Fire on the Mountain
words
Guest blogging the next few days from the Mike Levine Journalism Workshop, in Livingston Manor, N.Y. More to come.
UPDATE: Keep up with the goings on via Michael Kruse (and others?) here.
Mike Levine
hearing his words
Stepping Aside
breaking the bottleneck
Anna Quindlen: ... But my second response to reading over the stories was delight. They were so thoroughly reported, so well written. Whether local, national or international news, they were just what journalism ought to be. The next time anyone insists the business won't survive I may bash him with one of these binders, which are heavy with hope for the future.
They also made me think again about my own future. These clippings thoroughly ratified a decision I began to make a year or so ago, that has led me here, to my last LAST WORD column for NEWSWEEK.
Saving Soles
the cobbler
P.J. Huffstutter: As the morning Wall Street crowd rushed past Minas Shoe Repair, a group of women in dark business suits stepped inside, sorry-looking pumps in hand.
The shoe-shine stations along one wall were full. There was a line of tapping toes and shuffling feet a dozen deep, waiting before the black marble counter.
It was 9 a.m. Trading at the New York Stock Exchange, a couple blocks away, would start in half an hour.
Slowly taking a drag on his cigarette, Minas Polychronakis ignored the impatient crowd, picked up a sheet of sand paper and began rubbing it across the scuffed toe of a black leather Chanel ballet flat.
... Another in the series here.
The Parasite Is Slowly Killing The Host
high-end journalism is a profession
From the newspaper hearings, David Simon: It requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending. For a relatively brief period in American history -- no more than the last fifty years or so -- a lot of smart and talented people were paid a living wage and benefits to challenge the unrestrained authority of our institutions and to hold those institutions to task. Modern newspaper reporting was the hardest and in some ways most gratifying job I ever had. I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information.
Monday Reading
the good stuff
Hank Stuever: We live in the age of extreme niche fandom. Even more extreme is the quibbling.
I was commanded by Paramount's publicists -- the Legion of Women With Clipboards -- to come alone to an advance, clandestine screening of "Star Trek" a couple of weeks ago. I expected the theater to be sadly semi-private, with just a few entertainment writers and all those empty chairs. But when I got there, it was packed with serious Trekkers who had all been there for hours and hours (of course they had), summoned by some magic e-mail. Really, they have been there for 43 years -- waiting, watching, assessing, obsessing. The night was at once joyful and as serious as a heart attack.
Michael Brick: SACRAMENTO — It was billed as an invasion. On a chartered tour bus carrying two dozen fighters, promoters of the wrestling style known as lucha libre rode through California last month to stage matches replete with the colorful masks, sexual slapstick and frenetic, acrobatic fighting style that have propelled their sport to rival soccer for popularity in Mexico. The headliners were long-haired, muscle-bound and handsome, promising crossover material for the American market.
But in the heart of the fight card, a deeper conflict played on the racial tensions and stereotypes of a downtrodden immigrant audience. Among the wrestlers, the vilest of the vile were the members of La Legíon Extranjera, the Foreign Legion, gringos who openly disparaged the spectators, their language and their country. The invasion, in this sense, referred to the chance for the Mexican heroes to drive out the Foreign Legion.
Lane DeGregory: Jim Moore still remembers the sweet smell of drugstore perfume, his birthday bike, a broken promise. But that's all he has left of his mom.
She disappeared 56 years ago. He never knew why.
Just after Christmas last year, his youngest grandson started grilling him. What happened? Where did she go?
His grandson is 13, the same age Moore was when he lost his mom.
Now Moore is 69. He had no answers. He wasn't sure where to start searching — or if he wanted to know.
At his home in Washington state, he logged onto Craigslist and clicked "Tampa Bay." He typed into the blank box:
Are you my mother?
Michael Kruse: Buddy Johnson feels most comfortable in restaurants. He visits four a day sometimes. The chatter and the clatter of cutlery offer the illusion that he's less alone. The restaurant he goes to most these days is BuddyFreddys, where the waitresses greet him by name and he eats for free. Sitting at his table, he can see the sign outside with his name on it, and inside, in a frame, his tiny blue and gold Cub Scout uniform hangs on the wall. "To this day," he said one afternoon this spring, "people still say, 'You're the Buddy of BuddyFreddys?' And I'm very proud of that."
This restaurant remains the site of his best success. It is also now his most reliable refuge.
For most of the last six years, up until November, when he was voted out as Hillsborough County's supervisor of elections, Buddy was in charge of an office that became notorious for botched elections and mismanaged budgets. His personal real estate deals were ill-advised, at best, and maybe illegal.
He has been called a horror and his own punchline. That's from the headlines. He has been called inattentive and incompetent, careless and unfocused, sneaky and paranoid. That's from some of the people who know him and have worked with him. He's also been called affable and intelligent and friendly and winsome. Same people.
Buddy Johnson says he is who he has always been.
"At the end of the day," he said, "I'm a salesman."
The product never changes. The product is Buddy.
Adam Bosch: BLOOMINGBURG — A 56-year-old ironworker shot his wife, barricaded himself inside the dream house he built and refused to answer telephone calls from police negotiators during a nine-hour standoff Saturday.
U.S.A 2.0
rebranding america
Cool idea from Paper Magazine. They invited a band of visual communicators to rebrand America. Take a look: Right now America is like a company teetering on bankruptcy -- we have lost so much credibility and brand currency over the past eight years. And so we invited some of the best visual communicators we know (from ad gurus to artists) to create original advertising concepts that could redefine our country's image. Welcome to U.S.A. 2.0.
A Different Ending
relief, for once
Stephanie Hayes: ST. PETERSBURG — Ted Dahlem settled into bed every night.
He talked to his wife. She died in 2005.
He talked to his children. Three of his four died, one by one, in 2007.
He talked to God.
What had he done wrong? Was he being punished for something? What else could possibly happen?
He thought about his only surviving child — a 50-year-old St. Petersburg firefighter with a life of her own, open to uncertainty.
"I don't know what I would do if I lost her," he said. "The fourth one."
On The Run
traveling kids
Chris Goffard: Before dawn that morning, they clambered onto an empty boxcar at the Union Pacific yard and rode it out of Bakersfield into the Tehachapi Mountains. There were six of them, a pack of drifters and runaways taking snapshots of one another and sharing bottles of McCormick vodka as the train climbed the chaparral slopes in the summer dark.
Traveling kids, they called themselves, a makeshift, ever-changing family that shared the hard floor of an empty junk train or the windy porch of a grain car before their journeys forked.
Word By Word
The girl and the cantor
John Barry: TAMPA — The Chair is one of those ugly gray Office Depot things. It faces the long messy desk of Cantor Moshe Friedler at Rodeph Sholom. All the kids in religious school have heard about it, even the little ones. They know that one day they'll take a turn in the Chair, squirming, twisting their tongues into granny knots of pitiful excuses and horrible Hebrew. And their tears will come, certain as God's justice.
Shelbi Dominguez was 10 when she started worrying about the Chair. Her older sister Sasha had spent 2006 in it, learning Hebrew for her bat mitzvah. Just try to picture Cantor Friedler — 12 feet tall, perched behind a desk 20 feet long, blazing black eyes barely peering over his massive golden Torah.
A year ago, Shelbi's bat mitzvah was scheduled for today. To reach the congregation podium, she had to get past the Cantor. She knew one thing about him:
"He made kids cry."
Beat Sweeteners
how it's done
We should have a conversation about beat sweeteners. I hear so many people ripping them and, frankly, this is one of the most interesting stories I've read out of the WH. Has anyone ever considered that readers WANT these stories?
Jeff Zeleny: WASHINGTON — Have you met Rotus?
This is a question President Obama has taken to asking some of his visitors to the White House. In a bureaucratic world awash in abbreviations and acronyms, this one in particular seems to amuse him.
Mr. Obama, of course, is Potus (president of the United States). Michelle Obama is Flotus (first lady of the United States). And the title of Rotus (receptionist of the United States) is worn by Darienne M. Page.
“This is the receptionist of the entire United States,” Mr. Obama said, introducing Ms. Page to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
Booney
a fire, and a mystery
Ashley Clark and Karla Ward: At 336 Hollyhill Drive, he was Leslie J. Burns Jr., the man who lived in a modest 1 1/2-story brick house before he died.
At a dimly lit bar and restaurant a few blocks away, he was affectionately known as Booney, the man who loved marshmallow Peeps and old-time Bluegrass music.
Booney was a man who spent hours settled in a tall wooden chair at The Ketch, off Southland Drive, where groups of patrons often share stories over cold Budweisers and hot sandwiches.
Eggers And The Rewrite
changing
Final Note
band plays one last time
Ron Matus: ... One day, the band meekly begins what should be a raging funk jam, Jungle Boogie. Mr. T tells the baritone sax player, "You got to be angry." He scrunches his face in mock fury as he bobs to the beat.
"Angry at somebody?" Mr. T shouts over the music. The boy laughs and shakes his head.
"Angry at your mom?" Another shake.
"Angry at Nazis?"
This time the boy nods and dives into the riff.
The kids still talk about the time, about a month ago, when they were working on Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. It's a tough piece for middle schoolers. Slow. Emotional. Mr. T told them some listeners would be moved because they would associate their faith with the music. Others would be transfixed because it's so lyrical and lush.
But the audience won't feel anything if the musicians don't, he said.
Feel it. Emote it.
Finally, after days and days of practice, they rolled through the whole thing, from beginning to end. And they nailed it.
It was so good, Mr. T held the last note for an extra few seconds before signaling the band to stop. There was silence as he lowered his baton and tapped his fist against his chest.
As the kids looked on, stunned, tears ran down Mr. T's face.
Deepest Wound
something dark lurked
Bruce DeSilva: My father's ankle-length, black-and-white tweed Mayfield, the first fine piece of clothing he bought for himself when he returned from the war, hangs still in my crowded closet. Once a year I slip it from the hanger and try it on, always astonished that I cannot squeeze into the giant's coat.
I picture him draped in it, towering over me as we stand beside his robins-egg blue 1948 Plymouth coupe, a snap-brim fedora pulled low over his twinkling eyes, his mouth curled in the confident smile of a man who knows he helped save the world.
But behind his eyes something dark lurked.
Emotional Cease-Fire
final salute, above the clouds
Denise Gamino: ABOARD A TROOP PLANE — Flight attendant John Bechtold keys the public address mike just moments after this wide-body jet swooshes into the humid Texas sky.
His message is not the usual seatbelts-fastened advisory.
He lectures on chew.
Smokeless tobacco is banned. But Bechtold's been flying with soldiers since America invaded the Middle East after 9/11. He knows dip is on board.
Don't spit into the seat back pockets, he warns. Don't leave it in the seats. Above all, don't spit in the lavatories.
Risks
two women and a baby, one roof
Lee Hill Kavanaugh: Her phone rings at 10 p.m. The voice on the other end is quiet, uncertain.
I just got picked up by the police. … Do you hate me?
Donnette Siems takes a deep breath and looks down at Victoria’s baby cradled in her lap.
Maddie. Seven pounds of hope.
Big eyes and silky curls. A near copy of her mother. Innocent. Vulnerable.
Helpless.
No, Victoria, I don’t hate you, Donnette says. What happened?
Mine
A MAGAZINE TAILORED TO YOU
Farhad Manjoo:
When I signed up for Mine a couple of months ago, I was mainly looking for a laugh. The new magazine from Time Inc. seemed like a gimmicky, goofy effort to save a beleaguered industry: Time wanted to print a magazine just for me! First, I had to choose several popular Time publications and answer a few odd questions about my interests. ("Which do you crave more—sushi, or pizza?") Then, every two weeks, I would get an issue, curated just for me, filled with articles from different magazines. The process seemed hopelessly anachronistic, like if the horse-and-buggy industry decided to compete with cars by letting me pick my buggy driver. Doesn't Time know that I already have a way to get a magazine tailored to my interests? The Web isn't just faster and cheaper than print; it also doesn't need to know what I ate for dinner in order to let me read exactly what I want to at any time.
Turns out my skepticism was misguided. I've received two issues of Mine, and I love it. Unlike a lot of the publications that slip into my mailbox each month, Mine is full of stories that I actually feel like reading.
How? Why? How? Why?
'I saw that girl on the ground'
Dan Le Batard (thanks, Nigel): The grass has browned around this haunted house in Davie. The lower half of the front door is covered in smudges that let you know the hands and feet of young boys live here. Inside the small rental, from the laundry strewn on the floor to the scared father struggling to keep it all together, everything is a turned-upside-down mess. The appearance of order isn't high on the priority list when you feel like you are drowning.
''I'm out of money,'' Jim Leyritz says.
Broke and broken. There wasn't just one life lost in a blink at that intersection in the darkness. Leyritz lost his good name, his livelihood, his identity and his peace on Dec. 28 of 2007 as well, his bejeweled world coming apart in an explosion of fragments as soon as those two cars collided in the night. His freedom could be the next thing to go. Just last Thursday morning, Leyritz's trial for DUI and vehicular manslaughter was set for September, and now the former New York Yankee and father of three is trying hard to explain the tortured tangle of emotions that sometimes keep him from quiet sleep. Shame. Grief. Fear. They're all here.
Hug High
'we're not afraid'
Sarah Kershaw: There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, N.J., that students have broken down the hugs by type:
There is the basic friend hug, probably the most popular, and the bear hug, of course. But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out.
There is the hug that starts with a high-five, then moves into a fist bump, followed by a slap on the back and an embrace.
There’s the shake and lean; the hug from behind; and, the newest addition, the triple — any combination of three girls and boys hugging at once.