How can a high-profile magazine like Details have published a piece by a high-profile guy like Kurt Andersen — and not know that the piece wasn’t by Kurt Andersen? Does Stephen Glass walk among us still? Or did someone at Details not, uh, bother to wonder whether that e-mail submission from a well-known writer was a forgery? One thing’s for sure: The details will be fascinating when they come out.
Dowd scores
After criticizing Maureen Dowd for her column on indie film, it’s only fair for me to note that her tone of short-attention-span mockery was the perfect fit for Bush’s Potemkin-Village-style “economic summit.” Choice description:
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He managed to last for 20 minutes each in four economic seminars at Baylor University. He dutifully scribbled some notes as participants talked, looking as happy as a high school kid in trig class, and bounded out of his chair when Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told him he could be excused.
“Yes, well,” a visibly relieved Mr. Bush said, jumping up after an exhausting 18 minutes in “Economic Recovery and Job Creation,” “that’s the life of the president. Always has to go.” |
Where old computers go to die
Today I did the kind of thing you only really have time to do on vacation — cleaned out the basement room and dragged two old monitors, one old CPU and an ancient scanner on down to the Computer Recycling Center in Santa Clara. It’s the third time I’ve had occasion to make this pilgrimage, and each time is eye-opening. I don’t spend a lot of time in the Valley, and traveling past those endless low-slung office parks with interchangeable names always leaves me in a kind of daze: The landscape is impenetrable. You just can’t tell from the outside whether any particular building harbors some amazing new technology on the verge of our lives — or just some dead-end venture-capital mistake.
While there are a lot more “space available” signs in the Valley today than two years ago, the pace of development remains intense. I drove down 237, which once was a quaint cut-over road through the South Bay wetlands and is now a mega-freeway racing past new malls and office complexes, and into the heart of Silicon Valley, past National Semiconductor and down a tiny side road, and there it was: in the back of a prefab warehouse, to the sound of a boombox blaring heavy metal, the folks at the CRC were heaping up mountains of old CPU boxes, stacks of monitors, dumpsters full of the Valley’s detritus. And I was hauling them my own little addition to the mounds.
So much money, energy and talent devoted to inventing, manufacturing and marketing the new stuff. And just one little ramshackle operation to deal with the discards.
Now would be a good time to re-read Jim Fisher’s definitive piece on “Poison PCs.”
Kicking Cisco
I generally find New York Times op-ed economist Paul Krugman to be reliable and incisive in his dogged criticism of Bushonomics. But I think he missed the boat today in his comparison of Cisco with Enron. Cisco CEO John Chambers is participating in Bush’s wacky Waco shindig, and Krugman strains to suggest that, somehow, Cisco is like Enron. But the only complaint he musters — aside from noting Chambers’ overly handsome compensation, which puts him in the same boat as a gazillion other overpaid CEOs — is feeble: “The company’s specialty was using its own overvalued stock as currency — paying its employees with stock options, acquiring other companies by issuing more stock.” But as Krugman admits, that’s entirely legal; it’s also plain good business — when the market boosts your stock through the roof, it’s telling you to do something with that value.
Sure, Cisco’s stock, like that of the disgraced flagships of fraudulent accounting, was a darling of the bubble that is now way off its highs. But unlike Enron, Cisco is a company that makes stuff. Without its routers sitting in front of every industrial-strength Internet installation, you wouldn’t be able to read these words, or nearly any others online. Where Enron was engaged in building a phantom new-economy business in “energy trading,” and booking the sum total of transactions that it brokered as revenue (nice business if you can get it), Cisco builds and sells boxes full of electronics. I hold no brief for Chambers or his company, and if anyone can ever show evidence that they have engaged in anything Enronesque I will join the chorus of outrage. In the meantime, I’m glad their routers work well enough that most of us don’t even have to think about them.
Hop high
It turns out that beer is probably just as effective, or more effective, than red wine in protecting you from heart attacks, raising the “good” cholesterol in your blood, and so on — according to today’s Wall Street Journal. Moderation matters, of course; one or two beers a day seems to be the happy medium, with emphasis on “happy.”
On, Voyagers
It’s the stuff of a great old “Star Trek” episode: the Voyager planetary probes just keep on trucking, and as they near the outer edge of the Solar System, they’re becoming — unintendedly — the first human-made interstellar vehicles. The New York Times’ John Noble Wilford’s paean to the Voyagers is great reading.
Weinberger, Motavalli, state of the Net
It’s up, for your reading pleasure: My double review of Motavalli’s “Bamboozled at the Revolution” and Weinberger’s “Small Pieces Loosely Joined.” The piece also offers my snapshot of the state of the Net, 2002, which, in short, is as follows: Reports of its death are not only highly exaggerated but quite ridiculous.
Strange doings in Obscuristan
One of the greatest pleasures of my years as the theater critic for the SF Examiner was the opportunity to cover the work of the San Francisco Mime Troupe each year. This theater collective with a distracting name (they don’t do what’s conventionally understood as mime at all) has been carting its free outdoor shows to Bay Area parks in the summer for over 40 years now. It has managed to invent its own tradition, mixing sharp political satire and musical comedy in the vein of 19th-century melodrama — think Gilbert & Sullivan meets “Dr. Strangelove” meets Brecht, with doses of vaudeville and Mad magazine thrown in for fun. The motivation is progressive politics, but the method is pure comedy.
This year’s show, “Mr. Smith Goes to Obscuristan,” borrows its plot structure from Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” transplanting the action to a mythical Central Asian country and transforming the hero into Jefferson Smith, a firefighter-hero of 9/11 who gets drafted by the Bush administration to observe the first “free” elections in Obscuristan. There are jabs about the U.S.’s last “fixed” election; merciless mockery of President Bush, Dick Cheney and even Barbara Bush; gags about Internet-connected mullahs and a shadowy opposition candidate named “Ralif Nadir”; and, beyond the jokes, a thoughtful tracing of the distinction between honest post-9/11 patriotism and good old American jingoism, self-interest and hypocrisy. The script is co-written by my old friend Josh Kornbluth, so I cannot offer an impartial review, but I can offer a highly biased recommendation: See it if you’re in the area.
August
This week Salon takes its annual summer break, known to the editorial staff as “dark week” — a week in which we update the site with fewer articles. It’s a chance during the dog days of August for those of us who basically work around-the-clock most of the year to catch our breaths and take a real vacation. I’m doing the same — though I’ll keep updating this blog, perhaps a little less regularly. Don’t worry, though; Salon will have a new cover story every day, the wires will continue to be updated, and of course the blogs will keep rolling.
If you stay tuned you can catch my cover story tomorrow — a double book review, of John Motavalli’s “Bamboozled at the Revolution” and David Weinberger’s “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” — that uses those books as a chance to look at the state of the Net in general. I’ve tried to write (at least) one such piece a year.
Whose Talking Points?
OK, so Salon contributor Josh Marshall‘s Talking Points Memo blog does not have the reach of, say, Time magazine. But it’s still a well-established site by a reasonably widely read D.C. writer. Today Marshall notes that the Washington Post has begun running an online column with the name “Talking Points.” Talking point for Post editors: Time to rethink that.