The Rake's Progress

We've Moved!

2005-01-07T11:02:00.000-06:00

If you've bookmarked us at this location, we suggest redirecting yourself here. See you on the other side of your click-thru!

Begob, there's our bus...

Where We Hang Our Hat

2005-01-06T11:37:00.000-06:00

Last night, we convened the monthly round table at Kieran's. Owing to the lazy holiday period when we had nothing better to do, the deputy editor had reserved the Titanic Room, which was—of course—an unintentional indulgence of present distractions. Much the usual crowd, lively banter, pints of Finnegan (charitable, but not deductible). For calorie counters, the Big Boss had a walleye sandwich, which won the traditional plaudits. To our right was a "buffalo salad"—a plate of greens piled with chicken that was roughly the color of orange Ne-Hi. (We thieved a piece from starving speech-writer DG. Yummy!) Down at the end of the table, we took note of columnist CC, who can normally be counted on to hoarde the french fries and nurse the beer.

We find the main thing to come out of these little to-dos is a persistent hankering for Tullamore Dew, another recently aquired vice (affordable! benign!). The question arose as to which was smoother—Canadian or Irish Whiskey. No one cared to speculate. The wise words of Sandberg, not present, were evoked: "You know, I don't drink that much bourbon anymore."

Although we have other favorite haunts within stumbling range of the office, Kieran's is our social headquarters. It is a comfortable and gracious place to take the family out in public. The homage to one of The Rake's patron saints, the generally inspiring nature of all things Irish, above all the noble art of blarney—Kieran's fits us like a mitten.

Readers sometimes say they'd like to visit us at the office. Sometimes they just pop in. We recognize them from a mile away, and the party instantly grinds to a halt. Our man at the front desk radios up. "Incoming!" Everyone looks very busy indeed. Boomboxes are shut behind closet doors, open liters of Mountain Dew and Jolt Cola are stowed behind book cases, cigars are extinguished, the dog, cat, and shetland pony are led into the back hall and vigorously shushed, the hang-glider is folded away, the pom-poms and shredded paper are kicked into the corners, shirts are buttoned, the small kiddie pool is shoved into the conference room, the Incredible Hulk boxing mits are returned to the Ad Directors empty filing cabinet, the disco ball is turned off, the mini-trampoline goes into the wine cellar, the throwing knives go back into their velvet lined case, the can-can dancers are shuttled into the copy room, garters are pulled up, skirts smoothed, hair patted, cowlicks flattened, flasks hidden in potted plants, whoopie cushions deflated. The reader is ushered in. Nothing going on here. Just a bunch of mouse-jockeys staring at screens. A scent of Lysol hanging on the air.

No, actually here is a little flash tour of The Rake World Headquarters.

It's true that the office is maybe not as exciting as it could be, but we're comfortable and we do have our own brand of fun. But if you want to see us at our razor-witted best, try to sneak into our monthly round table at the pub. Flattery often pays the tab, you know.

Begob, there's our bus. Good-bye.

Remember Pole-Sitting?

2005-01-05T13:26:00.000-06:00

Inexplicably, I've been obsessed with sailing—right here in the heart of winter in Minnesota. Well, there is a reason, but it's not what you think... just a new personal obsession, originating here and here. In my ongoing effort to reverse a previous decision never to reread a good book (so many other classics I'll never get to, for shame!), I picked up Moby-Dick again. For years now, I've called it the all-time best American novel. But looking back—and attempting a re-reading— I realize now why it took a graduate course in theology to force me to finish the book on a schedule. All those victorian flourishes and bygone references, they become goads, not impediments, when you are reading a book for an elective credit. It may no longer be the best American novel—probably Twain deserves that honor, I guess.

So, anyway, I've just finished reading the chapter on mastheads on the Pequod. Apparently, the word did not come into regular usage until the 1740s—when whaling was beginning to become one of the world's most vigorous commercial enterprises. There have been masts, and the heads of masts, since boats were first equipped with sails (Jonah was thrown from a sailing ship, you know). But no one thought to stand at the top of one until it became a useful perch from which to spot whales spouting far off in the distance. (Pirates, seeing other merchant mariners as plunderable whales, no doubt manned the masthead too.)

So how did newspapers and other publications come to use the term as it is used today—to let you know who all the fine folks are that are responsible for creating your favorite magazine or journal? Some etymological sources say that the masthead on a ship is where you fly the flag—thus the "flag" (in a newspaper sense) is flown from its masthead. But that is a tautology. Why is the flag in a newspaper called a flag? (We've stopped using that word in the magazine world. We call the flag the "logo." Stubborn newspapermen persist, as ever.) I don't really have an answer, other than the rough guess that it originated with some broadsheet of shipping news. The first newspaper in America was Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick in Boston, in 1690. There could not have been a newspaper in the American colonies that did not concern itself with shipping and mariners and the like, and most likely on the front page, over the fold.

I like the association, actually. It's neat to think of every little publication as its own ship, on its own journey, with captain and crew steadfast and loyal at the helm. We may not really compete with the Titanics and Lusitanias and Disney Cruise Ships of the world, but we have our own white whales to chase. Personally, I am not afraid of heights, and I don't mind being on the lookout for ice bergs and pirates and friendly trade winds. Avast!—The Editor in Cheese

Song & Dance

2005-01-04T10:42:00.000-06:00

We noticed in the Sunday Times magazine a twenty-five-page advertising supplement promoting the Times’ "Arts & Leisure Weekend." That would be this coming weekend, and it would encompass hundreds of events across the country (even spreading to Europe). What type of thing are we talking about here? Mostly it is theater and art shows, but also includes—somewhat oddly, we thought—restaurants, spas, health clubs, and "attractions." It’s fun to browse through the supplement to learn what is going on in your own neck of the woods—but also to learn what other necks of other woods the New York Times seems to occupy throughout this bitterly divided land. The supplement constitutes fully a third of the issue, so it must be a big deal. (Paid for, apparently, by four full-page ads in the pagination by "Weekend" presenters Volkswagen, Mastercard, UBS, and Microsoft.)

Lots of publishing companies are trying this sort of thing, including our own little enterprise here at The Rake. Surely the Times is trying to fight the same weight as the New Yorker, which has quietly cultivated the New Yorker Festival into the gold standard in this particular area of the publishing biz. And the NYer Festival has merely been the locomotive at the front of a spiffy train of similar events and services that complement the book, and no doubt account for the magazine’s celebrated return to profitability last year. The New Yorker’s events and marketing department today is a wide-ranging juggernaut of brand-extension. (We noticed, for example, an advertisement in last week’s issue for a new service at Cartoonbank.com, the New Yorker’s online store, that resells New Yorker comics. The ad was promoting a new feature: Licensing cartoons for corporate reports and presentations. Go, Bob Mankoff, go! When will you return our call?)

So what is the story with every little festival accosting the good readers of America? You kind of have to make allowances for a huge diversity of offerings--from the shite "home tours" to the cerebral book signings to full-blown parties—but basically they are of a piece. The "branded editorial event" is the sort of marketing and "brand-extension" operation that can do two things. One, it "leverages relationships" with potential advertisers. Two, it offers interesting real-life opportunities to readers. Without offering both of these things, though, we feel like these things are a tremendous waste of effort—not to mention a possible distraction from a magazine that might improve its position in the world by merely being a better magazine.

Now, the New Yorker has a delicate and valuable brand that automatically lends any event a certain class and panache, a certain attractive world view. We suppose the New York Times does too, but it is interesting that they brand this event as a particular section of the newspaper. Each section of the paper surely has its own identity and voice, and this is probably a good thing—for the paper, but not necessarily for a festival. We wonder what the "Week in Review Weekend" would look like. Lots of events celebrating short-term memory? A movie marathon of "Memento"?

There’s a lot of cork in this particular wine, but if you’re lucky enough to live in New York, you may drink long and deep. From our point of view, the real value of the "Arts & Leisure Weekend" will be the limited number of Manhattan events that really flex the muscle of the brand. The "Times Talks" series, tacked on as the last page of the supplement, is where New York readers really luck out. We here in the Twin Cities can go to Gold’s Gym any day out of the year, with or without the imprimatur of the New York Times. But if you’re in Manhattan this weekend, you could see Times reporters interviewing Kiefer Sutherland, Billy Joe Armstrong, Chuck Close, Bill Murray, and Amy Tan—and that’s just in the first twenty-four hours. Blue-chip advertisers like Microsoft, Mastercard, and VW probably don’t care about these tiny little first-come-first-seated events at the City University of New York. But without them, they’d be underwriting a whole lot of events that would go off just fine without them or the Times.

And that is ultimately what the print-media festival is about. Coincidentally, it is precisely what print advertising is about: You are an advertiser, and you want good customers. So you associate yourself with a brand that already has them. All that’s left to be sorted out is who pays whom for the privilege. And whether readers actually get something they didn’t already have.—The Editor in Cheese

Comic Relief

2005-01-03T13:40:00.000-06:00

Well, I never did find Jim Romenesko ice fishing, but I found the flu. So last night abed, I had two friendly companions—the DVD player and a magazine. I’ve had a copy of the movie "American Splendor" gathering dust on top of the TV for months, and I grabbed the latest issue of the New Yorker. It was an interesting coincidence.

To refresh your memory and mine, "American Splendor" is about Harvey Pekar, the Ohio working stiff who authored a famous comic book series of the same title. During one of those times when comics and graphic novels become fashionable, Random House published an anthology of the first numbers in 1986—ten years after American Splendor No.1 was pulped. In the normal course of publicity glad-handing and ass-grabbing, and glad-handed ass-grabbing, Pekar was invited to be a guest on David Letterman’s popular television show. Letterman found Pekar a raw, entertaining, and combative guest, and kept inviting him back.

Pekar never had much patience for anyone, and it didn’t take long for him to rebel against "the American Dream" which Letterman believed he was offering Pekar—in other words, anomic midwestern working stiff gets rare opportunity to become world-famous TV star, not unlike the Ball State graduate himself. It ended badly between the two of them, in part because Pekar just doesn’t like people that much, and because a few TV appearances with the cynical, mocking David Letterman shows just how devalued the Warholian "fifteen minutes" of fame has become. Also, Pekar seems to prefer his life of relative obscurity and subterranean credibility. It’s both his muse and his material. He couldn’t stop being himself just to be a celebrity.

Here in my sickbed, I say it was a coincidence, because now I am looking at last week’s New Yorker, and in it there is a nice little comic feature by R. Crumb and his wife Aline. Pekar and Crumb were old friends from Cleveland, and it was Crumb who originally encouraged Pekar to write comics, though Pekar had (and has) no facility as an artist.

As "American Splendor" makes clear, Crumb was an underground sensation as early as the mid sixties, making a decent living, hanging out with bohemians, moving to San Francisco, and generally being himself a substantial, life-supporting satellite of that whole Merry Prankster, Summer of Love, hippy-dippy cultural moment.

And now, forty years later, he makes the pages of the world’s greatest magazine.

Am I the only one who finds that a little depressing? I realize Crumb has been in previous issues, and I realize that the New Yorker has hardly been sitting on its thumbs--having within the past twelve months published full spreads by, for example, Chris Ware. (Credit Bob Mankoff with being a true hero of the revolution, though we’re not sure anyone has noticed, even when it is a National Book Award winner. I mean, you know, like who really cares about the "graphic novel" category anyway?) So it certainly is not the New Yorker’s fault--nor even David Letterman’s fault. But there is a persistent, aggravated tension between mainstream media and comic artists, and I wonder if it can ever be fully overcome.

Is there something inherently anti-social about serious, adult-oriented comics, something that causes an inevitable backlash and fall-out and back-slide into obscurity? That prevents the final big breakthrough into mass culture that seems to be the forever just-out-of-reach apotheosis? (And what would that look like, anyway? A Dan Clowes page in every newspaper and magazine in the land?) It’s a wonderful and unique art form, but can it be a billion-dollar industry like film or video games? We’re tempted to say that its greatest naturalist pioneers—Crumb and Pekar—were too steeped in hippy paranoia and politics to ever allow themselves to be embraced by "Big Media." Or maybe they just have not translated to other mechanical requirements as gracefully as others.

Well, the fact that I am watching a major motion picture about a filing clerk from Cleveland should tell you something. That I am reading a three-page feature drawn by R. Crumb in the world’s most prestigious magazine is also another clue. We call it the First Corollary to the Thermodynamic Law of Pastry Acquisition and Consumption (alternate, informal name: Letterman’s Razor): In rare cases, it is possible to have your cake and eat it too—but you may have to do it without anyone else noticing or caring.

On the other hand, y’know, comics are still basically for kids, right?—The Editor in Cheese

Down Time

2004-12-28T10:04:00.000-06:00

We hear Jim Romenesko is ice fishing up on Mille Lacs. We're investigating. See you in a week.—The Editor in Cheese

Bigger & Better: Linkless But Insinuating Christmas Edition

2004-12-24T11:36:00.000-06:00

Sitting around the office yesterday, we had noticed the proliferation of little pamphlet-sized magazines in our fair city—in fact, in cities all over the country. These are neat little publications, not because of anything that is in them, necessarily, but just because of the way they are. The format is fun, easy to pick up, maybe tuck into your back pocket—if your back pocket isn't already occupied by a wallet full of ATM receipts which represent cash that very briefly occupied that same space.

There are a couple of competing titles here in the Twin Cities. One is the clunky, unfortunately named "The Cites," which has some kind of pronunciation bar over the "e." (Note to self: simple puns rely on simple recognition. The sights? The citations?) For about six months, we read this as a typographic error in their very logo, rather than a device of surpassing cleverness. We hear through the grapevine that "Industry" is a knockoff started by a band of disgruntled "Cites" mutineers. (We hope this revolution was started by a righteous copy editor, but we have our doubts.)

Neither of these magazines has an editor, per se, which is fine because neither really has much editorial content to speak of. This is alright by us. The pictures are certainly pretty, the paper is heavy and white, and there is a certain sassiness to the design that must appeal to the twenty-something audience that palms these little magazines in the lobbies of strib clubs and martini bars.

As it turns out, a lot of serious Big League magazines are now toying with this sort of format, particularly in Europe. A couple years ago, Conde Nast-Europe began publishing pocket-sized versions of GQ and one or two other titles. In fact, the paractice goes way back, at least to World War II. One of the secrets of the New Yorker's massive success was their "pony edition" which they published during the war, without advertisements, for the leisure of American soldiers abroad. When those GIs came home, they were easily converted into a massive inflow of subscribers to the full-sized, ad-enhanced version of the magazine.

One can never think too literally about media, especially about the way people actually use the TV, or a CD, a book, or a magazine. What does it feel like in your hands? What is the actual, concrete experience of using this form of entertainment? In the magazine world, we frequently talk about "heft" value. How heavy is it in your hands? (Warning to all self-respecting editors: this, sadly, bears no relationship at all to the "substance" therein. Those perfume inserts are great scale-tippers though!) Part of this is down to nothing more than advertising. More advertising equals more pages. More pages equals more respect. Advertisers are pack animals, and they tend to gather where other advertisers have gathered. As our friend Dave Pirner once said, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

And yet, we think it is more than professional jealously that compells us to say what we must now say: It is possible to have TOO much of a good thing—whether it is ad pages or edit pages. There is nothing as easy to ignore as a 400-page issue of Vanity Fair, as great as that magazine is. And we very nearly missed Dave Eggers' disarmingly restrained story on Monty Python in the "Winter Fiction" issue of The New Yorker, just because we find these fat theme issues off-putting.

We look at our so-called competitors here in Minneapolis/St.Paul, and we are exercised. We strain our back picking these door-stoppers up off the floor beneath the mail slot, and we are just overwhelmed by hundreds of pages of... well, nothing much at all. (The size itself is annoying. But what is infuriating is how little they do with how much they have. There is a special circle in hell reserved for the idle rich.)

To be perfectly fair, the January issue of Vanity Fair—traditionally one of the thinnest of the year, advertisers having blown their wads in December—always sets records for uninterrupted edit pages, this year something like 80 straight full-pages of feature stories and jump pages. We find this nearly unreadable too. It's just too much. We prefer to invest that much time into a good book with a sustained subject and voice. Or a video game.—The Editor in Cheese

OK, you get ONE MORE wish. Don't waste it!

2004-12-23T11:18:00.000-06:00

Michael Miner can be forgiven for his rather unimaginative wish for the New Year—that more people will start reading newspapers. Why should they? We're tired of this perennial kvetch, especially coming from Chicago, where just about every trick has been tried other than improving the quality of the actual newspaper.

We were reminded the other day of the fact that Chicago, during the Gilded Age, used to have more than thirty daily newspapers. (We're also reminded: That's a helluva lot of tinder set at the feet of old Mrs. O' Leary's cow. A purifying fire, to be sure.) Even up until 1960, the windy city had eight major dailies.

In almost every other field of publishing, the drift has been clear: toward specialization and away from generalization. You find enthusiasts and you service them. You stop worrying about quantity in your demographics and start worrying about quality. This, it seems to us, is where advertising departments have been light-years ahead of editorial departments. THEY'LL be glad to tell you the unique selling proposition of their publications, while the editors sit on their thumbs and send around instant messages carping about this afternoon's "business seminar." But newspapers are the last great holdouts of the Bigger is Always Better school.

In a curious way, editors and advertisers are the idiots in this equation. It is the advertisers—well, more often their knucklehead media-buyers—who distrust the smoke-and-mirrors of the media kit. They like to see raw, audited circulation numbers, and hang the rest of it. Editors, too, distrust "reader profiles" and the endless smorgasboard of pie-charts and bar-graphs that purport to isolate every minor buying habit of their beloved reader, from a vague intention in the next fiscal quarter to buy a refrigerator from Southest Asia, to which direction they put the toilet paper on the roll. This skepticism is understandable, especially if you are an editor who has no clear picture in your own mind of who your reader might be. One does not create a reader from a collection of purchasing habits. One creates a reader with the imagination. (This is the real failure of the Chicago "reds.")

We have no real quarrel with our own advertising people. We love them. They dress beautifully, they're smart, they're quick with a dirty joke, their pinkies are in the air almost as often as our own, and so on. Most important, they understand that the editors' committment to a ~certain kind of reader~ is inviolable. And that this a bankable asset.

Newspapers should not wish to be widely read. They should wish to be more thoroughly and passionately read. Consider it a matter of public safety.—The Editor in Cheese

Got Jesus?

2004-12-22T11:33:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, the people who organize the Gay Pride parade in the Twin Cities filed a complaint against the Star Tribune. This one could sting: They are complaining to the Minnesota Commission on Civil Rights because the Strib apparently refused to publish an advertisement for the parade that showed two men kissing.

Many interested readers who pay attention to the subtleties have been piqued by the Strib in recent years—in fact, ever since Keith Moyers took over the paper. There have been some real brow-raising moments, particularly on the publishing side of the paper. Last summer, for example, there was a widespread rumor that high-ranking ad executives were avid followers of Luis Palau. Thus had his ballyhooed "Twin Cities Festival" not only got sweetheart status in the sales department, but the edit department had also bowed to the will of the Lord and published numerous odd features that could only be called fawning.

Then this fall, the paper refused to publish an advertisement that had no images at all— in fact, it was a piece of poster art depicting a bunch of numbers. It was a mathematical compendium of the lives and limbs lost so far in Iraq. (An advertisement we subsequently published in The Rake, incidentally. Of all the consipiracy theories, we like the one that suggests the Strib has something against simple math. It certainly seems to be catching in the newspaper industry.)

So what the hell is going on with the Newspaper of the Twin Cities? We doubt whether there's truly an emergent Christian fundamentalist impulse taking over down on Portland Avenue. Like most of these things, the real story is found neither on the front page nor the ad pages nor even in the op-ed pages, but in the McClatchy spread sheets.

It is just barely possible that the Strib is hoping to outflank the Pioneer Press's alleged play to the right (going for all those wacky Woodbury readers with backyard bomb-shelters, you know). What is more likely is that the business is simply responding to a certain neap tide of community sentiment. While the city's liberal core has been just as loud and outraged as ever, the Christian right has—as they say—been emboldened by what we in the Big Bad Media have made of them in the past 90 days.

We don't hear about it so much here on the far-left side of downtown—but then we've always tried to respect community standards in a kind of surgical way. (A smarter culture war!) But over there on the right side of Minneapolis, we imagine the Strib has seen a real spike in envelopes bearing a return address from the Holy Name Society. The Strib is undoubtedly the bellwether for this type of critical mass. On the opposite end of the publishing spectrum, we understand there are similar pressures. We hear through the grapevine that the Minneapolis office of the Onion is no longer accepting display ads for sexual services—in other words, pictures of boys kissing boys—and it sure as hell ain't because they suddenly got Jesus.

One word, people: Circulation.—The Editor in Cheese

My Grandmother and Nirvana

2004-12-21T01:30:00.000-06:00

I found an old scratched-up CD of Nirvana's "In Utero" in my desk drawer today, no jewel case. I put it in the tray, pressed play. Of all Nirvana's records, I like it best. It is the most raw, the most punk rock. At the time it was released, I remember, it was kind of a middle finger to the mainstream radio stations and fans that had annointed the band some kid of voice of a generation. They'd hired Steve Albini to produce their sequel to "Nevermind," and no one likes Steve Albini. (Don't feel bad for Steve. He prefers it that way.)

Until In Utero, I was skeptical of Nirvana. I remember hearing "Smells Like Teenage Spirit" on the radio while I was in Boston, in graduate school. Between classes on medieval church history and Mesopotamian creation myths, I said to myself, "This will be huge." In the world of rock music, there aren't many sure bets, but you had to be pretty dense not to realize that song was going to make a few people very, very wealthy. Nirvana, as far as I was concerned, was never really "underground," never really "punk rock" the way I understood it (and preferred it), even though that's one of the things they most wanted to be. They were trying desperately to be authentic outsiders, trying to espouse noble causes, to pay obeisance to the saints of latterday punk like the Meat Puppets and Husker Du. But as far as I was concerned, they'd always been a commercial enterprise. They just sounded too good and pleased too many people. It was easy to see their endorsements and pronouncements as poses, as commodifications of the things I valued. (I realize now that no one was better equipped to recognize imitative, faux punk rock than a semi-privileged white kid from exurban Minneapolis, who wanted deperately to be a beer-swilling, heroin-shooting, bin-liner-wearing bloke, pogoing to the amphetamine beat of the Jam or Black Flag or the Minutemen. Now I see the diminishing value of belonging to a club where you recognize other members by their haircuts.)

Anyway, at about that time I started publishing a weekly zine. Yeah, weekly! It was insane, but I didn't have much else going on. It was a weird little xeroxed pamphlet that I called "The Blue Reader." It contained short little experimental stories, the type of thing that has come to be called micro-fiction or "short-short" stories. (After putting this thing together for about a year, I realized the much-loved writer Donald Barthelme had been doing the same thing, a helluva lot better, about thirty years previously. Ah me; there is nothing new under the sun.) But part of the fun was publishing this thing just the way I wanted to, without any real consideration at all for who might pick it up and read it. In my egotism, I assumed the brilliance of my stories would be self-evident. It was a very mannered kind of experiment; I refused to put page numbers or titles on the pages. The only way you knew where one story ended and another began was a sudden change in fonts. (Yes, the heady early days of desktop publishing. I loved my fonts!) A couple of friends began to write stories for The Blue Reader, and the way you found out who had written what was to look on the last page, where the stories were indexed by their first line, sort of like in a protestant hymnal.

Well, my grandmother, who died last Friday at the grand old age of 93, once got a hold of several copies of The Blue Reader. Her critical verdict? "Too many dirty words. Do you have to use those kind of dirty words?" As far as I know, she never looked at my work again. (I am at her funeral today.)

I realize now that there is a lot of value in thinking about your audience, thinking about who might pick up your little pamphlet or magazine or book. It is the final little shine you put on a story, it is the impetus for one last read-through and brush-up, make that cowlick behave, dandruff off the shoulder. What will an indifferent reader think of this? Have I made an honest effort to invite him in? If not, what am I trying to hide? Just how badly would this alienate my grandmother?

When you sit down to create something, your first thought should not be about who you might offend, either intentionally or accidentally. But it should not be your last thought, either.-Jem Casey

Dancing About Architecture

2004-12-20T13:37:00.000-06:00

If there is a holy trinity of writers who capture the spirit of what we're trying to do here at The Rake, we would identify them as follows: E.B. White, H.L. Mencken, and Flann O'Brien. Much to the wife's irritation, we have taken to hauling these three separate volumes all around the house, sort of juggling between the pig farm, Baltimore, and a Dublin pub. They're paperbacks. Taken together, they are still less burdensome than "I Am Charlotte Simmons," which wastes under the bed.

Last Friday, we were sitting contentedly by the fireplace shuffling through these three books, having a nip of whiskey. In the back of our mind, we thought we might set down the books and do something adventurous. Earlier in the day, we'd heard that Kid Dakota was playing a concert at a bar down the street. Now we're sort of beyond the age of rock 'n' roll, and well beyond the age of voluntarily marinating in cigarette smoke and overpriced cocktails, but we like what we've heard about this Dakota kid. When the better half got home, she cast a disapproving glance at the tower of books presently in rotation on the sideboard. We received permission to check out the kid.

We've been hearing for a few years about Darren Jackson, the musician who calls himself Kid Dakota, who also dabbles in a few other projects, such as the Olympic Hopefuls (great name for a band!). When the local weekly posted an MP3 last week, we got hooked right away.

One of the ongoing, low-level frustrations of toiling as a writer: You go to see a brilliant young musician. You sit there passively; he works his magic under cover of stagelight and volume; he makes your own interior strings resonate sympathetically, powerfully; your throat catches, your eyes irrigate.

And, being a writer, you immediately convert this experience into professional jealousy. Your fear is that the medium in which you work—words—just cannot compete with this. People are not reading the way they used to read, because they are being enticed away by their other senses. Film, music, dance, theater, TV, even the web—these all engage several senses at once, and they can be taken in without much participatory effort, beyond parking your butt in a point of vantage and ordering a pint. The prospect seems so much more daunting to write a thing of beauty, that can really move a reader the way a good song or a good film can do, that doesn't instantly become tomorrow's fish-wrap. (I'm not saying it's easier to write a great three-minute song; just easier to imagine that it will move your auditor.)

Over the years, several people have said something along the lines of "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." (We prefer to attribute the saying to Frank Zappa, who seems the most credible candidate, and whose music was the most difficult to describe.) We see the point of this bromide. It is impossible to compete with the visceral power of music, and yet like moths to light, the music journalists—maybe more than anyone—are constantly trying to capture the numenous qualities of our most powerful art form.

And yet Zappa's Razor has its limitations. It cannot really be applied to all writing, as you think maybe it should. Writing, as a medium, is most like visual art. It takes a certain willful act of participation from the reader. You have to be willing to spend some time in it, it could involve some work, you might not know immediately what you're looking at. But in the end, you may be rewarded for your effort with a more memorable experience. You may even buy the damn thing for your bookshelf or your living room wall.

Still, we think we've hit upon the perfect new strategy: The party shuffle of literature. Pick three of your favorite books, and keep them in heavy rotation. When the going gets tough in one, move on to the next. Either come back and try again, or trade out the voulme. Listen while I tell you: You have nothing to lose but the sanity of your domestic partner. Begob, there's my bus.—The Editor in Cheese

Strunk and White and Read All Over

2004-12-17T15:35:00.000-06:00

Especially clever readers of The Rake know what we think of E.B. White. He is one of our pole stars. When things seem to be getting a little too serious or ornery or inhuman or just too damn wordy, and the readers are in trouble, we refer back to the American master of the humane essay. Just last night, we picked up our dog-eared, spineless, heavily highlighted copy of his greatest hits. Like that old Bible trick, we let it fall open. And we reread White's wonderful little profile of Professor WIlliam Strunk Jr. , the man who originally wrote "The Elements of Style."

That book, of course, is considered gospel today in most college composition courses. But before White wrote this profile of Strunk for the New Yorker, "The Elements of Style" was a tiny, self-published little pamphlet that had fallen into disuse. (Strunk had been White's composition instructor at Cornell.) Shortly thereafter, White was asked to produce a new edition of the book. Thus was it reborn into celebrity as "Strunk and White," its nom de guerre ever since. We keep it within reach at all times. We think not enough people actually read it or take its chastening message to heart.

Over lunch yesterday we happened to be browsing through the latest issue of a good local paper that publishes some of our favorite writers, including some Rake contributors. But something funny had happened to the copy. It had been run through some kind of taffy-stretching machine. Where we expected a crisp bite, we got several mouthfuls of soggy prose. Here is a random sentence that we noticed: "I don't know what the lens looking back at me reveals about my thoughts on sex, but I imagined on the other side of the room sat a lonely rotund businessman who called for a raven-haired hottie while wiping his sweaty forehead with a filthy handkerchief." The excerpt made us feel a little sad, because we suspected that our friend the writer didn't have much fun writing this.

But speaking mechanically, this is a good example of gilding the lily, of obscuring the picture by trying to be too precise. Some of the best writing is distinguished by what is left unsaid. It reminded us of one of White's most wonderful emendations to the Elements of Style. Under "Style Rule Number Four" ("write with nouns and verbs"), he says, "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place." We think this is exactly right. It is our constant struggle to unhitch adjectives from exhausted nouns that are spinning their wheels in swampy sentences. (No one is blameless, by the way. That last sentence is way too wordy, for example. Practically roccoco. We would have improved it, but we are conserving our strength for print.)

So, we have a larger more interesting point to make. We were also reminded of Garrison Keillor's most recent novel, "Love Me." We liked that book about as well as any of his novels, which is quite a lot. Maybe a little bit more than the others, because it was his most directly autobiographical novel. It was sort of like Bill Murray in "Lost In Translation." The perfect autobiographical vehicle, even if it was slow and uninteresting to anyone who isn't a superstar in literature or film.

Keillor, in the person of his pseudonymous self, Larry Wyler, discusses his years at the New Yorker, and it's a fun read. But there were two bizarre falsifications. First, he made legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn into a capering cad, whereas Shawn (it is said) was actually a mousey, painfully agoraphobic genius. We'll chalk this one up to humorous inversion, though we're not sure it works.

More bizarre is Keillor's sustained soto voce attack on "Strunk and White's Elements of Style." At several points in the book, it is a metaphoric stand-in for writerly indulgence and wrong-headedness. Late in the novel, Keillor puts these words into William Shawn's mouth:

"I don't want you to turn into a stylist like White and devote your life to painting Easter eggs. Him and Strunk have screwed up more writers than gin and scoth combined. You take the Elements of Style too seriously and you'll get so you spend three days trying to write a simple thank-you note and you'll wind up buying a nickel-plated .38 and robbing newsboys out of sheer frustration."

Now, we can understand the contrarian desire to dismiss any formulaic approach to writing—there is a strong sense among writers that the act of writing is more like surfing than wood-working. So reducing the act to a handful of rules is offensive in principle. White knew this and wrote about it. He said trying to analyze good writing is like dissecting a frog; it won't hop any more, and the innards will interest only the scientifically minded.

But we can hardly think of another writer who better embodies many of the principles of Strunk and White. Few writers are as concise and fluid as Keillor, few writers are so parsimonious about their structure, few writers make every word count the way Keillor does. (Corollary: Comedy is HARD!) And few writers have had the spine to leave the New Yorker as a result of having even higher standards of style and simplicity.

Strunk and White would have been proud of Keillor, we think. Despite Keillor's odd dissing of the masters.—The Editor in Cheese

Haves And Have-Nots

2004-12-16T11:36:00.000-06:00

Last night, we stayed late at the office in order to crash a party upstairs. We were finishing the new issue, too. Needless to say, we were thirsty. Someone here in the art department (always the hipsters at any magazine) had received an invitation to the WEA/ADA office holiday shindig up on the seventh floor.

WEA is Warner Elektra Atlantic, and ADA is the Alternative Distribution Alliance. In other words, the music biz—or at least Time Warner's local folks whose main job is to make sure Best Buy and Target stores get their CD inventory. We're told that Best Buy and Target are today the two largest retailers of music on the planet, followed closely by Wal-Mart.

Now, we've seen our fair share of music-biz hipsters on elevators, and we've gibbered about Pavement and Modest Mouse enough to know how to inveigle our way into a high-buck party in a swank office with leather couches and atomic sound systems. We made our way up.

There were beautiful boys and girls everywhere, and there were framed records on the walls, and there was a spread of salsa and hummos and celery sticks, and a god-awful lot of liquor, beer, and wine. We tried to chit-chat with the powerful people, but the powerful people were standing back with arms folded over name tags, avoiding eye contact, trying to make sure—we guess—that no one set the place on fire. (Smoking! Inside the office! When was the last time you saw that? Rock 'n' roll!)

We were overwhelmed by the memory of working more directly with the music industry, the way we did a few years ago. Any setting like this is always a study in extremes. You have very powerful, very wealthy executives in tony offices, with unlimited expense accounts, surrounded by starving artists and prestige laborers. That is, the music industry is a star-making industry that attracts all sorts of good-hearted people who will work for peanuts as long as they can be in an office that plays cool music, and allows you to wear leather pants and tee-shirts to work. (The magazine business is not dissimilar,with one minor difference: We don't get filthy rich. Also, leather makes our butts sweat. We hate that.) The neatest trick is when big money gets paired with a brilliant idea, and deserving people receive their just reward—from an ingenious A&R guy, to a cutthroat distribution manager, to a superoriginal band that represents the future of rock 'n' roll. It does happen.

This is a neat trick because it is the rare exception. Money tends to be conservative, hunger tends to be desperate. It happens just often enough to be maddening—powerful people with equal amounts of money and curiosity, willing to take a risk on creativity.

We mention all this, because we ran into an old friend at the party, Simon Peter Groebner. He is now comfortably installed in a permanent position with the Star Tribune, where he writes about music, and god bless him for it. We've known Simon Peter for almost ten years now, and he's been through a lot. The life of the writer and editor can be a difficult one, especially if you can't pick up and move to another city. Back in the day, we used to run into Groebner at places like the music conference SXSW, down in Texas. It was not uncommon to find that Simon had hitchhiked the whole way, and was sleeping on whatever floor of whichever record executive's hotel room he could weasel for the night. That was certainly rock 'n' roll, and we always felt a pang of guilt for being—at the time—at the front end of the gravy train.

Anyway, Simon Peter at one point took one of the coolest jobs in the Twin Cities. He became the editor of FATE magazine—an awesome, pulpy, salacious little publication that explores the supernatural and the conspiratorial. FATE is one of the oldest magazines in the Twin Cities, having been launched back in the forties. In the 1980s, Carl Weschke, the wiccan head of Llewellyn publishing in St. Paul, bought the magazine. It seemed like a match made in, erm, a parallel universe. By the late-90s, Simon Peter was working on the magazine, and quickly rose through the ranks to become its editor in chief.

This was right at the peak of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Files. The time could not have been better for FATE magazine to boldly go into new markets, and capture young readers. Simon Peter, in his first job as an editor, put together one of the finest business plans we have ever seen—laying out just how he and his team were going to take FATE where it had never been taken before, into the big time and into the mainstream.

The main problem with FATE was that it remained inertly earnest. It was a magazine locked in the 1950s. It ran stories about UFOs and Loch Ness Monsters without acknowledging the exploding, post-ironic world of pop culture. It spoke to its audience as if time had stood still for them, too. In other words, FATE was comfortable with a fringy readership that could not tolerate any real skepticism, or tongue-in-cheek irony, or even the mainstream popularization of its subject matter.

Llewellyn at the time was totally cashing in on the phenomenon, becoming the world's largest publisher of "occult" books, especially a series about witchcraft specifically for teenage girls. It was pretty cool.

So. Everything was perfectly in place. A brilliant young editor with a great idea and a solid business plan, and plenty of money at his disposal. The only thing missing was the go-ahead, the nod of confidence, the "damn the torpedos, what are we going to lose, money? We can always get more money!*" kind of entrepreneurial spirit. (*Those, by the way, were the actual words, uttered three years ago, of our own publisher. Yes, we know how lucky we have been.)

Alas. Llewellyn took a pass, the magazine was downgraded and eventually sold to an old-school FATE steward, and Simon Peter moved on. Today, he's a made man, but we can't help looking back with deep regrets at what might have been, if his bosses had had any adventurous spirit at all.

Maybe they could see into the future, and they didn't like what they saw. Fate can be such a bore.—The Editor in Cheese

Memory Lane

2004-12-15T13:22:00.000-06:00

We were thrown into a mild fit of nostalgia today, courtesy of Slate magazine. In graciously quoting an article from The Rake written by Albert Eisele, Timothy Noah erroneously cited it as being from the current (December) issue of the magazine. We certainly don't mind if Slate quotes us and makes us look smart and timely. But that essay was published in May of 2003.

Almost from the date we launched the magazine, we'd been working on Albert Eisele. He is the editor in chief of The Hill, in Washington D.C., and a native of Minnesota who made his way to the capitol when he was Vice President Walter Mondale's press secretary. Eisele was a high-value target in our magazine's hunt for interesting and smart writers working on unexpected stories. Anyway, we thought it would be very interesting to get Al's perspective on the long decline of Minnesota democrats on the national stage. Where were the men and women who could steward the state's good name? What had Minnesota's reputation become in Washington? How was it possible that the same state that had produced two solidly liberal vice presidents, and two radically liberal presidential candidates—how had this same state produced Sentor Norm Coleman? The same Sen. Coleman who, during this peacable holiday season, has been making a national ass of himself by loudly demanding the head of Kofi Annan?

We don't remember if we asked Al to try to keep his piece light— not too heavy-handed in terms of partisan preferences. But we scarcely needed to tell him how to keep 'er between the fenceposts. After all, he's got decades of experience reporting and editing political stories in the most neutral way possible. In fact, we were very pleasantly surprised by his assessment of "The Minnesota Model."

It turns out that Minnesota's long tradition of progressive politics has as much to do with the Republican party as the Democratic party. Nationally, we are frequently remembered by our historical highwater mark of Hubert H. Humphrey (and his hand-picked acolyte, Walter Mondale). But before that generation of red-faced and owlish liberals took the dais, there was a previous generation of Republicans who had established the standard: Moderate government, reasonable taxation, widespread committment to the common weal (especially education), an abhorrence of corruption (and the appearance of same), embracing the global palliative of the UN, and so on.

Al Eisele's essay reminded us that the values we hold dear here in the blue heartland are values that used to be shared by both parties, that were actually established by the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Sen. Coleman should bear the scruffy ears and remarkable intelligence of a loveable political mutt. But the inevitable view of him is not charitable. Even party flacks see him as a flip-flopping turn-coat who once was Paul Wellstone's biggest supporter, who then became a Republican for no apparent reason other than to get elected mayor of St. Paul, who now finds himself spouting some of the most silly Republican clap-trap. He is a favorite lap-dog of President Bush's, which is probably the most obvious betrayal of any moderate impulse he might ever have had. There are many things you can say about Sen. Coleman. But you would not say he is his own man.

Our Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, also has the manner and bearing of a centrist Republican like Clark MacGregor or Elmer Anderson. (The latter, we note, had a John Kerry sign in his lawn in the weeks before he died, rest his honorable soul.) But the boyish gubernator is constantly proposing radical-right nonsense such as reinstituting the death penalty, and weasling out of unflattering revelations about his strange business dealings.

The problem as we see it is that the perceived shift to benighted, self-serving, I-got-mine Republicanism is being followed by a real one. But maybe this is a temporary thing. The last election was a sign, we think, that things are evolving back toward the middle, at least here in Minnesota. Still, we prescribe a strong dose of historical perspective, just to insure a speedy recovery. There are still some nasty viruses abroad.—The Editor in Cheese

Breaking News—Later Today at 3 PM!

2004-12-14T11:16:00.000-06:00

We were amused to see StarTribune.com, along with virtually every other online news outlet in the country, trot out the "Breaking News!" banner yesterday for the Scott Peterson trial, whatever that was. In an effort to string this along, first the big news was that the jury had reached a decision. Then, a few minutes later: Verdict to be announced later this afternoon! The appointed hour arrived. Scott Peterson receives the death sentence!

Now, we're not going to grouch about the depredations of cable television and second-string newspapers. They do what they have to do, and anyone still trying desperately to hold them all to a higher standard has a long row to hoe indeed. We are intrigued, actually, by the phenomenon of the newsworm— which is similar to the earworm, where an annoying pop song gets into your head through no fault or voluntary act of your own.

We have almost literally no knowledge of the Scott Peterson affair. We have actively ignored it. He killed someone—his wife? She was pregnant, or had a small child? He was trying to weasel out of it? He looks a little like our brother, especially those petulant lips? All of this detail somehow got through the active, aggressive, angry filters we have in place to not waste our time on such an obvious and vacant ploy for our attention. We are proud to declare that we have wasted no time on this (other than right now), so the filters have done their job. And yet it has been a story with such a high level of saturation, it's like trying to keep your feet dry in a canoe.

We do not know whether television stations interrupted regular programming to announce this staggering news, but we think probably they did. (If we had to guess, we'd say the daytime viewing audience could not wish to see anything more titillating or gratifying.)

And we think back with a deep sense of pride for our countrymen when we think of the idiotic CBS producer who was fired for breaking into CSI:NY to convey the news that Yaser Arafat had passed away. An impotent world leader in the most embattled precinct on the globe! It's not like he was going to be alive again by the time the 11 p.m. news came on. What was she thinking?!—The Editor in Cheese

Whose Ox Would Jesus Gore?

2004-12-13T13:11:00.000-06:00

We've carped a lot lately about that annoying person who claims that "the mainstream media" does not cover this story or that story. Our boilerplate response is that this person has simply not looked hard enough. (Hint: Most public libraries now provide free web access—when they are open.) As an afterthought, we often ask: What story were you looking for, precisely?

If you honestly believe that newsrooms are driven by national politics, that reporters at real news organizations are secretly trying to get you to vote for a Democrat, then we think you maybe don't understand journalism very well. The only bona fide, premediated prejudice that we know of is to be the first to report a credible story.

This is why so many media people are so bent out of shape about the Fox News Channel. Fox has successfully convinced its viewers that all other news outlets have a liberal bias. The only formulaic way to distinguish yourself from all other news organizations in one stroke is to be what all the others are not—subtly but unmistakeably partisan. (You want an example of a news organization that does the same thing on the lefty side of the equation?)

The other day, we got into a conversation with a particularly smart neo-con. He seemed smart to us, anyway, because he was willing to talk about facts rather than opinions—a rare bird indeed. We said, "Facts are not partisan. The truth is not, itself, predisposed to one particular party or another." He seemed to disagree. We proceeded to talk facts, and we found that the facts themselves were frequently in dispute, even when they came from what any normal person would consider a neutral source. It was news to us, but even the University of Maryland folks who found a majority of Fox viewers believe the opposite of the reported facts—are being attacked.

(Typically, convoluted arguments are fomented about particular semantic and syntactical questions. If you have no stomach for this kind of tit-for-tat, skip to the next graf. Sometimes you have to get dirt under your nails to gainsay an idealogue. An example: PIPA found that most Fox viewers believe Saddam Hussein solicited uranium from Niger, whereas this is simply not true, and has never been proven. But if you are a neo-con, you say this: Niger does not equal Africa! There are studies—the Hutton Report, the 9/11 Commission—that show British intelligence suggested it was solicited from somewhere else in Africa.)

"It depends on whose ox you're trying to gore," said our neo-con friend.

See, that is precisely the problem. There is no ox to gore. Reporters at real news organizations don't give a toss for anything but the late-breaking, exclusive-scoop, over-the-fold story with their byline on it. To put a point on it, with our example: Either Hussein went looking for uranium in Africa, or he did not. If he did, it would have been reported that way. The sketchy intelligence President Bush may or may not have believed and based his actions and his speeches on is irrelevant. There is no independent, verifiable proof that Hussein ever went looking for uranium in Africa, which is why it has never been reported by a news organization. So why do Fox viewers believe this untruth?

It is interesting to find neo-conservatives now arguing so vehemently on the side of epistemological relativism— that there is no news, that there are no facts, that can be communicated WITHOUT some sort of normative spin, without an "ox to gore." Call it the Heisenberg principle of journalism— we cannot observe and record reality without promoting (or denigrating) George W. Bush.

We can't speak for neo-conservatives, but we guess this is now the state of things: A "truth" is a self-evident moral proposition like "abortion is wrong" which does not require any physical evidence. Observable, recordable, verifiable, repeatable scientific facts, on the other hand, are rudderless things that make no sense until they've gotten a hard shove to the left or the right. What a strange world we live in!

Still, there is an easy solution. One word, actually: OMBUDSMAN. Fox News still doesn't have one.—The Editor in Cheese

No Bad Daddy Words

2004-12-10T11:06:00.000-06:00

You might find this hard to believe, but we get writers around here who constantly want to use the F-word in their stories—and presumably in their lives. (My daughters call this the "F-swear," which they've heard daddy say once or twice, I'm sorry to say. To which I have responded, "Do as I say... not, uh..... as I do—say... er. Never mind. Just don't use that word. It's a bad daddy word." ) Why do so many writers wish to use that word? Because they see so many other writers getting to use that word in other publications.

When we first launched The Rake three years ago, we considered whether or not we were going to print that word. It slipped into a few early issues, but only in direct quotes, and more or less under our breath. (If you can find the issue and the story, I will personally buy you dinner and drinks, no kidding. But you may have to sign a confidentiality agreement, heh heh.)

We never would have decided that it was OK to print the word in display type (a headline, or a pull quote, or any other loud context), and we always intended to work very hard to find alternatives to the word, even in direct quotes. This can be an interesting challenge, and it leads to some artful editing—which is one of the little word-geek things that makes this job fun.

For example, in this month's short story, by Sara Woster. The story is about a young girl whose father spends a lot of time teaching her outdoor survival skills. At one point in the story, the girl is speaking to another girl—a teenager—at the side of a hotel swimming pool somewhere in South Dakota. Here is the exchange:

"How long can you tread water?" Laurie asked, inching toward her father, who was holding open the door to the hotel.

"Who cares? It's the goddam prairie. There is no water," the girl said.

Now Sara's original draft had the girl saying "It's the fucking prairie." That is a much stronger word, much more acidic, and really works a lot better than "goddam." It rings truer, and hits the ear better. But a policy is a policy. We made the story a teeny-tiny bit worse—something we never otherwise do, especially in a piece of fiction—because we simply do not print that word. It wasn't that big a trade-off, in the grand scheme of things, and Sara was gracious about it.

When we were considering whether or not to take a hard line on this policy, I called up Adam Moss, who was at the time the editor of the New York Times magazine, and I asked him if the word "fuck" had ever appeared in the New York Times. Everyone at the Times knows the answer to that question. The word "fuck" appeared once, in a direct quote from Richard Nixon.

So that is now OUR official policy, too, and we think it's a good one: Only Richard Nixon gets to say "fuck" in print, and he's dead (though I suppose he is still imminently quotable).

Also, we get to say it on the web. Just this once, maybe.—The Editor in Cheese

And Who Did You Say You're With?

2004-12-09T11:12:00.000-06:00

Today, the AP reports the tragic news that a person with a gun charged the stage at a rock concert and opened fire. Last night in Columbus, Ohio, Damageplan was one song into its first set when a man opened fire and killed three people before being shot and killed himself by police officers. Among the dead: "Dimebag" Darrell, real name Darrell Abbott. It's the first I've heard, but the AP tells me he was among the finest "metal guitarists" of his generation. He was killed on the same day John Lennon was murdered.

I certainly don't want to insult a man tragically killed in the prime of life. I don't mind insulting the AP, though. Several things struck me about the report as it appeared at the New York Times. First, I wonder how much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair there must have been in newsrooms all over the country this morning. First, call the music critic! Do we have a music critic? Does he know anything about this band, this "Damageplan"? The early wire says "formerly of Pantera," I've heard of them, they're big, right?

Next. Shit, better brew another pot of coffee, this is going to be a long meeting with copy and standards. Is it gonna pass muster to use this guy's name—"Dimebag" in the lead? I mean, fer chrissake, that means DRUGS. And it was a nickname. But that's what everyone knew him as. "Darrell Abbott" means nothing to people. Yeah, but "Dimebag"... drugs! OK, but first reference ONLY!

OK, I'll stop pretending at this point, because I honestly don't know how newsrooms work, and The Big Cheese is too busy to ask (new issue). But what I thought was goofiest about the AP report was this paragraph:

"Telephone numbers for both Darrell and Jerry Abbott are unlisted and could not be reached early Thursday by The Associated Press."

Two thoughts on this:

A) You do not just look up a rock star in the phone book. Anyone who has ever dabbled in music journalism knows that you first subscribe to Pollstar magazine for several hundred dollars, then one to twelve months later, you get a special phonebook that allows you to look up any major record label, then a record-label phone-tree connects you to a "publicity and media" office, then you send a fax describing the reason why you called the PR office, then you are given the number of a PR person, who then promises to get back to you "later today" which is code for "after you call me about a hundred times for the next two weeks and finally reach my assistant," who then must repeat the process with an agent, who then repeats the process with a personal handler, who then "might have him call you sometime." This whole process may start over, if any one person in the line of command is away from his or her desk. Shortcut: Say you are with the Times or Rolling Stone, and this is for a cover story. Can you hold? I'll connect you now.

B) Who did they expect to answer the phone at Dimebag's house? And what would the AP have said if he'd answered?—Jem Casey

Scooper & Scooped: Poached Edition

2004-12-08T13:19:00.000-06:00

We were surprised to open up Monday's Minneapolis Star-Tribune to see Jon Tevlin's article on religion in the workplace. Surprised, because it was very similar to a feature story that was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine about a month ago. We'd noticed Russell Shorto's feature, not only because it was a compelling cover story, but because its main subject was a small bank in outstate Minnesota. Also because the photographs, taken by white-hot Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth, were wonderful.

We've already commented recently on the phenomenon of follow-on news stories: The New York Times or the Washington Post do the heavy-lifting on a story, get all the glory for the scoop, and when the parade has passed, all the local papers shuffle along shoveling up the remainders, maybe a little ashamed that someone in Manhattan managed to break a local story under the noses of a whole newsroom full of local reporters.

Tevlin does acknowledge the source of his interest in Riverview Bank, after a fashion. Near the end of his piece, he notes that Riverview Bank, on its website, claims to have converted Times "freelancer" Shorto during an "interview for a newspaper article." (Shorto denies this.) When we emailed Tevlin about his follow-on article, he told us there were lots of other interesting loose ends to tie up in the Riverview Bank story, and he was onto them the day after the Times article appeared. The St. Paul Pioneer-Press, in the person of business reporter Dave Beal, was also on the story. They published their own follow-on November 11.

There is nothing wrong with this practice per se. While we don’t want to inflame professional jealousies, it would be nice if writers acknowledged where they get their story ideas, particularly if it's from other writers. It is merely vanity that prevents someone from writing "as first reported in the New York Times." But this sort of story poaching goes on all the time; local daily newspapers are especially bad about doing it to nationals, weeklies, and monthlies. They have done it to us here at The Rake. (We've already given up hope of ever working elsewhere in this town. Funny how if you write about media in New York, you're guaranteed a job practically for the rest of your life. If you write about media in the Twin Cities, you'd better keep Monster.com bookmarked.) For our own part, we admit to being allergic to a story if it has appeared anywhere else our esteemed readers may have been exposed to it. This falls under the principal of giving your readers a little credit. And, as we love to point out, a newspaper article and a magazine story are two very different animals. Tevlin's story was different from Shorto's, though it was clearly provoked by it.

Still, we were surprised that the Star-Tribune photographs were so similar to Alec Soth's. One Strib image depicted the exact scene as the shot on the New York Times Magazine’s cover: An office wall with a handsome painting that shows one modern businessman introducing another businessman to the robed and haloed Jesus Christ, as if to say,"I'd like you to meet my boss, the Son of God."

The striking similarity in the photographs seemed a breach. Were we being naive? We can see how you might make the argument that, just as Riverview Bank is sitting out there in the public domain for anyone to write about, their office interiors and personnel are not themselves copyrighted. And given that Tevlin's lead specifically refers to this painting, it falls under the definition of pure documentary photography, right?

We don't know. It doesn't seem possible that Stormi Greener, an excellent photographer in her own right, was unaware of Soth's photos when she shot hers for the Star-Tribune. To our eye, it seems obvious that someone asked her to take precisely the same pictures Soth had taken for the Times magazine— photos that are undoubtedly under license and embargo, and not therefore available to the Star Tribune or anyone else. You look and see what you think: Here is Soth's photo for the Times, and here is Greener's.

We got ahold of Alec Soth in Paris, and he was a little surprised. "Wow, that is quite similar," he said. But he was willing to believe that it was a coincidence—and that probably an editor at the Star-Tribune should fall on the sword for this. (We know from experience: It is ALWAYS an editor's fault!) Jon Tevlin told us he thought you could send dozens of photographers to Riverview Bank and they'd have taken the exact same photo. The Jesus-in-the-executive-suite artwork is a "no brainer," he said. Times magazine editor Gerald Marzorarti politely declined to comment, and Greener has not answered a call and an email.

This photographic facet of the follow-on story undoubtedly falls into a grey area, and maybe it illustrates the difference between fine art photography and photojournalism. Soth's photo is striking in part because it is so artful, whereas Greener's has a solid if unremarkable gravity as photojournalism—and it's almost the same picture!

But it's the art within the art. When we first saw the cover of the Times Magazine, we were convinced that a Times art director had pulled off an amazing illustration. Indeed, the point of both the Soth and the Greener photos was actually to reproduce the astonishing piece of framed, evangelical art, in situ. Perhaps the real injured party here is Nathan Greene. He is the formerly anonymous born-again capitalist who was responsible for painting "The Senior Partner." He'll undoubtedly get his reward—and maybe his copyright—in the next world.—The Editor in Cheese

Floating Blog

2004-12-07T14:39:00.000-06:00

We have very little patience for the ongoing conversation about blogs and whether anybody cares about them or not. Like most things, it makes very little sense to judge a whole medium or phenomenon generically. There are good blogs and there are bad blogs. (Helpful hint: paid professionals are paid professionals for a reason. They have a huge advantage over the passionate amateur, because they don't have to actually work an honest job for a living. This is no guarantee of quality; it just guarantees that you can complain to their bosses if they really stink.)

That said, there have been lots and lots of first-rate bloggers who have made the leap to the pros. One thing you can say about blogging is that it gives a person lots of daily practice in the craft of writing (or at least summarizing and linking). Exhibit A: James Lileks. We think this man has entirely gone off the deep end of paranoia, and he should be ashamed of his chameleon-like conversion to a shrill conservative alarmist in the wake of 9/11 and fatherhood, whichever came first. But we are also awed by his command of the language, and the ease with which he can turn a delightful phrase and a killing joke. Being professionals around here, we know that good writing trumps bad faith every day of the week. We count ourselves reluctant fans, but admiring fans nonetheless.

We launched this daily blog thing about a month ago, and all along have been kind of openly obsessed with media and media criticism. This is a beat we don't cover so much in the magazine. Seeing as how the blog here is supposed to open a window into our office (More windows! Open-able! Yes please!), it's natural that our "water-cooler" chatter has more to do with the internal workings of the media business than with what we publish in the magazine.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the blog. Yesterday, we decided to publish exactly the same thing on the blog and at the website, under the aegis of the magazine. When it was offered in a non-blog context—without the blogspot.com URL and without the other obvious visual scaffolding of a blog that you see around you here —we were suddenly being read all over the internet. Do you know why?

Yesterday' s piece was a text-book case of blogging. We read three or four commentaries on media, and then added our own, without any new reporting or factual information. We just saw some interesting connections, and we hoped that we were able to convey them in clear, entertaining language.

Now, we don't know if we succeeded in doing that, and we earnestly hope the next paycheck is still on its way. But we do know that the marketplace is already judging blogs not on their context but on their content. Folks like Wonkette, Andrew Sullivan, TMFTML, Dong Resin— these are all amazing writers, all of whom are now being paid to do what they have a real talent to do.

The first two were great writers long before the word "blog," or even the Web existed; the latter two were "discovered" by traditional media, and have since been put to work earning their own way. We've even been known to harrass a blogger or two until they'll take money from us, no kidding.) We could give you lots of other examples, but then we'd have to start tracking down URLs, and we hate having to do that. Maybe that's what the essential difference is between a blogger and a "real journalist."—The Editor in Cheese

Panderlust

2004-12-06T10:08:00.000-06:00

In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Frank Rich makes a point we were trying to make ourselves a few weeks ago. In the aftermath of the election, USA Today had published a story that suggested Big, Bad, Liberal Media was scratching its collective head, wondering where it had gone so terribly wrong in understanding the country--and more to the point, underestimating the electoral muscle of the anti-intellectual, conservative, white male, NASCAR masses. In fact, even Frank Rich’s boss, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, was described in that article as being somewhat flummoxed--so flummoxed in fact, that the best idea he could come up with was to reopen the Times shuttered Kansas City bureau.

Yesterday, Rich looked at the problem as it applies to network TV news, what with the recent retirements of Rather and Brokaw, and the ascendency of Brian Williams. He suggests that network news is desperate to win the hearts of red America, so desperate that they are making a point of decamping to Toledo and Dubuque and Denver. NBC news is going to great lengths to establish the bona fides of Williams--hey, he’s a part-owner of a go-cart track! He drinks Budweiser! He showers AFTER work. (Well, no maybe not that. But hey, he’s got a mitten loofa too, just like O’Reilly! Wait, that’s kinda faggy and liberal, innit?) Why would they do that? Is it because they seriously believe there is news happening out there that they are ignoring because of their bi-coastal myopia? What Rich said better than we could ever hope to say was this: They are chasing an audience, not a news story. And that is a real sign of declension, and a cause for worry.

Salient, fact-checking moment: Why chase after Fox News viewers who are rabidly partisan and reality-challenged, and in any case, are far outnumbered by network viewers? The problem is perceptions and myths. As Louis Menand makes very clear in his wonderful story in last week’s New Yorker, the already unassailable “take-away” from election 2004 was the “values fallout.” There was no values fallout. Menand points out that this was strictly a misreading of exit poll numbers with no clear consensus on why people voted in any particular way. (This is probably, like everything else, the fault of Democrats. Republicans could care less why they won--the less said about that the better, as far as they’re concerned.)

The key to this little conundrum is the very real frustration that great media organizations like the Times and the New Yorker and almost any other thoughtful organ of print journalism are feeling. You can print the facts, the truth, the most compelling sorts of historiography--but you can’t make that horse drink the water.

We had the same sinking feeling after reading Rich’s essay that we had reading all those terrific pre-election presidential endorsements--that there isn’t one person in the country who’d read it and have his mind changed. In these fractious times, even the Times is preaching to a choir. One can certainly forgive them for trying to either expand the choir a bit, or take their show on the road. (Incidentally,interesting article today covering the same territory with NPR, but with a racial facet; Tavis Smiley wonders how to get more blacks to listen to public radio. How is this different from trying to get more conservatives to read the New York Times? Discuss...)

To have a small but vocal crowd of knownothings grow into a hateful GOP monopoly of government that has, in no small way, been underwritten by a deliberate campaign of falsifying reality and pre-emptive accusations of “liberal bias”-- this has diminished the power of the entire industry of journalism. Facts are not partisan, but many people don’t seem to believe that anymore. We guess you just feel the pinch more at the top, where you’re accustomed to the respect afforded the “paper of record.” When it develops that the news is not the news, but an exercise in servicing an audience, you get-- well, modern TV news.—The Editor in Cheese

Poor & Honest

2004-12-03T11:59:00.000-06:00

Yesterday at Slate, Jack Shafer claimed that "the best place to judge journalists is on the printed page." That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to say... if you're judging them on their journalism. But that was not the point of his article—which purported to follow up on an "anonymous tip" regarding the speaking fees of New Yorker writers. It seems that someone out there feels that New Yorker writers shouldn't take money from anyone but their employer, evidently because it compromises their professional neutrality. The tipster wanted Shafer to judge whether writers should take speaking fees, and Shafer sort of deflected—for the right reasons, in my opinion.

I'm not sure why Shafer persists in sourcing this "tip" to an anonymous person. It's hardly a secret that many journalists do all kinds of moonlighting, and it's silly to pretend that their little jaunts to the lectern—or the NPR studio, or the CNN set—aren't going to have something to do with their area of interest and expertise.

It seemed strange to me that Shafer would insist on attributing the charge of calumny to this anonymous source when all you have to do is scan your TV guide, or your local University bulletin, to catch up on who's having their bread buttered on the public circuit. But it becomes clear that he's siding with the particular writers his "source" tells him to check out—The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki, who are friends and colleagues of Shafer's. In other words, he wanted to reassure his powerful friends on the other end of the ethical microscope that it wasn't his idea.

Still, it was a nice essay regarding the ethics of journalism. But the answer, to us, is significantly less complex than Shafer makes it out to be: If money compromises journalists, then we shouldn't pay them anything, ever. Journalists, like anyone else in any other profession, need to worry about job security and the value of their personal stock, and taking a multi-channel approach to reaching your audience is good work, if you can get it.

Now, that is a much different proposition than being paid by a subject to write about him, her, or it—which is that bright red firewall you might have noticed between a piece of journalism and a piece of advertising. In my view, the media marketplace does not need the ethics cop that Shafer declines to be. In fact, I believe it is slightly condescending to think that readers are too stupid to sort out advertising from editorial content; they recognize catalog copy from magazine copy.

(This, by the way, does not mean readers automatically prefer editorial to advertising the way editors and writers think they do— they just know the difference, and are capable of enjoying both. Nor does it mean that we should therefore get lax about distinguishing advertisements from editorial material, where there is any possible confusion—if that is something we care about. We do. Not everyone does.)

Not long ago, I was reading the letters of Harold Ross, the founding editor of the New Yorker. I was struck by the fact that Ross frequently exercised his authority even over the advertising side of the magazine. He was pathologically skeptical of all advertising, considered it a necessary evil, pored over the advertising copy, complained if he felt it didn't comport with the magazine (he was famously squeemish about ads for toilet paper) or if he felt it made dishonest claims, and even occasionally nixed advertisements. (Imagine that happening today.) But if you look at copies of the New Yorker from that era, you instantly understand why Ross worried so much about it: Advertisments in the thirties and forties were almost always narrative in form, and were in many cases almost indistiguishable from the editorial copy adjacent to it. While there are many contemporary examples of ads like this that intentionally try to blur that line, I guess it is a blessing in disguise that ads today have become so strongly image- and logo-driven.

Is this nervous Nellyism a relic of a bygone era? I think the issue remains, but has been simplified considerably, for one reason: This is only an issue if you make it one, if you build your business on a particular value like "neutrality." If you are at the top of the journalistic food chain, through either luck or hard work or fiat, you will not be forgiven for the sin of putting personal gain ahead of your employer's integrity. In other words, you self regulate. Of course, if your employer has no integrity, then it's no foul.—The Editor in Cheese

Scooper & Scooped: Local Edition

2004-12-02T10:17:00.000-06:00

We don't normally pay that much attention to the local daily news. Not in a professional way—it's too much work for too little reward, and we're constantly annoyed at how the paper has become more about pictures and graphics than about actual news stories.

But certain broad cultural trends had us interested in seeing the newsroom flick "All The President's Men" the other day, and it was fun to see Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford on the phone so much. Newsrooms, from what we hear, are intensly competitive places. If you work at the Washington Post, you first read your own paper to see who among your collegues have been favored by the makeup editors, and you keep a daily calculation of a wide variety of grudges and jealousies. Next, you read the New York Times, for a broader, more ecumenical kind of self-loathing and professional jealousy. And if you get scooped by the New York Times, you go to the bathroom and splash cold water on your face and you curse loudly, and you wonder if you're in the wrong business.

We couldn't help noticing in all the national hype about the alleged Chai Vang murders—Fox News! LA Times!—that BOTH of our hometown papers really got scooped in the embarrassing way. Yesterday, a New York reporter at the Times published a story that had a number of local Hmong sources saying Chai Vang was, in fact, a shaman in his St. Paul community—a widely respected religious leader among his people who on more than one occasion has performed intense religious rites to exorcise evil demons from those who require such services.

It became painfully clear that no one at either Twin Cities newspaper had actually picked up the phone and talked to anyone in Vang's extensive circle of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Judging from Stephen Kinzer's story in the Times, it was the worst kept secret in the St. Paul Hmong community. So how did the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press manage to not overhear this bizarre and interesting news?

What's even more interesting to a layperson like ourselves is that neither paper has, at this point, acknowledged that contribution to our understanding of who this controversial figure is. (Today's Star Tribune has the groundbreaking scoop that Vang had a warrant out for his arrest on previous trespassing charges. Yawn. And Todd Nelson, at the Pioneer Press, does talk to friends and relatives, and writes a nice profile of Vang—but this is basically what you'd call a rear-of-the parade followup story to the Times which does not acknowledge whose shit it was that the Pi-Press was shoveling a day late.)

Also, it is not uncommon for the Star Tribune or the Pioneer Press to reprint stories from the New York Times—but they're not doing that with this story. Why? Probably because it would make both papers look pretty stupid to have a local story reported better from some desk in Manhattan.

Like we say, we're just casual observers. We're not in the news business per se, so we don't wish to cast aspersions. We will, though, toss the inky wretches a freebie here: If you read to the end of the Times piece, you might notice that a person named Noah Vang was credited with local reporting from St. Paul. Is this the same Noah Vang who was indicted on murder charges last year, in a Hmong after-bar knife incident?—The Editor in Cheese

Eternal Recurrence: Tom Wolfe edition

2004-12-01T11:04:00.000-06:00

In our ongoing coverage of Tom Wolfe's new book, we mentioned yesterday that we enjoyed Jacob Weisberg's review in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review. What distinguishes good criticism from great criticism? We're glad you asked. A couple of things, actually.

First, we prefer critics to resist the urge to pronounce a simple verdict. There are great pressures in the "marketplace" of modern media to give everything a thumbs up or a thumbs down. That has more or less guaranteed that most critics are all thumbs. They approach every review with the idea that they have to make an argument either for or against it; they begin to marshall their evidence and write their punchlines. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't often give the reader or the subject a fair shake. There are not very many flawless masterpieces being produced these days—in fact, ever. (That's kind of inherent in the definition of "masterpiece.") There IS a lot of crap, but you can usually find something redeeming about most of it. The point is, there is a kind of intellectual dishonesty about reducing everything to an unqualified yes or no.

Second, there are way too many critical reviews and they are all way too short. This is related to the first point—marketplace pressures to cover as many artifacts and events as possible, and to do it decisively, if not very thoughtfully. Thus our "blurb" culture. Can you find an example of a magazine or newspaper that DOESN'T have, as a part of its regular offerings, dozens of instantly forgettable reviews of CDs, books, and movies? (We can think of one. If you think of the same one, or another that fits the bill, we'll send you a Rake T-shirt. Send your answer here. First responder wins). It is not necessary for a good critical review to be long, but it helps.

Third. This is the most difficult quality to explain and to achieve, but it is what makes a really good piece of criticism something we tear out of a magazine and carry around in our breast pocket: the ring of truth. The beauty of a really good review by someone like Anthony Lane—or Peter Shjelldahl, or Jacob Weisberg, or Chuck Klosterman—is that you know, without reading the book, or seeing the film, or listening to the CD, that the critic hit the nail on the head.

Now, we think Weisberg hit several homeruns in his piece. He comments that Wolfe's descriptions of the modern campus are "excrutiatingly" detailed, but Wolfe—being a journalist rather than a true novelist—writes like a reporter. There are no meaningful descriptions of peoples' motives, only their actions and their appearances. (This is an editor's constant struggle, by the way, and it is what distinguishes a newspaper reporter from a magazine writer. Reporters are very uncomfortable with subtle description and analysis. If they can't find a source to say it, and another to confirm it, then they can't write it. Writers have the opposite problem—finding an authority greater than themselves.) Weisberg also gets it just about exactly right when he says that Wolfe's peculiar magic is his ability to create page-turners; it's almost impossible to put Wolfe down, even when he's at his worst. Finally, the clencher: Who ever re-reads a Wolfe novel? No one. Running our own mental check, we find that the only Wolfe book we've ever reread was "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," and that, of course, is not a novel; it is a work of non-fiction.

Compare "I Am Charlotte Simmons" to, say, Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," or Jonathan Lethem's "Fortress of Solitude." Both of those books have short sections which describe life on the modern college campus— but they are both better books, because they trade in interior, essential truths rather than surface appearances and incidents. We've been planning to reread both of those wonderful books from the moment we finished them the first time.—The Editor in Cheese

Ten Yards, Loss of Down For Clipping

2004-11-30T11:18:00.000-06:00

Jarrett Murphy, in the Village Voice today, complains that the media was quick to cover the infamous NBA brawl, and to put it into saturation rotation. He enumerates the coverage in newspapers and TV broadcasts, inferring that it was as salacious as it was unwarranted. (Not "hard news!" Not hard news! Foul! Is anyone listening?) He suggests that this is an example of the media adjusting to changing times, and taking on a story with heavy "moral" overtones and ramifications.

As a kicker—an afterthought, really—Murphy grouses that it would be nice if journalists today would apply the same hard questions to more serious moral catastrophes like "the war in Iraq, the scenes of mad shoppers on the first day of the Christmas shopping season, or other stories not featuring sweaty athletes." (One wonders if he reads his own paper, or values it so little as to not count it in his survey of big media.)

See, this is the type of lazy criticism of "the press" that puts us into a lather. Murphy carefully compiles all of the most egregious examples of reporting on the Pacers-Pistons brawl, and then expects us to just accept his broad generalization that no one anywhere has ever asked serious questions about Iraq—or, for that matter, Christmas shopping. Our esteemed reporter might argue that you can't prove a negative—that is, it's hard to enumerate all the articles that have NOT been written. But that's only because he hasn't tried very hard. In this day and age, when anyone bitches that a story has not been adequately written about, we have an automatic response: That's just because you haven't looked very hard. (The more subtle and precise answer is this: That's just because the story hasn't reached the critical mass where it assaults you everywhere you turn—like the NBA brawl story. It's not that the story hasn't been written. It's that the reading public has not cared. Sad, but true.)

We're not crazy about media reporting or media criticisim—mostly because we can't escape the feeling that no one really cares, out there in the real world. And then there is the more substantive reason: Media criticism is often the most trite, navel-gazing, uninteresting, and self-righteous sort of writing a person can have the pleasure of not reading.—The Editor in Cheese