“On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” goes Peter Steiner’s New Yorker cartoon. Now a whole new mangy race, attracted by the comfortable surroundings and flexible hours, compete with me for page views and visit their own Dogbook pages.
(From CNN) Wimsey the Jack Russell terrier hard at work on his blog, which owner Hope McPherson helped him start.
Perhaps the saddest thing about the Bush administration is how little Americans have come to expect of it. It has resulted in an orgy of incompetence that have seriously damaged first America’s image, and now our economy and very .
The current agony of more than 200,000 American Airlines passengers stranded on more than 2500 cancelled flights at America’s airports is just the latest example.
A competent administration would have kept the FAA on the case in the first place. A more foresighted administration would have recognized the cost to Americans and the economy of airlines like Aloha, ATA, Skybus and now Frontier failing. And a stronger administration would have acted in the crisis, like Truman did nationalizing the steel industry or, yes, Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers union as a “peril to national safety”.
“The buck stops here,” Truman said. By contrast, the Bush Administration has done nothing. Nothing. There has been an absolute leadership vacuum. And sadly, that has come to be what we expect from it. Consider:
And the media, distracted by its own evisceration, has done a piss-poor job of holding the administration accountable for its across-the-board failure of leadership.
I hadn’t seen this before, but I had guessed that celebrities would be the target of your typical bored, unethical passport processor at the State Department.
Bingo!
According to ABC News, “On at least two other occasions during the last eight months, contractors were fired for accessing records of Hollywood celebrities, the official said.”
The Daily Telegraph thinks the “Love and Consequences” debacle, following other made up personal tales of drug addiction, Holocaust suffering and priestly rape, may mean the end of the ‘misery memoir.’
I’m not so sanguine; just as readers love to see the rich and famous brought down, they also appreciate seeing people in gothic straits.
Because the life of a writer is not all that interesting (who would pay to read about someone staring into a computer screen?), the pressure comes for exciting ‘true stories’. And the decline and desperation of the publishing industry is shown by what it will do (or not do, like fact-check) to deliver these ‘authentic experiences.’
Writers are also entertainers, although almost comically unfit for the role, crippled by depression, self-doubt, procrastination, over-thinking, research mania, envy and all other manner of self-loathing. Yet they strive to give the people (especially their editors) what they want.
The latest disaster to result is ”Love and Consequences”, Margaret B. Jones’ “autobiography” about growing up among gangbangers, by a half-white, half-Native American girl sent to foster care in South Central LA after a sexual assault at age five. (Even typing that florid description, my bullshit detector is beeping.) The memoir was actually written by Margaret Seltzer, a white woman from Sherman Oaks who went to Campbell Hall, a private high school that costs over $20,000 a year.
Hell hath no fury like a newspaper scorned: the NY Times article exposing the fraud refers to Seltzer as “all white”. (Imagine calling Shaquille O’Neal “all black”.) Like the publisher, The Times has a big credibility problem, because the woman’s editor is the daughter of a NY Times editor who had run the book review section, and the Times gave the book a rave review. The Times also has to answer for this handjob of a story and slideshow.
The Times didn’t even break the fraud story–Jones/Seltzer’s sister called the publishing house, saying this “could have and should have been stopped by now.” She’s right–except that no one in the chain wanted to make a single phone call to check this ’story that’s too good to check.’
Equally repugnant, last week “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was exposed as a . “She didn’t live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn’t trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She’s not even Jewish.”
Can you say–exploitation?
We could explore why these women felt their own experience wasn’t authentic enough to write about, so they had to borrow other’s suffering. But the larger question is why should people believe anything they read when writers–and publishers–do this? Why, in fact, should they read at all?
As a writer, you should be able to speak in other people’s voices, even say that voice is one of your own voices. What you can’t say is that you are that other person.
What these ‘writers’ are saying is “I felt like a Jew…I felt like a gangbanger…’ therefore I can poach their experience, turn their trauma into a story I can sell.
My father said at the end of the day, a man’s reputation is all he has. To these writers and their enablers, reputation, truth and honesty are encumbrances to be thrown off in pursuit of fame and success.
The public is fascinated by celebrity actors. But really, what’s their life? Get up, go to a cafe, have a few cups of coffee and lots of cigarettes, obsessively check their Blackberries and cell phones for phone calls, go to the gym. If they have money they go shopping, if they’re famous they get dressed and go to clubs at night to get photographed and chat with their friends. This is for the 9 months a year when they’re not shooting a film.
Television actors have an even more boring life. They get up early for their 6AM call, then spend most of the day on the set reading or chatting (again drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes) in makeup and costume waiting for their scenes. At the end of the day they get in their cars (no chauffeured craziness here), drive home, see their families, have dinner, help their kids with homework or catch up on DVDs, and go to bed before 11PM; gotta be fresh for that early call.
The writer’s life, like an actor’s, is not all that interesting. He or she gets up, makes a pot of coffee, turns on the computer, starts procrastinating, walks around, checks email, procrastinates some more, goes to their favorite websites, blogs–anything to postpone writing. Two or four or six hours later, they finally do some writing, have lunch, go back to check the web, walk the dog, pick up the kids from school.
In short, the real life of those in so-called ‘glamour professions’ is boring.
Apocalypse, disaster, alienation, thy name is Los Angeles.
In Bladerunner, “L.A. has become a pan-cultural dystopia of corporate advertising, pollution and flying automobiles, as well as replicants, human-like androids with short life spans built by the Tyrell Corporation for use in dangerous off-world colonization.”
In reality—hey that is reality around here!
Los Angeles has been blown up, attacked by aliens, ridden with pestilence, smashed by earthquakes, populated by murderous madmen and become a post-apocalyptic battlefield in films from Escape from Los Angeles to Terminator II, where Schwartzenneger snatches a video-playing boy from death at the insipid Valley mall by LA’s concrete river.
Then there’s The Omega Man (the original, gun-crazy zombie-slaying Charlton Heston version of I Am Legend) and Falling Down, where bespectacled Michael Douglas, fresh from a killing spree, asks “So I’m the bad guy?”
But the ultimate Los Angeles dystopia movie is Bladerunner. It’s an art director’s opium dream of LA—the stately Bradbury building is home to a genetic modification engineer and the humanesque ‘toys’ he’s built, the detective lives in a crumbling Frank Lloyd Wright house, the emblematic LA tunnel makes an appearance.
In Bladerunner, just like LA, you’ve got your perfect, highly-engineered specimens. In the movie, set in 2019, Rutger Hauer’s platinum blonde ultimate soldier nibbles hungrily on equally blonde, impossibly lithe 20-ish Darryl Hannah. Just like LA.
Later, Darryl Hannah’s character Pris, who like her fellow replicants only lives a year or two, complains of her “advanced decrepitude.” She’s a model LA woman like so many other aging ‘blondes’ finding surgeons in the back pages of Los Angeles Magazine, desperately fighting the good fight.
In the movie, there’s an unending parade of beaten-down pedestrians, men in nuns habits, Asians of many descriptions, a Chassidic Jew and other LA types, walking numbly through the rain. In reality, LA is a dystopia of people from 170 countries who’ve come here to misunderstand one another, living in stucco houses and dining in minimalls.
In the movie, you got your cynical killer cops like M. Emmet Walsh, Edward Olmos and Harrison Ford himself as Deckard. Just as Robert Patrick’s shiny fascist LAPD motorcycle officer in Terminator II is a well-observed LA reality, Bladerunner, like the real LA, is loaded with lots and lots of cops. The movie has street patrolmen, helicopter cops, car cops, bladerunner detectives. In LA County, we’ve got a not-so-gorgeous mosaic of LAPD officers, LA Sheriff’s deputies, California Highway Patrol, Santa Monica/Pasadena/Long Beach police, even LAUSD school police and park police.
Bladerunner is LA. Oh sure, they got the predominant ethnic group and the weather wrong. In Bladerunner, it’s Asians, in 2007 LA, more than 50% of the population is Hispanics. In Bladerunner, the forecast is for perpetual acid rain, in LA, it’s dry smoggy heat, with white particulates from the fires.
But those are only details. In its anarchic chaos with its enervated residents, Bladerunner is LA in the dark.
We go through life asleep here. As the late Brion James replicant puts it, “Wake up. Time to die.”
No, it doesn’t run on electricity or hydrogen, but the gigantor Chevy Tahoe was named the greenest car at the LA auto show. The new hybrid Tahoe supposedly gets a whopping 21 miles per gallon in the city, (although the November/December Truck Trend says they got 18mpg in LA city driving), a “thirty percent boost over standard V8s” which was enough to win the award from Green Car Journal (actually a pretty good publication).
It was a good week for the Tahoe, as a robotic version built by students at Carnegie Mellon, perhaps the foremost robotics institution in the U.S., won the DARPA Urban Challenge unmanned car competition.
And really, is giving the Tahoe a ‘greenest car’ award any more absurd than $50,000 Japanese ‘economy cars’ that get less than 20 mpg? I looked at the entire Acura line and none get more than 18mpg city mileage. They’re not the only offenders; the Infiniti G35 and most Lexuses are similarly challenged.
But the award points to deeper problems. In the real world, newspaper advertisements scream $11,000 off! on Tahoes–big gas-eaters strapped consumers can’t afford.
The automotive press is particularly cozy with the manufacturers–you’ll never see a car get blasted in Car and Driver or Motor Trend. There’s a reason public relations folks refer to them as “trade and enthusiast” pubs. Advertising has a lot to do with it, but so does access–say nasty things and you’ll never get another vehicle for one of your ‘unbiased’ reviews. On the other hand, stroke the manufacturer with a Car of the Year and you’ll get plenty of advertising.
It reminds me of when I edited PC LapTop magazine; each laptop was always “the best yet” (since last month) from the manufacturer. The auto show is a party for the press; I didn’t get a free car, but I did get free lunch.
Two ways: relevant content from reporters and editors who know the niche, plus compelling cover lines.
Top Business Priorities (HealthImaging&IT, October 2007):
Increasing Procedure Volume
Maximizing Reimbursement
Improving Workflow
No beating around the bush here.
As we all listen to WII-FM–What’s In It For Me–and this song is about money–who wouldn’t read that?
LA may look like a big, ‘civilized’ city, but there are tell-tale signs of ungovernability. Last month we had the fourth power outage in Encino in the last six months. Previously, transformers have blown up and cars have hit power poles; this last was because a cat (who survived!) got into the power equipment.
Southern California is wealthy and cultured, but sometimes the edges show. The fires this time (to paraphrase James Baldwin) burned 509,024 acres, destroyed 1,997 homes, injured 98 and killed 7, according to the LA Times of October 28.
“All the ingredients for disaster came together last Sunday. A massive high-pressure system moved across the western United States, and Santa Ana winds began to howl at speeds sometimes reaching hurricane force as they squeezed through the canyons and passes of Southern California. A year of record-low precipitation had created a tinderbox, and all it took was a spark from a downed power line or a careless welder to ignite blazes that were quickly blown into firestorms that spread across the regions. Before the winds died down late in the week, massive blazes had charred thousands of acres between Ventura Couny and the Mexican border.”
Eighty-foot flames roared near Ramona, and Roger and Dena Bielasz survived the Witch Fire while others died by taking shelter in their swimming pool, to emerge to a house leveled by flames–but alive.
Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times
Dena Bielasz and her husband, Roger, of Escondido, sought refuge in their pool as the fires raged through their property. Roger said to his wife after they were rescued “lets promise each other that was the worst day of our lives..it can only get better from here.”
But disaster sometimes plays as hapless comedy here as well: The huge lines of people snaking through the TSA lines at our airport, beloved LAX, were recently doused by a sprinkler failure. It sent soaked people and their wet luggage fleeing from yet another evacuated terminal. Of course, to return they had to go through security again, costing an hour and no doubt missing their flights.
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| Los Angeles International Airport |
Then there are those lost even before they hit bumper to bumper traffic–inexplicably, the 101 freeway, which basically runs east and west in LA, is labelled the North/South 101, leaving thousands befuddled.
In Annie Hall, Woody Allen said LA’s only cultural advanatage was making a right turn on red. In some parts of LA, now you can’t make a right turn on green without our hated motorcycle cops giving ticket after ticket.
Rather than find some other way to deal with protecting pedestrians, the traffic geniuses of LA decided to put up a sign, which of course drivers ‘didn’t see.’ One woman got off without a ticket because the officer gave out so many he ran out.