Theory According to Chuck Berry

Citizen Journalism vs. Citizen Papparazzi

The story in yesterday's NYT about the OfftheBus.net, the Huffington-supported citizen journalism site makes some, or suggests some, points about the infant medium.

• The number of OTB correspondents increased from 300 to 7500 after the Mayhill Fowler scoop in April on Obama's "bitter" small town white men comment.
• It didn't say how many of this 7200 increase are Republican dirty tricksters, or what the OTB peoples' criteria for resume and fact-checking are.
• If the bitter comment is OTB's greatest story, it suggests a number of things about what the OTB citizen journos believe citizen journalism to be: political papparazzism. Citizen papps catching the celebs with their pants down, and feeding into the pointless 24/7 CNN news cycle which obliterates substance with a shitstorm of minutiae. Call it papp style.
• It could be suggested that OTB's greatest story is 800 detailed profiles of the superdelegates. Call it wiki style.
• Obama precinct captains are covering platform meetings (of which party the piece does not suggest). OTB says this is OK because all citizen journos must reveal in writing their political affiliations and contributions. This is the very privileging of special interests -- ie., the Obama moveon geek groundswell, which I suggest is overwhelmingly white boy and white bread and privileged by their access to a $1500 computer -- which OTB decries.
• A white boy alone on a laptop is not a revolutionary. He is often a libertarian of the Ayn Rand persuasion, which edges into the kind of ubermensch fascism, and demagoguery, and feeding frenzy, this world has had its fill of.
• The NYT is all over this, as is the rest of the traditional press.

I am amused, because that while the use of the intarwebs for barely body temp political journalism is news, the news created by the citizen papps is minuscule, and the trad press coverage is mostly industrial spying.

The virtue so far, I venture, of citizen journalism is the papp or opticon effect. But 300 people laboring to produce the bitter molehill strikes me as a brilliant illustration of what one law student's brilliant and revolutionary professor said. And that is, law review is a waste of the resources of the truly talented.

And there's the whole starfucking thing. Arianna Huffington has been famous for nearly 40 years as the number one starfucker in the world, truly prodigious, since her graduation from Cambridge. This kind of OTB gotcha starfucking gives amateurs (of which newsrooms themselves are totally full) a hardon to catch a politician making a basically harmless gaffe. It's feral and it's beneath the dignity of everyone who does it and everyone who is forced to read it. It keeps the candid and the teachable out of political office. It keeps young people, women and people of color, away from the polls in droves, which is the death of the democracy. If the Obama gaffe is to be the greatest all-time hit of OTB, I do believe the citizen papps are ultimately the minions of Fox and CNN.

I think citizen journos also repeat the worst sins of trad journalism. The most important is being solely driven by fake events, rather than focussing on systemic kleptocracy, for example, computer-enhanced data gathering (great reporting on redlining mortgages and other institutional crime stories derived from forensic geekery), and the system of environmental, economic, racial and sexist crimes committed with impunity by the institutions of democracy and capitalism. In citizen-oriented groups, be they juries, civic action groups, the book club, or online discussions, I have noticed that invariably the group is swayed to a wild goose chase, wasting years on the minuscule ego projects of the irrepressible while an overview of the scope of the work is, once again, obliterated as on CNN with a shitstorm of minutiae. It is a waste of the resources of the truly willing to learn, the truly willing to work, and of the truly willing to become political activists. It is my experience that without an institutional leader and institutional standards, the limited free time of those few citizens who are willing to volunteer is wasted. Those who have nothing else to do? Are unemployable for a reason. I think it was Tocqueville who said that in a democracy, scum rises to the top.

The second worst idea of trad journalism is that politics is news. Politics is reaction to the news, and as Dave Broder and others have taught me, even the news about politics is not where people think it is. It's basically in the governors' conferences, and has been since long before the dead hand of gridlock stopped Washington in its tracks. No face time for you on the TV networks.

That said, the intarwebs are the mother lode of real news about what's happening out here in the real world. I think the Obama New Yorker cover discussion is the tip of the iceberg of something really important, and if you were paying me $250 an hour, I'd figure it out for you, peg it, and lay out the story idea. The intarwebs are full of information I would be a much lesser person without, from the discovery of Aunt Cherie's book of poetry in the papers of the late poet laureate of Delaware, to the fire and brimstone sermons of an Ulster Presbyterian ancestor, to the papers of the mayor of Buffalo who shut down the tuberculosis sanatorium my mother was in in 1923.

It's also full of beautiful, informative websites by hobbyists and professionals about important American ideas and institutions, such as the 19th century Kirkbride mental hospitals, whose repurposing a young professional journalist is writing a story about.

These archives and hobbyist sites are to me the actual citizen journalism on the internet -- easily dismissed as feature stories or backwaters of archival trivia, but in reality the substance of the thing unseen. The next big social movements will rise from ideas and trends already visible on the nets. (See $250-an-hour disclaimer aforementioned.)

The Nick Lemann piece on citizen journalism (he is the Columbia J school dean) makes some of these points, a couple of years previous to the Mayhill Fowler bitter scoop. His main one is, the proof is in the pudding. Reporters get stories. Big ones. Like Abu Ghraib or how Enron was responsible for the California brownouts. No WMD. It's about massive, unrelenting, quotidien, life-and-death, white collar crime.

Gotcha just doesn't begin cut it. The story is not the stray brain fart. The story is the system. Limbaugh, Fox News, et al? Sucker punches. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And none to his water boy, OTB.

No Sedition Please, We're Black

Like everyone in the world, I rely on the sharp eye and sharp tongue and the talent of black Americans to critique the whiteboy culture by interposing its own.

That is a carefully composed and edited politically correct statement.

The fact is, black Americans already are the arbiters of taste in world culture, as the Tupac posters on the walls of shacks and omnimedia boardrooms all over the world testify.

Now come the instapundits on the New Yorker cover showing the Obamas as Rush Limbaugh's worst nightmare:

There are many times and places where white people of good will should shut up. After due consideration, I submit that this is not one of them.

The instapundits of the black persuasion are saying that it's racist, not least because Michelle Obama is wearing an Afro. And that it wouldn't be racist, and would clearly be satire if a frame were put around it and it was depicted as a picture Rush Limbaugh is holding up. Or that there should be a mirror behind the Afro'ed Michelle and the Osama'd Barack showing what they really look like. Because you're too fucking stupid to get the joke.

No, people are saying that.

My first thought was, if black people lose their sense of humor, it's all over for us. Then I thought two things simultaneously, both the fruit of my long years in the feminist trenches. One, as women will never be equal until they commit great crimes, black people will never be equal until they have a vested interest over which to lose their sense of humor. When black people start being President and stop being hip, they will lose their sense of humor and take another step toward parity. Second, as everyone who has studied comedy knows, it is aggressive, nihilist, hostile and resilient. It has been, since Euripides. It makes nothing out of something. And along these lines, I'm thinking, Obama is a humor free zone because every black person is so worried about his assassination that any hostile attack, especially including humor, is seen as danger. I feel bad about this.

Not bad enough to shut up.

Because wit is the only thing -- the glimmer of some kind of light on -- that gives me hope for this country. It's why I keep on here in the blogosphere, despite the massive waves of bullshit and idiocy, because there are about 10 of you out there who have some wit and are applying it to this tired old world.

The idea that you need to put a frame around the New Yorker cartoon cover, or mirror it, in order to make it clear that it's satire, is stupid. Nobody in this culture, who watches 150 television ads a day, which are the most sophisticated video art there is, produced by the best educated filmn and art school grads, is that ill-educated visually. Even people who can't read or don't are extremely sophisticated in terms of seeing art in media, and indeed style, as well as reality, in the streets. I saw old black ladies, for example, back in the 1980s, wearing Bart Simpson t shirts, at which point I understood the Simpsons were hip and I needed to check it out.

The frame the insta pundits are insisting on to identify the cartoon as satire already exists. The New Yorker logo superimposed over it is the frame. Whether or not you are ignorant of the fact that every week since the 1920s the New Yorker has published a cartoon on its cover. If you have never seen the The New Yorker before, and you know nothing about the many things it stands for, some of them, like John Updike and the whole school of suburban adultery literature, completely loathsome and retrogressive and sexist and racist, you will dig that a drawing which is a caricature (you can tell by the big heads) of the candidate for the presidency and his wife in funny costumes with the words THE NEW YORKER over the top contains, shall we say, at least one clue that this is satire.

The instapundit blather that most annoyed me was that giving satire Michele an Afro is racist, because it's supposed to make her scary. Uh, yeah. I know hair is a huge issue for black women but art history of the image of the female Afro since the 1960s ranges from Angela Davis (which Afro, GIVEN THE HUEY NEWTON STYLE AK 47 the satirical Michele is packing on the cover, numb nuts, is the Afro The New Yorker references), and the close shaved ones of '60s people like Pearl Cleage, up through the blaxploitation chick Afro hair, which was and remains gorgeous and funny, the 1980s topiary effects of Grace Jones which any human in their right mind would covet, Alek Wek's millenial riposte to Naomi Campbell's retromingent weave, etc. -- oh please, I just can't go on.

And if the idiots who think Obama is a Muslim buy the magazine looking for evidence that he is, high fives all around.

As the Undercover Black Man, aka David Mills, said, years ago, when Ted Danson showed up in blackface at a roast for his then-sweetheart, Whoopi Goldberg, but what if it's funny?

But what if it's funny?

Now that is seditious. Can't have no sedition 'round here. Mama don't 'low no sedition 'round here.

Old Babes

The latest issue of Cottage Living, a very strange ladies' magazine headquartered in Alabama somewhere, which hits a certain femme sweet spot in an aspirational kind of derriere-garde Tri-Delt way in which Utopia is, actually, one of those darlin' Disney housing tracts -- the architecture, as one scholar calls it, of reassurance -- has a feature this month on Julie Newmar.

Julie Newmar, as I recall from fleetingly glimpsed 60s vignettes in My Living Doll, a Jeannie/Bewitched knockoff in which Newmar played a fembot, was tall and smart and kinda wiggy. Was there something, back in the day, about her being six-foot-two and a MENSA member? In any case, she was always cast as an uberwench. Hollywood sort of got her and sort of didn't. Broadway too. She won a Tony in 1961, and Joe Papp fired her in 1973 from a Broadway production (The Boom Boom Room) in which she played "a bisexual go-go dance captain". She took it like a sport. Papp said, admiringly, "She had something. A bizarre, grandiose stage presence. If I had directed her earlier...." The other person Papp had fired from the production was the female director. Papp continued, "She needs a man directing her."

Newmar is now in her 70s and nothing has changed. The Cottage Living spread shows her standing in the middle distance in her garden, looking beautiful and very, very thin -- still maintaining the classic Hollywood silhouette of huge head and stick body.

http://www.cottageliving.com/cottage/gardens/article/0,21135,1812477,00.html

Her garden is unbelievably beautiful. There are roses and lilies and orchids named after Julie, and she grows them. It is impressive, and so is she for making it.

And I think of femme secession, of old people retiring into their gardens and making a world there. I think about Tasha Tudor, who died recently, who made a whole child's illustrated world of her desire to live in the 1830s. She dressed up and lived, somewhat seceded yet aggressively marketed by her family in all the twee ladies' magazines, until she was 90 years old.

Newmar has not lived quite such a hermit's life. She is a California girl, born and raised in LA. She was widowed young and has a deaf son with Down's syndrome. She had a long aggressive feud with her neighbor, Jim Belushi, trying to run him off.

Her house is, according to the architectural rendering in Cottage Living, quite modest but CL thinks a lot of things are cottages which are not.

The layers of climbing, blooming greens all but obscure Julie's modest 1940s house, which she fell for in the early 1980s because violets sprouted in the drive. "'Pick me! Smell me! Embrace me!' they cried. So I did," she says, smiling.

Cottage Living says she is a busy actress, investing in real estate and travelling. This does not sound busy to me. Asked where she'd been since Catwoman in the 1960s Batman, she told the New York Times, "I would prefer being a producer, someone who shows the way, rather than one at the end of puppet strings, who has to work so hard. It's not worth it anymore. And being a mother and businesswoman are major tests in life. You just can't be a movie star."

She has a blog, not a bad one, either. It's quite good. She writes of trying to get into Gaza to a school for the deaf. She writes she is unable now to walk without assistance. She writes about having sex.

There is not one comment on any of the posts.

http://jezebel.com/350059/meow