A couple awaking-at-3pm thoughts on what appears to be a beauty of a wintry Sunday in New York:
1.) Kettle’s new “Fully Loaded Baked Potato” chips are a fairly large disappointment. It seems the stoners in their R&D department merely combined the seasonings of the BBQ and sour cream-and-onion lines and called it a day. Bacon isn’t even mentioned among the ingredients. Thusly, I’m saving the second half of the bag until my re-up of Bacon Salt arrives (no, really). Will report back.
2.) Ghostland Observatory + Terminal 5 = laser armageddon. Yes, Steph, this is my review.
3.) A couple of Brits are immersed in a very cool project of modest intentions (via): “To write to everyone in the world.” In April, Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe sent a unique, handwritten letter to all 467 residents of the Irish town of Cushendall. The recipients learnt all about the origins of the horse and the artists’ outdoor exploits. Last month, Clayton and Crowe launched part two of Mysterious Letters, this time loosing their thoughts upon the 620 denizens of Polish Hill, Pennsylvania. The results include such genius dickery as this. Looks like they’re catching some press, too. Coffee table book in six months’ time.
Today’s SF Chronicle carries a front-page article on the San Francisco Panorama, the ambitious forthcoming publication from SF publishing house McSweeney’s. Blatantly self-serving motives aside (the piece offers Chron readers “the chance to preorder the one-time product” through its sfgate.com website and announces plans to run excerpts from the Panorama in the coming weeks), Julian Guthrie’s overview neatly profiles a literary endeavor that is anything but concise: The Panorama clocks in at 320 pages. The pub’s centerpiece comes in the form of a 112-page broadsheet newspaper comprising investigative and feature news writing as well as substantial arts, sports, food and comics sections. A 112-page magazine and a 96-page books section round out the epic.
As one would expect of an endeavor of such staggering length, McSweeney’s employed an army of creative types for the project — 150 of them, to be inexact. As the broadsheet’s name implies, the Panorama is heavy on the Bay Area/NorCal slant, and the contributors’ page is accordingly representative (Michael Chabon, Robert Hass, Peter Orner, Sean Wilsey and other notable locals, as well as “dozens of working and laid-off Bay Area journalists,” provided words). But the scope of Panorama’s literary and artistic haul is equally impressive from a national perspective: Stephen King, Chris Ware, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Art Spiegelman and Matt Klam lend their names to the project. So breathtaking is the collection, in fact, that the Chronicle deems it deserving of a quote from one of its own editors, Ward Bushee, who asserts that “the Panorama may be the biggest, most creative and famously bylined edition of a newspaper ever printed.”
Justifiably gushing praise for the literary collaborgy aside, let’s get real: Dave Eggers’ latest altruistic project, slated for release on Dec. 8th, looks to be brilliant in many, many ways, but it will not save newspaper. The Panorama is a one-off several months in the making. It costs $16 (though Bay Area readers can cop it for just $5 the day it debuts). And the prospect of the publication realizing a profit appears dubious at best.
Wisely, McSweeney’s stops short of issuing any delusionally grandiose proclamations, instead implying that the Panorama is intended to display to the public and What Remains of Newspaper that there are alternatives to reining it in. Explains the publisher: “We think that the best chance for newspapers’ survival is to do what the internet can’t: namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible. To that end, we opted for a huge and luxurious broadsheet — 15” x 22”. Then we unleashed artists and designers to show exactly how much the format can do.”
The newspaper section of the Panorama, then, should serve as an experimental blueprint — an idea, or rather, a collection of ideas, for purveyors and readers of newspaper to examine and consider. Many, if not most, major newspaper publishers and owners will dismiss the Panorama as a fantastic and fiscally nonviable exercise in “alternative” journalism. These are people whose ideas — or, more accurately, lack of such — haven’t served their publications particularly well in recent times.
Newspaper needs an overhaul if it is to survive in any physical form; the time for tender tweaks to the business model has passed. In an industry whose only recent innovative success is championed chiefly by a fossil intent on reeling back civil rights to 1952, the Panorama may serve as the radical catalyst newspaper needs to avoid a meek descent into utter irrelevance.
(Note: As extensive analysis shows that most readers don’t delve deeply into DCQ’s back pages, we’ve decided to occasionally tap our archives for highlights. This post originally ran on January 27, 2009.)
From time to time, among the peyote-driven snake-femme battles and botched Rolling Stone assignments, Hunter Thompson managed to Take Care of Bidniss when he decided his associates’ missteps had reached catastrophic levels. A source sends us proof positive of one such episode, in which Thompson takes the meat grinder to attorney George Tobia for apparently bungling negotiations with New York publishing house Simon & Schuster over the 1998 publication of ”The Rum Diary”:
In another declassified communique written two days earlier, the Master of the Cannonball Sendoff informed Tobia of his fate while simultaneously filling him in on leisure plans for the day and demanding an estimate of his “exact profit expectations” from the soon-to-be-released “Fear and Loathing” film adaptation. The last graph alone speaks volumes about a man who knew he had the juice to disregard formality and spent the bulk of his career doing just that:
For his part, Tobia seemingly made good with Thompson after the dustup: At present, the Boston lawyer continues to represent HST’s estate — 19 years after the two met while Tobia was handling the estate of another writer who rejected conformity in savage fashion: Jack Kerouac.
That’s what we’re doing — if we can navigate the hordes of pasties jostling for seats, that is. If not, we’ll just call up Darryl Strawberry and rail crushed Pop Rocks in Washington Square Park. He’s cousins with Doc Gooden, who’s cousins with Gary Sheffield, who played left field like Kevin Mitchell, who held his girlfriend hostage and then cut off her cat’s head. Only one of the preceding assertions is false, and it’s not the one you’d hope.
Ignoring the fact that this fragile world is just rife — rife, I say! — with such saccharine abuse and feline homicide, some parents are reportedly shitting their Flyover State dungarees over the specter of Maurice Sendak’s grinning monsters giving little Tanner nightmares. Prompted by a Newsweek reporter to address the issue for the umpteenth time since test screenings launched last summer, Sendak said he’d assuage the concerns of Mom n’ Pop by telling them “to go to hell…if (the kids) can’t handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.”
Sendak went on to elaborate that he couldn’t accept the “concentration on kids being scared, as though we, as adults, can’t be scared. Of course we’re scared. I’m scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can’t fall asleep. It never stops. We’re grown-ups; we know better, but we’re afraid.”
It’s no stretch, then, to conclude that Sendak sees fear as an essential part of growing up — something he says American parents are remarkably reluctant to accept, and something he made a point to highlight in Where the Wild Things Are:
“We are squeamish. We are Disneyfied. We don’t want children to suffer. But what do we do about the fact that they do? The trick is to turn that into art. Not scare children, that’s never our intention.”
On a side note, the breezy, captivating NewsweekQ&A — which brought together Sendak, adaptation director/Labcabincalifornian Spike Jonze, and screenwriter/philanthropist Dave Eggers — revealed Sendak’s inspiration for his celebrated beasts:
“The monsters were based on relatives. They came from Europe, and they came on weekends to eat, and my mom had to cook. Three aunts and three uncles who spoke no English, practically. They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do. And I knew that my mother’s cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother. We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that. We couldn’t taste any worse than what she was preparing. So that’s who the Wild Things are. They’re foreigners, lost in America, without a language. And children who are petrified of them, and don’t understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate. So there you go.”
If you’re still at your desk reading this, really, shame on you. SHAME. Take a look around. It’s Friday. It’s probably raining. The free bagels are gone. Everybody with a spare excuse or sick day is at home sleeping off last night. And nobody in the office is actuallyworking except for The Bobs, who are cashing in your 2010 raise for telling the bossman how expendable you are.
So grow some balls, fake some swine flu, smoke some dope, and drop twelve hard-earned duckets to spend the afternoon being a kid again.
Bolstered by a positive Sunday-edition New York Times book review, Josh Neufeld’s “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” plowed through a gauntlet of Batman-related titles to earn a spot on the Paper of Record’s Graphic Hardcover Bestseller List last month. However, for all the publicity Neufeld engendered through such critical acclaim and a modest book tour, the book’s tenure on the list ended after two weeks; apparently people are more interested in studying The Joker’s origin than in reliving Hurricane Katrina.
Neufeld, who built comic-geek street cred illustrating “American Splendor” for Harvey Pekar, truly began working on “A.D.” during the three weeks he spent working with the Red Cross in Katrina-ravaged Biloxi, Miss. after the 2005 storm: His blog on the experience spawned a self-published collection of choice works, which in turn drew the attention of SMITH Magazine. With the online mag as a platform, Neufeld expanded both his narrative breadth and the scope of his geographical focus (he migrated to a New Orleans angle after discarding, for logistical reasons, a considered examination of the larger Gulf Coast). Earlier this year, Smith — with Pantheon on board to bankroll — published “A.D.” in hardcover.
Neufeld’s work straddles a line between fact and fiction in a manner that might make traditional journalistic purists uneasy: “A.D.” is a novel, albeit one rooted in historically-accurate details, and Neufeld makes no claims to the contrary. Some of the book’s seven central characters, whose divergent narratives reflect the vastly different backgrounds of their subjects, are real people, while others are hybridized creations based on multiple real New Orleanians. Accordingly, Neufeld warns in the book’s first pages that “…some names and details have been changed for dramatic purposes….” As Neufeld told the Times in its “A.D.” review in August, “I did whatever worked to make the emotional truth of the stories much clearer. It’s what makes a certain scene emotionally satisfying in a way that makes the whole book add up to a novel.” But Neufeld’s intricate attention to detail (in addition to the obvious phone and in-person interviews he conducted, Neufeld “took tons of photos” in order to replicate precisely such minutiae as the contents of of one featured couple’s DVD collection) lends credence to Dave Eggers’ characterization of “A.D.” as “one of the best-ever examples of comics reportage.”
The human perspectives Neufeld provides certainly reflect a level of journalistic integrity rivaling or exceeding that exhibited by much of the mainstream media during and after Katrina. He wisely resisted the urge to overtly damn the federal agencies’ abominable reaction to the crisis (FEMA isn’t even a blip on the book’s radar), instead forcing readers to draw their own conclusions based on his characters’ hyper-localized trials. In doing so, we see thugs — left, along with everyone else, to their own devices by unresponsive authorities — maintaining peace at the city’s convention center, rather than raping and pillaging as had been reported at the time. (This isn’t to say that none of the atrocious rumors relayed ad nauseum by CNN and its ilk during the catastrophe played out as fact. But the erosion of these sensationalist outlets’ fact-checking standards during the meltdown was palpable, and their follow-up on such rumors during the recovery period was markedly insufficient.)
Neufeld, however, does mimic Anderson Cooper — as much a Gonzo student as a straight-edged, impeccably-coiffed WASP can be — by inserting himself into the story at book’s end. Neufeld introduces this narrative transition to bring closure to each character’s tale, portraying himself following up with the seven by phone from his Brooklyn apartment. Some of the characters initially moved away from New Orleans after the hurricane, while others stayed in the area; all have since returned to New Orleans or have plans to do so. By describing each of these stories in polychromatic form and without regard to the “official” assessment of conditions in the city during and after Katrina, Neufeld provides a raw, revelatory and intensely personal perspective on the largest domestic humanitarian failure of the 21st century.
Perhaps of equal importance in these sad, helpless days of print media consolidation and syndication, though, “A.D.” confers a considerable measure of legitimacy on a form of quasi-journalism Neufeld by no means invented (see: “Maus”): Comics and graphic novels as social conscience.
Say what you will about his politics or his dubious interpretation of ‘objectivity’ — Rupert Murdoch got it right this time around. Back in the spring, when a very few brave souls produced a muffled murmur that resembled “Newspaper Bailout,” pundits praised Ol’ Rupe for charging readers to browse his Wall Street Journal online — a tactic eschewed by nearly every other daily in the nation.
Among the papers fearful of instigating a reader revolt, of course, was New York’s Paper of Record. The other day, we came upon this sordid scene at a craft fair in McCarren Park:
Our photo work could stand to improve — standing there, shooting away, we felt like the proverbial foot thwacking the proverbial dead horse — but the sign reads “50% Off!” The Times didn’t even bother to send out a proper sales rep — the poor sap here appears to be the laid-off mother of one of their delivery boys (they can still afford those, right?). Sad, sad days for the dead tree industry…
A few months ago, somewhere along the daily descent from online work research to tangentially work-related online reading to Youtube animal porn, Emily Gould became a known name to us me (disclaimer: much of DCQ experienced a near-total internet blackout from 2002-2005, which partially overlaps with the time period in which subject Gould rose to infamy). She’s a competent and compelling enough writer, but Jimmy Kimmel got drunk and punched his grandma and then disappeared Larry King before verbally eviscerating Gould on national TV over the dire threat her employer’s Gawker Stalker app poses to celebrities like him free societies everywhere. Other bloggers ragged on Gould’s performance, she meekly defended herself, others came to her aid, still others doubled up on the attack, and the celebrities themselves were able to leave their Cloaks of Invisibility at home that week when they picked up their frappuccinos.
Then, in February, a Cleveland startup that tracks high-end real estate deals and IDs the players involved found itself the target of some strikingly Kimmelesque criticism: Farcically malevolent legal giant Jones Day sued Blockshopper for daring to evoke the firm’s name and link to its website in articles describing condo purchases by two Jones Day attorneys. The site’s founders chose to settle with Jones Day rather than blow their wad on legal fees fighting an army of 2,000-plus smarmy Ivy League grads.
For the curious, the firm claimed the site’s usage of links constituted copyright violation. If that’s the case, Jones Day, you’ve got your work cut out for you. The real motivation for the suit was most assuredly the fact that Chesters One and Two didn’t appreciate their addresses being sprayed all over the virtual world of realty. (If you’re still struggling with good guy/bad guy, let this guide you: Jones Day is the firm that helped Chevron first defeat a lawsuit by relatives of dirt-poor Nigerians killed while protesting the company’s environmental and human rights violations, then turn around and countersue the villagers for $500K in an attempt to discourage other third-world exploitees who might sue in the future—just as the Blockshopper suit was used as a suppression tactic aimed at other would-be freeloading hippieschannelers of free traffic to the firm’s site.
From time to time, among the peyote-driven snake-femme battles and botched Rolling Stone assignments, Hunter Thompson managed to Take Care of Bidniss when he decided his associates’ missteps had reached catastrophic levels. A source sends us proof positive of one such episode, in which Thompson takes the meat grinder to attorney George Tobia for apparently bungling negotiations with New York publishing house Simon & Schuster over the 1998 publication of “The Rum Diary”:
In another declassified communique written two days earlier, the Master of the Cannonball Sendoff informed Tobia of his fate while simultaneously filling him in on leisure plans for the day and demanding an estimate of his “exact profit expectations” from the soon-to-be-released “Fear and Loathing” film adaptation. The last graph alone speaks volumes about a man who knew he had the juice to disregard formality and spent the bulk of his career doing just that:
For his part, Tobia seemingly made good with Thompson after the dustup: At present, the Boston lawyer continues to represent HST’s estate — 19 years after the two met while Tobia was handling the estate of another writer who rejected conformity in savage fashion: Jack Kerouac.
