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).

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.

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?

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?