The Rake Magazine

Category: Blog Post

  • Towers Repeating

    Apropos of Pete’s comments yesterday, I have to admit I haven’t looked at many New Times papers in recent years. I think their impulse to be politically contrarian is a good one (which is a much different thing than being anti-liberal, but that’s a whole ‘nother conversation–of course, anti-liberalism usually IS more or less disguised conservatism, but not always) for a lot of different reasons, but the nationalizing of a sensibility and actual content is obviously troubling.

    The Onion is, of course, in a class all its own and not really an alt-weekly in any meaningful way, although one could make an interesting argument that it is to alt-weekly print what Jon Stewart is to network news. I think their only opportunities for profitability are national ads (they get a few of those, but may be too edgy to get a lot more) and local listings ads (hence the expanded arts coverage). Editorially, they could never replace the City Pages of the world. As a business, they surely could, if the world of paper has any survivors in the next 20 years.

    Alt-weekly news is some of the most vital journalism happening today (although not always the most entertaining or interesting, in my humble opinion–again, another separate question), but eventually I fear these big chains will follow the lead of even the most respected dailies (i..e. McClatchy) in quietly requiring mid-level editors to sit in on business meetings that are not about news but about news readers, not about what’s in the paper, but about who reads it. And, maybe more to the point, how much that paper costs (that is, the newsprint itself).

  • The Miers head fake

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    Would somebody please give this guy head so we can impeach him?

    We weren’t cheered too much by Miers withdrawal from the Supreme Court nomination. It’s not as if Bush needed anything else to emphasize how truly out of his depth he is. I was always convinced the decision to nominate her in the first place went something like this:

    Bush: “Karl, Dick, we’ve got to nominate someone for that big judge thing whatchamacallit. You know any good ‘ol boys who could completely tip the court off the edge of reason?”

    Rove: “Dubya, I got my own damn problems here with this Fitzgerald guy. Can’t you do anything yourself?”

    Bush: (Yelling down the hall) “Hey, Harriet, whatcha doin’ for the rest of your life?”

    Cheney: (Stage whisper to Rove) “Evidently not.”

    But, now that we’ve had our fun with Harriet, maybe we should turn our thoughts to those who’ve really paid the price for Bush’s incompetence and Rove’s treachery. In case you’ve forgotten, there is tape of Rove telling the Republican National Committee in January 2002 that the “War on Terror” would be the issue that would carry the Republicans to victory in the next election. Since the overthrow of the Taliban in Afganistan wasn’t going to take that long, they needed something else to keep up the image of Bush as the man to keep America safe.

    So we get lies about WMD, the Plame incident, and a war that’s now killed 2000 American boys and girls, wounded and crippled another 15,000, and killed or wounded uncounted Iraqis. Does anyone still believe we did this for the Iraquis as opposed to doing it to keep Cheney and Rove in power?

    The indictments that are probably coming down soon are already being positioned by the White House and their sock puppets as “technical” ones–ones that will probably be for perjury instead of the crime of outing one of our covert agents. We get a big laugh out of that, especially since Hutchison voted to remove Bill Clinton from office for just such a “technicality.”

    But somebody’s keeping their eye on the ball, despite all the Republican pitches in the dirt.

    Today Operation Truth released a new television ad. Watch it, please.

    And would someone tell me how oral sex grew into an impeachable offense while all those flag-draped coffins are kept out of sight?

  • A Wish In The Wee Hours

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    If dogs could stand as small

    as humans, and on their hind

    legs, upright in a manner of speaking,

    and if they could negotiate

    the complexities of a phone

    booth and had change,

    or pockets for change,

    and if you could still find

    a functioning phone booth

    in this godforsaken city,

    I’d wish a lost dog would dial

    my number entirely by accident

    at four o’clock in the morning

    and ask me to drive across

    town to scratch its belly

    and murmur consoling endearments

    in the parking lot of a SuperAmerica.

    american spirit-the cut.jpg

  • Musing on the last two World Series winners

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    Say it ain’t so, Joe. The Sox beat me to it.

    Next time I’m in Vegas, I’m putting $100 on the Cubs to win the 2006 Series. It’s their turn.

  • (Ironing) Bored with the Strib

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    I have to finish this so I can make the hubby a nice dinner

    Probing every day for a new low in journalism, the Strib doesn’t let us down today.

    One of my female colleagues brought this to my attention. Right before she vowed to call and cancel her subscription.

    I never look at the life style section. This is why. Imagine you are a female reader and you run across this sentence: “Whether you’re tired of paying dry-cleaning bills or just want to impress your future mother-in-law, it makes sense to learn how to iron a shirt.”

    Unfortunately, I never met my mother-in-law, but I can certainly tell from the way that she raised her daughter that ironing technique was not high on her list of qualifications to be permitted to marry into the family.

    Irony, yes. Ironing, only if you have to.

    One thing an iron would be good for, though, is cracking some editor at the Strib over the head. I don’t normally advocate violence, but in this case, I’d make an exception.

  • Repeater Towers

    The announcement yesterday about the Village Voice and New Times merger was interesting. All concerned parties–that is Mike Lacey, Jim Larkin, and David Schneiderman–are awfully defensive about charges of “selling out,” but then they’ve been hearing that for years, so their protests have always landed on my ear just a touch too loudly.

    I personally don’t doubt that all the papers in the new stable will continue to do what they’ve been doing for a while, even after the merger is approved. (Fans of local, independent, lefty alternative papers may be surprised to find themselves rooting for the Federal Trade Commission on this one, in hopes that they’ll nix the deal. But that would be terrible; it would be little else than confirmation of the Man’s bias against the lefty press. Mainstream newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, billboard companies, and concert promoters are merging all the time. If you think the FTC is worried about alt-weekly monopolies, but not any other type of media monopoly–well, you see what I’m saying.)

    If the New Times people are as smart as everyone says they are, then they’ll be content to sit back and count their money– after, you know, tamping down the imminent rebellion at Cooper Square. I think the argument, enunciated by Lacey (who has never lacked for a full voice), that this was “to make the papers stronger” is, I think, a little disingenuous and revealing at the same time. It’s clear that he sees this as a personal triumph, and it’s also clear that he personally doesn’t need the money. On the other hand, Village Voice has not been financially robust ever since the investment group was cobbled together to purchase the company from Leonard Stern. Official reports say that “no money changed hands,” whereas early leaks suggested that David Schneiderman would receive a seven figure bonus for forging the deal. Anyway, I’ll take their word for it, and accept the implication that New Times is in a position to strengthen the crumbling footings of Village Voice Media–also recognizing that “Village Voice” is undoubtedly the stronger, hipper brand.

    If either of these chains were more concerned about making bank than doing good work, they might have made some radical adjustments a long time ago. For example, with the rise of the internet and the temptation modern alt weeklies have felt to write a substantial portion of their content to the national and international opinion scrum, you could argue that there is overwhelming duplication of effort across all markets. Throw in the regular critical coverage of movies, CDs, games, and even theater that is in national release, and it starts to look like you’re paying twelve pretty good film critics where one excellent one would do. Indeed, if you want to really guage where this merger is going, and catch them in the act of radical profiteering, watch for your local VVM alternative to become a sort of repeater tower for Musto, Hentoff, Lacey, Sinagra, Berger In many of these markets, of course, there are no strong competitors–and if City Pages one day became The Village Voice’s City Pages, and finally The Village Voice–Twin Cities edition, what would be lost, really? (A lot, of course: especially the farm system for developing great new writers. But there is not any money to be lost in the deal.) Indeed, the new directive to create the bleeding edge VilliageVoice.com may indicate the thin edge of a wedge to nationalize alternative journalism. That, by the way, was the brilliant idea behind the expansion of The Onion–which doesn’t give a toss for the individual glory of local editors, reporters, writers, or critics. The Onion qualifies in more ways than one as the first truly national alternative publication. Area Man Reads Fake News, Laughs, Still Gets Local Listings.

    In the paltry details of yesterday’s announcement, to my eyes, one thing stood out like dog’s balls: It is proposed that all editors will report not to their own local publishers, but to the national commanders. Is this another stormy petrel of to a nationalized alternative press? That wouldn’t be a horrible thing, although as I’ve said before, I think the alt-press could learn one thing from mainstream newspapers, and that’s the compulsion to evolve with its readership, or cultivate a different one. The dailies have gone much too far in their chasing after vacuous, quick-read, second-person service journalism. But the alt weeklies have for twenty years coasted on the usefulness of their listings and their sex advertisments.

    I’d love to see this new brain trust dedicate some energies to reinventing the alternative press for a new twenty-something readership, but these people have all acted like Generation X would be the last generation to read for pleasure and entertainment and political edification, and they will follow that readership to the grave (even though that readership stopped using the listings–and thus stopped reading the paper about ten years ago). Maybe they’re right, but the last time I checked, kids were still being taught how to read.

    It will be very interesting to see how long the Powers That Be can keep their butt-pickers off the local editorial. I expect to see them make the dumbest mistake right out of the gate–tweaking local design to comport with their papers in other markets. I won’t blather on about it here, but design is one of the things that is absolutely murdering the alternative press, and it is such a simple thing not to do. Heavily templated content is like receiving every Christmas present in the same wrapping, with the same ribbons and bows, with identical greeting cards. Eventually, you’d rather sit under someone else’s Christmas tree than have to open yet another Red Baron-themed raft of presents, no matter what treasures you might find within.

    FULL DISCLOSURE: I freelanced for City Pages over the years, and several staff members here have worked at City Pages–including our publishers, who founded City Pages.

  • Bertie Rathbun's Soul

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    From the moment she was finished, shoved in a box, and buried under a shower of styrofoam peanuts, Bertie Rathbun understood that through some accident of God she had been given a soul. As she had been dangled in the air at the inspection station, and as her strings were jerked each in turn, jiggling Bertie’s head, hands, arms, legs, and feet against her will, she had caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the eyeglasses of the woman who would initial the packing slip signaling her completion.

    Bertie was alarmed not only by what she had seen reflected in the woman’s glasses, but also by the fact that she could see anything at all.

    Something had happened, and though she was not quite sure what had happened, Bertie thought that whatever it was had occurred earlier in the afternoon when one of the detailers in finishing –a small, stooped, and melancholy Japanese man who was nearing retirement– had bent over her, puffed his warm breath three times directly into her face, and then buffed her painted features with a soft rag.

    The little man had then held Bertie Rathbun before him in his outstretched arms, and with an expression of great sadness on his face addressed her in a quiet voice. What the man said to Bertie, before he carried her into the next room and hung her on a metal rack alongside dozens of other puppets, was this: “Such a pity, little one.”

    And in that man’s warm breath, and in his strange, inscrutable statement –somewhere in that series of moments– Bertie’s soul had entered her body.

    Perhaps, even, it was not Bertie Rathbun’s soul at all, but the soul of the old man, or a seed from his soul that he planted in her empty chest or head. Bertie didn’t know a thing about souls; she didn’t even know anything about knowing, but it would later occur to her that somehow she’d been given that old man’s broad ignorance and disappointments, his longings and desires and badly faded dreams, dreams that would appear to Bertie as dim and fleeting images on an almost translucent screen.

    No sooner was Bertie Rathbun folded up in the darkness of her box and she began to feel the first fierce stirrings of resentment at her fate. She hated the very idea that she was a puppet; even worse was the realization that she was being sent out into the world as the most hopeless and hackneyed of all-purpose metaphors.

    Bertie also recalled with horror that glimpse of her own reflection: she had absolutely no idea what sort of puppet she was supposed to be. Was she a mouse? A little bear? A kitten? Perhaps, even, a wingless bat?

    Like all puppets that have been cursed with consciousness from time immemorial, Bertie Rathbun dreamed of autonomy, of free will, of a life unfettered by her cursed strings and her dependence on the hands and whims and attention spans of complete strangers. Bertie wanted to play the bongo drums and dance of her own volition and, regardless of what sort of creature she was supposed to be, she wanted to live in a hole in a river bank, ride about in boats, and sleep in a luxurious four-poster bed.

    All of these thoughts went through Bertie Rathbun’s head during the many days she spent smothered in the darkness of her box and being jostled about and then, eventually, dangled and jerked around in a store full of other bright and noisy toys.

    A fat and smiling woman finally purchased Bertie Rathbun one day and took her home and hung her from a fireplace mantle alongside a glowering nun and a stern gladiator, both of which were clearly as devoid of feeling and soul as the leering nutcracker displayed on the ledge above them.

    The next morning a little boy came down the stairs and squealed with delight when he saw the puppets hanging above the fireplace. Bertie watched as the boy first took down the gladiator and swung him around the room gracelessly, tangling his strings and then letting him drop in a heap to the floor. She saw the boy crouch to remove the giant sword from the gladiator’s fist, and Bertie felt a spasm of hope and excitement jigging in her chest.

    With her eyes Bertie Rathbun tried to implore the boy to cut her strings and set her free. And then she watched with horror as the little boy took the gladiator’s sword and, rather than cutting Bertie’s strings, plunged it directly into, and through, the neck of the nun.

    The nun did not make a sound or shed a single tear, but slowly at first, and then in a bright torrent, blood began to stream from the wound in her neck and started to drip, drip, drip down to the fireplace hearth, entirely unnoticed by the little boy, who had moved on to play with the other toys that were splayed beneath the Christmas tree.

    And at that moment Bertie Rathbun watched as the translucent screen on which the old man’s dim dreams were displayed in her head went entirely blank, and she felt her soul leave her body.

    nun puppet 2.jpg

  • More Words From The Scrap Heap: The Hill Singer

    american spirit-chicago.jpg

    Many years ago, shortly after my arrival here, I discovered a hill in the middle of the city. This hill had long been a sanctuary of teen lust, the rocks and trees painted and carved with the arithmetic of young love.

    An old man who’d allegedly traveled the world would ride his bicycle each day to the park at the foot of the hill, in search of aluminum cans. He would gradually make his way to the top of the hill, from where he would sing Schubert’s lieder in a striking baritone from a swinging bridge that hung above the river that wound its way through the park at the bottom of a bluff.

    At dusk a procession of local teenagers would climb through the brush to make clumsy love to the old man’s songs. This ritual had been a local tradition for several generations, dating back to the first days when the old man –then, of course, a much younger man– had returned to the town from many years of traveling and hardship. The truth, though, was that no one really knew anything about the hill singer, as he came to be known to the townspeople.

    Over the years the town was much changed from those early days. It had grown much larger, and was now a place of immense loneliness and institutionalized trepidation. People came to the town from all over the world to suffer; the place had become an international capital of angst, of waiting and fretting and polyglottal fear, all related to the mysteries of the human body and its frequently malign secrets.

    These pilgrims brought with them their questions, and were entered into a vast lottery for answers, for which they might wait weeks, months, or years, often with little or no satisfaction. The Agency that administered the lottery had become a gargantuan bureaucracy that was plagued by inefficiency and indifference. It was also alleged to be as corrupt as it was massive. The pilgrims often paid exorbitant sums simply to enter their names in the lottery, this despite the fact that it had now been many years since anyone could recall the Agency handing down anything even remotely resembling an answer.

    The squalid rooming houses and motels that had sprung up around the Agency’s vast headquarters were overcrowded with desperate souls. This desperation in time led some of the pilgrims –many of them quite aged– to venture to the hill in the middle of the town, where they, like the legion of local teenagers, would crawl through the brush and make love to the old man’s songs.

    Word quickly spread that these passionate excursions had an oddly consoling and salubrious effect, and soon more and more of the lottery entrants began to make the trek up the hill, and the woods and bushes were crowded each night with trysting pilgrims, their cries of equal parts anguish and passion rising like an animal chorus accompanying the old man’s songs.

    The old man, however, could not live forever, and one evening the procession of pilgrims and teenagers arrived to find only silence on the hill. For weeks a gradually diminishing number of the amorous and desperate continued to make the hopeful journey, but the old man did not return.

    Whether or not it was a coincidence remains a matter of conjecture around town (many of the older residents never heard the hill singer, and to them he remains more myth than reality), but shortly after the old man’s disappearance the exodus of pilgrims began, a trickle at first, and then a massive retreat. The rooming houses and motels were largely shuttered, and the town fell on hard times. And then, less than a year later, the Agency headquarters were destroyed in a massive fire of suspicious origin.

    Those of us who remain –and there are fewer of us by the month– find ourselves living in a city of ghosts and ruins, and the hill in the middle of town is now a neglected reminder of our shameful past, littered with moldering condoms, hastily discarded items of clothing, and aluminum cans.

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  • You, too, can win your very own body armor

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    Lucky at cards, unlucky at war

    This story yesterday from the NY Times depicts a new low in how we treat our soldiers. Actually, it’s not a new low, since it has been going on for many years.

    We’re running casinos on military bases. So, we’re not only asking our men and women in uniform to gamble their lives, but, hey, while you’re at it, why not throw in your paycheck and your family’s livelihood?

    All this is justified because the Pentagon uses the $120 million or so it fleeces our soldiers for for “recreational” uses. You know, golf courses and such.

    As the story notes, jackpots are kept low so soldiers are less tempted to gamble. Of course, anyone who knows anything about compulsive gambling knows that doesn’t really work.

    I wish I could come up with some crack about this. You know, maybe “Let’s have a raffle for a set of armor plating for your squad’s humvee.” Or how about, “It won’t cost you an arm and a leg to take a chance on winning your very own set of body armor”?

    Instead, I’m just sort of ashamed.

  • The Rum Life

    You might have thought I was in Puerto Rico at that glamorous American Magazine conference, but no. I don’t think I could afford the gas to get to the airport, much less leave the country. But I see my old friend Wonkette is there stirring things up a bit. It’s been a few months since she was pinging loudly on my radar screen, needling powerful media people in expensive offices–Jon Stewart briefly took over that role in her absence (finishing that novel)–and now she once again enjoys another upswing in the Tao of celebrity. Good for her. She must be in galleys.

    I do envy all those magazine big-wigs down in the Caribbean, even if they were in the path of the world’s largest hurricane ever. This year’s conference seems to have been topically pretty interesting, from an editor’s point of view. So often these trade pow-wows are an excuse for all kinds of expense-account flapdoodle, and the only meaningful work gets done by the same people who already know how to play while they work–the business folks on the advertising, marketing, and publishing side. Editors and writers are the real culprits who view such events as paid vacations in every sense of the word–moral, professional, and personal.

    But I see where the chiefs of ASME have issued a new set of guidelines to shore up the eroding walls between editorial content and advertising content. I keep a copy of the old guidelines at hand, although most of the rules are simple in spirit and in practice. A little magazine like ours is not going to attract a lot of attention if we DID mess with these rules (for example, no advertising on the cover–not even a sticker that announces advertorial content inside). Indeed, our two main competitiors tamper with the limits all the time–and not just the ASME guidelines, but the US Postal service guidelines governing media-class postage, ad-to-edit ratio, and so forth. It is for precisely this reason that we wished ASME had a bit more sway at the local level, so that advertisers and potential advertisers had a better understanding of what editorial credibility is, what it’s value is, and why there should even by third-party audits and ajudication. In a lot of ways, ASME guidelines might seem quaint or dated, and as a supposedly young and open-minded provacateur of the publishing industry, I like to think about how we in the publishing industry can innovate in both the edit space and the ad space. You gotta pay the bills, and you hope you can do it with great content and great ads, and you trust that each must excel independently of the other. I hear all the time from people, especially the smart and engaged people we most like to reach with our magazine, who are in some state of disgust over editorial content they see in various places that is tainted by a direct commercial interest. As I say, I am not a stodgy old-school cynic about these things–the church/state divide is, to me, more of a saturday/sunday divide. One follows the other, they have equal value, but they are clearly separated by midnight.

    Thus, we went on the record with the whole New Yorker/Target flap with basically a two-word assessment: Big deal. True, it was a minor violation of the ASME guidelines, and this was talked about down in Puerto Rico… not that Target bought every ad in the magazine, but that there was no editorial statement in the magazine that explained (excused) the sponsorship, and reassured readers that the firewall had not been breeched. For the New Yorker, this must have been a bit of a conundrum, because it is not a magazine that, in its edit space, allows for a sort of loosey-goosey editor-to-reader bedtime prayer. The closest they ever come to this sort of thing is the legal fine print required by the postal service, usually found in the last handful of pages. As I mentioned before, I’m pretty confident that the New Yorker’s readership can without much difficulty identify and distinguish advertising from editorial content. (Now, whether there was any Target influence on the cover art of that issue is an interesting potential consipracy theory.)

    Coincidentally–and to bring this full-circle–I have been in the magazine-geek’s cognitive equivalent of Puerto Rico for the last two weeks: I bought the complete New Yorker DVD set, and have been catching up on all my old favorites from the Ross and Shawn years. I have to admit that I bought this in a hurry, because it is not entirely a clear cut ‘n’ dry legal issue as to whether the New Yorker has the right to republish and resell every issue ever printed, and (for strictly personal, selfish reasons) it would suck to have this particular archive deemed a violation of individual copyright. For years, I have spent long, frustrating, expensive hours at the microfiche machine at the public library, and I have bought expensive, damaged backissues piecemeal from eBay, and I have coveted the impossibly rare bound volumes that exist like authentic splinters of the True Cross in a few libraries around the country. So this… this was quite a moment.