So this is what it looks like...

It often felt like it would never come, but it looks like North Adams' "Mayor for Life," John Barrett III, has finally met his match after 26 years. During the years that I covered North Adams for the Eagle, and spoke to the Mayor almost daily, I often wondered what the end would look like. I especially thought about this after getting one of those hair-dryer treatments when he didn't like a story I'd written, or was forced to bite my tongue and report some unpleasantness about the Harriman and West Airport, or the Hoosac Water Quality District. I had it on extremely good authority that he was already planning his post-City Hall future, but I figured he would go out on his own terms. After all, he hadn't seen a real fight since the 90s, and the dead-end grumblers and sincere proponents of change never seemed to outnumber his base of seniors and lifelong city residents whose kids could have been in one of his grade school classes way back when he was a school-teacher. One of the great things about local politics is how real and raw it is. There is no polling, no big media machines, no legions of consultants (thought there was a little of everything in this race -- I was astonished to see ads for the candidates during a Celtics game last week). It is face to face and personal, and it is impossible to predict. All you can do is listen to the local wiseguys and feel like you're watching baseball before sabermetrics. Watching this campaign through the year, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Nothing would have surprised me, except, perhaps, the size of Dick Alcombright's margin. I'd have predicted it would have been way closer.

Superpower blues

In a piece for The Boston Globe, I compare the state of civil society here and in Russia.

The Balkan Disease (part 2 of 2)

I had to leave a few days early to get back to Budapest to apply for a Russian transit visa. So one Saturday afternoon, Olga and Mila accompanied me to Split. We spent a little while in Diocletian's Palace, stopped by a 'Konzum' for some train-going provisions, and they accompanied me to Split's strangely tiny train station.

It turned out the train was undersold, and I had a compartment to myself, which truly must rank as one of life's best unpredictable joys. On the way up, I stared out the window. The train crawls up the hillsides in such a way that it feels almost designed like some sort of tourist attraction. Each turn presented a new angle on the city, and the island of Ciovo and the Adriatic in the distance. Unfortunately, I left the camera with the family, so all I have is what I remember. As we pulled into the mountains, and the sea left, I had to leave the compartment because it faced the sun and was just too hot. For a long time, I stayed in the corridor, leaning out the window, watching the scrub-covered rocky landscape whiz by.


At one point, the train stopped at a place called Primorsky Dolac to let another southbound train pass. After all the heat, the light, the train's noisy movement, it was surprisingly pleasant to be stopped for a moment. Directly in front of the window there was a building, or rather, the ruins of one. Four sturdy stone walls in place, with a roof collapsed in, the doors all pushed in, the windows gone altogether. But on the outer wall, high up above the level of the windows, there was some sort of monument marker. It was a Catholic cross inscribed above an inscription, which for the life of me I couldn't make out from the distance we were standing (it was also in Serbo-Croatian). But it had a date, 1914, which got me thinking. What was this thing? One would assume, at first, this must have something to do with the Great War, with the terrible events of that summer not half a days drive from there that changed the world forever. When men of that village would have marched off to fight their Serbian neighbors. Or perhaps, it was about something else, something that could have happened in any other year ahead of then, but simply happened to have happened the same year as the single turning point for the Western world.


The whole trip was full of those kind of moments. Eventually we came out of the parched mountains and into a broad, green valley. The sky had turned grey, and as if on cue, it began to rain. I hadn't seen rain in weeks, and it was strange to not see a blue sky overhead. Outside there was a wide valley, and I realized that the mushroom-like structures placed near each railroad trestle appeared to be machine gun emplacements. The tracks run not far from the Bosnian border, through the heart of what would have been the Serb parts of Croatia, and which were the scene of great fighting during the war. It was raining when we came into Knin, the city that had been the capital of the breakaway Serbian Krajne Republic. From the station, you could see the fortress on a commanding hill above the city. That day there was an enormous Croatian flag flying from the fortress, and it was clear to see that there was a lot of work going on up there. The walls and ramparts were being repaired, but there was nothing about historic preservation in the work -- it was a functioning military outpost on the edge of a state that still didn't really trust its neighbors. Through the hills the train continued, and you began to see abandoned houses and farms and villages. Trashed houses, and barely overgrown orchards and fields.


The sun was going down already by the time we got closer to the heart of Croatia. And there were many things I saw that have stayed with me. Among them was a view of a long valley just as the sun was casting its last rays on the valley. It was impossible for me to retreat to my compartment as long as there was light. In the distance there was a small, narrow hill, and on its crown was a bright white church, which seemed to light up above the valley like a sort of beacon. It seemed like it had been there like that for who knows how long, and that every evening the light hits in the same way, for whoever happened to be around to see it. That day, Aug. 8, was my day to see it. And tonight and tomorrow the same image will appear for someone else.


I eventually feel asleep, waking occasionally when the train lurched to a stop, including one spot somewhere in Hungary in the early dawn hours, when I was awoken by a mob of young people at the station wrapping up a warm summer night, presumably trying to get home. We arrived in Keleti Station in Budapest in the bright early morning hours. It's difficult to explain why certain experiences move you in certain ways. I suppose for me this trip was about going to a place where I never thought I would go, and seeing up close what history looks like. That it isn't a slow sluggish march, but something that loops around and refuses to sit still.

The Balkan Disease (part 1 of 2)

Mila by the sea at Okrug Gornji, July 2009. The one constant companion on my travels over the summer was a copy of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her epic, thousand-plus-page 1937 travel book about Yugoslavia. Robert D. Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts, said that he'd have preferred to lose his passport than his copy of the book. Seemed like the kind of recommendation that made it worth lugging around. Despite its many quirks and hinks, the book is about how this part of the world has a weird habit of grabbing people bay the ear and refusing to let go. I thought about this a lot as we prepared for our trip. I had also listened to a podcast of a talk given by retired American diplomat William Montgomery, who had served as ambassador in Croatia and Bulgaria in addiiton to many other posts around the region. When he retired a few years ago, he decided to settle down in a house near Dubrovnik, which prompted one of this friends to express the concern that an interest in the Balkans can become like a disease. It is a condition that got Montgomery, West, and even my wife, who has always got a funny look in her eye whenever she talks about Croatia. Of course, everyone sees this in their own way. For me, my first impression, was of an incredible pain in the bum. We left Budapest by train very early in the morning, and reached Zagreb to find that the trains would go no further becauase an accident near the coast, which had killed six people, had closed the railroads. So we had a few hours in the capital before taking a bus for another six hour trip to Split on the coast. From there, we had to catch another smaller bus to Trogir for the rest of the trip. For whatever odd reason, the bus station in Split is far too small for the country's second city. And it was a mass of crushed people and buses coming and going. As we searched for the right loading spot, I got to talking with a young fellow to see if he was going up the coast. He had just come off the ferry from Bari, which docked just across the street, and was on his way on another bus to Sarajevo. I have to confess a certain American ignorance about the city, which I knew mostly from news reports in college as the epicenter of a world of baffling and confusing pain. It struck me as strange that this fellow -- who was of indeterminate ethnicity but American citizenship, but that's a long story -- would be bouncing around hoping to get there. Once we found our place near the sea, my first impressions were immediately shaped by traveling with a two-year old, and that we were staying with our friends and their own two-year old. Totting the shorties around unavoidably warps your sense of time and place -- how you sleep, what you do, what you eat, what you think is fun. It isn't bad, just different. But it didn't take long for me to note that Croatia is much more touristed than I had thought. In the English-speaking world, Croatia barely exists as anything other than a slightly exotic and out-of-the-way place for certain adventurous travelers. But for a wide swath of Central Europe, it seems to be the rough equivalent of Cape Cod. The part of the village where we were staying was almost entirely hastily constructed summer rentals. The traffic was astonishing -- it took us two hours on a bus one day to travel the two kilometers to Trogir. That gave me lots of time to note the different license plates -- from Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Hungary. The beach was a scrum of different languages, rarely English. Maybe because I've spent my entire adult life living in places with a significant tourist economy, or because I read too many situationists in college, but I feel acutely aware of the condition of being a tourist. When I'm traveling, I always feel that sense that whatever I am seeing or experiencing is warped by the very fact that I am there. Couple that with the realization that an entire infrastructure exists to accomodate me there as an economic unit, and there is a strange sense of guilt, self-consicousness and alienation from what is, at a certain level, unreal. It is something I struggle with in the strangest ways -- the thing I like most about living in the Berkshires is showing people from other places around. I often feel like I am helping them to puncture their sense of "tourist-ness" by presenting authentic experience, even when taking them to Mass MoCA or the Clark or some other perfectly obvious touristy thing to do. But nevermind the digression. Back to the point, I was stunned by how beautiful the sea was, the Solta Channel with the islands just out of reach, the sparkling clean water. I was amazed at how perfectly well the weather held for two weeks, in which we barely saw any clouds and when the day and evening temperatures fell into such reliable predictability. There was the cute little restaurant nearby, with its lovely pizza and Karlovacko beer, which I loved even though every night we ate their they played the song "Baker Street" on the house stereo, thus permanently lodging it in my head like some kind of sonic shrapnel. It was perfect, but if the first sniffle of the Balkan disease didn't come until later.

Person who died

I never really bothered to have a strong opinion about Jim Carroll, the poet, diarist, and rock star who died suddenly last Friday at the age of 60. He swam in the same current as many of my favorite writers and musicians, so I've long known and admired much of his work. But I've never felt much more than that. He was in all the right places, knew the right people, but it always felt like he was opportunely a few steps behind.


Take his cult classic, The Basketball Diaries, which never struck me as even a very good example of writing about drugs. Looking at it again recently, it seems to me it isn't much more than a disjointed collection of clever observations, with a certainly dated shock value, which all suggest raw talent that might lead to something solid with the right influences. But the book itself never gets too deeply into why this nice Catholic jock would go so far off the rails, nor about what any of these misadventures might have to tell a disinterested reader.


His poetry was, I guess, alright, but not really that distinctive from a lot of the kind of stuff happening around New York in the good old days. The Jim Carroll Band, his game effort at rock n' roll/poetic fusion, never went far enough (see the perfectly serviceable version of "Sweet Jane" below, which really doesn't give you any reason not to just listen to Lou's original version again).  


 The only thing he did that is truly timeless is the song "People Who Died," an unrelenting, upbeat, almost hypnotizing rocker that transcends the ghoulishness of its subject matter to become a very profound assertion of life in the face of impermanence. But even then, the song was just an adaptation of a poem by his friend and mentor, Ted Berrigan.


Carroll gave a reading at Penn when I was there, and I came away impressed. The thing that I remember most was his voice -- this incredible, authentic New-Yawk honk, which sounded incredibly strained and weary croaking out of his tall, frail body. There was something in the way he read that suggested a kind of humility. The kind of deep appreciation many recovering addicts possess, especially one that pissed away what many think could have been a really promising career in professional sports. There was something about him that made you want to root for him, a kind of everyman sense of wonder and awe.


Of course, there is another way to look at this -- Robert Christgau acidly described him as being a phony "who's been charming suckers ever since he ran away from home." (He then goes on to acknowledge that charming this successfully takes real talent. "He's got a great eye, a great memory, great connections. He knows how to put himself across.") I wouldn't be that uncharitable though. You have to imagine him as a fifteen year old kid with a lot on his plate -- one of the best young basketball players in the city, already turning tricks around Times Square to fuel a drug habit, and still finding the time to stalk Frank O'Hara as he walked home from work, just to see what he saw and maybe get an insight into what made his poetry tick. They really don't make them like that anymore -- poetry has become ossified and ridiculous, promising athletes are channeled into the game so thoroughly they barely develop personalities, and the great American stewing pot of New York is a pathetic shadow of itself. He swam in some amazing slipstreams.

Rumors of war, and no pronunciation guide

By sheer coincidence, I've been spending a lot time researching the lead-up to the start of the Second World War, 70 years ago this morning. Reading through the papers and magazines of the time, it is hard not to feel a chill reading about how the world marched into the abyss, while America was content to look on with what almost feels like bemused concern. I came upon this thought from an editorial in The New York Times on Monday, August 21, 1939.

"Already we undergo a fresh baptism of consonants at news dispatches from Grunia, Lwow, and Bydgoszck, and worse may be yet to come. Any day now we may have to read of skirmishes at Mlawa and Piotrkow, turning movements at Wloclawek and Wlocklawa, and artillery duels at Bycloweszka and Czestowhowo. For all we know, there will even be retreats to Zgenz and Maciecjowice and a famous victory at Tecxynski, and by then the tongues of suffering millions will be tied in hard knots for life."

My senator, Ted Kennedy

What kind of Massachusetts liberal would I be if I let the day pass without a few thoughts. Lots has already been said, and I've been surprised at just how positive and sad the coverage of Edward Kennedy's death has been. No matter how we try to explain it away, public mourning is always about ourselves, not the man or the family or the times. And Ted's death comes just at a moment when there is so much to be worried about. So I'll leave it to others to eulogize the great national tragedies that have cut so close to him, or the many personal ones that he bounded over in the course of a career of dedicated service. All I can think about is how far we've sunk, and for what. I'm thinking of the tea-baggers, and the birthers, and the Town-Hallers. About the legions of white men nursing delusional grievances about how women and minorities are out to get them. Or all those folks who suffer from inadequate educations, and can articulate nothing beyond parroting how we must stop "these Nazi socialists from taking over health care and messing up Medicare." These increasingly loud and obnoxious folks who have allowed themselves to believe it is appropriate and kick-ass to bring assault weapons to public policy forums. There are two things that have struck with me throughout the day. The first is the way the Ted and the entire Kennedy clan were able to cut through this fog, and make these people see their interests clearly, and inspire them to think beyond hate and greed and toward a better future. For Ted, this was a skill he learned from his grandfather, the great Irish ward-heeler and Boston mayor John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald. The Democratic Party has completely lost this skill. You don't need to look far to see why. Just check-out the Times OpEd page today, where Maureen Dowd approvingly drops in passing the following repugnant stink-bomb from Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic: "The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.” Here's the thing: these same wretched proles way down there under Wieseltier and Dowd's noses weren't the vanguard of the Reagan revolution. They were for decades the core of Ted's support. And it is no mean feat that they stuck with him through a lot -- from Chappaquiddick, through busing, through all the drunken embarrassments. Whatever his personal problems may have been, politically he was usually right, and he was able to persuade the people who voted for him that he was -- whether against invading Iraq, supporting a sensible and fair immigration policy, or rejecting the hateful "Defense of Marriage Act." Unlike the wealthy today, Ted was raised with the belief that if you were born in the right place and the right time, that you actually owed your country an awful lot. He served his constituents well, and without condescending to them. It doesn't seem that hard to figure out, so I'm having a very hard time trying to figure out why his death should mark the end of an era. The second thing that's been on my mind is what Ted's life says about the real spirit of bipartisanship. It came through loud and clear listening Sen. Orrin Hatch try to stifle a sob talking about his old friend on the radio today. Here is the big secret about compromise: you have to actually have principles before you can start negotiating them away. You have to believe in more than maximizing your chances to be reelected for another term, and can't try to pass off as real values a pile of triangulated, Mark Penn market-tested centrist bullshit ginned up by the Democratic Leadership Council. There's no shame in being a liberal, especially now.

On my grandfather's passing

I was in Budapest when I heard about my grandfather's final illness and death last week. Whenever you are away from home you feel more attune to how time and space work, how the simple act of stepping out of your day-to-day life exposes how the threads of narrative that tie people and places together weave around each other, overlap, veer apart, and come together. It was what I thought about standing on the balcony of our friends' apartment in Budapest, thinking about how someone I tied so closely to my hometown spent so much of his youth not a day's journey away from where I was. The world felt a little smaller, and a lot more mysterious. The details of my grandfather's passing were predictable: he was 97 years old, after all, so you couldn't call it unexpected. He had been in declining health for years, which in some ways is a very sad and slow way for things to happen, but for those of us who survive it is in some ways the best, for you have plenty of time to make peace with the idea of loss before it happens. It was certainly sad to be so far away when it happened, unable to make a last visit and see the rest of my family when it did. The experience gave me a chance to witness just how pitiless airlines have gotten in these rough economic times. I hoped to make it back for the funeral on Friday, but thanks to some unfortunate restrictions on my type of ticket, it took only ten minutes on the phone with a Delta representative to reach that very rare point in customer service in which you only hear monosyllables and silence on the other end. "No. Anything else?," followed quickly by just plain "no," and waiting for me to hang-up. (I paid my respects Friday morning at St. Margaret of Hungary Church on Lehel Ter near where we were staying.) My grandfather led a full and long life, and is hard to really grasp when you think about it. When he was Mila's age, Archduke Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo, setting the fuse on the tumultuous 20th century. The entire history of the Soviet Union, from Bolshevik conspiracy to its restless aftermath, fits comfortably within his lifetime. I'm certain he could have told a multitude of interesting observations and impressions, but I didn't hear many of them. My grandfather was a profoundly laconic man, at least around me. My wife often scolded me for not learning more about his life and times. But I don't think she fully realized realize how many hundreds of afternoons I spent fishing with him on his boat on the Connecticut River, and how few questions I ever got answered. What was the 1933 Paris Exhibition like? Lots of crowds. What was interwar Poland like? we lived in a village, like any other. The stories I heard most -- about why he never took up smoking, or about how the local kids teased him for his Polish first name -- were interesting, but felt like small details of a much bigger picture. I'll never be able to say for certain why this was. Some people just don't like to talk much. I've found myself that as I get older, the days when I felt any and every occasion deserved a poem and every impression should be shared have decidedly ended. Or maybe I was just being a pest and asking the wrong questions. But it could also be that we saw things differently, and that he couldn't see what I thought was so interesting. I grew up in a small town, and didn't really begin to travel until I was done with graduate school. So the world seemed very big and interesting to me. I was full of romance and illusions. It could be my grandfather, who had seen a lot of the world by the time I came around, just saw them with a realist's eyes. That would probably be a very Old World way of looking at things. We Americans have a touchingly naive sense of history as straight line, always going up. Even our ugly chapters have a sort of cheery optimism -- like race relations for example. The big story most of us probably have in our heads is of our unfortunate history of slavery, wiped away in the Civil War, delayed during the Jim Crow era, blossoming in the Civil Rights movement, and culminating in Barack Obama becoming president. Whatever comes next, most of us probably think, will be great. We stick to it admirably, but it constantly struck me traveling around the Balkans and Hungary that no one else thinks this way. In Budapest I visited the Museum of Military History, which is located in the northern corner of the heavily touristed Castle Hill. But it was largely empty when I went -- a grandmother and her son, one other English visitor, and myself. These kinds of museums are usually of a type -- lots of uniforms, swords and armor, and usually the kind of basest nationalist chest-thumping. Hungary's museum has plenty of costumes, but the chest-thumping was astonishingly meek. Partly, that is due to Hungary's rather spotty military record -- it is a history of lamented losses, bad luck, and worse decision-making. It reflected itself in an almost self-effacing sort of museum experience. One major exhibit focused on the years 1918 to 1945. National museums are always incredibly careful about what they show and how they show it, so how this period was framed is astonishing. It begins with how the Austro-Hungarian army disintegrated at the end of WWI and was at the mercy of Czechs, Serbs, and Romanians. It follows the efforts in the interwar years by the Horthy regime to rebuild the military. It traces the country's disastrous decision to follow Hitler in the invasion of the Soviet Union (though perhaps tries a little too hard to justify this unfortunate chapter), and ends with the army's complete annihilation by the Red Army. The story goes: Big Loss, Bad Decisions, Enormous Loss. It used to be said that American southerners were the closest to Europeans because they were the only Americans that had lived through a story like that. Americans don't have the patience for this kind of difficulty and honesty in our national storytelling. Take immigration, for example, which is consistently presented to schoolchildren as a tale of osmotic motion, of people suffering in the Bad Old World, having the gumption to adventurously seek out a better life, and then arriving on America's shores to live happily ever after. It never worked that way, and for the record, it still doesn't. Consider my grandfather, who was born in Easthampton in 1912, but then moved with his family back to Poland when he was 11, after Poland became an independent nation once again. He would decide on his own to come back in the 1930s. There is something very childlike in this kind of linear sense of history, and it is perhaps something many of us carry as we are launched into the world. I always thought, for example, that as I grew older I would learn more about things. When I was younger, I was always aware that there was much I didn't know, but was confident they would be revealed as time went by. But in truth, what you learn comes in disconnected drops, and doors are constantly shut for good. So I'll never know if my father thought of me as anything other than a lingering inconvenience from his distant past. And I'll never know what my grandfather thought when he was boy traveling across the sea to Poland, or what he thought years later on another ship coming back.

Budapest

I'm in Budapest this week, having come up from Croatia a few days before Olga and Mila to get a Russian transit visa. This is an extension of the visa hassles I wrote about a few months ago, proving that the consequences of taking your eye off the ball when dealing with Russian bureaucracy are long and annoying. But while the Russians play with my passport, I have had some time to explore what is really shaping up to be one of my favorite cities. I'm staying at our friends' apartment in the Ujilipotvaros neighborhood of the city, a quiet district along the Danube north of the center. It is almost entirely residential, and full of modernist apartment blocks built between the wars. Although it is rather densely built-up, the buildings seem designed for humans, with an abundance of balconies and courtyards. It feels like a healthy, middle class sort of place, full of shops and cafes, and with an interesting mix of people from young families with children to seniors. It is what I imagine the Upper West Side must have been like before Manhattan lost the plot and became a gentrified shopping arcade. Before I arrived, I imagined that the city was like a sort of smaller, more provincial Vienna. And indeed, a great deal of the city dates from the second half of the 19th century, during the Dual Monarchy when the country enjoyed a long golden moment in the Hapsburg fold. But its most pompous buildings -- St. Stephen's Basilica, the Opera, Parliament -- are so ridiculous that they almost become self-effacing. By some strange and pleasant force of aesthetics, it achieves a king of harmony. And if parts of Budapest feel a bit too much like it jumped out of a travel brochure, Hungary is remarkable in just how dramatically it sticks out from its neighbors. It starts at a very basic level, with the faces you see on the street, most of whom have rather striking, dark features. But it really goes to a whole new level when it comes to the language. I've never actually traveled to a place where the language is not related to something I've learned before. So the words of the language, which is closer to Finnish and Siberian native languages than to anything Romantic or Slavic, often seem like just a pile of haphazard syllables. This partly explains why despite closely studying and comparing bottles at the shop, I still keep bringing home carbonated bottled water. So much of how I see the world comes through the prism of America and Russia, and I am always pleased to come to a third country that seems comfortable and happy with itself, which I think is the direct result of not having pretensions to superpower status, either in reality or in their imagination. This is what shapes my personal adjustment process when I arrive in a new place. There are usually a few days that I spend sputtering in frustration about why Russia, a country I have so much invested in, has to be so comprehensively inadequate in how it treats guests. And there is also the inevitable reflecting on being an American, the kind of self-awareness that is so important but which way too many of my fellow citizens lack (I mean, in what civilized country do people insist on bringing firearms to a debate about health care?). You realize how we are seen, for good and for ill. When I arrived on Sunday, I took a walk around the center of the city and came upon Szabadsag Square. There is a statue there of Harry Hill Bandholz, someone I'd never heard of. He was in charge of a peacekeeping detachment sent here in the chaos of 1919, and organized the defense of the National Museum from pillage-minded Romanian troops. It is a touching thing, and in a substantial way made me proud to be American. I kept walking to the north part of the park, and noticed that a whole quadrant was blocked off by ugly grey metal pylons. I saw a ring of jersey barriers and metal gates blocking traffic, and signs in Hungarian and English wanring that photography was strictly prohibited. Yep, I'd stumbled upon the U.S. Embassy. It is a perfect embarassment, and as a taxpayer and citizen I hope that Obama is successful enough at restoring our standing in their world -- and our sense of basic self-confidence and decency -- that our embassies will someday soon stop looking like colonial outposts perched among the natives waiting to be attacked. When our embassy in a friendly, peaceful ally like Hungary looks like it belongs in Islamabad, something is deeply amiss.

Marching on Red Square

Mila on our trip downtown, Tuesday, July 21, 2009.

The first leg of our trip to visit family in Moscow is complete, and we're off now for a little more exploring.

Trendy newspaper design

Newspaper design sometimes feels like a "rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic" kind of endeavor. It's a thankless job, and having done it for awhile, I appreciate it when it is done well. A big part of the challenge of the work is dealing with the work cut out for you by the wizards who run the business. It is where the admonition to "do more with less" is most apparent.

They have fewer actually designers to do the work, there are fewer reporters and editors producing the content, and they even have to endure the injustice of having less paper -- less space -- to work with. Those incredible shrinking newspapers are a nightmare to make anything meaningful on.

Of course, newspaper designers haven't always helped themselves out much. The whole field is prone to fads and foolishness that occasionally sweeps through. First and foremost is the recent failure to remember that this is a print medium, and however important visual imagery is, it is second banana to the words around it. These aren't picture books, for crying out loud. And many charts, graphs, boxes, and briefs exist simply to eliminate "gray space" -- the design world's unfortunate and obnoxious term for what we old-fashioned folks call "text." Another particularly silly meme was that newspapers should somehow "look like websites." This came from a fundamental misunderstanding of what a newspaper is, and a the kind of ham-handed cross-marketing effort dreamed up in a B-school seminar.

The Hartford Courant bit hard on this kind of stuff, and the newspaper I picked up on recent Sunday on a trip to Torrington bore almost no resemblance to any other newspaper I've seen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The flag was off to the side, the Courant's delightfully weird logo (with a bright red heart, crown, and pigeon holding a telegram) was placed too prominently up top, and you had a hard time finding out where basic bits of info like the price and date. But scrolling down, you noticed that they appeared to have their own second thoughts about the subject...

All this is a great shame, because newspaper design doesn't need to suffer this much. On a recent trip to the UK, Olga brought me back a stack of newspaper, including several of the Sunday broadsheets. In the UK, broadsheet still means "broad sheet." During the week, most of the respectable British papers have switched to a tabloid size, which despite being a major taboo in the U.S., makes a ton of sense. It saves paper, it puts an emphasis on the text, and it gives advertising much more impact (businesses that pay for tiny ads at the bottom of a broadsheet page are wasting their money). But for their Sunday editions, they blow it all out. And suddenly, you realize the value of it -- huge photo spreads, properly constructed in-depth packages including break-out material -- in other words, something worth paying money for and spending some time with.

Michael Jackson's legend

What can you say about our culture? You're checking in with the NBA draft, and suddenly an interview with Shaquille O'Neal begins with him offering condolences to the Jackson family. Huh? Then CNN and MSNBC have dueling helicopter shots on another helicopter waiting for a corpse to cross a parking lot to a coroner's office. It was the dark apotheosis of celebrity culture, the gross spectacle at the end of modern capitalism. But of course, it is also a human tragedy really (from many, many angles), and the passing of a great artist. I remember distinctly going to summer camp as a kid (this would have been '84, '85), and meeting new kids and figuring each others' likes and dislikes out. The consensus usually emerged that you really liked Jackson's music but were a bit creeped out by the guy himself. My generation had to grow up with an innate sense of awareness about how you compartmentalize culture. The music was ubiquitous, and legitimately brilliant, but it felt like it had been around forever to us -- he was already in the same category as Sinatra or the Beatles, which seemed to mean that he could be taken for granted. And "Jacko" himself was so hard to understand, and therefore so easy to mock. Of course, as the years went by, he just got harder to understand. And his sudden but perfectly predictable death just leaves a ton of questions we'll no doubt have decades to pick through. For example, I've always wondered who are all these people screaming and crying during his press conferences and outside the courthouses? What do they do with the rest of their time? And as much as I hate to say it, Al Sharpton made a good point Thursday (repeatedly, across many different media platforms, naturally) about how tons of people would put out statements about his passing, but where were all those people the day before? Indeed, that's what has been the most disturbing part of his ridiculous efforts to rehabilitate his image over the past 17 years. Was there no one to stop and tell him, "Wait a sec. This looks crazy!" Janet? Quincy? Elizabeth? Anyone? And these ill-conceived ideas were wildly compounded by the gleeful willingness of the media to go along with the circus, because freak-shows are terrific ratings. And what's worse, knowing his family and the ranks of sketchy hangers-on, it is perfectly clear that this is going to go on for a long time. The closest analogy has to be Elvis -- a historic early career, an embarrassing end, and decades of sordid gossip. But as with any pop cultural turning point, there is more to this than the cheap spectacle, something at the root that is very important and true. One afternoon in 1996 (or '97), I was hanging out at my favorite coffeeshop in Philadelphia with two close friends, talking about music. These guys were black, natives of Philly, and had an honest sense of patience and humor about race, and taught me an awful lot about black life and culture which I only learned about before through a mediated distance. But when I made a joke about Jackson -- something perfectly common about how weird and possibly criminal he was -- their faces went blank, and an actual chill seemed to come over them as they asked why I thought that was funny. I think that was the one time I can recall stumbling upon a racially awkward moment that I completely couldn't have foreseen. They explained to me about how they listened to their Jackson Five records until the grooves wore out, and about how much they meant to them and their parents and their families. They were aware of his substantial flaws, but regarded them with the resigned patience of a wayward family member. They then spent a long time reliving their favorites in earnest falsettoes, and joyfully imitating dance moves from the early days. So, I'll just think about that day as Michael Jackson's sad, contested legend continues. Now, what were we talking about a day ago? (Iran, I mean Iran. Not Jon and Kate, whoever they are.)

Happy Bloomsday!

Here's my 2006 editorial for the Eagle about our favorite literary holiday.

Iran's moment

Watching what is happening now in Iran is quite frustrating, because you realize the deep unknowability of what is happening there. Our current media environment is both very broad and very shallow, and presents the dangerous impression that we know what is happening, when in fact we don't. I often think about this in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The other day, I had occasion to spend some time at Sawyer Library reading through the 1991 run of The New Republic. What's left of the historian in me loves spending time this way, and I always marvel at how things have changed. The first thing that struck me is the amount of writing about what was happening in Russia. There were detailed observations about changes in state news telecasts, about the ominous violence between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, about price changes in the markets and the splits between Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn in the dissident community. The coverage was extensive and informed, and overall pretty good and insightful. And yet, it was slightly off. Throughout the spring, writers frequently referred to "glasnost" in the past tense. There was a tenor that Gorbachev was pulling back from reform, as demonstrated by the growing number of perceived hardliners he was putting in place in the Kremlin. Of course, those reactionaries would lead a coup against him that August, whose failure sealed the fate of the Soviet Union once and for all. But no one could accurately see the ways that Gorbachev was being pressured from within, or just how dramatically the Russian people had moved away from the regime. These are the moments that force everything out into the open, and time will tell what the current unrest in Tehran says about the regime and its relationship with the people. From what I've read so far -- and I'm by no means an expert -- we've been hearing in the media for a long while about the Westernizing, reform-minded, young generation in Iran, and that demographics and political pressure suggested change was in the air. But what seemed to happen in the election is that the conservative "silent majority," with an assist from the authorities, have stepped in. It remains to be seen if this is going to be more like the August Coup or Tiananmen Square.

Stamp collecting

No matter how many times I go through it, no matter how many new holographic stickers my passport picks up, it seems I can't go through the process of getting a Russian visa without some sort of drama. This year's adventure is particularly painful: once we'd mapped out our summer plans, I managed to misread the (vaguely-worded) fine print about timing options, which caused a few days of real stress and turmoil around here. I think we survived this time -- but one is never certain you've succeeded until the landing-gear goes up on your return flight. Folks unfamiliar with the details of traveling to Russia are often astonished about what it takes. For example, no, as a matter of fact, being married to Russian citizen has not changed a single friggin' thing about our visa options. Even though we scaled the bureaucratic equivalent of Mount Everest by getting hitched in an official Russian ceremony, I still have to drudge through the visa regime like anyone else. And the tough part is that I, raised in full American "Don't Tread on Me" libertarian bliss, am incredibly bad at sorting through fearsome state structures. I decidedly lack what I call the "bureaucratic imagination," a set of skills most Russians learn and hone from birth. It is a kind of attention to detail and ruthless persistence in the face frustration, rudeness, and hopelessness that is the only way to get the right stamp on your passport, or get your kids into the right school, or to make sure local authorities can't sweep you aside. It is the cynical -- though perfectly frank -- admission that there is a vast system out there that does not exist to make things easier for you, and the ability to creatively imagine the ways that it is going to beat and crush you if you aren't careful. It is something that our soft consumer society has lost. But, as wife would surely note, 'tis my own damned fault. I should have just called about the visa a month ago. I swear I'll remember next time.

That kind of year...

The day the Pulitzers are announced is usually a chance for the staffs of the handful of newspapers still in a position to win such things to pat themselves on the back. But there's always at least one out of nowhere, feel-good surprise. This year, it's editorial page editor Mark Mahoney of the Post-Star in Glens Falls, NY. "This is for all the small newspapers out there that never got to play in the game," said Post-Star editor Ken Tingley. But being 2009, of course one of the winners had already been laid-off from his job late last year. But Paul Giblen and his editor and a few other laid-off staffers from the East Valley Tribune have started their own online news outlet. I hope it works out.

Hillsborough

“I was still on the road when the match began, and after two minutes the radio commentator said that something was wrong. There was trouble on the terraces behind the Liverpool goal. There was a sad, not-this-again feeling in his voice, a quality of resignation, that the supporters, especially those from Liverpool, were sacrificing a game of football to pursue their own violent entertainment: again.. The play continued, but you could tell that the commentator was not watching it, that he was trying to figure out what was happening on the terraces. He couldn’t definitely say that it was crowd trouble, but it was something serious, and the police were gathering near the spot. And then, in an instant, that was it: the game was over. The referee had been told by the police to stop play. That was about the time I arrived home. The stadium was about to become the most famous in the world.” -- Bill Buford’s description in his 1990 book Among the Thugs of hearing about the Hillsborough stadium disaster, twenty years ago last Wednesday, in which 96 fans were killed.

There were lots of opportunities to think about what sports means last week. Wednesday marked the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, when 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death as an FA Cup semifinal against Nottingham Forest got underway. There are many layers to what happened, particularly about tragedy and memory, but also about sports' changing place in society. There are many interesting things about how the 96 victims are remembered. In many ways it fits in with how other major public tragedies are remembered -- particularly the emphasis on ritually reading aloud the names of the victims, which you see in memorials to Sept. 11, and the Vietnam war. There is also an active and vibrant set of conspiracy theories that abound, and the belief that justice has not yet been served. And the the tragedy's legacy includes many unique quirks, such as the way that the Sun newspaper remains hated in much of Liverpool to this day due to its lurid and unfounded allegations of Liverpool hooliganism at the tragedy. But at the same time, the entire event seems tinged with a bit of self-pity -- 1989 was the absolute low ebb of English football. It was serving out a ban from European competition at the time as punishment for the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985, in which Liverpool fans played an unfortunate role. But unlike too many tragedies, this one’s long-term legacy is positive: the investigation into what happened, the Taylor Report, produced a list of recommendations that essentially gave football a chance to start over. They recommended such things that seem so obvious -– like having seats in stadiums, instead of just pushing people into terraces which, as Buford notes, police actually referred to with the same language as moving herds of cattle: “pens,” “cages,” etc. It marked the start of the modern game: a big-money generating, largely respectable, family-friendly form of entertainment. It is a little ironic that the anniversary –- widely noted in Europe but ignored here in the States -– came just as the New York Yankees inaugurated their current fortress of capitalist bounty: its new $1.5 billion, taxpayer-supported stadium whose most expensive seats are $2,500 and have teak armrests. All this points out the strange paradoxes of sports, that is at the same time nothing more than and much much more than watching grown men play childrens' games. What it all means, and who cares about it, is always subject to change and cycles. English football changed dramatically one afternoon in 1989 – but even so, a 2007 poll found an overwhelming majority of fans want standing terraces to return. And here already, the new Yankee stadium is a monument to another era -– of leveraged capital projects, unchecked greed, and blissfully entertaining unreality. Yet another of the fascinating things about this economic crisis is to see what role sports will play in society at the other end.

‘With lightning telegrams...'

The Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was a big fan of telegrams. It was the height of communication technology at the time –- messages condensed down to their most efficient, poetic length and then zipped over wires at the speed of lightning (then delivered by a man riding about town on a bicycle, but nevermind). He was a man of his times. And so am I! I just joined Facebook -– apparently just a few minutes after it began its long downward slide into Friendster-dom (I’m guessing that New York mag profile is the highwater mark). As with Mayakovsky’s love of telegrams, I suspect social networking sites are an overexcited and ultimately useless misapplication of a useful technology. But never let it be said I didn’t try – and please don’t point out what Mayakovsky probably would have thought of Twitter.

Only a personal post...

It sounds ridiculous, but I try not to write too much about myself here. That is to say, I don’t like to get into anything about my personal life that is not perfectly obvious from a distance. But I feel it is time for one of those exceptions right now, mostly because I think it will explain a lot about why I’ve been so quiet these past few months, and will hopefully explain to my friends out there where I’ve been all these months.


Last June, my family and I came back from Moscow. It was a weird time, I remember sitting on that plane -- or more properly, running around in circles on that KLM Boeing-747 as Mila did laps for several hours -- full of all kinds of nervousness and anticipation. I didn’t have anything I was going back to, but something about being abroad and living in the big city made me appreciate our quiet country lives. Things would work out. But something came up. In the middle of adjusting to the culture shock, and moving to a new house, I got a job offer. In general, it is not a great idea to make major life decisions guided solely by fear.


But when I was offered a night editing job at the Eagle, my old haunt, I was terrified of refusing a regular paycheck when the economy was beginning to circle the drain. So I took the job, and I remember driving down to Pittsfield my first day, and then there is nothing but this whooshing sound. And here I am, months later, unsure about where the time went. Lots happened, of course -- Mila started daycare, we went to Poland -- but honestly, those details feel like detached dreams. My schedule at work was only nights, and most weekends. There was no set schedule, so the weeks all blurred into one mush of work. Because the job hours happened precisely and solely when we did not have access to childcare, my wife had to take care of Mila, significantly impacting her work as well. Our family life suffered because we were together rarely. I spent my time in Russia looking forward to being able to cook again, but now I had a job in which I couldn’t cook anymore. And the work itself was difficult. Years and years of budget cuts at American newspapers have whittled it down to a few incredibly busy jobs it is almost impossible to do well. Basically, you show up for work, grind away on a computer, look up and realize its time to go home and fall asleep. The closest analogy, I’m afraid to admit, was that summer in college I spent 12-hour shifts putting labels on shampoo bottles at a plastic molding factory.


So for the past few weeks, I’ve been in agony thinking about the future. It came about because this spring we have a lot of things on our schedule, and my work, in which I was parceled out a random batch of days two weeks ahead of time, made it frustrating to plan. I realized I was on a path that was wrong for my career, wrong for my wife’s career, wrong for my daughter’s childhood, and I stuck with it because I liked my co-workers, I liked the idea of having a career in newspaper journalism, and I liked the paycheck (though note: I did not like the amount of money it brought me. Newspapers work is appallingly badly paid). I went back and forth over and over again. I made up my mind and still agonized over whether it was the right thing to do. I ate badly, I lost sleep, I snapped at friends and strangers. And in the background, the steady, miserable backdrop of economic apocalypse. As the ship goes down, to step off it makes you feel perfectly insane. I’ve been pretty responsible though – no ill-advised mortgage, just ill-advised student loans. And there is the general malaise and agita of the future of newspapers (this year’s Internet meme must surely be “The Death of Newspapers” … but that’s another post!).


But what tipped me over the edge was the most mundane thing: a really, really bad boss that made none of it worthwhile. Maybe I’ll get into all that later; I haven’t decided yet. And then you had winter. Readjusting to a New England winter, especially a particularly nasty one like this, has been hard. In Moscow, you get central heating, crews of central Asian immigrants that keep the snow cleared. Here, where you are responsible for everything yourself, it feels like each little thing takes a greater toll on you. Every time you have to shovel the walkway, or pay a jaw-dropping bill for a heating oil delivery, seems to make things a little worse. But I try to remember all those things about how I felt on that plane slouching toward JFK International Airport. And after this months-long detour, I can look forward once again to the fear, uncertainty, and… spring!

I'm younger than that now

I was living in Washington eight years ago when Bush was inaugurated for his first term. It was one of the most upsetting and disturbing days I can remember, how down to the very details it was like a cinema director's impression of the forces of evil taking over the world. The freezing drizzle of that grey day, the dispirited protesters who gathered in Dupont Circle and sullenly marched toward some vague point near the parade route. Through the night, the city was full of coaches carrying hillbillies who thought it was very funny to wear cowboy boots with tuxedos from one ball to another. It was like a gang of fat Visigoths and their plastic-haired wives had taken over the capital.


I kept reminding myself that it wouldn't be that bad, that it couldn't be that bad. America is a land of political compromise and balance, after all. But for eight long years, it proved to be worse than anything anyone could have imagined. Each unspooling catastrophe and outrage was followed by something even worse.


I would very much like to be there today when it all comes to an end. Mostly for personal reasons, not really related to the moment -- that I had an up-close seat at the horror, I'd like to have a look at what I hope will be its exact opposite. But my life is different now. Much has happened in those eight years, and now here in Williamstown, with my family, my work, I have that "my back pages" feeling. In spite of everything Bush and his cronies did, I don't think it took anything away from the joy I felt at my wedding, or when I met my daughter.


And nothing Obama will do, for good or ill, will really change my world at a certain level either. Don't get me wrong. I can't think about this past election, and the gravity of this moment, without getting that feeling of words failing me, and with a rising flush of pride and joy that these American ideals are bright and true. But as Obama himself would be the first to tell you, these pretty thoughts are good and all, but not enough. As the Beatles put it, "the movement you need is on your shoulders."