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Sunset claws

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Longtime readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. Their new album, The Sunset Tree, is out, and it’s extraordinary. Singer/songwriter John Darnielle gets directly autobiographical here; where his previous outing, We Shall All Be Healed, was a series of recollections and epitaphs for friends and acquaintances from time spent among doomed speed freaks, this one is about his own experiences trying to grow up in a house with a violent stepfather.

That of course makes it sound like the most tiresome sort of confessional singer-songwriting; but when you take this kind of autobiographical material and run it through the loom of the imagination rather than the mill of therapy, something different emerges. There’s poetry here, and exquisite music-making, and more than a little wry humor, and a sense that youthful pain remembered and sung about is better than youth simply forgotten.

And so we have songs like “This Year,” a beaten-down teenage boy’s answer to “I Will Survive” (“I am gonna make it through this year / IF IT KILLS ME”) set to an ostinato hook, and “Dance Music,” with a perky melody playing counterpoint to scenes of domestic mayhem, and “Up the Wolves’s” Romulus-and-Remus parable of growing up wild, and “Pale Green Things,” a delicate tune that close out the album on a note less of reconciliation than of simple witness.

There’s less of We Shall All Be Healed’s Velvets-derived rock, more cello and mandolin in the mix. Each song is memorable, the production (John Vanderslice) is autumnally intimate, the effect stunning. I’m tempted to say something like “abuse never sounded so good,” but rather than trivialize The Sunset Tree with that kind of throwaway line, I’ll just say how glad I am to have it in my ears and head.

(Amazon has a good interview with Darnielle, and streams four songs from the album. For more Goats detail, there’s Jim Fisher’s in-depth study.)

A cure for Mad Boss Syndrome

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With the controversy over John Bolton’s nomination to become Bush’s ambassador to the U.N., it’s been possible for the administration’s supporters to paint Bolton’s opponents as whiners. The Democrats, it seems, don’t like Bolton because he’s, you know, tough. Raises his voice. Pushes around his inferiors. Well, ask the Republicans, what’s wrong with that? Shouldn’t we want a tough guy at the U.N.? We’re the strongest nation on the planet! Why should we care if one of our diplomats is a hardass? We’re supposed to reject an appointment because the guy yells?

Of course, if you’ve been following the story, you may understand that the issue here isn’t one of bad manners — it’s about bad management and bad judgment. Bolton isn’t just a tough guy; he’s a tough guy who apparently used his ire to bludgeon intelligence reports into the shape he sought. It’s one thing to push around your subordinates; it’s quite another to push around the information on which the lives of Americans and American troops depend. The reason Bolton’s nomination strikes so many observers, including me, as so profoundly wrong is that it’s precisely Bolton’s management style — one shared by, and endorsed by, the Vice President’s office — that led to the debacle of American intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.

In the “whatever happened to those WMD?” game, the Bush team has been pretty successful at shrugging off blame or diverting it at the intelligence community: Darn that CIA! How could they have misled us so badly? But Bolton’s confirmation hearings stand as a blunt reminder of what really happened: Bush’s men hammered the intelligence “community”, raged at their troops, threw fits and tantrums and delivered threats and ultimatums until the information flowing up from the field matched the fantasy their ideology dictated. When that fantasy collided with the reality on the ground in Iraq — look, ma, no WMD after all! — these men turned around and said, well, we acted on the best information we had at the time. First they pushed around their subordinates; then they blamed their subordinates. Classy! And, sadly, genuinely dangerous in the realm of national security, which is why the intelligence field has a strong tradition of trying to keep its reports insulated from the political tide — one more tradition, like the Senate filibuster, that the pseudo-conservatives of the Bush cadres are casually tossing overboard.

The Bolton saga strikes a chord with the American public because we’ve all worked with, and most of us have worked for, a Bolton or two in our time, and we know how it goes: Mad Boss shouts at the top of his (it’s usually, though not always, a male phenomenon) lungs until the things people say to him match the things he wants to hear.

I first encountered the world of Mad Bosses in various jobs I held as a college kid and later as a fledgling journalist. I assumed that this was the way of the world — that somehow the role of Being In Charge carried with it a dose of generic rage, and that all bosses would inevitably, at some point, explode and abuse their employees. The macho culture of old-school American newsrooms certainly spawned its share of Mad Bosses, and I’d have my run-ins with them. For me, one of the grand things about leaving the comfortable nest of the newsroom and helping found a company was doing my small part to shape a different, more civilized workplace culture, in which people treated each other — superior and subordinate alike — as colleagues, not kicking posts.

I came to realize that Mad Bossism was not an inevitability; it is, in fact, an anachronism. It flows less from power than from frustration at powerlessness. The boss explodes because the world won’t bend to his will — and it’s supposed to! What good is being boss if it won’t?

This has given me a tad more empathy for the bulging-veined, red-faced bosses of my past, though I’m firm in my determination never to work anywhere near the type again. The truth is, it’s no longer as easy as it used to be to get away with this kind of behavior: Joe or Jane Subordinate is going to be blogging every last twitch of Mad Boss’s tantrums. Just look at what’s happened to the director of Los Alamos National Labs, G. Peter Nanos. If the postings about him on a largely anonymous Los Alamos insiders’ blog are true, he’s a classic Mad Boss. Yet the scientists and engineers who work for him, having reached their limit, aren’t giving up; they’ve used the Web to shame him. Mad Boss may have met his match in Mad Blogger.

I can’t say I’m sad to see the field so leveled. The Web is criticized, and often rightly so, for the incivility of so much of its dialogue. But here’s one instance in which it can actually help counter the sort of offline incivility that for too long has been simply a given of the workplace.

A Web birthday

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Dave Winer just turned 50. Here’s a happy birthday to send his way.

I first met Dave over a decade ago at one of Sylvia Paull‘s digital salon gatherings. I didn’t know what to make of him but he was clearly smart and creative, as well as argumentative. I crossed paths with him again in the days of the San Francisco Free Press, when he pitched in with some code to help us post our stories during the newspaper strike. I joined his DaveNet mailing list and read his Wired column. In 1999, after I wrote about blogs (before we called them that), he came to visit us at Salon and urged us to start using his new Manila software, but we’d just built our own content management system and couldn’t face trying to integrate a whole different platform. Then Dave started writing about something called RSS, and at first I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Later I did.

I think I’ve been reading Dave’s stuff longer than I’ve read anyone else online, watching as he developed new ideas in full public glare, made mistakes and made history. At first, there was something unique about a software developer stepping forward and saying, “I’m tired of journalists messing up my story — I’m going to tell it my way.” Now there are thousands of programmers doing the same thing; the Web hums with their conversations. As I work on my book I’m tuning in to a lot of them, amazed at how much understanding is unfolding in this abstruse and hitherto cloistered field — and how great an example the programmers are setting for other groups going down the same road. I don’t think these conversations would be happening in quite the same way without Winer’s difficult, challenging, inspired example.

There and back

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Last week was spring break for the kids, so we went off to Sea Ranch, wandered the wind-swept beaches and spied on baby seals and their mums. It was grand.

I could deal with the 2500 emails piled up for my return (90 percent’s spam, anyway). But the RSS reader backlog is a scary thing. And unlike the spam, these are posts I want to read — otherwise, I wouldn’t be subscribed in the first place. The Net is a harsh mistress: abandon it for a spell and it will have its revenge.

No reader is an island

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You can’t open your RSS reader these days without finding another thoughtful essay or exhaustive report on the troubles confronting the news business and profession.

These critiques are valuable and necessary. Still, sometimes I think the situation is much simpler. Reading Larry Lessig’s pained response to New York Times coverage of a recent panel he shared with Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) and Steven Johnson (of Feed and several great books, including the forthcoming “Everything Bad is Good For You“) reminded me of why.

Lessig read the Times piece and, despite the number of people who told him they thought it was great, reported his disappointment in David Carr’s coverage — specifically, Carr’s failure to offer his readers a full understanding of the issues in the copyright controversy, which are far more complex (and interesting) than the dull-brained dichotomy of “I support piracy” vs. “I think artists should get paid” that the Hollywood content cartel promotes, and to which, Lessig felt, Carr’s piece reduced Tweedy’s position.

This disillusionment happens every day, even with publications at the top of the heap, like the Times, the Post and the Journal. (Our expectations for broadcast journalism are so minuscule that there’s less room for disappointment — we assume the worst going in.) We’re happy with what we read in the paper until we’re reading about something we know really well. Then, too often, with all but the very sharpest and most conscientious reporters, we see all the small errors, distortions, omissions and problems that are daily journalism’s epidemic affliction.

Of course we experienced our share of this over the years at Salon, during the period when every little sneeze and twitch of our business — as well, to be sure, as some more significant seizures — seemed to call forth an avalanche of coverage. If you bothered to complain about problems in coverage, the common reaction of most journalists followed a sort of Kubler-Rossian sequence of stages that rarely cycled all the way through to the end:

  • Denial: There’s nothing wrong with our story. You’re blaming the messenger.
  • Anger: Ingrate! You should be glad you’re getting any coverage at all.
  • Bargaining: Okay, we did mis-spell that name, but does anyone really care about the distinction between “losses” and “debt”?
  • Acceptance: The correction will run when we get around to it. (And we’ll remember what a pain in the butt you are the next time around.)

When our own stories were challenged, I always tried to remind our staff of how they felt when we were on the receiving end of sloppy coverage, and to work past the inevitable human reaction of defensiveness toward a more disinterested stance: if we got something wrong, we should be the most eager to find out what “right” is and fix the record. (This is one of those discussions where it remains useful to try to uphold the fast-eroding distinction in the language between “disinterest” — meaning, you can be neutral because you don’t hold any interest in the matter — and “uninterest,” meaning you’re bored.)

Of course, many complaints about coverage aren’t about simple facts but rather about emphasis, scope and slant, and the correction process doesn’t really help there, anyway. Lessig’s issue is probably in this category.

The problem is that writing on deadline is hard to begin with. Writing on deadline about a subject you’re only modestly knowledgeable about is even harder. The newsroom is a place of generalist bravado, in which most reporters feel perfectly qualified to write about anything, even if they’re flying blind. They’d better feel that way, since their editors ask them to do so all the time.

Until recently, each reader who saw the holes in the occasional story he knew well was, in essence, an island; and most of those readers rested in some confidence that, even though that occasional story was problematic, the rest of the paper was, really, pretty good. Only now, the Net — and in particular the explosion of blogs, with their outpouring of expertise in so many fields — has connected those islands, bringing into view entire continents of inadequate, hole-ridden coverage. The lawyer blogs are poking holes in the legal coverage, while the tech blogs are poking holes in the tech coverage, the librarian blogs are poking holes in the library coverage — and the political blogs, of course, are ripping apart the political coverage in a grand tug of war from the left and the right. Within a very short time we’ve gone from seeing the newspaper as a product that occasionally fails to live up to its own standards to viewing it as one that has a structural inability to get most things right.

Blogging potentially allows CEOs and politicians, companies and institutions to tell their own stories in their own words, and that’s dandy, but I’d never trust it as the only record. Coverage of important news by smart generalists — disinterested generalists — remains of great public value. But too many practitioners of this venerable art have grown (figuratively) fat and lazy from their monopoly position. They’re not used to being challenged, they don’t like being challenged, and too often their first reflex when challenged is to question the motive of the challenger.

Now the monopoly is fraying, the challenges are coming on in a wave, and the entire field is at a crossroads. As a profession, journalism has a choice: It can persist in a defensive, circle-the-wagons stance, pretending that nothing has changed. (The public has spontaneously and inexplicably decided to withdraw its trust from journalists! How strange! Let’s wring our hands and wait for the madness to pass.) Or it can accept the presence of millions of teeming critical voices as a challenge to shape up and do a better job.

It’s hard work, and it requires a level of humility that is not yet in wide enough supply in the newsrooms I’ve known. But most journalists are, or once were, idealists, and I think enough of them still wake up in the morning wanting to seek out and tell the truth that there’s hope they’ll come to understand that the Internet can be their ally in that quest, and not just a channel for random noise and personal invective. (It helps to have a thick skin and a functioning “ignore” filter for such invective when it’s encountered.)

As a business, journalism has a choice, too: It can ride out the monopoly’s sunset, delivering the dregs of a once-profitable position to investors until the business sputters out, replaced by a whole new system with new opportunities, problems — and owners. Or it can get entrepreneurial, invest in some new experiments, knowing that many will fail, but that the few successes could point a way out of today’s cul-de-sac.

Almost inevitably, incumbent business franchises choose door number one, the cul-de-sac. There are just too many reasons to say “no” to change, and too few guarantees of a payoff if you say “yes.” So, while I’m hopeful for the choice that the journalism profession will make, I’m skeptical that the business management of most media corporations today will will hear the alarms through their profit-drugged stupor and rouse themselves to do the unexpected.

After all, if they did, it would mean admitting that some of those ragtag bloggers might have been, you know, right.

Out, out, brief outline

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I’m an outliner devotee, and I’ve always thought that a Web-based version of my beloved Ecco Pro would be the best of all possible outlining worlds. Sproutliner is just a gesture in the right direction, but it’s a beautiful one — it’s got click-drag-and-drop, it’s got columns, and it’s apparently just beginning development. Its outlining design is more natural and versatile to me than the list-oriented approach of Tada Lists; it avoids the click-and-wait Web-app torpor of Forty Notebook.

It still needs user authentication, text wrapping, clickable urls, cut and paste… and on and on. I don’t know how far you can push the Ajax magic to mimic the responsiveness of a desktop application. But this is pretty impressive.

Put that keyboard down!

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John Darnielle writes about the fatally self-destructive temptation for artists to respond to bad reviews online:

  …if you’re smart, you’ll realize that the best way to preserve your honor is to keep your mouth shut and let others share their opinions of your work. They don’t like it? They hate it, and want to say so publicly? Well! Welcome to public life! If you don’t like it, there are plenty of dishwashing jobs available! If you’re all that angry, arrange for your label not to send them promos in the future. But pissing matches with the guy who wrote the review? Ones in which, God save us all, the dreaded “that’s only your opinion!” last-gasp-of-a-defense card is played? Can we just not, please? Can we be a little more grown-up about things?

And while we’re reading Mr. Mountain Goats, check out this posting which explains why the Mountain Goats are more like Bruce Springsteen than you ever imagined possible. (Via Largehearted Boy)

Apple vs. the press

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As long as I’ve written about blogs I’ve made the point that blogging and journalism are separate activities that may or may not overlap. Since this debate has now entered the legal realm, let’s restate this with mathematical precision: Bloggers can be journalists; journalists can be bloggers. Neither state — I Am A Journalist, and I Am A Blogger — excludes the other, but neither guarantees the other. There is an axis of blogger to not-blogger, and an axis of journalist to not-journalist. The two axes are orthogonal, not parallel.

The legal matter that forces us to contemplate such a graph is Apple Computer’s suit against three online journalists in an attempt to get them to reveal the sources they used to publish some advance scoops about forthcoming Apple products.

We’re fortunate to be at a moment in history when changes in technology, begun a decade ago by the rise of the Web and accelerated by the introduction of anyone-can-publish software, mean that the spectrum of journalism has been broadened in ways that were previously unimaginable. The danger in the Apple suit lies in the possibility that a bad court decision — like one a lower court has already delivered in this case — might careless and foolishly decide that in order to be a journalist one has to receive a salary from some operation that some legal authority has defined as a journalistic entity.

That such a definition would be not only wrongheaded but actively harmful to the vibrant and lively democratic free-for-all on today’s Internet is the point of an amicus curiae brief filed today by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. I’m proud to be among the signers of this document, which was written by Lauren Gelman of the Stanford center. (Here’s a full list of the amici, with links.) The brief argues that, when the courts need to determine who receives the various legal protections available in some circumstances to working journalists, it should decide who is a journalist by looking at what putative journalists actually do, not who pays their salary or what membership cards they carry or what degrees they hold:

 

Amici come together to urge this court to hold that Internet publishers, including webloggers who are engaged in the reporting and dissemination functions a journalist performs, may invoke the protection of the journalists’ privilege on equal footing with traditional reporters and news organizations….

The applicability of the newsgatherers’ privilege is determined not by the reporter’s formal status as a ‘professional journalist,’ but rather by the reporter’s functional conduct in gathering information with the purpose of disseminating widely to the public.

If you take the time to read the somewhat confused state court decision that is now under appeal, you’ll see that the judge’s initial ruling, in favor of Apple and against the Web sites, declares that it doesn’t really matter whether you consider the Apple news sites to be conducting journalism or not, because, the judge seems to be saying, journalists have no business publishing trade secrets anyway.

I’m not enough of a lawyer to try to predict where that argument is headed; it seems of a piece with a variety of assaults taking place today on the rights of journalists to protect their sources. (The parallel amicus brief presented by the AP, a long list of California newspapers and the Reporters’ Committee for the Freedom of the Press tackles this issue.)

What I do know is that, if the New York Times or Time magazine published a scoop from an anonymous source about a forthcoming Apple product, the company wouldn’t be suing the press. So it’s important here for people who do journalism at all points along the spectrum from “pro” to “citizens” to step forward and say: If you ask questions with intent to publish, and you publish information someone considers news, you’re a journalist, and should be treated as one by the courts.

Interesting reading

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## Peter Drucker looks at the big picture of the world economy today — really four economies, he says: information, money, multinationals and mercantile exchange.

  For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world’s foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation. Though the United States today still dominates the world economy of information, it is only one major player in the three other world economies of money, multinationals and trade. And it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could
conceivably make America Number Two.

## Cynthia Ozick reviews Joseph Lelyveld’s memoir. I haven’t read the book, but the former N.Y. Times editor apparently did a vast amount of legwork researching his own childhood. This is Ozick’s discussion of the limitations of Lelyveld’s approach:

  …There is no all-pervading Proustian madeleine in Lelyveld’s workaday prose. Yet salted through this short work is the smarting of an unpretentious lamentation: ”If this were a novel,” ”If I were using these events in a novel,” and so on. Flickeringly, the writer appears to see what is missing; and what is missing is the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective with its untethered vagaries: in brief, the not-nailed-down. Consequently Lelyveld’s memory loop becomes a memory hole, through which everything that is not factually retrievable escapes. Memory, at bottom, is an act of imaginative re-creation, not of archival legwork. ”Yes, I was finding, it was possible to do a reporting job on your childhood,” Lelyveld insists. Yes? Perhaps no. The memoirist has this in common with the novelist: he is like the watchful spider alert to every quiver on its lines. Sensation, not research.

Well put. I think one of the reasons I chose, as a young writer, a career as a critic rather than as a reporter was that I could not see devoting my life to writing that was all “nailed-down.” Reporting is a necessary and valuable skill, and I have deep respect for those who do it well; it’s hard, hard work, too. But it will typically miss that dimension of “the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective.” In American journalism as it is conventionally defined by those who carve out the job descriptions, a critic’s portfolio is broader, and it’s possible, under the right alignment of stars, to feel as well as to record — or rather, to record what one has felt along with what one has witnessed.

## Apparently there’s a movement afoot in the world of writing about games to be less “nailed-down.” It’s called the “New Games Journalism” — “a narrative, experiential approach that acknowledges the effect of the game on the player.” I’ll need to read up. This was sort of what I had in mind 15 years ago when I began to move my attention from the world of theater to the digital realm, and thought, hey, why not try writing more ambitious reviews of videogames? I’d just turned 30, though, and was already feeling that the gaming world was one I would be less and less able to keep up with as the decades advanced. (So right!) So I wrote one opus — an “experiential” discourse on the world of Super Mario — and moved on to broader terrain.

Goodness abounds

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Here are some things that have happened lately that are good:

Reissues of two previously unavailable early Mountain Goats albums, Zopilote Machine and Nothing For Juice, are now available. These are great if you are already tuned in to John Darnielle’s taut no-fi frequency; if not, last year’s We Shall All Be Healed remains the best intro. (Though if you go download “Sinaloan Milk Snake Song” you just might end up disagreeing with me and thinking that those older albums make a plenty fine intro, too.) A new album, The Sunset Tree, looms next month as well.

JD Lasica and Marc Canter, working with the Internet Archive, have opened the doors on their Ourmedia project — free hosting for video and audio files. I’m looking forward to playing with it.

Google Maps is here, and doesn’t seem to be going away, and it’s just really good. And you know, what’s good about it isn’t exactly the same as what’s cool about it. I mean, it’s fun to use the “Ajax”-powered thingies and slide the map around by grabbing it. But what makes it where I go now when I need to find something is that it’s much easier to read than the older services — which I assume will now frantically scramble to catch up. (It also claims not to work in my Opera browser, but in fact works just fine — though the scrolling is smoother in Firefox.)