enjoy being a kid while you still can.

There is an ironic, media-world corollary of this–a growing conservatism in certain sectors of publishing, especially newspapers. I suppose it is sort of a counter-balance to MTV and Comedy Central and HBO (I happened to see “Rome” the other day, and I liked it quite a bit, but was a little surprised to see so many soft-core depictions of rough sex during prime-time) when newspaper editors fret about publishing photos of the dead in New Orleans, for example. I have been told by several newspaper editors, including one at the New York Times, that they have to be sensitive to the fact that the newspaper lands on the family breakfast table every morning. “What do you say to the frightened, weeping child who sees A-1 laying there in front of daddy?” Well, lkike I say, I appreciate the impulse to protect chidlren from the adult world, but in this case I would gently suggest that daddy keep the New York Times in his briefcase until he gets to work. Let the adult world and the childish world be separate domains.

But for god’s sake, let those cheerleaders still wear mini-skirts.

This week’s New York Times Sunday magazine packs an interesting one-two punch. In the opinion slot, David Rieff argued a new facet of an old premise–that President Bush’s approach to liberating the world is not necessarily seen that way on the receiving end. Rieff said what many people have been thinking for some time–that the fundamentalist Islamic critique of Western Civilization is essentially anti-modernist. But he points out that this makes it a tougher nut to crack in competing paradigms than the previous gold-standard for clashing ideologies– Capitalism versus Communism. Communism, he noted, shared some basic modernist values like science and secularism. Indeed, you could make the argument that Leninism was a more pure form of modernism than democratic capitalism in its strident rejection of religion and psychology and other gassy emanations of the individual.

It’s an old adage that in war we begin to look like our enemies, and I found it more than a little interesting that in the feature well of the same issue, Daniel Smith delineates the Bush administration’s war against science–the true cross of modernity–or shall we say its global struggle against uncomfortable facts like evolution and global warming.

Simple-minded Americans have come to believe that the war on terrorism is in fact a thinly veiled, old-fashioned war of faith–Christianity against Islam, my god against your god. (Actually, as people of The Book, this is more accurately a “my prophet against your prophet” internecine squabble. Yeah right, and the West Bank is just a slight difference of exegetical opinion.) The more the present administration insists on conforming reality to its ideology, the more it looks no better than the forces of anti-modernity it seems to have such a hard time dealing with. Given the monopoly party’s winning success in convincing most Americans against their own best interests of half-truths and hateful moralities, I wonder why they haven’t been so successful abroad. Perhaps the struggle should be seen less as modernity versus anti-modernity but as a purer form of selfish individualism versus virulent communitarianism. So yes, maybe similar to the old capitlism versus communism monolith– but minus the science on both sides, and thus a truly frightening clash of faith founded not on reason but on passion.

If we wanted to be true to our one abiding national faith, we should be dropping Barbie dolls and Nikes on them rather than bombs. But this is hardly a time for spreading conspicuous consumerism. Or is it? I heard somewhere that shopping is the new self-sacrifice, and I’ve been salivating to do my part–here’s the new J. Crew collection for men–now if someone somewhere would facilitate my self-sacrifice by, you know, giving me some walking-around money…

I think I admirably avoided ranting about this year’s main event, dropping only a single Lance Armstrong-inspired metaphor a few weeks back. For this, I have been congratulated for “keeping my Lance in my pants” by a certain fellow who ought not to be pointing because there are three fingers pointing back at him. (I’m sure he’ll see this after he gets back from passing gas in the mail room.)

Anyway, I was gone on vacation when the French daily newspaper L’Equipe published a story that claimed to prove that Armstrong had tested positive for an illegal performance-enhancing drug called EPO. (EPO boosts the blood’s ability to carry oxygen, and has thus been a very popular drug indeed in most endurance sports.) Today, this moderately well informed Chicagoan chides the American press for being too dismissive of the story, and blames it on anti-French sentiment. He has a point, but it’s a minor one in the big scheme of things. Aside from the highly dubious proposition of expecting a newspaper to conduct a neutral doping test [(1) get a hold of a six year old urine sample; (2)handle it properly; (3)insure purity and provenance; (4) insure peer review of the testing process], there are lots of problems here. Lance himself made many of them clear in an interview with Larry King earlier this week.

But two points have not been made. The Tour de France was founded, and for most of its existence, run by a French sporting newspaper, L’Auto. I don’t have a lot of experience with the culture of French sporting newspapers, but I do know that rivalries tend to be bitter and longstanding–and the birth of the Tour itself was the direct result of a nasty copyright squabble between L’Auto and another paper called Le Velo. French sporting newspapers have therefore taken not just a professional interest in the what has become one of the world’s greatest sporting events–the interest occasionally becomes morbid. L’Equipe, ironically, is the modernday corporate descendent of L’Auto. L’Equip has been hot on the story of proving that Lance Armstrong is doping ever since Armstrong won his first Tour De France. (They have previously published two separate, similar stories sourced to former disgruntled associates of Lance’s, who expected that their word would be enough. The stories thus never rose above the level of he said-she said insinuation.)

Second–and this is a point that gets quietly made because its subtle and a little thorny–EPO is one of the more effective tools in the treatment of cancer, particularly the kinds of cancer Armstrong was diagnosed with. In fact, if memory serves, Armstrong took prescribed EPO as a part of his (spectacularly successful) cancer treatment. This was not only lifesaving, but perfectly legal. Still, by the time he began racing his bike again in 1999, he would have been expected not to use the drug for any purpose, nor to test positive for its presence in his blood or urine. But it does not seem entirely beyond the realm of possibility that a man who once used EPO for legitimate medical reasons might thereafter show evidence of having used it. As an additional complication, until recently there was no direct way to test for the presence of EPO itself in the blood (it perfectly mimicks human hormones, or something like that). You could only test for its results, by checking the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood (hematocrit levels), and somewhat arbitrary levels were set as being natural versus unnatural. Needless to say, most world-class athletes have naturally high hematocrit levels. Some of the very best have unnatural levels.

I suppose you can’t blame L’Equipe for so relentlessly pursing this story, even if it isn’t there. It would be the biggest scandal in sporting history–yes, much worse than the Chicago Black Socks, when you consider all of the endorsements and charities and corporate interests and cancer survivors that ride on the back of Lance Armstrong. Which may be the strongest argument of all against the remote possibility, and until there is unimpeachable truth, I prefer to believe that quickness of body and largeness of spirit are possible without cheating.

Somehow, I managed to avoid most of the television coverage of Katrina until last night, when I stuck on CNN for a while. As has been repeated ad nauseum, the tragedy beggars the imagination, but that of course wont stop most major news outlets from giving it the old college try, after this short break.

A few months ago, Aaron Brown spoke to a writer here at the magazine, and they talked about what was then the most sensational TV news story–the Terry Schiavo case–and I was surprised almost to the point of admiration at how Brown described why that was a great story made for television news in the modern era, and why CNNs coverage of it had been good, even though in my gut, I felt unconvinced, and continued to suspect that CNN had been part of the problem rather than the solution. In that situation, it maybe was politically expedient–at least for the left–that the medias intrusiveness became indistinguishable from the intrusiveness of the republican U.S. Senate.

Anyway, while its important to document the terrible human toll Katrina has taken (and will yet take) on one of Americas great, defining cities, there comes a point when I want to ask: Well, what about the larger ramifications here? Why havent any of the majors reported that ninety percent of all oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are literally gone–as in not only offline, but missing? And that GOM oil accounts for close to two percent of all oil consumed by Americans each day? And that the long-feared spike in peak oil is probably upon us, with barrels of crude going for more than $100 a pop (resulting in at-the-pump costs–for all Americans, by the way–of up to six dollars a gallon)?

As I rode my bike in to work yesterday, I thought: Wouldnt it be convenient to believe that because Im a bike commuter, I am dodging the high cost of fuel? But when gas tops out at five or six bucks a gallon, I probably wont have a job to commute to. The ramifications for our economy are staggering, and coupled with the housing bubble, I had another thought. The Amish have had it right all along.

As promised, though overdue– our assessment of the “controversial” All-Target issue of the New Yorker: Big deal.

No, that’s not exactly right. In fact, we’d like to see more of this sort of thing. Given the economy of the last four years, no one deserves a vacation more than magazine ad sales executives, and we stand by our earlier uninformed impressions.

Also, we direct you to some pretty funny riffing on the subject over at MNSpeak. Such clever folks over there!

This has nothing to do with feeling a certain amount of secret pride for having poached our own small portion of glory from this ephemeral meta-media goodie…

It was a surprise to come back from vacation to hear that Village Voice and New Times may be well on the way to a merger. You may remember as I do that it was someone’s unenviable job to make Village Voice Media properties profitable enough to justify the significant investment it had required by the capitans of capital venture when Leonard Stern couldn’t interest his children in continuing the family business. The odds seemed long for a couple of reasons–not the least of which was the tension at the core of the business between making money and casting a jaundiced eye upon all who make money–nowhere more of a destructive/creative force than at the company’s namesake paper. But creative tension does not necessarily result in creative change.

New Times and Village Voice have been nothing if not persistent. In other words, “innovative” is not a word I would use for most of the papers those companies own and operate. The old-guard alt-weekly world has stayed in the same old trenches that were first dug in the fifties and sixties, and then paved in the eighties and nineties. It’s a necessary front, and I’m glad someone is occupying the watch while the rest of us play around at other forms of “entertainment.” Indeed, you might say that alt-weeklies suffer the opposite problem of the dailies–they have not innovated enough, not made enough inviting gestures to their readers, continued expecting the mountain of readership to come to Mohammed on the masthead.

Someone has to be doing this necessary work– the problem is, no one has to read it. So the alt-weekly’s self-appointed task of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the blah blah blah (and also continuing the important post-grad colloquium on the hermeneutics of popular music) is not necessarily a business venture that capitalists ought to be all that interested in–except as a property to be flipped when ripe. The pitch seems to have deveopled thus: if you buy enough of these local papers, you can create a pool for national advertising. An advertising buy in New Times or Village Voice is a nicely targeted national buy with impressive local numbers. That’s the idea, anyway. Problem is, as I say, ain’t no one gotta read it, and it remains an open question whether the combined papers of VVM and New Times would be any more capable of selling national ads than they are now. There are reasons why national ad buyers still prefer Rolling Stone, Vibe, and Teen People to the local alt-weekly–and it’s not just about glossy paper and Jessica Simpson.

You could also make the argument–and we often do make the argument–that a broken clock is right twice a day. Never has the traditional role of the alternative press been needed more, for social opportunities as opposed to business opportunities. Indeed, the last time the need was so great for a skeptical, pugnacious, David-taking-on-Goliath press, that press didn’t really even exist as an industry. This should be the alt-press’s finest hour since Vietnam. And yet, like the boy who cried wolf for thirty years, these papers tend to appeal, editorially speaking, to a small number of chorus members who crave being preached to.

What’s the point? I’m not sure the national chains of alt-weeklies recognize the value of entertaining and engaging readers while they continue the important work of shouldering the world. Is it possible to be both substantive and irreverent? To do good work without being a toady for the correct political party–and still make money doing it?

We haven’t had a chance to look at the new issue of the New Yorker–the one that has been entirely underwritten by the Target corporation. That’s because we haven’t received our copy, and this is added to the bank of anecdotal evidence that the magazine is delivered to nicer neighborhods first, or perhaps to readers who are more loyal than we are–though that’s hard to believe. Our mad love is documented–published even!

But we have already been sucked into the vain conversation about whether that was a good thing to do or not. Some are getting quite shrill about this, and where there are shrill journalists, there usually aren’t nearly enough drinks on the bar.

Lewis Lazare, for example. Down in Chicago, from his seat at the media desk at the unimpeachably righteous Sun-Times, where advertisers are held to the highest standards (of, you know, check-signing and remittance–post office will not deliver without proper postage!), Lazare calls this “the most jaw-dropping collapse of the so-called sacred wall between editorial and advertising in modern magazine history.”

Like we say, we haven’t seen it yet, so we’re not sure whether the hyperbole is warranted. But we’re suspicious. First, in principal the idea is not all that galling. Think, for example, of Firestone’s long, singular, solo underwriting of the radio concert series, and an entire symphonic orchestra. Or of Mobil’s unassisted check-signing for Masterpiece Theater. Practically every season, there are a couple of television programs that are presented without commercials, the largesse of Ford, say, or Microsoft, or Bill McGuire. (Uh, maybe not Bill McGuire.) It’s not unprecedented in the world of magazines either, and in recent years, some of the very best glossies are actually owned and operated by major blue-chip advertisers. (Think of Sony Style, or Benneton Colors–both terrific titles where, one could argue, the fact that Corporate Daddy has chased the wolf away from the door, actually makes the magazine more delightfully idiosyncratic, interesting, provocative. But that’s a different animal.*)

The way Lazare describes some of the issue is a little troubling, if it is–as he claims–as difficult to distinguish ad from edit space. This would suggest the collusion of editors with the advertising people, but then again maybe the conclusion should be a big fat “So what?” It sounds as if the Target campaign is mostly visual, and in a magazine that is typically about 85 percent edit to art, can it be that difficult to discern edit art from advertising art?

Most troubling of all, we guess, is Lazare’s sort of cavalier dismissal of the creative work that undoubtedly went into the “project”–Target wished to credit the artists involved, and this stinks to Lazare’s high heaven.

Often, prigs of Lazare’s stripe assume an awful lot about the history of “modern magazines.” We just happen to be reading a biography of E.B. White lately, and we were interested to learn that some of the best, smartest advertisements in The New Yorker in the halcyon 30s and 40s were actually written by White . (Granted, most were house ads to build subscriptions. Note, though, that White was first an advertising copywriter before he ever took the woolen tunic and vows of poverty of the Edit department. ) We’ve mentioned before, too, that editor Harold Ross actually read the ads in the magazine, and in some cases edited (or suggested edits) in the ad space–largely because advertisements were narrative in form, and looked almost exactly like edit space, and he didn’t want the ads to be held to a lower standard than the edit, because he felt it brought the whole magazine down a notch.

When Lazare expresses outrage at crediting the artists for a project he believes readers are too stupid to recongize as an advertising project, he echoes a most common prejudice. Creative people working in the ad space are paid handsomely, so they don’t get the byline and the non-monetary compensation in prestige that their poor little brothers and sisters get in the edit space. But this too is not a timeless truism inscribed on the stone tablet of Ye Old Testament of Magazine Rules. In a history of Esquire magazine, for example, we recently read that legendary founding editor Arnold Gingrich actually argued the other way-that the fine art appearing in rpestigious advertisments of the 30s and 40s really demanded to be signed by the artists, the readers deserved to know who had created it. (As far as we can tell, the impulse has only survived in those Absolut and Absolut-inspired ads that are commissioned and credited to various strutting cocks of the fine arts world.)

We have a whole week to check into this–if our copy arrives before we leave for vacation. So more when we get back, possibly, if anything more needs to be said.

*FULL DISCLOSURE, in the first-person, and besides, it’s interesting though slightly off-topic: I was for several years the editor of Request, a now-defunct magazine that was owned by Musicland/Sam Goody. I know from first-hand experience what good can come from a corproate sugar daddy who is free from the scimpy margins of traditional publishing. My opinion is biased, of course– I thought it was a terrific magazine. But whatever people might have thought of it, I can say that it was entirely mine to make as bad or as good as I pleased, without any interference whatsoever from our benevolent, Armani-armored overlords. By the way, it is defunct now largely because larger financial pressures eventually made those same overlords say to themselves, “What the hell are we doing in the publishing industry, anyway? With those scimpy margins?!! ” Musicland has been sold several times since then, and my only lasting grudge is that the new owners deleted from the web about five years of my life.