Owlspotting

Here’s one of those quiz things that gets passed around — along with my “result.”

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

So Bob Woodward is a liar. He lied by omission in his book “Plan of Attack.” I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, “Media Lies” has been scribbled on Washington Post boxes for years.

So now that we all know that Bob Woodward is just as big a hack as Judy Miller, we should treat him accordingly. Which means the most important (and yet-to-be-answered) question is: Who did Bob screw to get the story?

Do you believe in letters to the editor?

I ask myself that question a lot recently — mostly as a result of paying closer attention to the letters printed by the Washington Post. It’s refreshing to see readers complain very articulately about the problems journalism faces today, some of which I already bitched about earlier this week.

As a result, I’ve started writing more of them, the last of which I sent to the Post this morning after reading an innocent piece on Ira Glass, the host of This American Life. Here’s a sample of my comments:

“[…] it’s disappointing to me as a subscriber to the Post and someone who attended Mr. Glass’s presentation that Ms. Frey got so little out of it. Mr. Glass spelled out his philosophy of telling stories and bringing meaning through journalism in a noise filled broadcast world. All Ms. Frey’s article illustrates is that an event happened, in which a goof-ball with thick-rimmed glasses with an odd radio show talked about his pet peeves.

Ms. Frey doesn’t even mention the structure of Mr. Glass’s talk and ignored that the message he delivered was conveyed in the same styleand structure as the radio show. This would be a small omission if she used the space she had for this article to talk about journalists who believe in telling stories — something she failed miserably at on this occasion.

Ms. Frey also referred to Dove in her story as being the detergent mentioned in Mr. Glass’s talk. It was Dawn and the word was repeated countless times during the segment. She also dismisses Mr. Glass’segment on the FCC as a “swipe” although it was a more compelling piece of reporting on the subject than almost anything done by other media organizations.”

It was a hard complaint to articulate because I was in the audience, stunned by Glass’s passion and his sublimely articulate vision for storytelling. I believe This American Life tells the best stories in journalism today, and I always knew that the format and the grammar as Glass says makes it what it is. But hearing Glass talk about how the show gets puts together, how ideas come about and much thought the staff is putting not only into the stories, but into the storytelling process, was fantastic.

Glass flat out rejected what he called the “topical sentence,” that nagging sentence in a story or a news report that signals to the reader that they are about to move to a completely new idea. It’s almost like a series of leads and the story looks like a quick assembly of chunks, which is most of the time a failure.

On This American Life glass pushes for story telling that is almost chronological in nature, the action moves from point A to B to C and is peppered with delightful surprises along the way (see Roy Peter Clark’s idea of the golden coins). As the audience moves through the story, they know to expect these moments of emotion, humor, genuine surprise and insight.

Journalism is struggling mightily with meaning, which is why hearing TAL is so rewarding. The action is always followed by the greater theme, the thread that makes us connect to the story and it’s more than the straight news “nut graf” that is supposed to tell readers why they care. This is a moment that most of the time goes to the heart of the human condition — it makes the listeners understand the character and feel connected to them and the world at large.

This is one of the things that made me mad while reading the Post story — there was no attempt to tell the readers why listeners they react to This American Life and make them feel what is the magic behind a 10-year-old wonder that captures the hearts of 1.6 million Americans every week.
It bothered me that the Post would do a story about a storyteller (to which they devoted considerable space) and not share his quirks and techniques. If I did know Ira Glass, I would have set down the paper having learned nothing, having no idea that this man is preoccupied with feelings, with life, with the idea of being part of the world and understanding it.

Glass said during his presentation that the average time a listener spends tuned to the one-hour how is more than 45 minutes. I’d like to see the Post or any newspaper for that matter compete with that. I’d like to see the Post — or any other media for that matter — convince me to tune out the world and stop doing anything while they take me on a trip that not only makes me more informed, but that — to some degree — makes me more human.

I started dating American media in the fall of 2003. We became serious in early 2004 as she started kibitzing about the lack of restraint shown by a former Democratic governor and presidential candidate who, she said, blew up in front of an Iowa crowd — yelling as if the whole world had fallen in a deep slumber and needed to be roused to take up arms against imminent danger.

It was her passion for moments devout of meaning — such as the scream that deafened Iowans — that hooked me. After more than a year of being suffocated by her presence, I find myself more neurotic than a Woody Allen character and more forgiving than a rock star’s significant other. She has disappointed me, cheated on me, and lied to me; all while promising to look out for my best interest as we navigated the twists and turns of the American reality.

Now, a good editor would tell me that the metaphor of media as a lover needs to serve a purpose and further the cause of the article. But in a world of journalism where too many people believe there is always a right answer, I’ll politely dissent from the good editor on this occasion.

Bob Woodward is the white Bedouin that broke my camel’s back. He just had to show off — he did handstands on the hump, did “look mommy, no hands” bits with his eyes closed, and rode aggressively. My camel is a stand in for the patience I have for my lover, the American media.

When Woodward revealed he learned about the CIA agent Valerie Plame before everyone else, I wanted to call the Washington Post and tell them, politely, to throw my subscription information in the same thrash bin they threw their credibility into. As an idealistic reader, I still believe in the notion that the media should be god damn glad I exist. Because if I didn’t exist, neither would they! I am their boss, their main reason for being and they are “my spies” in the corridors of power.

As someone employed by the Washington Post (the newspaper I subscribe to), Bob should worry about what I need to know, and about what he needs to tell me so I have all the elements to make informed decisions. I know it’s advertising and not me that pays his salary, but that’s the way the system has always worked. Advertising pays Bob to serve me.

Bob sits gleefully up on top of a lot of problems facing journalism (read this nice apocalyptic Q&A on the topic by the AP). Forget for a second the debates about the death of newspapers (here is one more), the rise of citizen-journalism (and the visuals citizens produce), and the successful business model of a Web-driven media. Journalists, as a wise man said recently (I promised confidentiality to this anonymous source) risk of becoming obsolete. There might not be a business to save if the practitioners themselves become irrelevant.

We have been so caught up in saving journalism that we forgot to save the crew. Not only are we on a sinking ship, we’re on a sinking ship with a crew running amok. Judy Miller promised to identify “Scooter” Libby as a “former Hill staffer,” but claims she would have never used it. She only wanted to hear the information. Under that logic, she would have accepted to identify Libby as “Sandman,” “Mickey Mouse’s roadie,” or “a wrestler turned sober gym teacher.”

Why do I, the poor reader care about this information-gathering game? I’m probably stuck in an outhouse in Kansas trying to decipher the intellectual intricacies of Time magazine trying to serve me what I want (or what they think I want): desperate housewives, the latest in God and top 25 home-made weapons to fight avian flu! I volunteer to write the latter.

Judy works for me, doesn’t she? I should trust her and plug her site at the same time. After all, she spent 85 days in jail for a source whose name she forgot. That’s how dedicated these reporters are — they will go to jail for people they don’t know!

Journalists — mostly the East Coast celebrities that staff behemoths like the Post or the Times –forgot they are working for the reader. Len Downie has said that Woodward’s mistake was not keeping readers in the dark, but keeping the editor in the dark. An editor who in turn would probably have made the same decision: keep readers in the dark. After all, there are so many things, Downie said, that we don’t publish.

Downie suggests he knows what’s best for me, but won’t ask if I agree with him or not. Me, the reader doesn’t matter anymore. Haven’t I understood how hard it must be down there in Washington? Haven’t I understood that my state-school educated behind should feel privileged to be protected by martyrs of the first-amendment like Judy, makers of history like Bob, or horrible spellers like Matt Cooper?

I guess I can’t find the word to express my gratitude. I am privileged to have an affair with such a lover, one that is willing to protect me from the noise that would — god forbid — make a better citizen. After all, why do I even need to be a better citizen as long as Survivor is still running, Martha Stewart is still cooking and 50 Cent keeps getting rich or dies tryin’?

A hot story on deadline can provide interesting mistakes, such as the one below from an AP story tonight.

After spending a gorgeous morning walking around my new neighborhood in Washington, DC, sampling the overpriced homegrown apples at the Sunday Market, I decided to find the perfect park bench in the sun for voracious media consumption. First, though, I needed a perfect tasty soda, so I stopped by the Kripsy Kreme, which has an absolutely fantastic carbonation-to-syrup ratio.

There was a line, and after I ordered, a khaki-clad DC-type praised me for my willpower to resist the freshly fried delights gliding through the hot icing waterfall right in front of us. The sole employee behind the counter seemed a little tired, but all in all it was a happy atmosphere in the local donut paradise.

I was next in line to pay when a guy — whose clothes said “bum,” but who am I to judge? — sort of stepped in front of me, holding two $10 bills. He asked me how to get somewhere, and being new to the city, I automatically said I had no idea. The Krispy clerk had the cash register open and was talking to the customer ahead of me when he interrupted her. “Can I get change real quick? Can I get a twenty for two tens?” Then he turned to me, “You got a twenty?” He was warm and polite, but I did not, so he put his bills on the counter. “Can I just get change for that?” She wearily agreed, and tossed him a crisp twenty. When he picked it up, I noticed he had a $1 bill in his hand.

He restarted our conversation, talking superfriendly-style as the clerk finished with the other customer. When said customer left, the guy turned from me, put the dollar on the counter, and said to the clerk, in his distracted, superfriendly way, “Hey, I asked for a twenty. You just gave me a dollar. Can I get my twenty?” Big smile. She said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and opened the register.

I was rather surprised when my mouth started moving without any direction from my brain. “Hey! No. You already gave him a twenty — that’s his dollar.” The clerk looked up at me with her eyebrows raised, and the guy got excited, saying, “What? What are you talking about?” and then to her, “I gave you two tens and you gave me a dollar.” I said flatly, “No, I saw you give him a twenty.” At that point, the clerk’s eyes narrowed, and she looked at him sideways. “Yeah. I thought I did.” The register slammed closed.

Oh man that bum was mad. He turned to me, oh God he was so close I could see right into his mouth, and he yelled “Why you tryin’ to get all up in my bidness?!!” The only words that came to me, honestly, were: Because it’s right, and I could not let something that cheesy and talk-radio approved come out of my mouth. So I just stared at him, looking up but with my head down slightly (an effective defense, I’ve learned, because it makes my eyes get Precious-Moments big). He kept turning between her and me, “What? Why you…” and “Man!” and “Well, at least give me my tens back!!” The clerk, juiced with attitude now, said “I ain’t givin’ you nothin’. Get on outta here and leave her alone.” And he did.

She gave me my soda, and I paid. As I turned to leave, I looked back, smiling at the other customers, but all of them, even Willpower Guy, avoided eye contact. Liberal pussies.

Read the New York bum chronicles:
– The Subway Masturbator
– The Brooklyn Used Condom

I tried to pitch the story below to Slate (“it doesn’t seem quite right for Slate,” they said) and also to Salon (they haven’t sent the rejection yet). Because he believes Salon will only echo Slate, the pesimist in me decided to post this review here.

In the pickup world, MLTRs, or multiple long-term relationships, are part of the game. Men can have their own harem and juggle five to 10 women as long as they follow the golden rule: tell every woman there are others sharing the same status.

The literary world functions in a similar way. Think of us readers as the personal harem of a writer. He or she loves us equally and, theoretically, gives us equal consideration.

This equal consideration ranges from not giving a damn about us to spending more time deciphering the algorithms of the bestseller list than actually writing.

A superficial read of Neil Strauss’s latest book, The Game, certainly points to the latter. The Game is, in no particular order, Strauss’s personal odyssey in the world of pickup artists, a how-to guide for the “average frustrated chump,” and a collection of sexual escapades and celebrity cameos that only Los Angeles can provide.

Style is Strauss’s alter ego in the book, and he takes up 400 pages to tell us how he became one of the best in the game. Don’t believe him? He has the rolodex to prove it: Caroline, Nadia, Maya, Mika, Hea, Carrie, Hillary, Susana etc. The Rolling Stone writer vividly chronicles his two-year foray in the world of pickup, sketching a sanctuary to which frustrated males of all ages flock to for a step-by-step program that teaches them how to score.

But this article is not really about the book. It’s about Strauss persistence to prove he’s not just milking sex to sale books. He is a hard working writer, who wants to prove he can do it — show that behind the women-bashing theme is a novelist trying to find his voice. But to please the harem and score-high on his first single-credit book, Strauss follows in the steps of Style and falls upon tried and tested gimmicks.

If I were to focus on the book, I’d have to employ phrases such as “Strauss toggles awkwardly between this kind of misogyny and limp bids at self-awareness,” a phrase courtesy of the New York Times, the writer’s former employer. Strauss left the Times to ghost write porn star Jenna Jameson’s autobiography, “How to make love like a porn star,” one in a series of similar efforts that include bios of rockers Marilyn Manson, Tommy Lee and Dave Navarro. With this resume, Strauss has a world to overcome in making his first single-credit book work.

Strauss has a two-fold mission in “The Game”: prove he is the best pickup artist among writers and the best writer among pickup artists. If he slips in either direction, he’ll be back in the rock-star-writes-book-with-some-dude pit. So how does he balance Neil Strauss the writer with Style the pickup artist? Well as it turns out, the rule is simple: use gimmicks and always close.

The writer operates like his pickup persona; he masters the rules and sticks to them. Strauss writes in parts (or steps, or books), which are divided into chapters, which in turn employ many story telling devices such as alternating points of view. Strauss writes the way Rambo uses the machine gun — the artistry fades in comparison to the noise. The covers of his books, and many of their inside pages are black (“The Game” actually looks like the Bible), they are “true stories,” and they look cool on the shelf.

Strauss is indeed good with the long-winded title page introductions and the fancy chapter breaks, but his strength, like a true pickup artist, lies with the closing, which I’ll dub the “Strauss finisher.” Below are a few samples from his magazine stories and book chapters:

• “‘These things will stop,’ she says, ‘but somebody has to show the karma [I have].’ Of course, I’m not allowed to leave just yet: We still have the deleted John C. Reilly scenes from Boogie Nights to watch.” (From a story on Courtney Love in Rolling Stone).
• “Afterward, Randy kissed my back. It was a strangely affectionate move to make in a movie like this. Then he turned to the camera and said: ‘She’s kind of like Randy West with pussy and tits.’ I had found my calling.” (From “How to make love like a porn star”).
• “Sarging was for students, not players, of the game. It was time to take this brotherhood to the next level, time to pool our resources and design a lifestyle in which the women came to us. It was time for Project Hollywood.” (From “The Game”).

My all-time favorite Strauss finisher comes from a Rolling Stone piece on the rock band, The Strokes (apparently it ran in the Guardian as well). After drilling into the reader’s brain that singer Julian Casablancas hates Pringles, Strauss closes:

“Outside it is pouring. Casablancas walks into the downpour without an umbrella. Within two steps, he is soaked. I survey the detritus of the night on the table. There is a half-eaten sandwich, several empty beer glasses, an empty cigarette pack and a crumpled piece of paper. I unroll it: it is a receipt for $2.99. The date is today. Only one item has been bought: a can of Pringles.”

Writing is painful, it’s a craft, it’s best done with tools, and it doesn’t take a non-fiction guru to explain this. Strauss knows this well, and just like Style he uses tricks: follow short chapters with long ones, dialogue with monologue and journal entries with narrative. No matter what tools he chooses to work the reader with, the goal remains the same: to close.

If you read “The Game” it’s hard to swallow that Strauss the writer took a back seat to Style, the wannabe pickup artist — although the writer himself makes this claim. “There’s no social proof to be gained by hanging out with a writer,” he protests to a seduction student in the book, seconds after repeating a theme peppered throughout the pages: nobody wants to sleep with a writer. If you stay with the book until the end, you’ll see that someone does.

The problem with the book is that no matter how much he tries, Strauss can’t convince me that he was more focused on pickup than writing. After all, before the book came out, versions of it appeared in the New York Times and Esquire among others. Some of Strauss’s best Rolling Stone stories were also written while he lived in the pickup community.

And, he writes in “The Game” (surprisingly in mid-chapter):

“One of the reasons I became a writer is that, unlike starting a band, directing movies, or acting in a theatrical production, you can do it alone. Your success and failure depend entirely on yourself. I’ve never trusted collaborations, because most people in this world are not closers.”

Strauss is.

There are several things that excite me technologically, but few manage to amuse me. Sending SMS to Google (46645) or Yahoo (92466) is pretty funny. Today, you can bypass the money-hungry 411 and text message Google (or Yahoo) and ask about movie showtimes, the nearest bars in your zip codes, or even recipes for cocktail.

I wanted some fruit last night and sent a message to Google: “Fruit ZipCode.” In a few minutes I got a reply with the address of a fruit smoothie place. Sure, totally worthless information, but the system works. When I asked about movie showtimes, Google was actually nice enough to reply with useful information.

Yahoo might work too, although it is losing ground in my personal digital chart. Google is just quirky enough to offer word definitions, too. Such as “awesome,” for which it send me three messages (yes, I have one of those 400 free SMS deals on my plan).

One of them says: Awesome. Propriety. Amazing, inspiring awe or admiration or wonder.

Another says — and this was new to me: Awesome: An extended stunt where a flyer has both feet together in the hand(s) of the base(s). Also refered to as a Cupie.

Who knew?

It’s true, I don’t feel comfortable using the dishwater. It’s, well, too American for me.

On Friday I was catching up with episodes of This American Life that I missed and came across this piece by Diane Cook called “That guy” (the link a RealPlayer brodcast of the episode. “That guy” is act two). The story was about being the guy/girl who does not care for a particular product or activity (sometimes even hates it), but ends up embracing, or at least accepting it.

Why? Well, one reason is the desire not to be “that guy”who stands out for their anti stance to stuff. We’re not talking about principles here. It’s struggling with a backpack vs. owning a rolling piece of luggage. It’s owning a European-style phone vs. the popular American flip-phone.

And, yes, it’s washing dishes by hand vs. throwing them in the dishwasher.

I was that guy. That’s what I thought of last night when I heard the piece. And this morning when I stared at the front page of the Washington Post, there I was. That guy. On A1, just below the fold, the newspaper that was recently blessed by media critic Jay Rosen with the title of “Best in America,” ran a story on the immigrants’ refusal to be that guy who uses the dishwasher instead of his hands. The story was called: “Washing Their Hands Of the Last Frontier.”

“In many immigrant homes, the automatic dishwasher is the last frontier,” the story by Phuong Ly says. “Long after new arrivals pick up football, learn the intricacies of the multiplex and the DMV and develop a taste for pizza, they resist the dishwasher.”

Most times I cringe at stories trying to reveal “social trends” among subcultures, when all of us in the news business know these stories are the product of our knowing this friend of a friend of a cousin who does or uses something (take rainbow parties for example). But I stand by today Post’s story.

When I got my frist apartment in Columbia, Mo. I had a tiny kitchen in which my weird Albanian roomate would microwave salami or freeze bananas until they tuned black, then set them on the fridge and let them ooze brown goo over the white appliances.

Granted, my lack of skills with using a microwave also led me to explode bags of porcorn or my roomate to want to cook a pizza for about two hours. I just want to point out that our incapacity to operate in the kitchen is product of Eastern European patriarchy where men let/make women do all the work. It’s not that I hadn’t seen a microwave before. My mom actually owns one. So does my dad. Westerners are skeptical of this though; in 2001 I had to convince (and thus alienate) a Dutch blonde of the fact that Romanians do have televisions and our roads are indeed paved.

But back to the dishwasher.

I was scared of it. How do dishes get cleaned by themselves in this oven-like machine? It’s not a transparent process like washing clothes, where at least you could stare dumb-founded at your underwear making the rounds and say: “aha, so this is how that unproper stain will dissapear.”

While in college in Bucharest, I was proud of being a dish-washing man. A girl once remarked that I’m the first guy she’s ever met who washed a plate on both sides. I thing about her everytime I run a sponge over the underside of my dishes.

Sure, I had my flaws — my dishes pilled high before I actually washed them — but when I did, it was a relaxing hour of scrubbing and rinsing and scrubbing again while the news, or a soccer game played in the background. I was a grown-up having a grown-up moment, while catching up with the realities of the world. Washing dishes, I believed, could be enlightening.

When I got my second apartment in the U.S., dishwashing was the perfect moment to listen to an episode of This American Life. Enough dishes could last me through at least half an hour of the show. I feel obliged to mention that I did not have a dishwasher in this place.

But let’s get back to my first U.S. apartment. One day, I remember being scolded by my American friends for (basically) being “that guy,” and being told you can save tons of time by letting the machine work for you. I told them, like the Post story notes, that “not using the appliance is one of the truest signs of immigrant heritage.” Still, I went home, put some plates in the machine, some liquid in the hole and turned it on. “There,” I said! “I’m using the devil’s works!”

It was maybe ten minutes later when I returned to find my whole kitchen floor covered in foam and the machine fuming and bubbling like a rabid horse. It gurgled in pain, while spitting foam at me. I was baffled, wet, but revenged. The machine was evil, worthless and messy. The sticky foam-covered floor was proof. I somehow turned the devil off and never ran it again. The Albanian never gave it a try — he spend his whole nine months in the States experimenting with microwaving slices of salami.

It was only later that I found out dishwashers need special liquid and not the Palmolive I was using for hand-scrubbing. The machine was fine apparently, but the user had been an idiot.

The Post story also says 60 percent of U.S. homes have a dishwasher. I am probably in that category. My third American apartment, in Washington, D.C., is equipped with a dishwasher. And, yes, two months ago I gave up on being “that guy.” I bought the right dishwashing liquid and had at it. Sure, I melted some plastic in the beginning (no one told me it gets that hot in there!) but now I’m relatively proficient in using it.

Still, the main reason that I took to using it was not the American one of saving time or sparing oneself manual labor. My kitchen is so small and poorly designed that there is no space to wash and dry a few days worth of dishes. Like the immigrants quoted in the Post story (some who I believe were indeed friends of friends of the author), I would have stayed true to my manual ways if my kitchen allowed. I would have taken the chance to be “that guy.”

I’m still “that guy” in a few respects, such as driving (I refuse!) or comforming to casual shoe rules. But the thing with being “that guy” is that you could stop as abruptly as your started.