Foreign journalists?

A fellow Stranger refugee stopped me on the street the other evening. He said he still enjoyed my writing, my vocabulary, and my sense of style.

But he also said he thought I’d limited my vision by holding to a rose-colored nostalgia for “the old Seattle,” a viewpoint that’s ill-suited toward effectively discussing today’s city of high tech and hipsters.

I beg, as I do so darned often, to differ.

You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.

The mindset that created the Century 21 Exposition, f’rinstance, is with us still. The magnificent Space Needle was built with private money on land essentially donated by the city. The publicly-funded exhibit buildings were either cheap “multipurpose” constructions (just like most local government buildings between then and the late ’90s) or repurposed older structures that weren’t that distinguished to begin with.

The old Seattle had its progressive, even radical ideas, alongside plain old fashioned racism/sexism. Some of its citizens held both types of beliefs at once. (I’m thinking of labor organizers who appealed to anti-Chinese hysteria among their flocks, and of “New Left” rabblerousers who defined “women’s liberation” as the right to give blow jobs.)

Today, Seattle loves diversity. Or rather, it loves the idea that it loves diversity; just so long as its white female children don’t have to go to the same schools as black male children.

The old Seattle had civic leaders who tirelessly struggled to have their burg seen as “world class,” but always by someone else’s standards. (Hence the ’60s campaigns to bulldoze the Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, and large swaths of the Arboretum for parking lots, office towers, and highway lanes respectively.)

In more recent years, Seattle had civic leaders who saw every problem as solvable by a construction project. That’s why we can build new libraries and arts facilities, but can’t afford to run them.

The old Seattle’s governmental gears could grind very slowly; just as they can now. It took the “foodie” restaurant revolution of the ’70s before the city legalized sidewalk cafes. Now, we need, but are less likely to get, a similar outspoken demand before the city will allow new strip clubs.

If I may switch metaphors for a moment: Leonard Maltin’s book Of Mice and Magic, an invaluable history of the early animation business, refers at one point to the Warner Bros. cartoon studio’s desire in the thirties to “keep up with Disney, and plagiarize him at the same time.” Seattle’s assorted drives over the years to become “world class,” by imitating all the things all the other would-be “world class” burgs do, have often been just as self-defeating.

Warners conquered the cartoon world when its directors and artists stopped aping Disney and started to create their own brand of humor. LIkewise, Seattle will come into its own as it develops its own ways of doing city things.

We don’t have to have a cars-only transportation plan, or sprawling McMansions devouring the countryside. We don’t have to give in to corporate job-blackmail shakedowns. We can lead, not follow.

That’s not the “old Seattle,” but it’d be a better Seattle.

…in a recent column, quotes Pat Moynihan:

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

I’m a liberal, and I believe the first part of Moynihan’s statement. I believe politics is a subset of culture, not the other way around.

We can’t just elect or defeat a Presidential candidate and really change things.

We can’t just protest, no matter how spectacularly, and really change things.

We can’t just “deconstruct texts” and really change things.

We’ve gotta do the hard, lifelong work of building a national, permanent, progressive-populist movement.

And to do that, we’ve gotta construct a culture. Not just a “counterculture” or a culture of opposition, but a forward-looking, all-embracing, universally-welcoming aesthetic/zeitgeist.

All the aspects of current hipster and historic coopertative cultures can be part of this: Music, books, video/film, food/drink, architecture, small business, non-profits, artists, craftspeople, sidewalk philosophers, preachers, cafes, bars, “third places,” the Net, and so on.

They don’t have to be all coordinated or uniformly “on message”—the point is to free up human ingenuity to solve human problems.

And yes, there will be political rifts and divisions within such a non-top-down culture. There will always be geographic and other interests wanting, say, more funding for their own areas of interest.

And yes, there will be “cuture wars” within such a culture. There will be hammered-dulcimer people who don’t like heavy-metal people, sexually-reserved women who don’t care much for sexually-expressive women, etc. etc.

But all that’s part of the whole point—to liberate the whole mongrel beauty that is the US from the twin dictatorships of Hollywood/Madison Avenue corporate culture and right-wing authoritarian culture. To advocate a third choice, which is really millions of third choices.

It’s a task for the long haul, not for an election cycle. So take your vitamins, get into shape, and live for it.

…never publish photographs. Today, it’s got photos licensed to the AP and running on front pages around the world, depicting the now-familiar U.S. military atrocities.

…a “new” celebrity category—the non-singing, non-dancing, music video model. I guess the NYT finally got cable, some two decades too late.

…of US “private contractor workers” torturing Iraqi prisoners, the Guardian wonders why U.S. newspapers are so eager to not discuss it.

…whether the government and the news media (and, by extension, the private sector) are now run by autistics.

…for MotherJones.com that “The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged.” He depicts online commentary as a tertiary exercise of homebound pundit-wannabes snapping frenetically against the outrages of other homebound pundit-wannabes; an “online echo chamber” unsuited for “real” in-the-field reporting, or for the types of research that can’t be accomplished via search engines.

And Packer dismisses the type of three-dot prose seen on sites such as this one:

“I gorge myself on these hundreds of pieces of commentary like so much candy into a bloated — yet nervous, sugar-jangled — stupor. Those hours of out-of-body drift leave me with few, if any, tangible thoughts. Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication. There’s a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere — every point, rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or “fisk” (dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical reading) — is a knockout punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. They are also nearly without exception men (this form of combat seems too naked for more than a very few women). I imagine them in neat blue shirts, the glow from the screen reflected in their glasses as they sit up at 3:48 a.m. triumphantly tapping out their third rejoinder to the WaPo’s press commentary on Tim Russert’s on-air recap of the Wisconsin primary.”

I beg, as I often do, to differ.

Packer’s analysis isn’t so much wrong as it is incomplete. Perhaps, as a pundit himself, he’s drawn toward those blogs that specialize commentary about commentators. But there are countless others, as well, in which people write intimately about their own lives and their own political experience. There are others, such as Progressive Review, which link to direct reporting on important issues.

What the Web doesn’t currently have is a lot of original, online-only or online-first, direct reportage. In the post-dot-com-crash era, budgets are tight for such labor-intensive content gathering. All the top “news” sites are outgrowths of print, broadcast, and cable news organizations.

One possible answer could be found in old-time radio. As revealed at radio history sites, the early network radio “newscasts,” just before and during WWII, were pundit-heavy. Individual commentators lucidly talked for up to fifteen minutes, in the studio or (via shortwave relay) on location. But they’d done their homework before the came to the mike. The studio-bound commentators were often scholars and historians; even those without postgraduate degrees still read up about whatever they were discussing. Commentaries from the field, such as those of Edward R. Murrow, went out and witnessed events they later talked about. They didn’t use “sound bites,” which didn’t really emerge until the spread of tape recording after the war.

This original concept of “eyewitness news” could become the next step in web journalism.

An alternative-sex zine editor who supports Bush and the Iraq war, and who accuses antiwar activists of anti-Semitism.

…why “Books Are the Hot Medium,” specifically referring to the current deluge of White House insider scandal tales.

One answer: With modern production technology, a hardcover tome can be rushed to the stores as quickly as a monthly magazine.

Another: Interviews with authors (and with govt. officials on the receiving end of authors’ accusations) can cheaply fill some of the unlimited time the cable news channels have to fill.

A third reason, which the NYT story doesn’t give: As we head into the dawn of a long-attention-span generation, books simply seem to be more worthy of one’s time. Classic “short-form” TV programming keeps losing viewers, while feature films on DVD have become the US consumer market’s most successful new product. Even video games have evolved from pinball-length short entertainments into 45-hour-long epics of level after level. When today’s children-not-left-behind graduate into adolescence and adulthood from years of relentless studying for standardized tests, a long, hefty read will seem even more like a natural way to relax at the end of the working day.

I’m not completely thrilled by all this. For nearly two decades, my local professional reputation has been that of a writer specializing in short, sharp shocks. With the ascencion of Jean Godden from the Seattle Times to the Seattle City Council, my li’l monthly half-page in the Belltown Messenger is the only three-dot column left in local print media.

So I’m moving into books. They’ve got higher profit margins and longer shelf lives than periodicals. (A fourth reason why books are “hot.”)

It’s a whole different type of work, requiring stronger legs and a sturdier torso. You can’t just stretch a short topic to feature length, no more than you can enlarge a spindly-legged spider to movie-monster size. But it’s where the flow is going, and all the self-help books say I gotta go with the darned flow.

ROGER EBERT defends Howard Stern:

“I find it strange that so many Americans describe themselves as patriotic when their values are anti-democratic and totalitarian. We are all familiar with Voltaire’s great cry: ”I may disagree with what you say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.’ Ideas like his helped form the emerging American republic. Today, the Federal Communications Commission operates under an alternative slogan: ‘Since a minority that is very important to this administration disagrees with what you say, shut up.'”

Globe and Mail TV writer John Doyle wrote about the Faux News Channel’s attempts to get onto Canadian cable systems. Doyle said his countrypeople should get the chance to see the channel so they could laugh at it.

Bill O’Reilly, on said channel, urged his viewers to send insulting emails to Doyle, as if Doyle would be impressed and won over by people calling him dumb names.

Doyle’s follow-up article sez: “The people who support Fox News must be the most uncivil and foul-mouthed creatures on the planet. This is an informed opinion. They’d give English soccer hooligans a run for their money.”

…to find non-NYC American society odd at best, dangerous at worst.

Case in point #1: A Guardian essay by George Monbiot describing a Texas county Republican convention as the key to understanding the horrors of Bushism: “Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power.”

Case in point #2: A piece in The Independent by Andrew Buncombe about the small Bible college in Virginia that’s sent more than its share of grads into jobs with Republican politicians.

The media conglomerates have begun, timidly, to fight back against the Bush FCC and its neo-censorship agenda.

…in the coolness department: the new Vancouver affiliate of Toronto broadcast trailblazer City TV. Imagine: A commercial VHF station in a region no more populous that ours that’s got local cooking shows, local ethnic-cultural shows, local filmmakers’-showcase shows, serious arts documentaries, old silent movies, sex documentaries, uncut soft-R movies after midnight, and a Speakers’ Corner where citizens can videotape themselves ranting about anything they want.