Category: Blog Post

We hate being the center of the national news when it means yet another school shooting. And we hate having to write this: What possible service can this news be to the Plain People of America? It most certainly is news, even though we detect a certain low-level anomie—even a perverse detachment developing, as each new shooting story trickles into the living rooms of an increasingly jaded public. Normally, these sorts of stories are justified in newsrooms under the “protect the children” code that all professional journalists learn today—there is much danger in the world, even (especially?) in its most isolated corners. We report on these sorts of tragedies in the hopes of averting future tragedies. Right?

But that would require some pragmatic answers to complex problems. (More security? Trigger locks? Outlaw video games and trench coats? Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Uh, no, we were thinking a bit more serious than that.) Instead, what we see is something of a circus of gory detail, the voyeuristic stenography (block that ironic headline, please) of reconstructing a crime scene, without a lot of analysis or thoughtful consideration. Most efforts to process such an incident are feeble, moralistic, empty, soft-headed. What is a reader or viewer left with? What is the take-away?

We can’t bear to read through the reams of sensational coverage (the silver lining of heinous news: Nice work, Bemidji Pioneer, drinks for everyone in the newsroom—after a tasteful moment of silence, of course), so we don’t really know what we’re talking about, frankly.

But one thing we did notice this morning was a humble little press release from the National Mental Health Association that linked to an important resource page: Bullying and What To Do About It. Here is a salient extract:

“Although its always been around, bullying should never be accepted as normal behavior. The feelings experienced by victims of bullying are painful and lasting. Bullies, if not stopped, can progress to more serious, antisocial behavior. Recent incidents of school violence show that bullying can have tragic consequences for individuals, families, schools, and entire communities.”

See, gaining a little insight into the news is a lot easier than anyone could hope.

We would never be so simple-minded as to suggest that certain geo-political situations bear any relationship at all to the insular, microcosmic, uniquely troubled world of the Red Lake reservation. But it makes a guy think.

If reporting terrible news actually made the world a better place, well, we should be on the threshold of an honest-to-God golden age. But all signs point in the other direction. Still, there are a few heroes of the dawning Post-American Sino-European world. (Pre-emptive rhetorical device: Forced to live? Or allowed to die? It’s how you frame the question, innit.)

We are pleased to report yet another first here at the magazine: Last night, we finally took a nap on that old seat-sprung couch over there. (Photographic evidence to the contrary was carefully staged.) This morning, there are lots of reasons why we might want to just close our eyes and make the world go away—but last night’s little episode of shut-eye was actually the direct consequence of the subscription model for online content.

Let’s explain. Many readers have commented on the simpatico they see between the magazine and radio—specifically the more playful versions of public radio—and we frequently work directly with MPR. The relationship extends from a basic story-telling ethic. Great radio, like a great magazine, does not waste words. It rewards you for listening by creating vivid mental pictures (in print, we have the luxury of giving you pictures, true, but we do not have the passive immediacy that a voice in your car has).

Anyway, our obsession with radio’s story-telling possibilities goes way back, predating even a short run of writing for Garrison Keillor. (He didn’t like us very much.) It goes back to the 80s, specifically to Sunday nights in Eugene, Oregon, lying on our back on the carpet, staring at the ceiling, and listening to “Joe Frank: Work in Progress” on KLCC. And occasionally we drifted off, in a sort of narrative-induced trance. If you know Joe Frank’s work, you need no explanation—indeed, you realize any explanation is invariably feeble. Frank is typically described as “the master of noir radio,” but that implies that there really is something called “noir radio” and that there are other people producing it. (They aren’t. Well, they ARE, but they are not really being broadcast anywhere. The whole thing with radio is that it is a “push” technology—it comes to you. You get to be passive about it. Any radio-style production that uses a pull model—you go and get it because you know you want it—is probably doomed to fail.) Anyway, noir radio, if there is such a thing, is this: creative monologues, dialogues, fictional sketches, audio experimentation, typically produced with or without sound effects, soundtracks, sound loops, and so on. Ira Glass occasionally tinkers with the form, but less so in recent years. Keillor’s “Guy Noir” has nothing to do with it.

Since we ended up working in a parallel industry, we actually got friendly with Joe Frank a few years back, and we commissioned a story on KCRW, the legendary Santa Monica radio station that used to employ Joe. (A long aside, for extra credit: KCRW is frequently cited as one of the prototypes for our shiny new radio station, the Current. Which reminds us of a conversation we had over the weekend—a smart friend indeed was pointing out that public radio’s original insight was that commercial radio couldn’t or wouldn’t do news in a way that fully took advantage of the medium. Commercial news at the time was pretty much what commercial news is today—top-of-the-hour soundbites and summaries, barely going beyond what in print would be a headline and subheadline. NPR’s genius, born at St. John’s abbey lo these many years ago, was seeing that the listening public could short-circuit the traditional ad-based model and pay directly for more substantive news and thoughtful round-the-clock broadcast journalis. Now, the genius of MPR, and visionaries like Bill Kling and Sara Lutman, is that ~music~ is the next frontier of public broadcasting. We’ve been meaning to say this for a while: it is very gratifying indeed to see that there are still some new tricks left in this old dog!)

So we heard a while ago that there was supposedly some strange falling out with KCRW (and its legendary director, Ruth Seymour); but in hind sight, it might be that Joe Frank had a falling out with public radio in general—although we note that he recently participated in the pledge drive of New York’s WMFU, where they still broadcast back issues of his many, many radio shows. Joe seems to have little or no interest in producing new shows for radio. Instead, he has cast his lot with the Web, appealing directly to his fans to subsidize his work.

Last night we popped for a one-month subscription—feeling magnanimous, we guess, after becoming founding members of the Current—but then realizing we deserve no such pat on the back, having been public broadcasting free-loaders whenever the personal well had run dry. It is an interesting model; Joe is now producing a three or four new audio pieces per month, usually one long piece, several shorter pieces, sometimes posting short films based on his work, and so on.

We intend to make good use of our month-long subscription, and if it means naps every Sunday night on our couch, then so be it. We encourage you to do the same.

UPDATE: Readers have pointed out that there is an advertisement for The Current that pops up right over there, to the right of your screen. We–meaning me, the writer of this particular blog—have no control over which advertisements appear over there. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of control over what I end up writing about each day, either!

Every industry has its peer-reviewed awards competition, especially industries that are fueled mainly by ego and vanity the way the media industry is. There are serious awards and then there are somewhat ridiculous awards,but basically there are enough awards to make sure just about everyone can win something sometime. This has become such a cliche that one can really distinguish oneself these days by at least claiming never to have won an award for anything. This would be an asset for a couple of reasons, not the least of which would be evidence of strength of character, comfort in your own skin, a sort of clarity of vision to recognize that you do not want to belong to the club that would have you for a member.

Still, we cannot bear not to mention that the ASME finalists have been announced. As usual, the New Yorker dominates the field, and this is as it should be. We were especially gratified to see Louis Menand nominated in the commentary and criticism category, less so for Adam Gopnik. We love Adam, but mostly for technical reasons. Menand is just as smart and gifted, but he also happens to be genuinely funny and selfless; those are virtues of age that Gopnik may grow into, if he’s lucky. Other notable nominations: James Woolcott gets a much-deserved nod in the same category, and Ted Genoways—formerly of the Minnesota Historical Society Press—gets TWO count them TWO nominations for his Virginia Quarterly Review! Well done, fella! Notable ecxlusions: The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, an unfailingly, jaw-droppingly great art critic, somehow slipped through the cracks, and neither the scrappy, sincere Salon nor the self-evidentally great Slate made the finals in the online category. (To be clear, without inside information, there is no way of knowing whether they even entered, which they’d have to do in order to be nominated as finalists. It is probably better not to ask. Eyes are red and skins are chafed right now.)

Now it is important to note that the “Ellies” (as they are known to us editor-types; they are also known as the national magazine awards) are an essentially credible merit badge worth bragging about, especially among other editor-types. We’re not sure the public cares a whole lot, and if they do, they are not going to be especially surprised that the New Yorker received ten nominations, nor that Vanity Fair received seven, and they certainly aren’t going to think that Vanity Fair must have turned a dramatic corner in the last year, since they were shut out of the nominations last year. (By the way, here is our national magazine award-winning writer—though, of course, she won years ago for her work in the New Yorker, not her work in The Rake, which we have not entered into the competition.)

But here some salient facts that may interest regular folks—and by regular folks, we mean people who are insanely and irrationally obsessed with glossy magazines. Unlike some idiotic magazine awards that are run like college alumni clubs, anyone can enter the national magazine awards. The Awards are juried by members of ASME—that is, the American Society of Magazine Editors. That is, the editors-in-chief whose magazines are competing against one another. Naturally, there are all kinds of personal issues, high levels of favoritism, a certain predisposition to celebrate that which has already been celebrated frequently, a compulsion to look more seriously at the magazines of editors who eat lunch at the Four Seasons, and so on. But there are just enough surprises to keep the whole thing generally on the up-and-up, and these are all basically good people with unimpeachable ethics. Plus, the awards are administered by the Columbia School of Journalism, which puts a very high premium indeed on credibility.

What is the price of vanity? To enter the ASME awards, applicants must submit $400 per entry (that’s for the general excellence category; $200 if you are a member of ASME; membership dues are generally in the range of $200-300 per year). Needless to say, smaller independent publishers find it difficult even to enter the competition—magazines that spend disproportionately on quality editorial content ) are the most disadvantaged of all, because they would benefit the most from national notice, while being the least able to afford the steep entry fee (we’d spend $400 on a page and a half in our magazine, and our writers need the money more than ASME does, probably). If you think about it, it would really be shameful if huge, powerful, intensely profitable companies like Conde Nast DIDN’T monopolize these sorts of awards, even if their editors weren’t favorably judging each other’s titles-—oh, but wait. They surely aren’t allowed to do that, and knowing what we do about the insanely cut-throat culture inside Conde Nast, there is no guarantee that the dogs wouldn’t kill each other if they were caged together.)

The ASMEs are the Oscars for magazines, and that is not saying much, to be sure, but it is what we have. We have wondered for years now why magazines are conspicuously excluded from the Pulitzers—a cut far above the Ellies in terms of public prestige—when that award is spread from the daily fish wraps, to hardcover books, to freakin stageplays. What’s up with THAT?

Anyway, if if the Ellies have their limitations, they still give us hope each year that there ARE a number of magazine editors (and publishers and writers) out there who DO use their powers for good, even when the whole world is pushing them to be evil.

UPDATE: Because of bad wording that we are too lazy to edit right now, we implied the opposite of what we meant to say out loud somewhere in this little taradiddle: We did, in fact, enter in one category, GE. Alas, we did not escape relegation. If we had, we would not be here talking to you right now, we’d be drinking martinis across the street.

Yesterday, we had the pleasure of speaking to the Minnesota Book Publisher’s Roundtable. Even though we were running late and trying to duck the falling ceiling timbers, we managed to make it to our appointment, where we met old friends and made some new ones.

One friend mentioned to us that the Pioneer Press had last weekend published an item on polar explorer Will Steger, a man who is near and dear to our hearts after his very generous gifts to The Rake. We’d actually been thinking about Steger on the way over to St. Paul, as we heard reports from Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, who are presently trekking across the Arctic again.

On top of all that, we had a terrible desire to get an early start on St. Patrick’s Day tippling—our generally high spirits had been deflated by the unbelievably depressing news that our elected officials in the UNited States Senate had voted narrowly to allow oil drilling in the Arcitic National Wildlife Refuge. (Steger and Senator Mark Dayton have travelled together to ANWR; few people understand better than these gents that fragile polar environments are the best barometers we have for the health of the entire globe. What we are already doing to these wildernesses, at a great distance, is itself criminal, and now we’re going to simply rejoin chickens and eggs.) So let’s be clear about this: Effectively the vote of ONE PERSON, in the entire United States, has resulted in a razor-thin majority to allow a complete reversal of a longstanding trust—resulting in the permanent desecration of national property for the short-term profiteering of the oil industry and a handful of belligerent Alaskans. (The vote was 51 to 49.) President Bush, ever the master of simple and moving, if reductionist , slogans had this to say about the momentous decision:”This will help us get some more oil reserves on the books.”

We are still almost too angry to see straight, but we need to vent on a few issues here. First, thank you very much to Senator Norm Coleman who “kept a campaign promise” and was one of seven Republicans to vote against opening ANWR. Second, shame on Hawaii Democrats Ionouye and Akaka. We’d very much like to know how these fine gentlemen—normally a real credit to their state, their country, their people, and their party—justify their vote. Is there some special caucus for states that are not a part of the contiguous “lower forty-eight” that would compell them to side with the money-grabbing, self-serving, screw-you-me-first, nevermind-the- grandchildren-I-want-mine, God-gave-us-oil-to-make-us-rich Republicans of Alaska?

We note that Senator Akaka, in particular, sits on the Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. His website describes his seat there in the following way:

“This post serves the Senator’s longstanding commitments to safeguard our precious natural resources.”

Perhaps he could tell the Plain People of America how voting to open ANWR to oil drilling comports with this statement.

And we can’t help wondering what would happen to Hawaii’s lei industry if the Big Island were surrounded by oil rigs, and its volcanoes porcupined with geo-thermal taps.

UPDATE: We poked around in the Hawaii newspapers, and learned that the good senators from Hawaii chose to frame this issue as one of native (indigenous peoples’) rights. Apparently, there are a number or local inuit tribes that strongly favor oil drilling. (Well, duh. “Think of the money! We’ll be rich, rich, RICH!—cough, cough.”) So we have the very bizarre phenomenon of a tyranny of the (razor thin) majority passing a law that certain Democrats justify in their minds by framing as an issue of minority rights– in other words, all Americans must now agree to allow their property–their legacy–to be turned over to the profit of a very few, whether they be Inuit or Exxon.