Theory According to Chuck Berry

Citizen Journalism

Pondering the reader-assisted PayPal junket to Denver one blogger, of hundreds expected to cover both political conventions, I am pressed to consider citizen journalism once again.

It strikes me that bloggers are yearning to break out of isolation and into the scrum, whereas any real reporter who has scored either a very influential or very unforgettable story is yearning to break away from the scrum. It is my experience that any reporter who does, and has the stones and the news judgment to do it, and who sojourns far away from the places where photo opportunities and press conferences are construed as news, is the reporter who gets the story.

Wanting to be part of the scrum, I submit, is a necessity for those whose ambitions require face time on the networks or a front page byline. My observation is that people for whom entree is important -- the newshens, for example, of the Helen Thomas, Fran Lewine, Sarah McClendon, Dorothy McCardle generation for whom mere entree to the profession was a terrible struggle -- divorcees, unwed mothers, "perennial bacholorettes" of the 1940s and 1950s whose real stories probably won't ever be told -- treasure this work, which is stenography. So too do the television network reporters, who -- just to invoke a chimera of what their values might be -- consider subbing on the Today Show a promotion from covering the White House. Anybody who has been herded into a roped-off press section by junior press aides and force-fed pap for thirty seconds will be able to decide whether or not the job is for you.

I doubt the bloggers will be given entree even to these pools. They can't take notes without their computers, and that's pretty hard to do when the AP photographer is whacking you upside the head with his telephoto lens because you blocked his shot. He does that because at any moment the President could be assassinated and he needs to have that shot. Just so's you know what the White House -- or the Teddy Kennedy beat -- is really about.

The bloggers aren't going to get anywhere near the candidate or even the scrum. Since it seems to me that that -- the entree -- is what they really want I can't see that the whole enterprise is serving any purpose. You can tap on your laptop about what's going on on television at home just as well, if not better, than you can in a bloggers' newsroom where I suspect they'll all be quarantined, and bribed with free Krispy Kremes, as far as possible away from the action the organizers of the Event can put them. Their "press credentials", I suspect, will not permit them on the convention floor to mingle with the delegates or to wangle an invitation into any backroom arm-twisting, if mayhem so vigorous is still permitted at Events, that might be going on. I think their "credentials" will serve instead to curtail, as is traditional, any access whatsoever.

Here's the thing with citizen journalism. My sense is that they all want to cover the celebrity rat fuck events -- the backstage pass rock concert mentalilty -- like the political conventions, which are eponymously the locus of everything that is not news.

It seems to me the really memorable and influential stories have always been discovered by an experienced and driven reporter working on his own, usually way off the beaten path. My Lai -- Hersh didn't even have an employer.

Watergate -- Woodward and Bernstein worked far from the White House press room, and did not, to my knowledge, possess White House credentials during Watergate (as I did).

I was just reading about the black power salute story of 1968 -- Smith and Carlos have never been forgiven by the Olympic committee -- and caught a glimpse of what a great reporter would be doing during one of those ratfucks, the Olympics, which, like the White House or the political conventions, is the cynosure of all eyes.

Walking to the medal platform were Smith, Carlos, Mrs. Smith, who for some reason had a black glove in each of her hands, and Pete Axthelm. Nobody else.

(Yalie, dead of "liver disease" at 47, one apotheosis of my theory that nothing is harder to write well about than sports.)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/23/opinion/opart_inline.jpg

There is Ron Suskind, who is the very model of a pomo reporter, and the recorder of the epoch-marking sentence from -- it had to be Rove -- "We're an empire now" -- one of those laser-eyed guys who parlayed the daily front page byline into what it was worth -- a lifetime of book contracts. The first book he did was not one of his scathing political tomes, but one following a black kid through high school in Washington, D.C.. Slavery, as everybody knows, is the true story of the democracy, and Suskind used his entree to write about that. On his own, far away from the front page of the Wall Street Journal and all their very stupid shit.

There is Tina Rosenberg, who was travelling to Medellin and hanging with the Sendero Luminoso thugs, protected only by a MacArthur Foundation grant, about which, I have to tell you, the coqueros care less than nothing. She did it when no white boy would be seen dead covering Latin America which is still, pretty much, except for those who've married Cariocas, Siberia for foreign correspondents.

Finally, there is the classic Jimmy Breslin story -- the interview with Clifton Pollard, JFK's grave digger. This is a story that will last forever, unlike the thousands of others filed that day.

No citizen journalist I know of is interested in, or has the stones, or the news judgment, to go out into the meatspace world and do what these maniacs do.

I need to remember that.

Fashion Rocks

Conde Nast keeps sending me free copies of their new venture Fashion Rocks, which doesn't, actually. I'd never buy a magazine with a picture of Justin Timberlake in a tuxedo on the cover. They have a huge spread of divas photographed by the big fash photogs, which is pointless and boring because, basically, the clothes are stupid and the divas aren't fashion models. They're not good-looking enough, and they're kinetic: They look best bopping.

And there's the problem with the clothes....tuxedo with combat boots, mmmmm, MEGO. There's an amazing column by the hippest scenester fashion writer, Lynn Yeager, buried in there, among the 15 page advertising spread of Rihanna doing lip gloss, also boring because she is not a fashion model and doesn't look good/interesting from every crevice and angle which, baby grrl, are already way over-exposed (just been reading about how Mark Spitz blew it after becoming the first human to win seven gold medals: Rihanna, sweetheart, you are no Mark Spitz). Cutlines reading "On Will.i.am, Vivienne Westwood trousers, Diesel sunglasses, Dior sneakers" approach the edgier journalism purlieus of The Times of London Court Circular. Dior sneakers, are you shitting me? Mariah Carey, in an ugly Naeem Khan swag dress, and her ilk, shot by Stephen Meisel, and his ilk? A practically endless spread of Dhani Harrison sort of looking like George and sort of not? Yawn, seriously. I was swept away by the corruption, even down to the accents and the gestures they affect, of the rock establishment watching Tommy Lee  and what'shisname, Mr. Carmen Electra, with the eyebrows, on <i>Rockstar: INXS</i>. Blech. This is not rock n roll. Showing the EZ listening establishment in boring couture clothing is not rock fashion, it's Fat Elvis.

Anyway, it's a strangely frustrating production, an effort finally to track the influence of rock and roll on fashion -- a parallel trend both to couture and street/club fashion which has gotten much too little coverage by fashion journalists.

One note. I want an Afro pompadour like Janelle Monae's. To go with my gele, my hoodie, and my kimono.

Cultural appropriation forever.

That is all.

Trolls

The NYT mag had a piece on trolls and trolling this past Sunday, and the spectacle of sociopathic young, and not-so-young men vandalizing peoples' lives and livelihoods with impunity, and pleasure, was unedifying. I think dreams of Utopian internet community were always compromised by the self-serving salesgeek aspects. But the entrenchment of troll culture is the kiss of death. They make the environment a litigible one of hostility and harassment, and reduce the quality of life for everyone who has to pass through the neighborhood. I think the only solution is Giuliani's -- get all of them off the sidewalk, zero tolerance for subway turnstile jumping, and so on, but this isn't going to be possible any time soon.

I think they fall under the rubric which Tom Friedman, I think it is, has shrewdly winkled out of the many jihadis that he, like a good reporter, has talked to. They are young men, says Friedman, who feel like dwarves.

Gotcha.

The recent arrest of an alleged "good kid" in the Suzy Creamcheese suburbs here, a teenager with an arsenal of AK 47s and other assault rifles, bought for him by his father, a retired Air Force officer who works for the Feds, plus 50 pounds of bomb making materials and a map of Camp David again makes the point that the upper middle class is incubating a generation of dwarves. Just to drive the point home, this is how Dylan Klebold got his stockpile, his videos, his website and his plan together -- in a suburban garage, in his teen boy bedroom, completely unsupervised.

I think both girls and boys of the middle classes lead completely unsupervised lives these days, although according to the sociological research I do watching Supernanny a minority of these young sociopaths are unsupervised while being totally micromanaged by ambitious and completely amoral tiger moms. They beat, with closed fists, their little sisters while tightly bound in car seats in the back of the silver Mercedes SUV, on their way to their many after-school appointments.

And the passive-aggressive mother justs nods and smiles. (One of the most electrifying revelations of All God's Children, an electrifying book about the most violent prisoner in the history of the state of New York, whose father was the first Phi Beta Kappa to be inducted in prison, and also the last, is the pleasure the boy's mother took in watching him be aggressive.) I think this is one of the secrets of the very entwining relations between mothers and sons, and if penis envy exists, which I don't think it does, it does in the agency a woman gains through the aggression of her son.

There is, of course, the billions, and the creepy messianism Fred Turner so brilliantly reports on the morphing of the Whole Earth Catalog toolie culture into Silicon Valley, a book recommended to me by the perspicaceous <lj user = "bing_crosby">, who, with the Intelligent Craftafarian, is one of the only two people I know who is studying materialism through crafts -- and toolies. The problem with a materialist, to paraphrase the famous comment on atheists, is not that they believe in nothing. It is that they'll believe anything.

The trolls are geeks, and children's time with video games and online is almost completely unsupervised. Time after time Supernanny walks into a half-a-million-dollar 5,000 square foot suburban house to find tiny children screaming obscenities and acting out killing games they learn playing adult video games. Over which the smiling mutti has, oh my goodness, no control.

When they're not playing video games, they're on the computer -- girls seeking sexual experience -- also completely unsupervised.

No social skills, no negotiation skills, no table manners (there are no family meals) or the bare rudiments of how to meet somebody's eye in the elevator, much less get a job and enjoy life in a world whose values are composed to make life human-scaled and livable by all humans in community. No lessons on how to be seen, the pleasures of the sidewalk, and how not to be invisible.

One result is this idea that STOP signs are the intrusion of the man into your libertarian Utopia rather than, for example, the illustration of the idea that God is love for your fellow drivers' right to live.

Another is the conflation of computer skills, values, and internet information with anti-authoritarianism, democracy or mastery. All three are meatspace skills, as the flowering of the geek ubermensch ethos on the nets, and nowhere else, where, indeed, the defeat of the lone wolf/ubermensch/hero by the armies of capitalism is pretty much one of the themes of modernity since the age of enlightenment, illustrates. There can be no counterculture without a culture in which one participates successfully while passing for normal. There is no revolution without mastery of the laws of society, community and so on. And unless you are -- oh, let's say, redistributing to the poor the wealth, or disarming nuclear terrorists with your hacker skills -- by posing as an outlaw you're really just another hipster. Without the style. Or a scorpion in a bottle: limbic, deadly, ignorant and like all mental illness, malicious but excruciatingly boring.

There was another interesting piece in the NYT mag which I've had occasion to think of often. And that was on Bill Gates, and the principle of unintended consequence (in this case, of his billions for global charity). He said he harnessed his hardsell talents to a self-serving kind of Utopianism -- that every starving child in the world should have a computer -- until he was in Soweto one day. He noticed there was, perhaps, one electrical socket for every 600 people, and that it didn't work every day all day.

Welcome to my world, little man.