The bidding process for the World Cup, much like the process for the Olympics, feels like a scandal-in-waiting. But the details of the back-scratching and other funny business isn't as interesting at the moment as the fact that now, Russia and Qatar are going to have to actually go through with this.
My first thought on Russia's successful bid is amazement at the scale of the job ahead. There is presently only one top-grade football stadium in the country -- and that is Lokomotiv Stadium, which is in a hard-to-reach corner of Moscow and only seats 28,800. Nearly every other stadium is an awful Soviet-era pile built to host track and field competitions, with concrete bowl seating and distant sight lines. The nation's premiere stadium, Luzhniki, has hosted many big football events, and always with a lot of bitching by everyone involved before and afterwords.
So, if I were a politically well-connected building contractor today, I would have passed out at the news. A lot of things are going to be built in the next eight years, and there is little cause for hope that Russia can do it without massive amounts of fraud, waste, and corruption. And it remains to be seen whether or not Russia can actually pull off an event this size. The Sochi Olympics in 2012 may well turn into a disaster, and if I were FIFA, I'd have at least waited to see just how bad the damage is before placing this bet. But who knows why the judges judged as they did...
And furthermore, it is my long-standing belief that Russia has no business hosting any serious international event until it completely overhauls its Soviet-era visa requirements. The present hybrid system of police-state bullying and organized shakedowns is unfit for a country with such high aspirations. Plus, you know what else would be nice? hotel rooms. Not Ritz-Carltons and absurd high-end ones, but normal, affordable hotel rooms where you can be reasonable sure you won't get robbed.
As for the 2022 Qatar Olympics, I can only stifle a laugh. I'm waiting to know if someone will open a book with odds that this will mark the first World Cup in which a player actually drops dead on the pitch during a match. Again, who knows why the judges judged etc etc etc.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The Carter legacy
I'd love to offer former President Jimmy Carter the kind of quiet respect his office ought to deserve, but his weirdly vindictive and plainly untrue comments as he hawks his new new book shouldn't be left alone. It would have been nice to forget the nightmare of his presidency, and the wasted opportunity his election was for generations of Americans, but if he's seriously going to say in public that it was Ted Kennedy's fault health care reform didn't pass, then I'm going to say what a fraud and waste his entire career was.
They like to say that Carter has been a better ex-president than president. Which frankly, isn't that hard a post to pass. But the man does not get nearly enough blame for obnoxious trends in national politics that he introduced. These are things many of us think may have come from Nixon, or Reagan, but are in fact his unique contribution to American culture.
They like to say that Carter has been a better ex-president than president. Which frankly, isn't that hard a post to pass. But the man does not get nearly enough blame for obnoxious trends in national politics that he introduced. These are things many of us think may have come from Nixon, or Reagan, but are in fact his unique contribution to American culture.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
The Rus, the rus, the rus is on fire...
"... we don't need no Forest Service let the mother-f__ker burn!"
-- the 2010 Russian update, with apologies to Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three.
How best to describe the past few days around Moscow, the smokey, smoggy, disaster area you might have read about in the paper? It has been like standing closely downwind of a campfire, but you can't get far enough away. Your throat and nose burn, your eyes are on fire (if you wear contacts, just forget it.) Andrew E. Kramer in the NYT failed to complete the picture when he tried to describe it: "Moscow was choked with smoke, which seemed more like a smelly fog, thick enough to leave an aftertaste and a sensation of cement dust in the mouth," he wrote. "Residents wandered in the milky haze, many wearing surgical masks and dazed looks." Close, but no mention of the permanent headaches, or your hands and feet going numb, or the urge to take three hour naps in the afternoon. Or the rat the size of a full-grown cat I found lying dead in the kids' sandbox outside our apartment Friday.
Any American assignment editor by now would have had enough. There are only so many disaster stories you can run about heroic firefighters, top government official expressing concern and scolding low-level officials, and health authorities offering tips like wear a wetted gauze mask and drink green tea. Eventually -- certainly before two weeks have passed -- they'll want to know who to blame. No surprise, few media outlets here have bothered to think in such scandalously Western terms (with the notable and heroic exceptions of The Moscow Times, Ekho Moskvy, and Vedomosti).
Of course, some have tried to move the process along. Two immortal pillars of the Russian Soul are xenophobic conspiracy theories and crackpot pseudoscience. And that's where the U.S. High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program comes in, the scientific outpost in the far reaches of Alaska has been a magnet for conspiracy theories. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has made note of it, speculating that it may have caused the earthquake in Haiti. Some clever Russian intellectuals have wondered if this might indeed be some kind of ionospheric weapon aimed straight at Eurasia, presumable to keep Russia on her knees. The rabble-rousing tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted Georgiy Vasilyev, a physics professor at Moscow State University, as saying that the U.S. military has spent so much money on this for it not to be some kind of weapon. "The American explanation that this station was built for the study of the aurora effect is not very believable," he said earlier this month. "Moreover, (the United States) has spent almost 20 years and 250 million dollars on equipment for the study of such a very complex natural phenomenon!" Oy, studying a complex natural phenomenon, instead of just jumping to conclusions. Again, this from a physics professor at Moscow State University.
The principle of Occam's Razor hasn't been a big part of the thinking around here. So don't consider the fact that in 2006, the Duma abolished the Forest Service and left forest fire prevention to an ill-defined mix of local authorities and entities that "hold the rights" to the forests. They're obviously doing a bang-up job. If you've ever bothered to wonder what deregulating yourself into a Hobbesian state of nature looks like, well, it looks pretty f__king smokey.
The story of the Great Smokeout of 2010 has yet to be written, but I've noticed that many western media outlets seem to suggest that the degree of popular dissatisfaction at how an ossified, corrupt, and inept government could let things get this bad might lead to some kind of tipping point. That everyone will look up from LiveJournal and exclaim, "My God, Kasparov was right all along!" To put it simply, not a chance.
-- the 2010 Russian update, with apologies to Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three.
How best to describe the past few days around Moscow, the smokey, smoggy, disaster area you might have read about in the paper? It has been like standing closely downwind of a campfire, but you can't get far enough away. Your throat and nose burn, your eyes are on fire (if you wear contacts, just forget it.) Andrew E. Kramer in the NYT failed to complete the picture when he tried to describe it: "Moscow was choked with smoke, which seemed more like a smelly fog, thick enough to leave an aftertaste and a sensation of cement dust in the mouth," he wrote. "Residents wandered in the milky haze, many wearing surgical masks and dazed looks." Close, but no mention of the permanent headaches, or your hands and feet going numb, or the urge to take three hour naps in the afternoon. Or the rat the size of a full-grown cat I found lying dead in the kids' sandbox outside our apartment Friday.
Any American assignment editor by now would have had enough. There are only so many disaster stories you can run about heroic firefighters, top government official expressing concern and scolding low-level officials, and health authorities offering tips like wear a wetted gauze mask and drink green tea. Eventually -- certainly before two weeks have passed -- they'll want to know who to blame. No surprise, few media outlets here have bothered to think in such scandalously Western terms (with the notable and heroic exceptions of The Moscow Times, Ekho Moskvy, and Vedomosti).
Of course, some have tried to move the process along. Two immortal pillars of the Russian Soul are xenophobic conspiracy theories and crackpot pseudoscience. And that's where the U.S. High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program comes in, the scientific outpost in the far reaches of Alaska has been a magnet for conspiracy theories. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has made note of it, speculating that it may have caused the earthquake in Haiti. Some clever Russian intellectuals have wondered if this might indeed be some kind of ionospheric weapon aimed straight at Eurasia, presumable to keep Russia on her knees. The rabble-rousing tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted Georgiy Vasilyev, a physics professor at Moscow State University, as saying that the U.S. military has spent so much money on this for it not to be some kind of weapon. "The American explanation that this station was built for the study of the aurora effect is not very believable," he said earlier this month. "Moreover, (the United States) has spent almost 20 years and 250 million dollars on equipment for the study of such a very complex natural phenomenon!" Oy, studying a complex natural phenomenon, instead of just jumping to conclusions. Again, this from a physics professor at Moscow State University.
The principle of Occam's Razor hasn't been a big part of the thinking around here. So don't consider the fact that in 2006, the Duma abolished the Forest Service and left forest fire prevention to an ill-defined mix of local authorities and entities that "hold the rights" to the forests. They're obviously doing a bang-up job. If you've ever bothered to wonder what deregulating yourself into a Hobbesian state of nature looks like, well, it looks pretty f__king smokey.
The story of the Great Smokeout of 2010 has yet to be written, but I've noticed that many western media outlets seem to suggest that the degree of popular dissatisfaction at how an ossified, corrupt, and inept government could let things get this bad might lead to some kind of tipping point. That everyone will look up from LiveJournal and exclaim, "My God, Kasparov was right all along!" To put it simply, not a chance.
Friday, July 2, 2010
An abnormal situation on an abnormal road to an abnormal airport in an abnormal country
It's really no joke to say that everything is harder in Russia. Take getting to the airport. This week, the main road that leads to Sheremetyevo Airport northwest of the city -- and still the major one -- has had to have emergency road work done. Since it is chancey to drive there as it is, this development has been catastrophic. The Moscow Times reports that there have been huge delays, and even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has had to get involved.
And then there's this nugget:
And then there's this nugget:
Sheremetyevo director Mikhail Vasilenko said on his blog Wednesday that City Hall had intentionally blocked off the roads in order to undermine Sheremetyevo and support rival airport Vnukovo, which is opening a new terminal in July.All very amusing, especially as we are supposedto fly out of there next week.
Vasilenko sent a complaint to the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, which has opened an investigation into whether the traffic problems are linked with the Vnukovo terminal opening.
“In a normal economy, this would be an abnormal situation,” said Andrei Golomozin, the service’s deputy director, Interfax reported. “Those who are responsible should be punished. I am not sure whether it will fall into the realm of anti-monopoly law.”
“An intervention by the country’s top officials will normalize everything quickly.” Vasilenko said Thursday.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Accidental cultural competence
The ability to navigate through another culture sneaks up on you. Especially with language, when you reach a point that you spend so long focusing on how much you don’t know that you take for granted what you do know. Combine that with all the other bits of cultural competence you build up – the comfort-level of making a joke in what was once an uncomfortable situation, the ability to read street signs without thinking “I am reading a street sign in another language” – and you can forget how others see you.
I had a strange encounter on Wednesday in the park across the street. The family has been away at the dacha, and I’ve been staying in the city getting some work done. It’s been a lot of work, and of course, lots of football matches to watch on television. I watched the tense England-Slovenia, US-Algeria matches, and decided afterwards to take a walk. It was about 8 p.m., and the long Moscow twilight was still in effect. The weather has been beautiful, about 30 degrees C with a nice breeze, so I opted to take a walk.
I went to a kiosk and bought a Starry Melnik beer and went through the park near our house and sat on a bench to think through some problems in the book. The park is interesting -- it is a woody place, with a few benches, but it is usually perfectly safe except when it gets dark. I sat and watched parents with their kids in strollers walk by, a steady stream of people heading home from work, a few groups of young men and women gathered at nearby benches drinking beer and talking.
Along came a pair of visibly inebriated guys, who came up and started a conversation. One was a normally dressed fellow with a buzzcut and a tan, and the other was wearing blue workers overalls. They appeared to be Central Asian. Each of them was carrying a can of Baltika No. 9, a kind of strong, disgusting dark beer. Buzzcut sat beside me at a respectable distance, the other guy squatted a little to my right. They had a brief and poignant story about how they had just finished a long day of hard work, and that it was Buzzcut's birthday.
I realized quickly that these weren't muggers or hooligans -- just two hard-working guys who didn't have any more money and didn't want the fun to end. They needed someone to buy another round of something, and I looked like an easy mark.
I wasn't particularly interested, so I fell back on my default position for getting out of these things -- "I'm sorry, I don't understand."
They repeated themselves, hard work, birthday, etc. And I stuck to my story. They began asking, politely, where I was from. They were from Uzbekistan -- did I know where that was? Yes, I said. Near Tajikistan (I was very careful not to mention Kyrgyzstan in any imaginable way). I even said something about how they made lovely tea-cups (piali, which are actually, quite lovely).
And they wanted to know if I lived in Moscow. I said no, and insisted I didn't understand what they were saying. They wanted to know what "republic" I was from. I insisted I was from somewhere else. Probably Latvia? Lithuania? Eventually, I said I was from Canada. I have fallen back on this for years. Given the ambient anti-Americanism in Russia, there is an assumption that all Americans are rich idiots. There is also a weird contempt for Brits afoot, so I decided during the Bush years that pretending to be Canadian was best for wriggling out of these kinds of situations. It accounts for my accent, but is a country that I think most folks in Moscow feel indifferent to, or regard as a distant thing they can't quite map onto their radar of prejudicies. These two guys seemed not to know what I meant. So I explained that Canada was a friendly country over the ocean, far away.
They seemed to decide together to continue onward to their primary goal. "Look, it is his birthday! We've had a hard day of work, and it is his birthday!" They raised their half-empty cans of Baltika, and what could I do? I am, above all, a polite and culturally sensitive person. So I raised my half-empty Starry Melnick and, for the first and perhaps only time in my life so far, wished him a happy birthday -- apparently in a way that would make my long-suffering Russian tutors proud. Я поздравляю Вас с днем рождения.
Buzzcut remained perfectly friendly as he said, "I"m sorry, but you're Russian." I insisted no, I don't understand. Canadian. And he kept saying, "I'm sorry, but you're Russian."
The squatting fellow tapped him on the knee to get him to stop. But the conversation continued this way for a several more minutes. I was pretending I was dumber than I was, and they insisted I was more than I would admit. I kept apologizing and saying I didn't understand, and Buzzcut kept insisting that I was a Russian.
Eventually they gave up. We toasted one more time to Buzzcut's birthday, and they wandered off. They paused for a few words with two pretty young women sitting alone nearby, who unceremoniously told them to screw off, and they stumbled off toward the Metro station.
I had a strange encounter on Wednesday in the park across the street. The family has been away at the dacha, and I’ve been staying in the city getting some work done. It’s been a lot of work, and of course, lots of football matches to watch on television. I watched the tense England-Slovenia, US-Algeria matches, and decided afterwards to take a walk. It was about 8 p.m., and the long Moscow twilight was still in effect. The weather has been beautiful, about 30 degrees C with a nice breeze, so I opted to take a walk.
I went to a kiosk and bought a Starry Melnik beer and went through the park near our house and sat on a bench to think through some problems in the book. The park is interesting -- it is a woody place, with a few benches, but it is usually perfectly safe except when it gets dark. I sat and watched parents with their kids in strollers walk by, a steady stream of people heading home from work, a few groups of young men and women gathered at nearby benches drinking beer and talking.
Along came a pair of visibly inebriated guys, who came up and started a conversation. One was a normally dressed fellow with a buzzcut and a tan, and the other was wearing blue workers overalls. They appeared to be Central Asian. Each of them was carrying a can of Baltika No. 9, a kind of strong, disgusting dark beer. Buzzcut sat beside me at a respectable distance, the other guy squatted a little to my right. They had a brief and poignant story about how they had just finished a long day of hard work, and that it was Buzzcut's birthday.
I realized quickly that these weren't muggers or hooligans -- just two hard-working guys who didn't have any more money and didn't want the fun to end. They needed someone to buy another round of something, and I looked like an easy mark.
I wasn't particularly interested, so I fell back on my default position for getting out of these things -- "I'm sorry, I don't understand."
They repeated themselves, hard work, birthday, etc. And I stuck to my story. They began asking, politely, where I was from. They were from Uzbekistan -- did I know where that was? Yes, I said. Near Tajikistan (I was very careful not to mention Kyrgyzstan in any imaginable way). I even said something about how they made lovely tea-cups (piali, which are actually, quite lovely).
And they wanted to know if I lived in Moscow. I said no, and insisted I didn't understand what they were saying. They wanted to know what "republic" I was from. I insisted I was from somewhere else. Probably Latvia? Lithuania? Eventually, I said I was from Canada. I have fallen back on this for years. Given the ambient anti-Americanism in Russia, there is an assumption that all Americans are rich idiots. There is also a weird contempt for Brits afoot, so I decided during the Bush years that pretending to be Canadian was best for wriggling out of these kinds of situations. It accounts for my accent, but is a country that I think most folks in Moscow feel indifferent to, or regard as a distant thing they can't quite map onto their radar of prejudicies. These two guys seemed not to know what I meant. So I explained that Canada was a friendly country over the ocean, far away.
They seemed to decide together to continue onward to their primary goal. "Look, it is his birthday! We've had a hard day of work, and it is his birthday!" They raised their half-empty cans of Baltika, and what could I do? I am, above all, a polite and culturally sensitive person. So I raised my half-empty Starry Melnick and, for the first and perhaps only time in my life so far, wished him a happy birthday -- apparently in a way that would make my long-suffering Russian tutors proud. Я поздравляю Вас с днем рождения.
Buzzcut remained perfectly friendly as he said, "I"m sorry, but you're Russian." I insisted no, I don't understand. Canadian. And he kept saying, "I'm sorry, but you're Russian."
The squatting fellow tapped him on the knee to get him to stop. But the conversation continued this way for a several more minutes. I was pretending I was dumber than I was, and they insisted I was more than I would admit. I kept apologizing and saying I didn't understand, and Buzzcut kept insisting that I was a Russian.
Eventually they gave up. We toasted one more time to Buzzcut's birthday, and they wandered off. They paused for a few words with two pretty young women sitting alone nearby, who unceremoniously told them to screw off, and they stumbled off toward the Metro station.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Moscow slowness
We are on our annual trip to Russia, and it has hardly been a particularly eventful visit so far. Mostly lots of domestic cares. You forget how tricky it is to look after an energetic toddler when you take them out of daycare. Plus, the weather here has been chilly and damp, and we are without WiFi, so all there is to do is watch lots of World Cup matches and do the household shopping. A very slow time of year.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
The Unfolding Tragedy of the Blown Call
The Call Everyone is Talking About gives us a perfect example to talk about a weird quirk of American sports culture. There are lots of inexplicable things about American sports -- like how league structures here prove how socialism works great for rich people -- but in particular, we still hold a naive and weird understanding of officiating.
Somehow, somewhere, we developed a bizarre positivist sense of what an umpire or ref is supposed to do: that they are in the same category as doctors and scientists in determining Right and Wrong on the fly. This is childish, and an unreasonable expectation
This is one of the hang-ups I think Americans have towards "soccer" -- that it requires a more sophisticated sense of reality. In soccer, you have two side judges who solely monitor offsides and boundary violations -- just because the one referee can't see the angles. And everything else is handled by one fellow who is huffing and puffing up and down the field all match like everyone else, watching for fouls, keeping the official time. And he doesn't see everything, and trying to fool him is part of the game (thus, the much derided on this side of the Atlantic art of flopping).
But we insist on Truth, and that if the human factor can't solve it video replay should. Which raises logical questions about why not just install a ball and strike machine to make the calls -- the technology exists after all (as Slate explains). Why shouldn't we do it? because the human factor is important. The size of a strike zone, how it changes from game to game, pitch to pitch -- these are the things that make baseball interesting and not just an elaborate math problem.
Which brings us to what happened in Detroit. Obviously, by that point in the game, umpire Jim Joyce should have been incredibly prejudiced to give Armando Galaragga the benefit of any doubt, no matter how small. That would be the human thing to do. The fact that he didn't is the big mistake. If he had erred in calling him out -- even by a good few feet, no one would be freaking out right now. That's the game.
Somehow, somewhere, we developed a bizarre positivist sense of what an umpire or ref is supposed to do: that they are in the same category as doctors and scientists in determining Right and Wrong on the fly. This is childish, and an unreasonable expectation
This is one of the hang-ups I think Americans have towards "soccer" -- that it requires a more sophisticated sense of reality. In soccer, you have two side judges who solely monitor offsides and boundary violations -- just because the one referee can't see the angles. And everything else is handled by one fellow who is huffing and puffing up and down the field all match like everyone else, watching for fouls, keeping the official time. And he doesn't see everything, and trying to fool him is part of the game (thus, the much derided on this side of the Atlantic art of flopping).
But we insist on Truth, and that if the human factor can't solve it video replay should. Which raises logical questions about why not just install a ball and strike machine to make the calls -- the technology exists after all (as Slate explains). Why shouldn't we do it? because the human factor is important. The size of a strike zone, how it changes from game to game, pitch to pitch -- these are the things that make baseball interesting and not just an elaborate math problem.
Which brings us to what happened in Detroit. Obviously, by that point in the game, umpire Jim Joyce should have been incredibly prejudiced to give Armando Galaragga the benefit of any doubt, no matter how small. That would be the human thing to do. The fact that he didn't is the big mistake. If he had erred in calling him out -- even by a good few feet, no one would be freaking out right now. That's the game.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Eurovision unites us all
I confess I haven't followed Eurovision 2010 as closely as I should. Heh. Mostly, I've just wondered about Russia's entry this year, which since Morrissey still hasn't gone through on his threat to represent England sometime, looks like a likely favorite yet again.
Russia's dominant 'Evrovideniye' run is by no means surprising. They have had a long and glorious tradition of unapologetic, unintentionally hilarious pop junk. The recent viral sensation of a 44 year old song by Eduard Khil (that's "Trololo Man" to westerners) proves it goes back at least as far as Brezhnev. After the stinging disappointment of Serebro's 3rd place finish in 2007 (caused by a clear anti-Russian bias ginned up by the western media), the be-mulleted head of Dima Bilan lifted Russia off her knees to achive her rightful, glorious place in the first ranks of awful-pop music-loving nations.
This year's Russian entry is Peter Nalitch, or more precisely, the "Musical Collective of Peter Nalitch." They arrive after a transformation that can only be described as... you know, I can't quite think of a word for it. A few years ago, my wife pointed out the following video, which was a viral Internet hit in Russia and is honestly hilarious. It is also horribly catchy, and is frequently heard around our house to the extent that Mila has been heard singing bits and pieces.
The mix of cheesiness, a sense of light-hearted humor, and a catchy melody made them a clever candidate for Eurovision. But my god, their effort this year came out in the strangest possible way. They will go to this Saturday's Eurovision finals on the back of some kind of insane ballad called "Lost and Forgotten." Watching it, you wait for the joke... and wait... and wait... and my god, there is no joke!
I suppose it is not impossible this is some very advanced form of subtle, underground humor. A joke so deep that it completely forgets to be funny. But that is unlikely -- Russia takes Eurovision very seriously.
In a time when the very idea of one peaceful and prosperous Europe is fraying -- as Greece bottoms out, and others threaten to do the same, as Germany grumbles over bailing out its wastrel neighbors -- it is great that we have Eurovision to ask the big questions and raise the big issues. What's it all about? the best answer this year comes from Aisha, a crooner from Latvia whose existential ballad explores one particular blonde head's dark night of the soul. "What for? Only Mr. God Knows Why."
Indeed. (And I swear I'm not being ironic when I say I think she is way better than Ke$ha).
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
The agonies of Cleveland
One of the surest ways to my heart remains to bring me back newspapers whenever you go somewhere. Even though I'm over them, as it were, I think they remain the best way to take a core sample of a place and a time. Over the weekend, my wife's trip home from a conference took her through Cleveland, and she brought me the Sunday Plain Dealer. What I learned is that, boy, I'm glad I don't live in Cleveland.
The front page featured three stories. Two-thirds of that was one big story -- a detailed look at LeBron James' possible future by sports writer Brian Windhorst. It was a detailed accounting of what his options are, who the likely suitors will be, and what the timeline looks like from now until free agency begins in July.
The undercurrent of the story is so thick and heavy it needn't be spelled out. One of the fascinating things about this moment in time is the amount of anger and unease the nation is feeling, and the ways it is coming out all cock-eyed. We saw this with the Conan O'Brien debacle earlier this year. Somehow, a celebrity who -- let's face it -- kinda sucked at his particular job and got a multimillion dollar kiss-off became a parable for how ordinary, loyal, hard-working employees felt pushed around by inept, greedy, and selfish companies. The human urge to create narrative and sense out of high-profile situations often overwhelms the details. And the LeBron situation appears to be part of all that. The story is really about a small-market town, down on its luck, with a homegrown superstar who they can't keep away from the brighter lights. It is about the decline of an entire region, and seems to present all the swirling forces that are shaping American life today in an easy to understand story.
What is interesting abotu Sunday's Plain Dealer is how the rest of the front page communicates this malaise as well. Another story is what appears to be a long column by Steven Litt about the Cleveland Museum of Art's search for a new director (its third in ten years) as it precedes with an important building and redesign program. That's what the story is actually about, but it is instead framed by looking at how a much smaller, more nimble Sun Belt museum is building a bright future for itself (the headline: "N.C. art museum gains from strong leadership"). "Seeing it is enough to shake assumptions about whether Sun Belt cities outside California and Texas will always remain in the cultureal shadow of northern cities such as Cleveland," Litt writes. The article explains how museums like Cleveland's benefit from deep stores of cultural heritage and large endowments. About their museum has size and a breadth of collection that smaller, newer museums can't match. But in terms of their mission going forward, in contemporary art, in cultivating new donors and shaping their mission, these newer museums are doing much better.
One of the things that struck me is that the Cleveland Museum, which appears to have such a headstart, was only founded in 1913. It makes you wonder to what extent all that cultural capital is a brief, fleeting thing. If that old alignment that made what we now call "the Rust Belt" such a powerhouse of the American experience was just a blip of the Industrial Revolution, which is now over and done. And if that in turn means that the clock is running out, for good.
The third story on the front is more mundane, but just a part of the drumbeat of soul-sapping news. It is about the federal corruption investigation into a county commissioner, which sounds like it has been painfully dragging on for years toward some eventual, inexorable conclusion. "Even the public is growing weary of the demoralizing drip, drip of the corruption investigation, which flares up in the media each time somebody new is hauled into courty," the story reads.
Sales of Tums must be way up across northeast Ohio. And for the record, I don't think there is anyway LeBron is anywhere other than New York next season.
The front page featured three stories. Two-thirds of that was one big story -- a detailed look at LeBron James' possible future by sports writer Brian Windhorst. It was a detailed accounting of what his options are, who the likely suitors will be, and what the timeline looks like from now until free agency begins in July.
The undercurrent of the story is so thick and heavy it needn't be spelled out. One of the fascinating things about this moment in time is the amount of anger and unease the nation is feeling, and the ways it is coming out all cock-eyed. We saw this with the Conan O'Brien debacle earlier this year. Somehow, a celebrity who -- let's face it -- kinda sucked at his particular job and got a multimillion dollar kiss-off became a parable for how ordinary, loyal, hard-working employees felt pushed around by inept, greedy, and selfish companies. The human urge to create narrative and sense out of high-profile situations often overwhelms the details. And the LeBron situation appears to be part of all that. The story is really about a small-market town, down on its luck, with a homegrown superstar who they can't keep away from the brighter lights. It is about the decline of an entire region, and seems to present all the swirling forces that are shaping American life today in an easy to understand story.
What is interesting abotu Sunday's Plain Dealer is how the rest of the front page communicates this malaise as well. Another story is what appears to be a long column by Steven Litt about the Cleveland Museum of Art's search for a new director (its third in ten years) as it precedes with an important building and redesign program. That's what the story is actually about, but it is instead framed by looking at how a much smaller, more nimble Sun Belt museum is building a bright future for itself (the headline: "N.C. art museum gains from strong leadership"). "Seeing it is enough to shake assumptions about whether Sun Belt cities outside California and Texas will always remain in the cultureal shadow of northern cities such as Cleveland," Litt writes. The article explains how museums like Cleveland's benefit from deep stores of cultural heritage and large endowments. About their museum has size and a breadth of collection that smaller, newer museums can't match. But in terms of their mission going forward, in contemporary art, in cultivating new donors and shaping their mission, these newer museums are doing much better.
One of the things that struck me is that the Cleveland Museum, which appears to have such a headstart, was only founded in 1913. It makes you wonder to what extent all that cultural capital is a brief, fleeting thing. If that old alignment that made what we now call "the Rust Belt" such a powerhouse of the American experience was just a blip of the Industrial Revolution, which is now over and done. And if that in turn means that the clock is running out, for good.
The third story on the front is more mundane, but just a part of the drumbeat of soul-sapping news. It is about the federal corruption investigation into a county commissioner, which sounds like it has been painfully dragging on for years toward some eventual, inexorable conclusion. "Even the public is growing weary of the demoralizing drip, drip of the corruption investigation, which flares up in the media each time somebody new is hauled into courty," the story reads.
Sales of Tums must be way up across northeast Ohio. And for the record, I don't think there is anyway LeBron is anywhere other than New York next season.
Monday, May 10, 2010
What I learned from Newsweek
The news last week about Newsweek -- that the Washington Post Co. plans to put it up for sale because it can't see a profit in carrying on with it -- is sudden, grim and wholly unsurprising. As Slate's Jack Shafer put it, "The category has finally gone to mold and will, in another 30 months or 30 years, advance to putrefaction."
I worked for Newsweek for awhile right after school, and it is an experience I am very grateful for. I specifically worked in the New York office for the magazine overseas editions and partners, reporting on the details of editorial planning through the news cycle, and representing their interests and needs where necessary. I was a full-time fly-on-the-wall, and learned more about big-time media and how the whole sausage factory works than I could have anywhere else.
Back then, it still had a definite swerve, as did most mainstream media outlets. Circulation was stable, the dot-com boom was in full swing so money wasn't a problem. I didn't make a lot of money -- compared to all my friends who were making actual money at various Silicon Alley outfits. And since everyone still had dial-up connections, there was a definite sense around our office that the Internet was a problem within our power to master. Newsweek's web presence at the time was a semi-autonomous add-on, with content provided by eager young shlubs like me for a little extra money. There was a lot to be excited about.
But basically, I was at the bottom on the ladder, and you learn a lot down there. You see how people do their jobs, how they understand what they do, and most immediately, how they treat people who are at the bottom of the ladder. I saw first-hand just how howlingly pompous, glib, and shallow many high-flying media pros are. In many ways they are the ones who did irreparable damage to the news industry -- and yet oddly are rarely mentioned in any of the myriad panels, symposia, lectures, radio chat shows, or CJR features dedicated to understanding just what had happened to journalism and how it can move forward. These were the sort of people who would flatly dismiss a national desk story about a major Midwestern drought because "no one cared about that," but treated negotiations to get an exclusive feature with the five finalists of the first season of "Survivor" like it was the Pentagon Papers. (I've got plenty more stories, by the way, but I'll save them until we have a drink sometime).
On the other hand, I met a lot of people who I came to respect and admire. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham was in that second category. He was considered a bit of a boy wonder back then, when he was the managing editor. He was smart, and quick with intelligent and apropos historical anecdotes during meetings that were met with nervous titters. He's taken a fair share of lumps in the past few days, which says a lot more about media-land than about him. If there was any sense or justice in the world, Meacham would be leading some smart American version of The Economist (and I, since we're in fantasy-land here, would be one of his loyal foot soldiers, happily toiling away knowing I'm doing important work and being fairly compensated for it. But whatever.).
Meacham's understanding of the industry always made sense to me -- and Shafer admits he "understands publishing's upheaval better than his fading magazine would indicate." I thought their redesign last year could have been a step in the right direction, but in reality turned out to be little more than a half-assed gesture in the most likely cardinal point. The problem was that they chose to rely on brand names instead of content, which is a dangerous proposition if practically-speaking that means giving a free reign to gushing founts of conventional wisdom like Howard Fineman and Fareed Zakeria.
The short leash the Post have to the experiment cuts to the quick very fast. It is hard to believe that the idea of a newsweekly is really dead, but as Dan Kennedy put it in all its plain, simple truth, it really isn't. Newsweek just failed, while Time, The Economist, and The Week didn't. "Newsweek and U.S. News were not done in by cable TV and blogs," he wrote. "They were done in by leaner, smarter competitors who had a better idea of what a weekly news magazine should be."
The slow demise of this institution has been a steady topic of conversation among the media chattering classes, and the observations of one very small, temporary cog in it usually don't matter beyond that single cog. Although, many have had formative professional experiences in the trenches of these behemoths. Hunter S. Thompson, in his youth, was a copy boy at Time for a year or so when he was young. It was enough to frighten him into thinking about new and better ways to tell stories than the early industrial grind of the newsmagazine of record. (Update, 5/11: Alex Beam of the Boston Globe, another former Newsweek cog, has a much more candid assessment of his time there than I can muster at the moment.)
What lesson did I learn? The most immediate was I came to recognize that as much as I liked that second category of serious journalists, I was so creeped out by the first batch of media creatures that I got a powerful fugue-like sense that I had to leave New York -- at least for a little while -- or lose an important part of my soul. I could see that climbing that particular ladder came at the price of a certain emptiness -- the drudge of moving from assistant editor to associate editor, the sense that your professional life is a big high school cafeteria, and the stubborn insistence that Manhattan is the universe, and not just an island. So I decided to see the world on my own careful and cautious terms. So I made a parallel leap into another self-absorbed fish-pond (Washington, which is a whole other story).
But I never realized that those first few doubts would never go away. I'm grateful to Shafer for trying to put a positive spin on it, when he exhorts readers to cheer up: "There isn't a minute that something new and wonderful isn't being born." Yeah?
I worked for Newsweek for awhile right after school, and it is an experience I am very grateful for. I specifically worked in the New York office for the magazine overseas editions and partners, reporting on the details of editorial planning through the news cycle, and representing their interests and needs where necessary. I was a full-time fly-on-the-wall, and learned more about big-time media and how the whole sausage factory works than I could have anywhere else.
Back then, it still had a definite swerve, as did most mainstream media outlets. Circulation was stable, the dot-com boom was in full swing so money wasn't a problem. I didn't make a lot of money -- compared to all my friends who were making actual money at various Silicon Alley outfits. And since everyone still had dial-up connections, there was a definite sense around our office that the Internet was a problem within our power to master. Newsweek's web presence at the time was a semi-autonomous add-on, with content provided by eager young shlubs like me for a little extra money. There was a lot to be excited about.
But basically, I was at the bottom on the ladder, and you learn a lot down there. You see how people do their jobs, how they understand what they do, and most immediately, how they treat people who are at the bottom of the ladder. I saw first-hand just how howlingly pompous, glib, and shallow many high-flying media pros are. In many ways they are the ones who did irreparable damage to the news industry -- and yet oddly are rarely mentioned in any of the myriad panels, symposia, lectures, radio chat shows, or CJR features dedicated to understanding just what had happened to journalism and how it can move forward. These were the sort of people who would flatly dismiss a national desk story about a major Midwestern drought because "no one cared about that," but treated negotiations to get an exclusive feature with the five finalists of the first season of "Survivor" like it was the Pentagon Papers. (I've got plenty more stories, by the way, but I'll save them until we have a drink sometime).
On the other hand, I met a lot of people who I came to respect and admire. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham was in that second category. He was considered a bit of a boy wonder back then, when he was the managing editor. He was smart, and quick with intelligent and apropos historical anecdotes during meetings that were met with nervous titters. He's taken a fair share of lumps in the past few days, which says a lot more about media-land than about him. If there was any sense or justice in the world, Meacham would be leading some smart American version of The Economist (and I, since we're in fantasy-land here, would be one of his loyal foot soldiers, happily toiling away knowing I'm doing important work and being fairly compensated for it. But whatever.).
Meacham's understanding of the industry always made sense to me -- and Shafer admits he "understands publishing's upheaval better than his fading magazine would indicate." I thought their redesign last year could have been a step in the right direction, but in reality turned out to be little more than a half-assed gesture in the most likely cardinal point. The problem was that they chose to rely on brand names instead of content, which is a dangerous proposition if practically-speaking that means giving a free reign to gushing founts of conventional wisdom like Howard Fineman and Fareed Zakeria.
The short leash the Post have to the experiment cuts to the quick very fast. It is hard to believe that the idea of a newsweekly is really dead, but as Dan Kennedy put it in all its plain, simple truth, it really isn't. Newsweek just failed, while Time, The Economist, and The Week didn't. "Newsweek and U.S. News were not done in by cable TV and blogs," he wrote. "They were done in by leaner, smarter competitors who had a better idea of what a weekly news magazine should be."
The slow demise of this institution has been a steady topic of conversation among the media chattering classes, and the observations of one very small, temporary cog in it usually don't matter beyond that single cog. Although, many have had formative professional experiences in the trenches of these behemoths. Hunter S. Thompson, in his youth, was a copy boy at Time for a year or so when he was young. It was enough to frighten him into thinking about new and better ways to tell stories than the early industrial grind of the newsmagazine of record. (Update, 5/11: Alex Beam of the Boston Globe, another former Newsweek cog, has a much more candid assessment of his time there than I can muster at the moment.)
What lesson did I learn? The most immediate was I came to recognize that as much as I liked that second category of serious journalists, I was so creeped out by the first batch of media creatures that I got a powerful fugue-like sense that I had to leave New York -- at least for a little while -- or lose an important part of my soul. I could see that climbing that particular ladder came at the price of a certain emptiness -- the drudge of moving from assistant editor to associate editor, the sense that your professional life is a big high school cafeteria, and the stubborn insistence that Manhattan is the universe, and not just an island. So I decided to see the world on my own careful and cautious terms. So I made a parallel leap into another self-absorbed fish-pond (Washington, which is a whole other story).
But I never realized that those first few doubts would never go away. I'm grateful to Shafer for trying to put a positive spin on it, when he exhorts readers to cheer up: "There isn't a minute that something new and wonderful isn't being born." Yeah?
Sunday, May 9, 2010
It's okay to say, 'this is it' right now
The main reason it is taking me so long to make progress on the historical novel I'm working on is that there are so many ways to trip up. Recreating the past is a minefield of anachronisms, missteps, and potential howlers that you have to carefully creep your way through.
For example, you can never tell which common phrases might not have been around during the time you are writing about. In the past few days, almost randomly, I've learned from both A.J. Liebling's Mollie and Other War Pieces and Paul Fussell's Wartime that using the phrase "This is it" in its modern usage (to signify the start of something dramatic or momentous) is an invention of American infantrymen during the early days of the Second World War.
I guess it one of those small points, but if historical novelists don't lose sleep about them, who will?
For example, you can never tell which common phrases might not have been around during the time you are writing about. In the past few days, almost randomly, I've learned from both A.J. Liebling's Mollie and Other War Pieces and Paul Fussell's Wartime that using the phrase "This is it" in its modern usage (to signify the start of something dramatic or momentous) is an invention of American infantrymen during the early days of the Second World War.
I guess it one of those small points, but if historical novelists don't lose sleep about them, who will?
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Florida, February 2010
Going there always gives you a lot to think about. This time, for example, I kept thinking about the interesting fact that in 1950, the city of Pittsfield was actually bigger than the city of Orlando. It is amazing how dramatically fortunes can change, and how quickly they do so.
The biggest changes right now taking place all around is the way the housing market is collapsing. My folks live in a newer development on the edge of Ocala, in the north central part of the state, and it is today a landscape of half-completed housing developments. You see paved roads, streetlamps, road signs carved into what had been recently scrub forest, with only a smattering of houses spread around. It is like seeing the actual highwater mark of America's most recent bubble economy, the point at which it began to recede. You get the sensation of a giant project being suddenly abandoned.
While we were down there, we spent a few days by the ocean at Melbourne Beach. It was a little chilly, but Mila enjoyed playing in the sand. We stayed just a few miles south of the Kennedy Space Center, and the midcoast region there still fancies itself the "Space Coast," a touching bit of collective boosterism that tried to will the area in becoming the JFK Airport of the space age. But it is falling on hard times, with the Obama Administration backing away from the grandiose plans for the post-Space Shuttle future of manned spaceflight, and putting thousands of jobs at risk.
On Sunday night, the shuttle Endeavour was scheduled to land. A local television station provided live coverage of the event, and after watching for awhile I went out to the beach to see if I could see or hear it come in. I didn't see anything -- no lights, and the sonic booms caused by the shuttle smacking into the earth's atmosphere were heard only to the southwest. It was fascinating all the same though -- when I left my hotel room about 25 minutes before it came in, they had just explained that the shuttle had begun its "deorbit burn," somewhere high in orbit above the south Pacific near Australia. I think part of the frustration we feel about the Space Age is just how comprehensively it failed to live up to our hopes. If you want to go to Australia from here it takes more than a full day in airplanes, so secretly, isn't it annoying that after all these decades and billions of dollars we haven't been able to apply any of these things in a practical way? This is why the romance wore off, I think. But not entirely. It is hard not to be moved by images from the Hubble Space Telescope, or photos taken of earth from orbit. And it was haunting and strange to stand on a beach by the vast cold ocean and stare into the sky, waiting for a spaceship to land.
More mundane transportation issues are the first thing that strikes me about the Sun Belt. You have to get used to being in a car for every minor and major task, and you get used to the idea that it will necessarily take awhile to get from A to B. There is something deceptively easygoing about the driving too -- lots of straight lines and clean angles, and clearly marked lanes with nifty reflectors in the pavement that shine in your headlights. There are no rotaries, no one-way streets, no cramped on-ramps shorter than some driveways. It almost lulls you to sleep, and makes you think you should be moving faster than you really are.
The strangest and most natural place we visited in Florida was also one of its newest and most artificial. The town of Celebration was founded in the early 1990s as a development by Disney, and feels like it should be studied by sociologists as a case of American utopianism. Unlike the rest of Florida, the town was laid out with some principles of "New Urbanism." It has a compact, walkable center. There is mixed-use development. The houses have two stores, and sit on small lots. Everything seems, uh, quaint.
But things quickly start leaping out at you when you look closely. There are mushroom-like objects around the downtown that pump easy listening music at you. There are plates on the lampposts with the town seal on it -- and the seal is copyrighted by Disney. It was strange: I spent days grousing about strip malls, the lack of sidewalks, the social and economic dislocation of so much of what I saw, and then it was as if someone said, 'oh yeah, here you go.' And it felt very bland, and was not precisely the kind of place I'd want to live in. We can't really escape social planning, as much as we try -- here in Williamstown everyone talks about the importance of affordable housing, until real proposals butt up against someone's multimillion dollar "viewshed" -- nor can we escape human nature -- like the line of SUVs waiting in the middle of the road to pick the kids up outside the Celebration elementary school (presumably, Uncle Walt's vision of idyllic smalltown life must have involved kids walking home from school?). But the weird thing about Celebration is that you can't forget you aren't looking at an organic community, but just someone's vision of an organic community.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Politics and the English language, 2010
The President has proposed a half-day, televised health care summit, and in the process of chickening out, House GOP leader John Boehner and Eric Cantor use one of the most Orwellian quotes I've seen in a long-time.
"If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate."The mixture of Newspeak and lies in this solitary sentence is chilling. "Job-killing"? which think tank dreamt that up? And when precisely did "the American people" reject anything? When the people of Massachusetts voted in a special election?
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The enduring politics of noise
Thinking about L'il Liddy and the Teabuggers, and the general nature of political discourse in this country, I was struck by a quote I just came across. Try to place it...
"It was impossible in the tumult and the shouting to hear much that was said from the platform or to deduce the essential ideology of this great crusade. But one thing came out strong and clear. It was the promise, reiterated to deafening applause, 'to get the liberal termites' out of Washington and out of the conduct of American affairs. John F. Kennedy, you have been warned."That's Alistair Cooke, writing about a rally for Young Americans for Freedom ("which only two years ago was a defiant underground of odd-men-out and is now a national organisation") in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 9, 1961.
Monday, February 1, 2010
When Stalin went Hollywood
Turner Classic Movie has been running a fantastic series called "Shadows of Russia" about Hollywood's changing image of Russia. I haven't caught enough of it, but I did get to see last month the rarely shown wartime film Mission to Moscow, a Warner Brothers production from 1943 that answers the strange question of what it would have looked like if Hollywood had to spin Stalinism.
Just before I saw it, I happened to read James Agee's review of the film in The Nation in May 1943, which sums up its weird appeal...
"It is indeed... a mishmash: of Stalinism with New Dealism with Hollywoodism with journalism with opportunism with shaky experimentalism with mesmerism with onanism, all mosaicked into a remarkable portrait of what the makers of the film think that the American public should think the Soviet Union is like -- a great glad two-million-dollar bowl of canned borscht, eminently approvable by the Institute of Good Housekeeping. As such, it is as rich a subject for diagnosis as any other dream."The film tracks the increasingly peripatetic shuttle diplomacy of FDR's ambassador, Joseph Davies, in the years leading up to the war. He pledges to go with an open mind, and travels the USSR meeting a surprising number of factory workers and peasants who speak very good English. He also encounters scheming diplomats from the Fascist powers, and spineless diplomats from the western democracies who are more suspicious of the righteous Soviets than the Nazis. As the world rushes to war, he begins to hear about strange things, like acts of sabotage at weapons factories, which culminates in the most stylized portrayal of the Show Trials one could imagine. Here is Bukharin, Radek, Tukachevsky, all revealed as enemies of the people taking orders from Trotsky to engineer an invasion by the Fascists to overthrow Stalin. Agee is fascinatingly even-handed about this, which reflects how things are black and white only in hindsight. Even for an avowed liberal anti-communist -- Agee was already good friends with Whittaker Chambers at the time -- the facts were murky:
"About the trials I am not qualified to speak. On surface falsifications of fact and atmosphere I might, but on the one crucial question, whether Trotsky and Trotskyists were or were not involved with Germany and Japan in a plot to overthrow the government and to partition the country, I am capable of no sensible opinion. I neither believe nor disbelieve it. I neither believe nor disbelieve evidence to the contrary. I am unable to trust the politicians of either camp or of any other to supply, the world in general, or even their closest associates, with the truth.... It may be that this painful impotence is an impotence merely of my own spirit; it may be that I am immobilized, rather, by my conviction that a primary capacity for telling or discovering the truth is possible, today, to few human being in few types of occupation or allegiance. In any case I can attempt to learn the truth, and can defend, or attack, only in areas where I can rely in some small degree on the hope of emergent truthfulness in the material and in those who are handling it."It is a fascinating, somewhat uncomfortable thing to watch. Especially when they neatly present the thoroughly bogus Soviet version of the Nonagression Pact of 1939 and the invasion of Finland
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Keeping busy
A few housekeeping notes for the new year... As you can see, things have been pretty quiet around here for a few months, and I'm hoping that, in a number of ways, we'll get things moving again.
First and foremost, I've agreed to write a blog for the Albany Times Union about goings on in the Berkshires. And if you look to the right, you'll notice my brand new Twitter account. I'm pretty excited about this multi-platform future, though I predict it may take a little while to find the right balance between everything. I hope you'll stay tuned.
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